Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Learned to swim and then some in arid desert

Growing up in arid eastern New Mexico, it’s a wonder I ever learned to swim — but I did. I even learned to SCUBA dive in Portales.

We didn’t get to the city swimming pool too much until I moved to town at age 10, but we did have irrigation ditches. According to my parents, my first swim was the day I fell in the ditch as a toddler. When dad looked up all he could see was my straw hat floating down the ditch. After watching for a second to see if I could dog paddle he pulled me out.

As I grew up, the retelling of the story didn’t keep me out of the ditch. It was too big a temptation on a day so hot that dirt clods burned your bare feet. Unfortunately, our ditches weren’t deep enough to actually swim in and you could only get cooled off sitting down or on your knees.

We didn’t have a tank big enough to swim in but both our grandparents’ places did. Cleaning several inches of moss off the cement tank at Granddaddy Bob’s was a regular summer ritual when cousins arrived. We had to leave the lilly pads and gold fish in the water though.

We had other relatives and friends who had earth tanks or ponds we went swimming in occasionally and I have memory of wading out into a playa lake after a rain in tighty-whities with my buddy Jim-Bob. There were lots of weeds, mesquite bushes and cactus in that water and it wasn’t ideal swimming.

We did get to go to Ute Lake or Alamogordo Reservoir as Lake Sumner was known back then. By the time we first started doing that, my brother and I still couldn’t swim, but we were instructed by my mother, who couldn’t swim either, to keep one of those orange life jackets tied around our neck and waist anytime we were near the water.

Getting in the lake, we got pretty fearless of the water floating around with those life jackets like orange bobbers.

We took swimming lessons and I learned to thrash the water and float without a life jacket. My little brother jumped off the high dive in the class but I was chicken.

Living in town, we saved our paper route money and bought our own 18-foot round above-ground pool. Yeah, it was pretty much a redneck bathtub, but it cooled us off after running a route or when baseball was over. We lived in that thing mornings and evenings and got comfortable in the water.

In college I signed up for a SCUBA class at ENMU’s Natatorium. It changed the way I thought about being in the water. We completed a one-mile open water swim at Conchas Lake as part of the course and also dove at Blue Hole and Bottomless Lakes. Later I even went diving on the west coast of Mexico.

I’ve dived in ice cold streams, soothing natural hot springs and a pool bigger than a football field. I’ve even had my clothes stolen whilst skinny-dipping. But nothing sums up the fun like the words sung by MASH’s Col. Sherman Potter while showering.

“I love to go swimming with bowlegged women, and swim between their legs, swim between their legs.”

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]