LeeAnn Prescott - Escape From Nowhere

C is for Christmas

During Christmas 1979, I had just turned 8, and we were living at Camp Bayou in Ruskin, Florida. We had a pop-up camper that we called the Space Age Dumpster. It was an improvement from our previous home, which was a leaky canvas pop-up camper we had called The Dumpster. The Space Age Dumpster was fiberglass, and although it did not leak, in the morning the walls would drip with condensation and my blankets would be damp at the edges.

The week before Christmas, the campground filled with new people, including some children. I was excited to have playmates, even though I understood that they were on vacation and would not stay. I made a new friend one day and we climbed one of the crazy oak trees. While we were sitting in the tree, I asked her, “How do you think Santa Claus can find us when we are away from home? And how do you think he can get in the camper when there’s no chimney?” It was the first Christmas that I did not live in a house with a fireplace or a wood stove.

“Don’t you know there’s no such thing as Santa Claus?” she replied, surprised at my ignorance.

“That’s not true!” I yelled, aghast. “Then where do the presents come from?”

“Your parents,” she said. “How do you think you get what you want?”

I was still in shock. “I always write a letter to Santa Claus before Christmas! On Christmas Eve I leave milk and cookies out for him, and they are gone in the morning,” I explained, sure that this would prove Santa’s existence.

“It’s your parents that eat the cookies. Just ask them,” she said.

I could not believe that every adult I knew had been lying to me my entire life. 

“It’s not true!” I yelled, “There really is a Santa!” I climbed down from the tree and ran to the Space Age Dumpster where Cheryl was cooking. To my dismay, she corroborated the story.

When I got gifts for my birthday and Christmas the next day, I knew that Santa Claus couldn’t have made them – my second favorite gift after a Darci doll was a box for my dolls that Papa made from a drawer that was in the original Dumpster. He had taken The Dumpster apart and made it into a trailer that he could carry things in to sell at the flea market, and the drawer had become scrap material.  He had built dividers inside it, made a cover from wood paneling, and attached a suitcase handle to the top. My mother had painted flowers on the box to make it look like a fancy doll carrier.

Perhaps THEY were Santa's real elves, working together in secret while I played in the trees. Even then I sensed that elves in the North Pole couldn't have made mass-produced toys that had "Made in China" stamped on the back.

Here's the doll carrier. It still holds my dolls, although the sliding top is broken into two pieces after 30 years of use. Compare it to the photo of the 1976 official Barbie carrier that I found on eBay. Which one was made in Santa's workshop?

Home School and Truant Officers

In September 1979, when I should have been starting 3rd grade at Bath Village Elementary School, we left the Colonial Inn in a white VW camper bus towing a canvas pop-up camper. We took our time traveling down the East Coast, and finally stopped for a while at my Aunt Virginia's place near Sanford, Florida. This is where I started 3rd grade home school. I captured this in my journal - my mother insisted that I keep a journal of our travels, saying, "you're going to want to write about this one day."
 

The Calvert School is a correspondence school based in Baltimore, Maryland. The way it worked then is that they sent the entire curriculum for the whole year - textbooks, a manual for the teacher, drawing paper, and a ruler. My mother administered the lessons, which were planned out in detail. Once a month, I took a test and sent it to the school for grading. There were also quarterly exams for which I received an official report card.

Over the course of the next two months, we traveled to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where we lived in two different motels, and then back to Florida. We stayed for a few months at Camp Bayou, a campground on the Little Manatee River in Ruskin, Florida. Every morning, my mother would spend about 4 hours giving me the lessons out on a picnic table or in our camper if it was too cold. We stayed out near the "crazy oaks," an area with with a lot of low, twisted oak trees that were good for climbing. Here's a snapshot of me there:

One day after I finished my lessons, which was usually by lunch time, we went to go a nearby town to go grocery shopping. On the way, Papa told me, “watch out for truant officers, they might catch you and make you go to school.”

“What’s a truant officer?” I asked.

“A truant officer is a person that works for the school and goes around looking for kids who are playing hooky from school. One time my brother and I got caught by one and they dragged us back to school.”

“But I’m going to school,” I said. The lessons were harder than they were in regular school, and my parents said I was getting a better education, better than other kids, because I got to travel around and see the country. We did the lessons five days a week, sometimes on Saturdays if we spent a weekday traveling.

He replied, “They don’t know that you're doing home school. You could be anybody. All kids your age are supposed to be in school. So be careful.”

Thereafter, every time we went anywhere before 3:00 PM, I slumped low in the seat of the van so no one would see me. When we went into the supermarket, I wished I could make myself invisible so that no one would see me and report me to a truant officer. I rehearsed what I would say if someone stopped us, “I do lessons every day, and it’s harder than regular school, it’s an accredited correspondence school, and the lessons only take a few hours without breaks for recess and gym class, and we’re only staying here, not living here! Please, please officer, don’t take me away!”

I did Calvert again for 5th grade and 7th grade, and I never encountered a truant officer. But the fear never left me, and by 7th grade my speech to the imaginary truant officer was well-rehearsed.

Swimming - from a Vermont pond to Menlo Masters

This week I swam the  longest swim thus far in my whole life. I also got my official membership card from US Masters Swimming, after joining the Menlo Masters swim team a few weeks ago. When I got the card in the mail, I was nearly jumping for joy. I can't remember ever being that excited to receive a membership card in the mail. Why, you ask? Let me tell you about a lifetime of wanting to be a good swimmer.

Swimming in the area of New England where I lived as a child is an outdoor activity that can be enjoyed for about 3 months every year. There are lakes, ponds, and rivers to swim in, all which have varying levels of cleanliness, temperature, bottom surface, and current flow dependent on the setting and time of year. Some families had above-ground outdoor pools, and some motels had in-ground pools, but there were no public indoor or outdoor pools in the near vicinity.

One of my first memories of swimming was taking lessons at pond near Newbury, Vermont during the summer I was six. I remember playing ring around the rosie, and going underwater on "we all fall down!" I must have also learned to do the dog paddle, but not much else.

A few years later, when I was in 3rd grade, we went on the road and lived in Florida for the winter. I was thrilled to arrive at my Aunt Virginia's place, which had an outdoor pool. My parents and I lived in a camper on their property, but had full access to the pool and house. I would spend hours playing around in the pool, trying to teach myself to swim and do flips. We came back there again when I was in 5th grade and again in 7th grade, but my swimming skills never progressed beyond the crawl (with my head out of the water), basic backstroke, and sidestroke. I could do a cannonball off the diving board and I could do one-handed somersaults and handstands, the other hand holding my nose. I would watch my cousin with awe when he came over and would smoothly dive in, do handstands at the bottom of the deep end, and swim easily with his face in the water, breathing from side to side. This skills seemed magical to me, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't figure out how to do it myself. Here's me at age eight in Aunt Virginia's pool.

One summer, the year I turned 12, I tried desperately to learn how to dive. We were back in NH and would go to a swimming hole called Big Eddy, and I would practice diving off the rocks. Usually I ended doing some odd form of belly flop. My 11-year-old neighbor had taken lessons and tried to teach me, but I never got it right. Big Eddy was a wonderful swimming spot below a covered bridge 3 miles from hour house. There was one big pool, a deep pool above a waterfall, and another shallow pool above another waterfall, and plenty of rocks for sunbathing and jumping. The picture below shows Big Eddy when the water is higher than normal - there are usually more rocks exposed.

For my 13 or 14th birthday, I wanted to have a swimming party. Since my birthday is in December, swimming at Big Eddy was not an option. So my mother drove me and two friends 45 minutes away to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where there was an indoor pool. I enviously watched graceful lap swimmers and divers in the other lanes, but just the novelty of swimming in December was enough to make my day joyful.

In college, I was on the X-C running team, and sometimes we did pool running workouts. When I lived on Cape Cod during the summers, I would sometimes go "running" in local ponds for workout variety. I wanted to try to swim all the way across the ponds, but my stroke was not good enough to swim very far without exhausting myself. Sometimes I would backstroke a ways out for fun and just float in the middle of a pond, enjoying the view of the shore and the sky.

In my late 20's, I tried visiting my local public pool in San Francisco for early morning swims. I didn't know the first thing about lane etiquette, and still didn't know how to swim efficiently. I tried a few times but felt out of place and didn't know what to do with myself. The adult swim lesson times didn't fit my schedule.

In my early 30's, I joined a triathlon training program at the Bay Club, which was right next to my office at Levi Strauss & Co. My friends and the coach convinced me that lack of swimming knowledge was not a problem - they would teach me. Finally, I learned how to swim with my head in the water, breathing every three strokes. I won our little club triathlon competition, despite a slow swim. Later that year, I took private swim lessons to work on my stroke, and learned how to do flip turns. I competed in a few sprint triathlons, and a mile swim race, in which I proudly finished 7th to last.

For the next 4 years, I swam intermittently, doing 30-40 minute sessions on my own, at the Bay Club and at then at Equinox. When I moved to Palo Alto in July 2007, I was thrilled to learn that all the pools on the Peninsula were outdoors, and intended to join a Master's program. I had to work myself up to go to the Masters Lite workout at Equinox, and found it wasn't so bad. But real Masters Swimming seemed too intimidating. Some advice from another Masters swimmer ("just time yourself for 100 yards and get in the lane that's going that speed") helped me get up the courage to show up at Burgess Park Pool one sunny day this January. I was absolutely petrified. But Coach Tim Sheeper was nice, and everyone else was friendly and encouraging. Still, every time I planned to go to the pool for the next 5 or so times, I would come up with all kinds of seemingly important excuses not to go. For 30 minutes before leaving the house, I was a nervous wreck. I went anyway.

Every January, USMS has a competition called the "1-Hour Postal." Someone counts your laps while you swim as far as you can in one hour. Our club was doing it on January 31, so I volunteered to count laps for someone, just to see what it was like. As I watched Edie, a 58-year-old teammate, slog out 3,225 yards over the course of an hour, I figured I could do it too. She offered to count for me, and even though my results wouldn't be official because my membership wasn't processed in time, I wanted to have a benchmark for next year.

So on February 1st I found myself nervously floating in the pool waiting for Edie's "GO!" The next ten minutes were pure hell. Why did I decide to do this? What was I thinking? I could barely swim for five minutes straight, how was I going to swim for an hour? I might not be able to keep breathing. Would it look silly if I did backstroke the whole time? What if I was a lot slower than I thought I should be? This is silly! Can't I just quit?

I kept swimming.

After about 20 minutes, my stroke had a nice flow. After 40 minutes, I had a realization: How unbelievably lucky I am to have the choice to do THIS - push my body to a new limit, in sunny pool on February 1, with the sounds of a children's birthday party coming from the domed pool, a new friend I barely know counting my every lap, in a place where there are not one but FOUR pools with Masters programs within a 15 minute drive of my house. The sunlight sparkled on the floor of the pool, the water flowed smoothly around my body, and my breath remained even.

I swam 3,150 yards (about 1.8 miles), beating my goal of 3,000, and only 75 yards behind Edie. Next year I hope to beat her. And when I'm her age, I hope I can still call myself a swimmer, and swim farther and faster than the new team member 20 years my junior. At the very least, right now I can officially call myself a Masters swimmer, and I can work productively up until the moment I leave for the pool.