amie whittemore / essay

Water Crown

 I. St. Anne, IL, 1983

            Before the splash, my parents and I drove up the shady lane to their friend’s cabin in the woods in my dad’s old Volkswagen Rabbit, late afternoon light glinting through the branches. Before us, the in-ground pool shimmered—someone, maybe an uncle, dove off the board. Someone, perhaps an aunt, waved and came over to help carry towels and our cooler. We spent the sunlit hours swimming, and I imagine I wore orange wings tight on my biceps, paddling between my parents, or between their friends. Other children may have been there, younger than me—at three, I was one of the oldest offspring among my parents and their peers, surrounded by babies wrapped in blankets, nestled or crying in someone’s arms. At three, I was there to party; I had no time for babies. 

            As night fell, the adults rolled the pool cover out over the water and sat around the pool in folding chairs, drinking beer, eating hot dogs, listening to music. They all encouraged my silliness, letting me stay up late with them to dance and sing, egging me on as I shook my tush to Prince’s “1999.” I can hear them laughing and singing along. Then splash! I fell in the pool, having danced too close to the edge. 

            Uncle John fished me out with his foot, dragging me to the edge before bending and lifting me from under the cover that threatened to keep me under. I remember him teasing me about ruining his shoe—later that night and anytime I saw him afterwards, for years. It seemed impossible, as I got older—was I really that small, to be rescued—with a shoe?

II. Delray Beach, Florida, 1987

            It seemed possible Grandpa Bob could solve this small problem with shoes—but he insisted on walking the beach barefoot and always came back with black tar stuck to them. I didn’t understand how he accomplished this—my little brother and I never had tar on our toes. Nor did my parents or grandmother. It seemed to be an exclusively him problem, and yet it terrified me—even though I watched him scrape it off his feet each time, the idea of having tarry toes made me shudder. 

            Still—I loved the ocean. My dad would take my brother and I out to jump the waves while my grandparents walked or chatted on shore with my mom, sunbathing in a bikini, only entering the water to cool her toes or admire the castles my dad would build for us, ones we could fit into. The three of us would dig a large hole and then he’d stack buckets full of sand around it, like the merlons of a castle turret. As the tide came in and crashed into the walls, I felt both joy and sadness—I wanted the castle to last forever, but loved the wet sand beneath my toes, the excuse to abandon that nook and look for seashells. Later, as we tromped back to the car, I rinsed the shells beside my grandfather picking at his tarry feet, under the outdoor shower on the beach boardwalk.  

            One afternoon, my dad pointed into the distance at a brown-gray lump, like a giant pancake, floating in the water. “That’s a manatee,” he said. I believed him, but felt disappointed—that smudge on the water was a wild creature? I wanted to get closer, but it was so far. We stood and watched, leaping wave after wave. 

III. Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, 1992

            I stood and watched little waves leap at the edge of the lake, arms wrapped tightly around my twiggy body. I wanted to be invisible, drape a giant shirt over my swimsuit, a one piece that didn’t do enough to disguise the fact I had no breasts, that I was gawky and bony and ugly. “Ugly” a chime I rang again and again in my brain, repeating to myself my unworthiness. 

            I shared these sentiments with no one else, so my mom and I argued constantly about clothes, about the very swimsuit I wore instead of a giant shirt. My mom did not believe in wearing t-shirts to swim in. 

            I didn’t want to swim, fearing the lake was full of fish that would nibble at my skin, weeds that would slime below my feet, even though they were safely encased in water socks. I pouted kicking at the pebbly shoreline, complaining that this lake was nothing like the ocean. Every afternoon, I tried to hide out in the cabin we rented watching soap operas for as long as my parents would let me. 

            The resort we were staying at also had an indoor pool, so when it rained, or at night, we’d trek over there in our flip-flops, towels tossed over our shoulders, to play— my brothers, cousins, and I. I remember my parents trying to convince me to befriend a girl who was about my age, probably a couple years older, who also seemed solitary and friendless. 

            I gawked at her small but visible breasts, her long dark hair. How tall she was and how she seemed, to me at least, worldly and confident. I refused. I swam by myself in the crowded pool, nestled myself in a corner, counting the days till I could go home. 

IV. Momence, IL 1994

            Crowded on the pool cover, nestled in its nooks, swam more tadpoles than we could count. My friends, Jade and Kindra, and I stared, grossed out and enchanted: Jade’s mom was going to vacuum these tadpoles if they weren’t gone today, so the three of us knelt at the edges and strategized our rescue mission.

            Freshman year had just ended, summer only beginning to unfurl like a fiddlehead. We crouched beside the pool with little buckets and nets, scooping tadpoles into larger buckets and sloshing them down to the river’s edge where we freed them into a current that was likely, on retrospect, too rough for them. For hours we netted, sloshed, and sweated through the afternoon—yet there were still so many tadpoles left, huddled in the center of the sagging pool cover, beyond our reach. We tugged and tipped it as much as we could, but we couldn’t save them all. 

            Though my mom hates frogs, she rewarded our efforts by suggesting my friends join my family for a swim at the Elks Club, where we were members, and that Jade and Kindra spend the night at our house afterward. At the club, we swam the way teenage girls do—mostly by half-kneeling in the shallow end, so that our bodies remained submerged, and thus a little invisible, and chatting, our eyes darting around, alert for cute boys. Back at my house, tired and smelling like chlorine, the boy who liked me called—not for the first time, but almost, and afterwards my friends teased me about the cadence and pitch of my voice. I’m sure I blushed and tried to brush off their comments, reluctant to tell them that he had asked me to go to the mall with him—our first outing together. The whole day felt huge—I didn’t host many sleepovers. I didn’t spend full days hanging out with friends. I definitely didn’t get asked out by boys. I felt like a spring damp field, washed free, for once, of my teenage sense of injustice. 

V. Grant Park, IL 1995

            At first, we were filled with a teenage sense of injustice, watching the bulldozers and earth-movers slog through the spring-damp fields behind my cousin’s house. How dare someone build a house so close to theirs—country folk, we didn’t want neighbors. Let alone what sounded like rich neighbors. 

            But before they built the house, whose square footage was a regular topic when our parents gathered to play pinochle and sip light beers, they dug a pond into what was once a cornfield. Tacked on a dock with a ladder, though it was deep enough you could jump off the edge—which we did. 

            These strangers had built us a muddy swimming hole and for a summer before the house was built, we enjoyed it. As did my aunt and uncle, or so I remember overhearing—my aunt telling my mom how my uncle suggested they should make love there, in the early morning, before the kids woke up. 

            My cousin and I shuddered and made gagging noises as we retreated from the adults’ conversation, their laughter suggesting my aunt and uncle did exactly that. 

            And while I do not like to think of any family members in the grip of passion, a seed was planted—what would it feel like to have a lover invite me to a solitary dock? The wood planks below my back, the high whistle of red-winged blackbirds chirring from the reeds? I had a boyfriend with whom I did little more than kiss. The idea of taking him there felt so unlikely I almost laughed out loud. The fantasy was more pleasurable if it was inactionable, I realized, if it was about a dashing stranger, a someone, someday. I let it tantalize me as I fell asleep, my bedroom window open to summer’s cicadas, the night thick around me. 

VI. Phoenix, AZ, 1999

The night felt thick around me as I tromped from my friend’s aunt’s house in a gated community to the shared pool. Though it was only 9pm, it felt late, each house attached to its humming AC unit, a single jogger passing by me. 

Two friends and I were on the final leg of a cross-country road trip. We’d left Illinois to muscle over the Rockies, zipped down the California coast and with each stop our ability to coexist peacefully frayed a little more. They stayed inside, watching TV while I tried to swim off some restlessness. 

            Earlier in the trip, in Boulder, CO, we visited some of my relatives, who pointed us to a coffeehouse on Pearl Street they thought we’d enjoy. We drank coffee while listening to folk music; I danced a little in my patchwork skirt and flimsy top, feeling invisible until some other twenty-somethings approached us and we chatted late into the evening about dreams and Radiohead. Afterwards, my friends tried to convince me I wasn’t invisible, using the scene as evidence. 

The moon a night-bloom above, I swam slow breaststrokes through the tepid water. I ached for something to happen, to gnaw on something that would ease the pit of desire I carried in my gut. I clung to the ladder in the deep end, pulling my suit off. Swam naked for a minute, maybe two, before laughter and fear took over. Clumsily, I put my suit back on underwater. I walked back, water evaporating off my skin at a dizzying rate. 

VII. Momence, IL 2000

Water evaporated off my skin at a dizzying rate as I stood, naked, in the flooded quarry, my arms open in a triumphant gesture. July baked the water as my college roommate took photos for her summer photography class. We imagined a sea beast into the depths as we swam afterward, eyeing the steel pillars rusting below, the abandoned workings of the limestone quarry. 

To me, the quarry felt sacred and secret, even though more and more teens from my tiny hometown were using it as a spot to get drunk and stoned. Swimming in it that day, watching the sun glitter over the waves, I felt protective of it, torn between my desire to share it with more loved ones and for it to be a place only the geese and I knew. 

Looking at the photos, decades later, I see innocence slathered all over me like sunscreen. I didn’t think at all about why the quarry existed, or what harm this gaping maw caused to the earth. I was a virgin. I’d kissed three people. My hair in a messy pixie I’d cut myself.  I see all my untapped power like sap in my veins and wish I could go back to that girl and say: kiss more people! Study abroad. Be brave. The longing now rhyming with the longing then: an ache like velvet between my teeth. 

VIII. Cougar Hot Springs, Oregon 2006

The hot springs water ached like velvet as it inched up my thighs, soothing the chill that had seeped in after a night camping in the rain. My friend and I had gone to bed early, hoping to beat the crowds at the springs. The April clouds gathered around the mountain and led to a heavy rain that flooded through the tent seams, pooling around our heads. At one point my friend woke screaming in a night terror. I calmed her and we both pretended to sleep in our sopping bags instead of retreating to her station wagon parked just feet away. 

But now, the spring water restored us. We sat side by side, naked on a slab of stone. An old white man with a long gray beard soaked nearby, as did a young white man and woman. The sun was just starting to leak over the ridge. My friend and I laughed and made awkward small talk with the others. The old man told us to pour a bucket of cold water over our heads from the mountain stream babbling nearby and then slide back into the hot water—it’s good for your ions, he assured us. 

            My friend and I looked at each other; she shook her head, no. I stood up, grabbed the wooden bucket and poured a rush of icy water over my scalp. Sank into the heat, my muscles, my bones, rewired with lightning. 

IX. St. Anne, Illinois, 2006

Grief rewired my bones, my muscles, with lightning after my paternal grandparents died, six months apart. I couldn’t handle it on my own in Oregon so moved back to Illinois, into their empty house. 

            Eager to revive old connections, I invited college pals, hometown friends, and friends from the Internet chatrooms I haunted as a teen to a housewarming sleepover. A dozen people showed up and we spent the afternoon in some of my favorite ways: eating, drinking, swirling hula hoops around our hips, running through a sprinkler. As night fell, we took a walk through the sleepy, tree-thick subdivision, our laughter loud and loose, the lightning bugs flickering off and on above the tidy lawns. 

We came home and two of the boys said they were going to swim in the Kankakee River, which flowed behind the house. They stripped to their boxers and waded out to the center, the water never rising higher than their thighs. Three of us girls laughed on the shore then stripped and waded ankle deep, but the rocks and darkness were too much for us. We ran laughing and naked up to the house. I worried my neighbors, so accustomed to my well-behaved grandparents, were watching with disdain. 

Eventually the boys came inside and toweled off. We made arts and crafts in the sunroom then danced before bed. One of those boys slid into bed next to me, carrying the river with him. I held him close, bathed in a damp, green energy. 

X. Travertine Hot Springs, CA, 2014 

Bathed in damp, green energy, my love and I slipped into the hot springs under the Milky Way’s spill. The desert chill with November, mountains in the distance, their dark shapes like the backs of giant, prowling cats. 

We were at the start of a road trip down California’s length. We’d reconnected after years apart because a dream sent me scouring the internet to find her again. In the dream, we sat in the moonlight on a patch of grass in a small midwestern park, and I said all the things I’d held in my chest for ten years; I woke beside my husband at the time with a gleaming sense of purpose. I wasn’t going to leave him for her—that wasn’t the point of the dream. The dream showed me I’d been swimming against my own currents. Shortly after finding her and sharing a handful of delectable emails and phone calls, I broke off communication with her again until I could get my life in order—which eventually resulted in a divorce, but not for her. 

We hiked into the desert after sundown to find the springs. We were alone at first, drinking champagne, mesmerized by the night’s starry pelt, meteorites unzipping the dark. I can still hear her laughter, I can still see water dripping off her long hair. It felt like a dream (it always does) sitting next to her, in a life I was rebuilding in truer alignment with my own need, my own heart.

Then a group of young men arrived, loud and, while not quite threatening, we felt more naked after they arrived. We packed up our stuff, walked hand-in-hand back to the car. 

XI. Montserrat, 2015

            Divorced, with no husband with whom to walk hand-in-hand, my family distracted me from my first post-divorce wedding anniversary with a trip to Montserrat. My parents’ friends owned a house on the tiny Caribbean island, dominated by an active volcano that decimated the port town in the 1990s, leaving it free of tourists and full of windy roads, rum punch, ruins of once luxurious hotels, and empty stretches of volcanic ash that pushed the shoreline farther into the ocean. 

            One night, my family and our friends made our way down to Woodlands Beach at dusk. After the sea ate all the light, we waded into the shallows, which lit up with bioluminescent life with each splash. The next morning, we hopped onto a boat owned by local pals and cruised to a cove where some of us snorkeled and some of us dove below the currents. I was a snorkeler, flapping my webbed rubber feet over mostly bleached coral beds, spotting a few glimmering fish. The swim out to the reef was easy but I knew the swim back would be harder than it looked; I swallowed my anxiety like a stone. 

            I signaled to our group I was heading back to shore and reminded myself to stay calm, to paddle consistently, but slowly. I breathed in and out through my narrow plastic tube. After a while, I looked up and saw I hadn’t gotten very close to the shore—the waves were carrying me sideways, even as I tried to arrow to the shoreline. My broken heart leapt and splintered; I wanted to tear free my feet of the flippers, which felt heavy and worthless, though I knew they were helping, knew I’d do no better carrying them in my arms.

            Pushing through my panic, at last my feet touched sand. I stood up in the shallows, tore my snorkel mask off and high-stepped to ground—that’s when I remembered what day it was. Later, back at the house, my mom hugged me, assuring me she remembered, too. 

XII. Hot Springs, NC, 2018

We left the rented house, hugged by autumn sunlight, its assuring, crisp heat, as we drove down the mountain to the Hot Springs resort. A worker led us to our private tub in which spring water had been pooled for our two-hour reservation; after we left, it’d be drained, the tub scrubbed for the next visitor. We slipped off our clothes and into the steaming water, admiring the view of Spring Creek, which flowed below us, at the base of a small ravine. The autumn leaves starting to change, the air starting to bite. 

That man and I’d been dating for six months and had developed some ease with each other. Still, we talked about departures: I had an interview coming up, for a job several hours north of where we lived in Tennessee. We talked about long distance, about how he could come up the weeks he didn’t have his kids; he teased me for how that lit me up—not the visits, but the guaranteed solitude between them. 

Our talk dwindled as uncertainty pooled around us. We sat in silence, watching the world, listening to robins and wrens. But the water was hot and the air crisp; anxiety couldn’t quite find purchase.  Desire began to simmer in our limbs, and we climbed out of the pool to fuck beside it, my body bent across its wooden frame, before he turned me over, and knelt in front of me. We oozed back into the water, glowing with orgasms. Past, future—vanished. Just that moment, whole and ripe, a peach we passed between our sticky hands, warm mouths. 

XIII. Bryson City, NC, 2021

We shared slices of peaches, sun-warmed, licking our mouths clean, as we drove to meet my best friend and her family for a weekend getaway. Freshly vaccinated, the world was beginning to open—still we all wanted a mostly outdoor experience, so we rented a house together and planned for hikes and swims, a boat ride around one of the long fingers of Fontana Lake. 

It was the first time my new love would meet my best friend, with whom I’ve shared nearly every element of my life. I was nervous, until my friend folded me into her arms, her black lab happily circling us as I pulled her daughter and husband into it, teary-eyed and thankful. 

On our last day together, we rented a boat and navigated out to the deep center to swim, spikes of cold water shooting up from the depths, weaving into the sunbaked surface. My friend’s daughter, only eight, stood shaking and weeping on the boat’s edge, terrified of water so deep the bottom was invisible. My friend treaded water beside the boat, commanding her, more and more sternly, to jump. Her husband, on the boat, rubbed their daughter’s shoulders, trying to gentle her toward the water. Eventually she shimmied in, only to immediately paddle back to the ladder. 

My love and I watched this drama from a few yards away, swimming and doing flips, lying on our backs, debating which of us would be tough love, which gentleness in such a scenario. I said I’d probably let my kid stay on the boat, trusting that eventually she’d be ready if she was given space to steady her breath and body. They said, they’d egg her on, flicking water at me—no reward without risk, no pleasure without pain.

On the boat ride back to shore, my friend’s husband steered us home, and my love held me as we watched the sun sink below the hills. I thought I knew something about risk and reward, pleasure and pain—thought I was safe, swimming at those depths.

XIV. Percy Priest Lake, TN, 2025

I didn’t worry about risk or reward when I saw the bumblebee, drowning in the lake. One of my loves and I were swimming nearby, having kayaked to a small island in the large manmade lake—something we’ve done together for many years, the ritual engrained: load the kayaks on top of the Prius; batten them down with ratchet straps; load paddles, life jackets, cooler, and sunscreen into the trunk. Reverse it all at the lake’s edge. Then the crisp click of a can of hibiscus cider opening as we paddled to the island, rocking over the small waves caused by speedboats ripping by. 

I approached the bumblebee gently, swimming up to it, saddled on a life jacket, my drink in my other hand. I scooped the bee into my palm, and we watched it for several minutes. Its abdomen flexing up and down, shimmying off water. Wings opening and closing as they dried. I began to wonder if it would ever recover, so I slowly started wading toward shore to deposit it on a leaf. 

Then—almost faster than we could see—it popped off my hand like a happy cork, into the blue above. We laughed gently, in wonder. We swam for another hour or two. It was solstice. The day long, the love between us long and complicated, woven and unwoven and woven—like a wave, which finds itself as it crashes against a rock, again and again. 

XV. Coda

            It still seems impossible: was I really small enough, to be rescued—with a shoe? We stood and watched, leaping wave after wave. I swam by myself in the crowded pool, nestled myself in a corner, counting the days till I could go home. I felt like a spring damp field, washed free, for once, of my teenage sense of injustice. I let it tantalize me as I fell asleep, my bedroom window open to summer’s cicadas, the night thick around me. I walked back, water evaporating off my skin at a dizzying rate. The longing now rhyming with the longing then: an ache like velvet between my teeth.  Sank into the heat, my muscles, my bones, rewired with lightning. I held him close, bathed in a damp, green energy. We packed up our stuff, walked hand-in-hand back to the car. Later, back at the house, my mom hugged me, assuring me she remembered, too. Just that moment, whole and ripe, a peach we passed between our sticky hands, warm mouths. I thought I knew something about risk and reward, pleasure and pain—thought I was safe, swimming at those depths. The day long, the love between us long and complicated, woven and unwoven and woven—like a wave, which finds itself as it crashes against a rock, again and again.

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Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.