CreepyPasta

I Don't Swim Anymore

I grew up in Oregon, right on the cold, dismal edge of the Pacific Ocean. Fifteen minutes in any direction would take you to a beach, an open expanse of sand dunes, a National or State park, or one of about a dozen permanent lakes. For years, every summer we'd go to a family friend's house to use their lakefront property and their dock. Looking back it doesn't seem like much, but I can remember spending countless hours there swimming, kayaking, paddle-boarding and snorkeling.

When I was twelve years old, I refused to go again. I hated the lake, I hated that house. I had nightmares for years and never explained to anyone why it happened.

I still don't like to talk about it. Whenever I do, I feel like I can smell that lake again. People don't realize, but lakes are dirty places. Animals piss and shit and die in them, all kinds of plants rot on the surface, people dump their garbage. There's so much water that stays clear that people think that it's clean. It's not. All the lakes I've been to have a certain smell like they're not totally pure.

This lake - my lake - slowly developed a smell like death.

That sounds dramatic. It's not like you could just sniff the air and think "That's death." No one would have gone to the lake if it had been like that. It was just a subtle thing that you caught a whiff of once and then it was gone. Maybe you looked around you for a dead fish or squirrel or something and then you forgot about it. I probably only noticed it was getting worse because on most days I was there from sun-up to sun-down.

The dock our friends owned was a simple hand-built thing that involved Styrofoam and treated two-by-fours. A few times it had come loose from the rope that held it and had drifted across the lake. It sat sandwiched between two bigger and more impressive boathouses. As you faced the lake from the shore, the boathouse on the right was freshly painted bright red and housed a small white fishing boat. A simple pulley system allowed the boat to be lifted out of the water while it was stored in the majority of the year when it wasn't being used.

We never saw inside the boathouse on the left, and we also never saw anyone use it. It was made of plywood that had once been painted dark green, though years of weather had warped the edges of the wood and it had shed about half its paint. That summer when I was twelve, it disappeared and we all assumed that it had just been torn down so that it wouldn't be such an eyesore.

That summer was the first one that I got really into snorkeling. I had explored the surface of the lake many times before in a boat, but that summer, I got to see a whole other world hidden below the surface. My friends and I caught salamanders, built things out of cinder blocks on the sandy bottom and found everything from fishing lures and golf balls to pieces of old boats and docks from the past.

As you might have guessed, the lake was pretty small but it was frighteningly deep. Huge trees would fall into it on occasion, become waterlogged and would turn vertically with only their roots or broken bases poking above the surface. A swimmer drowned there once and even though they used scuba equipment to try to find the body, it was never recovered. At a depth of about ten feet, the water was already as cold as it was in the winter. At about fifteen feet, it was dark enough that a thick forest of weeds were able to grow on the bottom. Beyond was just cold and darkness.

My friend and I devised a plan to use an upside-down plastic barrel full of air and a boat anchor to allow us to dive much further than we could while only holding our breaths from the surface. We'd go out to the dive spot using a surfboard, then, with the barrel covering our heads and masks, we clutched the anchor and jumped off, quickly sinking to the bottom of the lake. You basically dove blind, since you had the bucket over your head. We could go far enough that the pressure would compress the air in the barrel to half its original size. All we had to do in order to surface was to release the anchor, and the barrel full of air would propel us quickly to the surface. Then we'd reel up the anchor with a rope and start again.