Swim . . . or . . . Drown

A couple of night’s back, I was surfing on the new wall-mounted TV in the family room. Sandy and Chris had already retired for the evening, and I was bored. As usually happens, I stumbled upon a movie to watch . . . a John Wayne Western—which I do not often pass up.

There was a scene in that movie which took me back in time . . . to perhaps the age of nine or ten. That does not happen much anymore for me, but it did this time. John Wayne—the Duke—America’s hero of the era, was standing alongside a slow-moving river with a young boy of seven or eight. Through their conversation, the lad acknowledged that he did not know how to swim, to which the Duke quickly grabbed the kid and tossed him, fully-dressed, into the river, while yelling those famous words: “Swim . . . or . . . Drown!” Amazingly, the kid thrashed around for a few minutes, then miraculously became an Olympic-quality swimmer! It was amazing how effective that tried-and-tested method of teaching young boys to swim actually was . . . I personally saw it employed on several such occasions!

I remember a similar experience in my own life, with a quite different result! Having seen that highly-effectiveness teaching method employed on TV fairly often, I personally threw my younger brother, Pete, into a motel pool in El Paso while pronouncing those very words. I never figured out what went wrong, and just assumed that I must have said the words wrong, or that Pete was simply a slow-learner, or something else . . . because all that dude did was trash about in the pool and holler for help—all the while screaming, “I can’t swim!” I managed to fish him back out before he drowned . . . I remember getting into serious trouble for trying to teach Pete to swim . . . I do not recall that dude getting into any trouble for refusing to learn to swim with this age-old proven method.

Over the years, I have had a couple of reoccurring thoughts, well more like questions; those being, perhaps:

1. I acted too hastily in retrieving Pete out of the pool; and
2. I should have simply left the scene and let nature take its own natural course of action. I have been back and forth on this question over the years — typical big brother / little brother stuff.

It Seems to Me . . . I don’t actually know if Pete ever learned how to swim!

Hmmmmm. If Pete did learn to swim, who was it that taught him? Which method did that teacher employ? Did Pete prove to be as difficult of a learner for his second teacher as he had proven to be with me?

I am curious . . . is that actually an industry-accepted method of teaching one to swim? It sure seemed to work for the Duke!

To see the video clip of John Wayne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u4fiKjalMU

 

 

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