He Won't Go Near the Reservoir

My son learned to swim at three and would fling himself at any water on the map: pools, seas, questionable fountains. Except one. The reservoir on the west road out of town — a manmade lake, popular, ringed with barbecue spots — turns him into a different child. It did from the first drive past, before he could talk: back arched, monitor-shattering screams, inconsolable until the water left the mirrors.

We chalked it up to some noise or light thing until he was four and a half, when we made the mistake of trying a picnic there with friends. He would not leave the car. He gripped the door frame, white to the lips — a child we literally could not peel — and when I crouched down to do the calm-parent voice, he put both hands on my face like grown men do in war films and said: 'That's where I went under. When I was big. The boat hit my head and nobody saw me until it was dark.'

Then he sobbed the sobs of someone much older, and we drove home, and my wife googled with shaking thumbs in the passenger seat.

The reservoir was completed in 1972. In its first decade, before the buoy lines and the wardens, it drowned people at a rate that made the regional paper campaign for safety measures. One case, 1979: a man knocked from a small boat, struck by the hull, not recovered until nightfall. The archived article uses those words. Until nightfall.

We have never returned. My son is eight, swims competitively, laughs at everything, and remembers no boat, no reservoir rule — but when his club proposed an open-water session there last summer, he came home with the flyer already crumpled and said, without drama: 'Not that one. It already had me once.'

We signed the form for the other venue. Some permissions a parent grants without needing the whole file.