View from the North 40: The '20s bring a changing waterscape to happiness

According to the latest research, now I’m apparently supposed to thank my dad for trying to drown me when I was a child.

That seems pretty messed up, right? Or fitting for these illogical times.

In the swimmer’s version of that infamous parental order to “stop you’re crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” when I was too scared to swim away from the lakeshore in water that was over my head, my own father picked me up and chucked me off the end of the dock.

And he laughed about it.

Sure, his claim is that he didn’t laugh until I was obviously swimming in the deeper water.

But the way I remember it is that he was laughing as my flailing body was sailing through the air.

Rude.

Outrageous, even.

Also the kind of behavior that passed for good parenting in the ’70s.

In the ’80s it was called “old school.” In the ’90s it was labeled “tough love.” By the 2000s the other parents would’ve looked unfavorably upon this parenting style, but definitely by the 2010s he would’ve had some explaining to do in the presence of some kind of authority figure and maybe a child advocate. There would’ve been video. Times change.

And sometimes times really change again.

Because now researchers at University of Exeter in England, who spent their lock-down days of the pandemic — the early 2020s — compiling and analyzing survey data from 18 countries have “conclude(d) that adults with better mental health are more likely to report having spent time playing in and around coastal and inland waters such as rivers and lakes (also known collectively as blue spaces) as children,” a report in Sciencedaily.com says.

“Our findings suggest that building familiarity and confidence in and around blue spaces during childhood may stimulate an inherent joy of nature and encourage people to seek out recreational nature experiences, with beneficial consequences for adult mental health,” Valeria Vitale, lead author, said in the report that was originally published in Journal of Environmental Psychology.

I’m just going to take a beat or two here to address this terminology: “blue space.”

I haven’t definitively pinned down the original source, but it dates back to at least 2016 and is a companion term to “green space,” which is an urban design term that refers to the outdoors or to areas with plants or at least to views of these outdoors elements.

Blue space, therefore, refers to any area with visible water whether it’s a pond or stream, a water front, a lake, an entire ocean or a fountain in your foyer.

I think it’s important to note that these terms originally referred to beautified urban areas that mimick outdoor elements or incorporate naturally occurring ones into an urban setting like having a park instead of a trashy, abandoned lot or an industrial shipyard.

I will also point out that the green and blue of the spaces are symbolic and they could also refer to the outdoors and water spaces of the high plains desert of north-central Montana where the outdoors is a brownish hue of some value for three-quarters of the year and the water is a brownish hue of some milkiness for 100 percent of the year, though in solid form for a quarter to a third of the year.

For the purposes of my counterpoint to this study, though, I wish to point out that blue space isn’t the cure all that it’s being billed as.

I can exist with reasonable certainty of continued life in a green space which is filled with breathable oxygen. Green space has a lot of usable space of this nature.

Blue space, though, is always one misstep away from killing me because, while the water does have oxygen in it, said oxygen exists within a covalent bond to hydrogen that renders it useless to sustaining human life when introduced to the lungs.

In other words, I can drown in a glass of water, hence the theory behind waterboarding as an interrogation technique.

Leanne Martin, co-author of the study said much the same thing.

“Water settings can be dangerous for children,” she said.

“And parents are right to be cautious,” she also said, without knowing my father or perhaps even sketchy parenting techniques of the ’70s.

“This research suggests, though, that supporting children to feel comfortable in these settings and developing skills such as swimming at an early age can have previously unrecognized life-long benefits,” Martin added, thus sealing my fate.

I got launched off a dock and learned to be brave. It felt like the lesson was under threat of death, but apparently now I have to disregard that part of the experience and attribute any sense of mental and emotional well-being I have as an adult on my childhood trauma.

That seems twisted, but I guess I’ll have to live with.

——

Ah yes, those were the, um, good ol’ days at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .