Imperial estimates at the hotel pool
Olympic gold medalist and former Subway spokesman Michael Phelps once told me the “secret” to surviving the flight back from Asia: hit the pool, then hit the bong.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t any weed at the airport Hilton in Denpasar, Bali, but there was a big-ass pool, and since I had two long-ass flights ahead of me, I decided half-assed prep was better than no prep at all.
I swam for fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I know this because my Apple Watch kept track of my workout, even though I didn’t ask it to do that. As I’ve mentioned before, my Apple Watch tells me how to live, but the price I pay is that it tells Tim Cook how I live. Life is a series of compromises and tradeoffs, I guess.
I didn’t count the laps because the point was to swim until my watch buzzed, alerting me that I had reached my daily exercise goal, and as a result, succeeded in closing the green ring on my watch. I’m a sucker for gamification, that’s for sure.
Another thing that’s for sure. I am not a swimmer. At least, that’s not how I’d describe myself. I can hit the bong with the best of them, and I can still take down a footlong sub, and I know how to swim, more or less, but I am no Michael Phelps.
Not that I’m trying to subvert your image of me. If you prefer to picture me as as an aquatic bong-ripping adonis who takes down foot-long subs two at a time, I’m not going to stand in your way. In fact, I encourage you to think of me as an aquatic bong-ripping adonis who takes down foot-long subs two at a time because that’s how another man at the hotel pool saw me.
“Sir, you are good,” he said. “Very hard to swimming. You are good, sir.”
I was resting against the wall near the entrance to the pool. My breathing was heavy. Since I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I had to squint to see the man paying me this compliment. He may have been Chinese, maybe from China, maybe ethnic Chinese from another country in Southeast Asia. I couldn’t be sure about that stuff. All I knew for sure was that the man was on the youngish side and blurry. Also, he thought I was a really good swimmer because he kept telling me so.
“Sir, you are good swimming,” he said in heavily accented English. “Good swimming, sir.”
I didn’t like being called sir; it made me feel old. But I liked the compliments. I’ve been swimming since I was five, but I’ve never been called a “good swimmer,” not once. On my best days, I am an adequate swimmer.
“Swimming good,” he said again. “Strong, sir.”
This time he made a pantomime of the breast stroke. Since I had been doing the breast stroke, I assumed he was imitating me, and since imitation is the highest form of flattery, I was flattered. For the first time in my life, I had managed to unlock that Michael Phelps feeling, without ingesting high-quality THC and low-quality deli meat.
“Thank you.”
“I not good.”
I smiled. He smiled. Or, maybe he didn’t smile. Maybe the blurry man I was looking at frowned. But I like to think he smiled.
“I take swimming test next week,” he said.
He explained that he needed to pass his swimming test, but didn’t say why exactly. I figured the swimming test had something to do with finishing his studies, or securing a job. Believing that he believed in my swimming abilities—for some peculiar reason—I decided to give the stranger some encouragement.
“You’ll pass,” I said. “Just takes practice.”
“Practice,” he agreed. “I practice.”
Then he turned to face the far end of the pool. He pressed his back against the wall, ready to practice. This was good, I thought. He needed to practice to pass the test, and watching me do laps had inspired him. This wasn’t exactly a mitzvah, but I think it qualified as a solid.
“How long pool? How many meters?”
“I’m not sure about meters,” I said.
“How many meters?”
“Sorry, I’m American, and we use the imperial system.”
“American?”
“Yeah, American. We use a different system, for some reason. I’m not good at estimating in meters.”
“Twenty-five meters?”
I hesitated because I had no clue. To me, twenty-five meters might as well be twenty-five cubits.
“Fifty meters?” he asked.
“Sorry, I can only estimate in feet.”
Actually, that wasn’t true. I can also estimate in yards, like any red-blooded, metric-ignorant American. But I didn’t think yards would be helpful in this situation. Only after I got out of the pool and consulted Google, did I learn that one meter is just shy of one yard. If I had known that at the time, I would’ve tried to imagine myself throwing a football to the far end of the pool. If the throw made it all the way to the other end, I could estimate the length of the pool to be twenty-five yards, or meters, which is the limit the Football Gods imposed on my mortal arm.
Not that my aquatic admirer cared about any of that. He just wanted to know the length of the pool, and he wanted the answer in meters, because that’s how most of the world measures distance.
“Fifty meters?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Fifty meters?” he asked again.
I thought about referencing that bit from Pulp Fiction, where John Travolta explains that in Europe a quarter-pounder with cheese is actually a royale with cheese on account of the metric system. But I never got the chance.
“Fifty meters,” he declared.
I didn’t want to argue, so I didn’t argue with the blurry man.
“Yeah, sure, fifty meters, I guess.”
Suddenly, the man gave me a blurry thumbs up. Then he sunk below the waterline, and used his feet to springboard off the wall.
Right away, I could tell the man was in trouble. Instead of surfacing to begin his stroke, his body writhed under the water in a series of disjointed contortions. I couldn’t discern a stroke. He kind of looked like a spastic version of the eight-bit centipede from the video game Centipede. Or, maybe that’s just how my mind’s eye filled in the gaps of the blurry figure thrashing about below the water.
Either way, this wasn’t good. I worried that I might have to save the blurry man’s life, not because he had flattered me, but because he was a human being who appeared to be in danger.
I needed to act fast.
I needed to formulate a plan.
I ran down a list of questions in my mind.
Question: Is there a lifeguard on duty, or is it up to me alone?
Answer: No life guard. Like everything else in Bali, you swim at the hotel pool at your own risk. Bali isn’t just paradise, it’s a paradise for corporate lawyers.
Question: Do I have enough energy and skill to save him?
Answer: I was tired. And I had never saved anyone from drowning before. But I knew I had to try. Between the adrenaline burst that would certainly come with whatever hero shit I was about to undertake and the energy I had left in tank after my workout, I thought I could do it.
Question: Wait a second. How deep was this pool? Shallow enough to stand?
Answer: I remembered the markings outside the pool said it was 1.2 meters.
Question: How many feet in a meter, damn it!? And why don’t American schools teach the metric system? It’s a way better system. It has more scientific utility, which is why Americans do things like chemistry in metric, plus the rest of the world uses it, so why should we be different?
Answer: Royale with cheese!
I took in a deep breath and prepared to swim as fast as I could toward the flailing blur of a man. But a split-second before I took off to rescue him, the man shot to the surface like that Russian sub at the end of The Hunt for Red October.
I heard him gasp for air.
Then I noticed that he was standing in the pool.
Standing and walking.
Walking toward the steps.
His practice session was over, thank the gods!
Despite my earlier advice, I didn’t think practicing would help him pass his swimming test. He needed to learn how to swim first, then practice. In the meantime, I hoped that he would fail his test, not because I wanted to deny him whatever achievement was contingent upon passing, but because I wanted him to know that pools could be dangerous, if you don’t know how to swim.
Not that I was in a position to teach this man about the dangers of pools. There was a language barrier to consider, as well as the fact that I am only an adequate swimmer. Only an aquatic newb like the blurry man could mistake Michael Estrin for Michael Phelps.
But as I watched the blurry man walk through the water to safety, I realized that he had taught me something. After all, he was standing up in chest-deep water. Since the blur was about the same height as me, I could deduce that the pool, which had a marked depth of 1.2 meters, was about four-feet deep!
After nearly thirty hours of traveling, we made it back from Bali. You can read all thirteen Situation Bali travel dispatches here. In the meantime, it’s good to be home, and it’s great to get back to writing Situation Normal. I’m thankful for each and every one of you who reads my silly stories.
Usually, I close with questions related to the story, but since this post is coming out the Sunday after the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, I’m going to leave you with some Thanksgiving-related discussion questions.
Did you celebrate Thanksgiving? If so, what did you do?
If you contribute to the Thanksgiving meal by cooking, what’s your best dish? I make a bitching cornbread stuffing, but I also roasted some Delicata squash that really brought the meal together.
Are you a Black Friday / Cyber Monday warrior? If so, tell us about the deals?
What’s your favorite Thanksgiving-themed episode of television, and why is it the “Turkeys Away” episode of WKRP in Cincinnati?
Pumpkin pie? Apple pie? Pecan pie? Or, do you eat all three on Thanksgiving because you’re livin’ right?
What are you thankful for?
As you seem to be an avowed imperialist, once you get settled back in to home, make sure you contact PG&E and ask them to help you understand your energy costs in horsepower in lieu of those weird kilowatt-hours. If you are all in on the imperialism ask them about british thermal units (BTU) they are definitely easy and sensible to remember also. As far as that meter nonsense, stick with the rod and the furlong. Helpful the next time you go to Santa Anita.
Welcome home! Although, I'm a bit sad I won't be getting these dispatches from Bali in my mailbox.