Spa Talk 10.

Thursday, March 26, 2026.

On Thursday morning, before my aquafit class at the YMCA, I had half an hour to spare and followed my usual ritual: a soak in one of the two outdoor spas, both set at a therapeutic 100 degrees, before submitting myself to the comparatively frigid waters of the indoor pool, which hovers around 90.

A few women were already in the spa, along with two regulars I knew well enough from class conversations: Steve and John. At our age—somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-one—formal introductions had long ago given way to recurring fragments of biography exchanged between stretches, locker-room encounters, and hot-water conversations.

One of the women looked at me and asked, “Where do you get your tan?”

“Mostly right here,” I said. “Between the spas and the pools.”

“The indoor pool?” she asked skeptically.
“Yes. When they open the roof panels, the sun comes through. I position myself strategically.”

That drew mild disapproval.

“I stay out of the sun,” she said. “And I always wear sunscreen. Skin cancer.”
I admitted that I had apparently been lucky. Steve, who had just climbed into the spa and whose training as a physicist seemed to lend authority to almost anything he said, came to my defense.

“The sunlight reflects off the water too,” he said.

I accepted this as reassuring scientific validation.

John, a lanky man in his seventies who stands well over six feet tall and remains head and shoulders above the water in the ‘deep’ center of the pool during aquafit, said the conversation reminded him of skiing.
“I used to look for sun on the slopes,” he said.

That sent us tumbling backward into old athletic histories.

I confessed that my skiing career belonged almost entirely to the past. My last cross-country outing had been near Lake Tahoe roughly thirty-five years ago. Downhill skiing required reaching even further back—to my teaching years in Newfoundland in the 1970s.

“I kept skis in my office,” I told them. “There was a two-mile trail behind the college. I’d ski during lunch.”

In Newfoundland, winter lasted from September through May, which left little room for excuses.

John countered with his own youthful skiing résumé. He had attended college in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, only minutes from the slopes.

“A ski pass cost three dollars.”
“So, you attended very few classes,” I said.
“We skipped them all the time.”

That was how the conversation moved—one memory triggering another, each story slightly less sensible than the one before.

Soon we were discussing avalanches, Olympic skiers, inflatable survival balloons, and whether ski companies should be liable when their safety equipment fails. That somehow led us to lifeguards and who exactly rescues lifeguards when they get into trouble.

From there, naturally, we moved to the ocean.

Steve had surfed for years in Newport Beach, back before surfboards were attached by leashes. If you lost your board, he explained, it could disappear quickly while rip currents dragged you farther from shore.

“The key is not to panic,” he said. “Ride with the current. Eventually it lets you go.”

He spoke with the authority of someone who had tested this theory personally.

I admitted that surfing had always seemed beyond my athletic ambitions.

“Boogie boarding was as far as I got.”
My own great ocean achievement, I explained, had been swimming from La Jolla Cove out to the buoy and back—a quarter-mile each way. Most of it, I confessed, had been done on backstroke, partly because it was easier and partly because I liked being able to see where I was going.

Then I remembered my brief participation in the New Year’s Day polar bear swims at Children's Pool Beach.

The water was brutally cold. Participants often wore costumes. One year I watched six people dressed as a six-pack of beer leap into the ocean together.

My son once joined me. My father, then in his eighties, watched from shore and seemed far more interested in being interviewed by a local television crew than in entering the freezing Pacific himself.

That felt, in retrospect, like a wise decision.

The conversation darkened when someone mentioned the seals that have largely taken over the cove.

“The seals won,” I said.

“They poop everywhere,” Steve added.
“And the smell,” I said. “You can smell it from a mile away.”

That led inevitably to sharks.
Steve explained the old surfer’s rule: if you saw seals in the water, get out.
“Why?”
“Sharks.”

He brightened slightly while explaining that dolphins occasionally attack sharks.
“I prefer experiencing nature from my couch,” I said.

That line earned the largest laugh of the morning.

By then the conversation had become increasingly absurd: baby seals jumping onto surfboards, drone footage of surfers unknowingly paddling above great white sharks, television documentaries about fatal shark attacks.

Eventually someone glanced at the clock.
Our spa session ended as abruptly as it had begun.

We climbed out of the hot water—three older men discussing avalanches, hypothermia, sharks, and survival—then shuffled off toward aquafit class, where our greatest immediate challenge would be water aerobics.

MvR – April 22, 2026. ✍️