Chapter 3 — Deep Water

"Deep Water" is an autobiographical essay by William O. Douglas, taken from his book "Of Men and Mountains". It describes how he developed an intense fear of water in childhood, nearly drowned at the YMCA pool in Yakima, and then as an adult overcame that fear through sustained practice with a swimming instructor.

Douglas traces his aversion to water to two experiences. Around age three or four, waves at a California beach knocked him down and swept over him, leaving "terror in my heart at the overpowering force of the waves." Later, the YMCA pool incident deepened that fear into a lifelong terror.

When Douglas was ten or eleven and visiting the YMCA pool alone, a big older boy — about eighteen, with rippling muscles — yelled "Hi, Skinny! How'd you like to be ducked?" and tossed him into the nine-foot-deep end. This near-drowning, in which Douglas sank three times before losing consciousness, is the misadventure he refers to.

Douglas landed sitting in the deep end, swallowed water, and sank. He planned to spring up from the bottom like a cork, but each attempt failed. His lungs ached, his legs became "paralysed and rigid," and "sheer, stark terror" seized him. He sank a third time, eventually relaxed into unconsciousness, and "crossed to oblivion" before being pulled out and found vomiting beside the pool.

Douglas never returned to the pool and avoided water whenever he could. Whenever he was near water — wading rivers, canoeing in Maine, fishing on the Columbia — "the terror that had seized me in the pool would come back... My legs would become paralysed. Icy horror would grab my heart." It ruined his fishing trips and deprived him of the joy of canoeing and swimming.

One October, Douglas decided to get an instructor and learn to swim properly. He went to a pool and practised five days a week, an hour each day. The instructor put a belt around him attached by rope to a pulley on an overhead cable and went "back and forth, back and forth across the pool, hour after hour, day after day, week after week." He then taught Douglas to put his face under water and exhale, to kick with his legs, and finally to swim the full crawl stroke, building the skill "piece by piece" into an "integrated whole."

It took several months of intensive training. The instructor spent weeks on the rope-and-pulley drill before the tension began to slack — "It was three months before the tension began to slack." He then worked through breathing, kicking, and full strokes. By April the instructor declared Douglas could swim; Douglas continued testing himself alone until July, then swam across Lake Wentworth, and finally dived into Warm Lake.

After swimming alone in the pool and across Lake Wentworth (two miles to Stamp Act Island), Douglas went to Warm Lake near Meade Glacier. He stripped, dived in, and swam across to the other shore and back. He "shouted with joy" and declared, "I had conquered my fear of water."

The central theme is fear and the human will to overcome it. The essay is described in the textbook itself as "a real-life personal account of experiencing fear and the steps taken to overcome it," with a sub-theme of "psychological analysis of fear." Douglas concludes by echoing Roosevelt: "All we have to fear is fear itself."

When Douglas sank for the third time in the pool, all effort ceased, a peaceful blackness swept over him, and he lost consciousness — "I crossed to oblivion, and the curtain of life fell." It means he briefly slipped into unconsciousness, on the verge of death, before being rescued.

Douglas reflects that "in death there is peace. There is terror only in the fear of death." Having experienced both "the sensation of dying and the terror that fear of it can produce," his will to live grew in intensity. He quotes Roosevelt — "All we have to fear is fear itself" — and concludes he felt "released — free to walk the trails and climb the peaks and to brush aside fear."

Yes. The NCERT Flamingo textbook PDF, including Chapter 3 "Deep Water", is available free on CBSE PrepMaster (cbseprepmaster.com). No sign-up or payment is required — just open the chapter page and read or download it directly.