I think sardines were his secret to long life and acuteness of mind, or maybe they were just a leftover from his bachelor days. Once when I gave him Cole’s Portuguese sardines in piri piri sauce, he opened a tin immediately and ate the sardines while standing at the kitchen counter. This was the kind of imagination he had-mischievous, intelligent, sweet. He said he found them miraculous because he’d thought I’d brought him green onions.
Once I gave Oliver a bouquet of unopened jonquils, and he was so surprised when Billy put them in a vase and they blossomed. I hope I can swim there until I die, as Oliver did. This was at the Blue Mountain Center, a community of writers, artists, and activists, situated in the prettiest place I’ve ever swum. While writing, swimming, and eating meals together, we were becoming friends. Back on shore, he exclaimed, “Your head forms a resplendent orange globe!” Volcanoes and jellyfish were far away, but Oliver wore a snorkel mask and put his face in the lake often to observe the small-mouth bass and brown trout wading in the transparent deep. It was the year he fell in love with the American writer Bill Hayes, who watched us from the dock as we swam out to an invisible rock at the point, where we treaded water and talked about shyness, his and mine. This was after he’d lost his sight in one eye because of a rare tumor, but before he learned that it had metastasized and occupied a third of his liver. When we swam, I wore a bright-orange cap and stayed a little ahead of him (“in the two-o’clock position”) so Oliver could see me. There is only the overwhelming sense of total immersion, of buoyancy, of well-being, and of the instinctual rightness of stroking through dark silky water, which on some days would throw us about like an ocean. Age disappears when one is swimming, so it didn’t matter that I was twenty-five years younger. I swam with Oliver in the Adirondacks in a cold green lake where he had swum for several decades. “Thoughts and images, sometimes whole paragraphs,” occur to him, and he must swim back to shore to hastily write them down. In his revealing memoir “On the Move” (the title is borrowed from a poem by his friend Thom Gunn: “One is always nearer by not keeping still”), Oliver remembers swimming in a pond at Hampstead Heath on his fortieth birthday, where he first swam as a toddler with his father, who called swimming “the elixir of life.” The most placid, joyful moments of the memoir are when Oliver is swimming, because he is without “fear or fret,” and this gets him thinking.
Still, for many years he took a weekly lesson from a Russian coach, Slava, to perfect his stroke, and his backstroke was especially fine. He believed swimming was instinctive, and that we must learn to walk but not to swim. “I remember all our swims together-we are both water creatures,” Oliver Sacks, a few months before his death, wrote in a letter to Henri Cole.
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