Swimming with Dolphins
It was 98° when we left the Cochiti Pueblo, crossed the Rio Grande, and headed up to Santa Fe. We were ready to go swimming at the Gloria Chavez Community Center, but the pools were unexpectedly closed until the evening session. The children and I went to the public library and then returned to the GCCC for the evening swim session.
We stepped into another world. The pool was filled with teens and tweenies splashing and gesturing and vocalizing, so much more than the usual swimmers and splashers. For the next two hours I watched Sam bounce and splash with boys and girls older than he who made no communications demands upon him, who had no "rules of engagement" that involved complex narratives all revolving about who ran the meta-narrative, and were unable to accommodate a dinosaur who splashed and danced. Children who splashed, not to make another turn away, but to make another turn towards. Children who ceaselessly choreographed gesture vibrant with immediate meaning. We were deaf.
There were the obvious comic aspects -- guards furiously blowing on whistles to get the attention of children, tweens and teens to -- get off the rope, walk not run, go down the (mongo) water slide feet first, not head first, get off the islands, etc. It was no different from the same guards vocalizing at Sam or Jonah about the same issues on earlier trips to the GCCC pools, and my having to translate in both directions -- to Sam or Jonah about the risk and rule, and to the guard unable to interpret non-response as receptive and expressive handicap.
But we were in a swirl of signing, splashing people, moving as the currents in the pool took us to, or past the stairs up the slide, or into the whirlpool, or in the shallower water where the younger children and parents splashed, a cacophony of vocalizations and hearing impaired speech and gesture. It was quite liberating to be free of the oppression of normal expectations for speech and behavior linked to gesture, and I don't think Jonah's rapid head turning or contorted and uncoordinated use of legs and arms while swimming, his stigmata, attracted the slightest attention. I took Jonah and Kezzie into the deeper swimming pool to do laps, and I noticed three boys pushing their hands sharply down from just above the surface of the water to create the strongest, deepest "thunk" splash they could. They were experiencing sound, the hearing of fish. It was very, very cool.
At 9pm the whistles sounded again and we made our way out to the family dressing area, where children's momentary nudity is conducted with equal equaniminity in English and Spanish (a Lou Dobbs free zone), and out to the parking area where several buses from the School for the Deaf lined the road, filling with happy noisy young people.
Mrs. Sansonetti had dinner waiting for us back at Cochiti Pueblo -- butterflies and garlic chicken.. Yum!
