Swim at Your Own Risk

During the time I was compiling the feature story Best of the Ohio Valley: Rivers, Waterfalls, Swimming Holes, my partner Attila and I took a hike to a rocky outcropping in West Virginia that we had eyed for years. The temperature hit something like 93 degrees that day. On the way to our destination, we eyed what looked to be a superb swimming hole. On the return hike, we ambled down to the creek and – sure enough – found a mini cascade emptying into a beautiful, deep pool surrounded by a little rock outcropping, sycamore trees and boulders. We hadn’t planned on a swim, so we took off our clothes (yes, we went skinny dipping) and I waded in far enough to see where the water was deep enough to dive. It was so cold that I surfaced yelping with shock and delight. I swam around the little pool and then returned to the rocks to air dry.

It was pure bliss – one of my favorite moments of the summer. I had the thought that every kid – hell, every adult for that matter – should have the experience of discovering and enjoying a great swimming hole.

There are plenty of swimming destinations we couldn’t list in our feature. Specifically, there are some great quarries and Army Corps lakes in our region that are perfect for diving – nice natural beauty, tall rock cliffs and a lake so deep it may as well be bottomless – where you can’t legally jump or swim.

Why not? It seems our litigious society is to blame. Someone might get killed and sue the Army Corps or the state park or the quarry owner. It’s been said that everybody expects either a fence at the top of a cliff or an ambulance at the bottom.

But the solution is neither a fence nor an ambulance. And it’s definitely not a ban on swimming in a lake or a river! The solution is simple. It’s a sign that reads “Swim at Your Own Risk.” You, the swimmer, take responsibility for your own actions. That means you don’t jump in like you’re a cliff diver in Acapulco, you don’t get drunk before you swim and you don’t sue anyone if an accident happens.

If something truly negligent happens – a park builds a bridge that collapses or some similarly unlikely scenario – okay then. But for the most part, we shouldn’t allow a threat of lawsuits from the people who don’t take responsibility for their own actions to create the policies that restrict the rest of us from experiencing the very definition of summer fun.

Do you think those motorboats are getting banned while we’re relegated to a 100-foot-long beach? No, and that’s in part due to the fact that power boats are an industry while swimming is not – it’s just one of life’s simple pleasures. But we can take action.

Let’s start by writing and talking to land managers to get cliff jumping bans overturned. Let’s get all our friends to mount a letter writing campaign to the local newspaper to turn up the pressure to do so. And let’s do our part to encourage the responsibility needed to keep these wild places open to us all. When I first started mountain biking in the late 1980s, it was (I would venture to say) alegal. There were no laws surrounding this new sport. But soon bad users got us kicked out of the parks and off of the trails. As the years went by, the mountain biking community (and industry) did some professionalizing, trail building and self-policing and now there are plenty of parks that welcome mountain biking for the visitors and economic development the sport brings. Oh, and for some of us, it’s also one of life’s simple pleasures.