The Backflip

Preface: The horrors continue: A member of my extended community was picked up and detained by ICE this week. The mutual aid group I am part of is trying to raise $3,000 in bail money by January 22nd to support this family.

One of my talents is baking fancy layer cakes (I had a job teaching baking to small children for a year; the labor conditions sucked, but I picked up some solid skills). To incentivize donations, anyone who donates at least $20 will be entered into a raffle to win a layer cake of their choosing. Some flavors I’ve done in the past: carrot cake with cream cheese German buttercream; chamomile lemon cake with honey Italian meringue buttercream; lemon cake with raspberry curd filling; chocolate cake with peanut butter mousse filling, and bananas. I do vegan and gf options too! And if you’re not local to Seattle, I’ll ship you an equally delicious but less fragile baked good.

Contributions can be made via Venmo at @danyellpf. Thank you so much for your care and solidarity, and enjoy this essay about the bliss of summer <3.

The Backflip

Tattooed bros, off-duty lifeguards, girls in red bikinis, hoards of small children, and me: summer baby, former pre-teen gymnast, shoulder dislocatee (thrice). We’re the odd micro-community occupying the diving platform at the lake. I’m here to train my backflip. I’ve decided to get it before the summer ends. 

I’m rabid for the lake. I’ll ditch whatever I can to get there. I go to Madison Park beach. I can take the bus there, the beach is sandy, and there’s the diving board. It’s the domain of teenage lifeguards on power trips. They love their whistles and their megaphones; their only dominion, most likely. Like all the beaches, there is the children’s side (south) and the gay side (north).

I like other beaches somewhat better for the scene. The Ls, Bs, Ts, and Qs frequent Colman or Denny Blaine (though the latter is under threat). Madison is the domain of the gay boys; not a scene I call home, but one I enjoy visiting. They wear Speedos and flirt. One particularly hot day, the beach was packed to the gills, and some boys on a picnic nearby had DJ equipment, and they were playing a cute set of techno music. The popsicle truck crossfaded with the bass. Summer!

One of the tattooed diving bros has swum out to the platform with a dry bag. He has a speaker, a camera, and his phone. He plays some summer music—Mr Brightside. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but here, it makes the scene feel cinematic. I’m here, at the lake, diving in and out of the water; usually only shrooms make me this blissed out. 

This bro does a layout off the high dive where he puts his hands behind his head like he’s on a recliner. A lifeguard with a startling six-pack does 1.5 flips. Children plug their noses and jump in. 

The trick with a backflip is that you can’t really try to do it. You can practice the jump, you can get a sense of your spacing, our strange posse on the platform attempted to coach a 9-year-old (“You have to throw your head back! The rest of your body will follow!”). Ultimately, you have to just do it. 

It’s the best feeling in the world once I do it. I flip as easily as I remember as a kid. The layout is easier than the tuck (it’s not supposed to be); I don’t spin so fast that the water goes up my nose on the landing. I try pointing my toes. I pretend I’m Simone Biles. I’m hooked. I do about fifty. Waiting in line, doing laps with the kids who can’t get enough. I can’t get enough. 

I’m 34 this summer. My birthday (July 26th) perfectly bisects the season. What summer dreams have to be accomplished before the season whizzes by? 

34 isn’t old. But it’s no longer young. The summers I have left feel finite. Two years ago, a frightening fibromyalgia flare stole the whole season from me. I gazed out my back door at the sun and a good tree, wishing I was out there. My body aged several years that summer; three months of immobilization and pain will steal muscle tone and flexibility. I’m more crinkly, more cautious now. 

A backflip is the elixir of youth. I built this muscle memory twenty years ago, at 13, flinging myself off trampolines, amassing power through my handsprings before flying. The muscles remember how to do it. Upside down, above the lake, I’ll be forever young. 

The lake is this good because it’s free. “Indoors” is private property. Fun, free things are sparse in the cold. The bros, the children, the gay boys, the people with a fancy pizza oven at the beach, the 30th birthday, the toddlers terrorizing the geese—we’re all here, unenclosed, enjoying ourselves together.

I came back a week later. The week after Labor Day, people start to tell me that summer’s over. People confess that they’re excited about sweaters and cider. I resent it. I’m in denial. I kick and scream. 

The Friday after Labor Day, I’m despondent: they’ve towed the diving platform away to hide at Seward Park, where it winters. It’s so smoky it looks overcast; the wildfires across Canada remind us of the collapse (as if we could forget). The lifeguards are gone, a handful of people swim, but it’s no longer a party. I drag a friend out into the water on my flamingo floatie, treading water while she lounges. She’s picturesque, backlit by the eerie red apocalyptic sunset.

I am grieving the summer; every moment of joy has the aura of anticipatory grief. The summer will end; one more of your precious summers is gone. The Seattle summer is short and fickle. And now it is hot: hot enough to hurt the vulnerable in old houses that were never supposed to need air conditioning. August is cloudy with smoke. The lake teems with milfoil, an invasive reed that grows like mad in the warming waters. The collapse is coming faster and faster; how many more summers before the die-offs, the mass extinctions, a forever smoke-clouded sky?

In the early days of summer, around the solstice, this far north, it stays light until almost 11. It feels manic. To sleep is to admit defeat, to let the sun’s absence win. The winter, by contrast, is deep and bleak and long. By November, it gets dark at 4:30. The depression is nearly inevitable. A friend reminded me that during a December bout of PMDD, driving in their car, I, out of nowhere, said, “Will I ever be happy again?” It feels like the summer will never return. 

It happens every year—the peaches at the market leave and the squash arrive; the grill gets dusty beneath its cover; the sun starts setting before 8 PM—but I still can’t bear it. What is as fun as a backflip into Lake Washington? There is sex and dinner parties and silly movies, I suppose, but it’s not the same! 

So, to be bleak, here is my last will and testament: My ashes should be spread at Madison Park Beach. A crowd of many who loved me must swim out to the diving platform. Summon a flotilla of kayaks and floaties and paddle boards for those who can’t make the swim. You should do this in the evening after the teenage lifeguards have left. Otherwise, they will yell at you. Someone should bring a bottle of champagne, and you should pass the bottle around, taking swigs. 

Someone has to learn to do a backflip off the diving board. My sweet sibling, is it you? Is there another brave soul? Are there, by then, energetic children who loved me who didn’t know that their time on a trampoline was preparing them for this moment? They should take a handful of me and fling it behind them as they set up the backflip. Let me fly like that one more time.