Night Swimming: Trogir, Croatia

(Photos courtesy of Will Van Beckum)

At night, the giggles and playful shrieks of children past still echo inside the abandoned waterslide. The sound flows through the maze of tubes, and bounces onto the shoreline, deceiving the occasional passerby into thinking lost boys have found a home here.

The slide, standing alone in its puncture-proof material, obscenely shatters the mystique of the otherwise raw, natural scene . A dull shade of office blue, carelessly painted by people who hate their jobs, just can’t compete with the azure water of the Adriatic Sea and the distant lights, which use the water’s surface as a stage to dance upon with effervescence. The sea perpetually laps up against this man made structure and mocks its lack of grace.

The lonely slide clumsily conceals a small beach, further guarded by heaps of varying stones and shells, instead of sand. Substituting for the lack of palm trees is a forest just steps behind the beach, throwing you off-track, making you forget where you are. The water’s frigid and causes your hand to retract on impulse. But if you’re patient enough, and show your benevolence, then the beach welcomes you and even shoos those pesky sea urchins away for your visit. Some visitors are oblivious and don’t care to learn the beach’s true disposition.

Even from a few feet away it’s tricky to see in the dark, but it appears as though three figures sit with their backs to the woods and heads facing each other, ignoring the beach. A few strides closer and it’s apparent that they’re chugging red liquid out of a one-liter water bottle, with the label ripped off and only adhesive marks left behind.



“Na zdrowie!” A Polish teen with thick-rimmed square glasses exclaims to no one in particular before he takes his turn pillaging the bottle of its contents. When he’s done, he shoves the previously full bottle, which is now drained to a little less than half full, into his friend’s callous hands.

They continue to go on, drinking and speaking to each other in Polish, but throwing in some English phrases like, “I’m so bored,” periodically.

They don’t swim. Swim in the water that’s only a few feet away. The water that puts on a cold front, but longs to be swam in and will gladly envelope its passenger in what feels like a silky second skin. Ancient Greeks and Romans once touched these waters, but they'll never know.

They’d rather finish drinking, then smoke up in the abandoned waterslide.