Where the Last Swim Never Comes

The Last Swim pages of this magazine chase warm water down the calendar, logging the season's final immersions from the Cape's ponds to the Georgia coast, and Maui retires the question entirely, the island's leeward ocean holding the mid-seventies to low eighties every month of the year, the swimming as good in February as in August, and the series' whole poignant arithmetic, the counting of the last warm days, simply not applying at twenty degrees north. Every series needs its exception, and this island is the last swim's, permanently postponed.

The year-round water shapes the island's whole aquatic culture, per its pieces in these pages, the dawn-patrol swimmers working the leeward bays before work in every season, the snorkel reefs and the famous crater islet running their programs through what the mainland calls winter, and the winter months adding rather than subtracting, the humpbacks arriving by the thousands from December through April so that the January swimmer floats in whale song, audible underwater, which is the series' concept inverted, the cold months offering more ocean, not less.

The practical calendar sorts by shore rather than season, the leeward coasts calm and swimmable most days year round, the north shores running their winter surf for watching rather than wading, per the island's standing counsel, and the water's honest hazards, shore break and currents on the exposed beaches, respected on the lifeguards' terms in every month. The full-week doctrine of these pages applies at strength, the ocean rewarding the settled visitor daily.

Swim every morning of any Maui stay regardless of month, take one winter swim with the whales singing somewhere below, and log it, per the series' tradition, as the last swim that never was. Mail the postcard to someone shoveling. The mainland's beaches close their seasons one by one down the coast, per every entry in these pages, and this island holds the door open all year, warm, blue, and slightly smug, which the series hereby forgives.