Glad you didn’t drown! Around here, (Cape Girardeau, Mo) people seem terrified of swimming in the Mississippi—tales of undertow and deadly currents. As someone who grew up next to an ocean, I find this fear kind of puzzling. The river isn’t as big as the Pacific, no waves, no rip currents. But the fear of swimming in the river is real and it is nearly universal. There is nothing resembling a beach on the river anywhere near here.
My point was the City of Cairo closed their municipal pool (with I assume life guards) rather than let blacks and whites use it at the same time. I have heard (but wasn’t in the area at the time, so I don’t know this to be a fact) that blacks got to swim one day a week, after which the pool was drained and refilled.
Actually, the much smaller Wisconsin River has more stories of deadly undertows than the Mississippi. Of course, different parts of the Mississippi can certainly vary. People have drowned in the Mississippi around here, but usually it's from getting drunk, falling in, and being too disoriented to get out.
There's only about three months of the year that the river is warm enough to swim in. If someone falls into the river in the main channel in the non summer months, they've only got a few minutes to get out. The current is too swift and the river is too cold