Deep Water About the author William Douglas ( - ) was born in Maine, Minnesota. After graduating with a Bachelors of Arts in English and Economics, he spent two years teaching high school in Yakima. However, he got tired of this and decided to pursue a legal career. He met Franklin D.
Roosevelt at Yale and became an adviser and friend to the President. Douglas was a leading advocate of individual rights. He retired in with a term lasting thirty-six years and remains the longest-serving Justice in the history of the court. The following excerpt is taken from Of Men and Mountains by William O.
Douglas. It reveals how as a young boy William Douglas nearly drowned in a swimming pool. In this essay he talks about his fear of water and thereafter, how he finally overcame it. Notice how the autobiographical part of the selection is used to support his discussion of fear.
Notice these words and expressions in the text. Infer their meaning from the context. treacherous misadventure subdued my pride bob to the surface like a cork flailed at the surface curtain of life fell fishing for landlocked salmon back and forth across the pool It had happened when I was ten or eleven years old. I had decided to learn to swim.
There was a pool at the Y.M.C.A. in Yakima that offered exactly the opportunity. The Yakima River was treacherous. Mother continually warned against it, and kept fresh in my mind the details of each drowning in the river.
But the Y.M.C.A. pool was safe. It was only two or three feet deep at the shallow end; and while it was nine feet deep at the other, the drop was gradual. I got a pair of water wings and went to the pool.
I hated to walk naked into it and show my skinny legs. But I subdued my pride and did it. From the beginning, however, I had an aversion to the water when I was in it. This started when I was three or four years old and