02-08-2025
Mermaiding magic offers a playful escape
In a suburban Maryland swimming pool, amid scuba divers practicing with oxygen tanks and young children wearing floaties while holding paddle boards, more than a dozen technicolored mermaid tails glittered through the surface in the nine-foot deep end.
The tails - fabric and silicone, purple and gold, some dotted with sequins or lined with seashells - swaddled the lower bodies of the swimmers, adorned with seashell crowns and necklaces, bright blue wigs and colorful streams of tinsel flowing through their hair.
'Go,' Margaret Emerick shouted, after the mermaids - most of them members of the Metro MerFolk Facebook group - undulated over to pool's back wall and assembled in a line.
They then swam in pairs from one end of the Merritt Clubs swimming pool in Eldersburg to the other while a photographer filmed underwater, their fluttering tails creating what looked like an underwater kaleidoscope.
Amid an era of escalating stress in which live-action role-playing and other forms of cosplay are a popular escape, 'mermaiding' is spreading through the Washington region - its lure attracting merfolk who are either looking for a unique form of exercise, a deep sense of community or something to take them out of their everyday human lives.
'Living here is fast; everything is fast. There's traffic. There's so many people, and it feels so suffocating sometimes,' said Montara Hewgill, a Gaithersburg resident who does supply-chain work for a company that makes space equipment. 'But, to escape into something magical, anything as far from this reality as you can, feels really nice, even if it's just for a couple of hours.'
Although there is no official census, the mermaids of the Washington area estimate that they have the second-highest population in the country, behind Florida. In 2023, their community was featured heavily in the Netflix docuseries 'MerPeople,' which focused on several aspiring mermaids' volatile journeys to earn admittance into elite pods, such as the Circus Siren Pod in Laurel, Maryland.
