bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
62/66 degrees
Feeling a bit tired and out of it this morning. Yesterday, Scott and I biked over to the State Fair and spent the entire day walking around with 145,000 other people (a record!). Wow, crowded. And fun. And great to bike there instead of driving or taking a bus. We biked 10 miles and walked almost 9.
Even with all of yesterday’s exercise, today’s bike ride wasn’t too difficult. Not easy to see with the gray sky, but not too many people around so it didn’t matter. Encountered acorns, walkers, runners, a few other bikers, and one dude on a hover board.
swim: 1 loop (6 mini loops)
30 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
65 degrees
The water looked smooth and silvery from the shore, so I was excited to get in. When I did, uh-oh, a film of green. Not quite looking like green paint, but not not looking like green paint either. Blue-green algae blooms? I got out and walked the shore, wondering what to do. Was it an isolated patch? Should I stay out of the water? I was thinking of biking over to the other beach when I saw another swimmer get in. Decided to go for it, but only a shorter swim until the testing results come out later today — they always test the water on Mondays with results on Tuesdays.
It felt great to be in the water, but I was uneasy. Would I run into slime? No, but I encountered even more milfoil than usual. So many vines reaching up to tap my foot or wrap around my wrist. No thanks.
Out, just past the white buoys, the water didn’t seem too bad — no slime, not that green. Quiet, calm. No boats or other swimmers. One seagull that was committed to their perch on a white buoy. 4 geese having a conversation on the edge of the shore. A few ducks. The water was colder. By the 6th loop, my hands and feet were getting a little numb. Time to get out!
10 Things
- swirls of green on the surface when looking from abover
- goose poop on the sand, feathers in the water
- thick, opaque water
- a silvery surface in the distance
- seagull on a buoy
- swimming directly over some clusters of milfoil, inches from my face, its sudden appearance was unsettling
- a feathery soft tap on my heel — swimming over milfoil
- a kid at the nearby playground repeating the same phrase over and over (6, 7, 8? times) it’s so quiet
- wading through water, a line of green at the point of contact between suit and lake
- clouds then, at the end, the sun breaking through
Swimming One Day
With today’s morning swim, I’m done to 56 minutes left. If it were actually a day, it would be 11:04 pm. Very close. Hopefully the lake won’t be shut down with algae blooms in a few hours! If that happens, I will still swim the 24 hours by finding water somewhere, but it will be more difficult.
hour entry: That it never/ Endi Bogue Hartigan
-That in 1751 Carolus Linneas conceived of a floral clock, a botanical garden designed with species that blossomed predictably at certain hours of day, so that walking through it, one could tell time from the petals.
That it never worked may have been critical to the pollen of future ruins and revolts, that the lily wrist opacity decided not to show itself, that 6:00 industry was lost to the ants and the nectar chambers, that I got nothing intended done all day and coworkers floated between cubicle sunbeams, that the cockle shell women and the snapdragon breaths and the pin code clues and the politicians’ shoes never quite stood to stand there in a punctuating sequence, that all sequence would stymy and revolt, that Mary mary, alarm and delay and caterpillar-staring, that the empirical battalion of the flower clock disintegrated by noon, that subsequently there would be wilderness of soon and soon and soon where the ruins of the instrument held us.
flowers:
lily / wrist, as in wrist watch?
cockle shell
snapdragons / pin flower?
politicians
Miss Mary Mary
a wilderness of soon and soon and soon!
Is this poem in the collection that mostly directly references the title, on orchid o’clock? Possibly. I love the idea of a botanical clock! And also, I don’t. What a delightful way to connect the natural world with our sense of time and what an impossible way to impose invented time on the natural world. And that wilderness of soon by noon? I love that as a description of rewilding! I want to memorize this poem for tomorrow’s swim!
An idea somehow inspired by giving attention to this poem : 24 short poems — inklings? — about swimming one day in august.