3.7 miles
bottom of locks and dam
71 degrees
Warm, sunny. Not too bad in the shade. Ran down to the entrance of the locks and dam no. 1, turned around, stopped to walk for a few minutes, put in my “Moment” playlist, then started running again, When I got to “Lose Yourself,” I did a few strides. Felt a few brief flashes of a runner’s high.
10 Things
- bawk bawk cockadoodle doo! heard from far away, slowly approaching — what is that? A bike with an open bike trailer passed by, 2 kids in the back pretending to be a chicken and a rooster
- no cars on the way down to the locks and dam, only one car parked at the bottom
- some voices above me, on the trail going up to Wabun or on the ford bridge
- an orange water cooler with a sing, “Mill City Running” near the bench above the edge of the world
- empty benches — maybe one or two occupied
- a biker passing, blasting techno music — even if there had been a doppler effect on the music how would you be able to tell?
- swallowed a bug — forgot about it until an hour later when I had a few coughing bouts — Bug! I called out, to no one
- the rush of leaves through the trees sounding like falling water
- stopping at a water fountain near the end of my run, waiting for another runner to finish, soaking my hat — I have no memory of what it felt like to put the wet hat on. Did it drip down my face? Did it feel cool? I have no idea
- Walking back, noticing a grid on the lattice of a neighbor’s fence — at first I thought, squares, then lines
I started thinking about grids and lines and my interest in them, which led to thinking about how open swim involves some lines, or maybe not lines but trajectories — from buoy to buoy to buoy, and it also has an imaginary grid and points on that grid. But, open swim also has no lane lines. You are tethered/connected to the world and others in a different logic. I’ve already written about this in a few different ways, including in this poem, from my recently published chapbook, Inklings:
My geometry
of open swimming:
an eye, lake water.
Both of us now grids
with one dot in our
centers — a cone cell
that works, a buoy
that beacons. A line
drawn between passes
through vacant lots and
murky seas as it
tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight and
to rarely see.