5 miles
minnehaha falls+
70 degrees
humidity: 82%
Too warm this morning! Sun and humidity and sweat. Tried out my new Saucony Rides. No problems, so I’m optimistic they’ll be good for the marathon. Tried something new: 1 mile run/3 min walk + 2 x 1 mile/2 min walk + 3 x .5 mile/2 min walk. I liked it; I’ll have to try it again.
10 Things
- empty benches
- a recumbent bike, speeding past me — too close
- a few more red leaves on the bushes near the trail
- a large group of older, (all?) white people standing above the falls, listening to a guide tell the history of the falls
- the faint, fake sound of the light rail bells ringing as it neared an intersection
- veteran’s bridge is completely blocked with chain link
- a man sitting at a picnic table near John Steven’s house
- rushing water as it tumbled over the limestone ledge
- a trilling bird
- the sound of bike shoes clipping into pedals behind me — sharp, quick, satisfying
Randomly encountered a great interview with many wonderful passages, including this:
There’s also this pressure, I feel, and perhaps this is just an internal pressure I felt, to write about one’s grief from a cold remove. As I was writing in London, I was just telling myself, if I ever write a book about this, it must be conveyed how it is right now: the extreme absolute end of ecstasy and nothing more or less. I made it my imperative: you will be in the heart of it with me, and you, the reader, either stay or leave, and I don’t care what you do.
Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi
And this:
For me, when we speak of divinity, it is that external sense of transit, trying to move from this realm to another, or to even peer into the other and recover something. But it’s also about puncturing something within oneself to get to that brink, look over into the chasm, and see what’s there.
Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi
transit / move from one realm to another / look over into the chasm / a puncture
Here I’m thinking about moving around the gorge, and looking/hearing/feeling the chasm/gap between shores, between real/imagined, girl/ghost, daughter/mother, here/there (or, not here). I’m also thinking about that puncture as the wearing down/erosion/leaking/a rent in the veil (see MO Leaf and the Cloud)
Swimming One Day in August, update: Last week, after open swim season ended, I tried to continue accumulating minutes for my 24 hours of swimming, but I felt stuffed up and tired after I was done. Then I found out that the beach was being closed “due to geometric mean of E. coli exceeding 126 MPN/100 mL.” I realized that I almost certainly had swum in that water. I didn’t get sick but continued to feel congested for several days. I also realized that 24 hours was not going to happen this year; I was disappointed, but not that disappointed. I’ll try again next year. I’m sad that swimming is over (is it? will I try again before they take the buoys down?), but I’m happy to be breathing better. Besides, I have moved onto marathon training and revising and expanding my collection of gorge poems. Yesterday, I wrote a poem about The Monument and Shadow Falls that I’m particularly excited about. Today, I’ll try writing about the trestle and/or Bohemian Flats, Locks and Dam no. 1, the tunnel of trees.