Almost every July, during the thick of open swim, I study water. I read about water. I write about water. I live in and for water. This July, I’ve been swimming slightly less days, but for more loops and for longer — 19 hours in the water. One theme that appears repeatedly is: forms of water. The title of this month’s challenge comes from a line in Anne Carson’s “1 = 1”: Every water has its own rules and offerings. How do those rules and offerings change depending on what type of water it is — sea or river or lake or pool?
2 july 2024 — Cole Swensen’s Gave and perspective
Yesterday I started thinking again about different bodies of water and how poets write about them: Mary Oliver (ponds), Lorine Niedecker (lakes), Alice Oswald (rivers, the sea). I also remembered Cole Swenson and their writing about the river Gave de Pau in Gave. I think I need to buy this book!
Water’s rules/offerings also depend on where you are in relation to the water:
As I looked down at the river from high above on the gorge, I thought about the rowers and their paddles and how different their experience of the water was to mine. Down there in the water, I bet it’s choppy and bumpy, with wind and spray. Up here, it’s almost flat and gray blue. No feeling of motion — no waves or the unsettling sense of being higher on water that’s on the edge of spilling over somewhere.
5 july 2024
Lake Nokomis vegetation
Eurasian watermilfoil : invasive, choking out native plants
Northern watermilfoil: native, food for the fish
7 july 2024 — no more silver boat bottom
A few random thoughts: I don’t miss the silver-boat bottom and even if it were still here, the course is set up in a way that would make it unhelpful for guiding me. I only breathe through my mouth when I swim because of my nose plug. Longterm, what kind of impact does that have on my swimming, breathing, fitness? It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me: breaststrokers always seem to be trying to race me. They irritate me. Not that I’m complaining, but how come I never see any snakes in this water (or eels)?
8 july 2024 — cedar lake vibes
The buoy across the lake was fine for the first loop, then partly deflated for the second loop, then completely flat for the rest of the loops. Just an orange blob on the water. I’ve never seen that before! Of course it happened at Cedar lake.
Another Cedar lake moment:
A woman to the lifeguard: Excuse me, my son doesn’t have a cap, and he’s not 18 (the minimum required age for open swim), but could he swim across?
Lifeguard: As long as he’s a good swimmer, it should be okay.Maybe I would have been critical of these things in the past, but I’m not now. Deflated buoys and underage swimmers are just part of the cedar lake vibe.
9 july 2024 — look pal, this isn’t the sea
Yesterday, I wrote about looking for a balance between routine and disruption. This morning (7:30 am), I’m thinking about how open swim club offers one model. Swimming across the lake during open swim is a routine with a few set rules: a designated time, lifeguards lining the route, buoys you are supposed to always keep to your right. But, how you choose to follow those rules is up to you. Show up early (often they open the course before it’s officially supposed to start), or halfway through, or even at the last minute. Do just one loop or as many as you can fit into two hours. Swim straight from one buoy to the next in a tight, efficient line or loop wide, taking up as much lake as you can. Swim without stopping, or stop often to catch your breath or orient yourself or feel the openness and solitude of the lake. Round the far buoys or go past them to pause at the shore. Use a kick board or fins, a snorkel. Wear a wetsuit or a tri-suit or a swim suit but always some suit (another rule: no naked swimming).
An open water slogan I’ve seen before: no walls. No lane lines or lanes. But, this isn’t Homer’s sea, Alice Oswald’s unfenced purple. There are shores in sight (well, mostly in sight) and only vines, fish, and swan boats to encounter. No sharks or motorized boats or big waves. Does that mean the lake is all routine? Safe, steady, predictable?
which is worse? Lake Nokomis doesn’t have sharks. It has uncertainty, mystery, a floor only 15-20 feet below scattered with things we can’t see because the water is stirred up, murky. I wonder, which is scarier? Swimming above sharks you can see, or above a nothing that could be anything that you can’t?
10 july 2024 — immersion and water, 3 descriptions
Lauren Groff: “there is a moment in swimming when, after a while, the body’s rhythm grows so comfortable that the swimmer loses awareness of herself. There is a marrow-deep letting go.”
Anne Carson: “And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.”
Sanders: “I feel metallic”
11 july 2024 — time and water
anne carson — staining together of time and mind
. . . the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.
1 = 1
Heidi Julavets — stop-time photography, the swimmer slowed while everyone else sped up
As we stroked past I thought I saw George growing older and older. His grandchildren beside him grew older, too, taking his place before being replaced themselves by their children. It was like a trick of stop-time photography, everyone shading into everyone else. . . . Time passed. I started to doze. The cold water had slowed our pulses but everything else spun at great speed. I worried I would awake to find myself an old woman, my husband dead, my daughter grown and turned into me. But life, when I woke up, was as I’d left it.
The Folded Clock
samantha sanders — the fountain of youth
[on swimming in Lake Michigan in the winter] The exhilaration is remarkable. I feel like we’ve discovered the fountain of youth.
Swimming Through
Alice Oswald — 12 white-collar workers, the hour itself ascending
or is it only the hours on their rounds
Nobody
thinking of the tides by turns
twelve white-collar workers
and from their meaty backs
Evaporations
A million crackling things
Burst into flight which was either water
Or the hour itself ascending.
Darby Nelson — ripples, connections, relationships
if I think of time as a lake, I see ripples set in motions by one even touching an entire shore and then, when reflected back toward the middle, meeting ripples from other events, each changing the other in their passing. I think of connectedness, or relationships, and interacting events that matter greatly to lakes.
For the Love of Lakes
19 july 2024 — the rhythms and rules of the waves
The water was choppy, full of swells. From the big beach to the first orange buoy, it was difficult to stroke; I felt like I was flailing. Not being hit with big waves, but feeling like the water just under me didn’t want to cooperate. From the far orange buoy to the far green buoy, it was difficult to see anything, everything kept hiding behind a wave. Mostly I breathed on my right side. The last stretch of the loop, parallel to the big beach, was the best. Pushed from behind by the waves, I felt like I was on a people mover. My strokes were stronger and faster and easier.
23 july 2024 — freestyle > breaststroke
I didn’t stop at the shore between loops, and mostly swam freestyle without stopping, but once or twice I switched to breaststroke and took in the solitude and the smooth-as-glass water and the silence. Wow! Swimming freestyle without stopping, your head barely out of the water, is a much different experience than swimming breaststroke, with your head almost always out of the water. I like it; I feel less like a human and more like a fish, underwater for an hour.
25 july 2024 — everything glowing orange and olympic pools
The stretch between the first and second orange buoys was strange. The sun was hitting my goggles in such a way that caused a weird red streak underwater in my left eye. Not bright red, just red.
Since noticing this orangey-red underwater, it’s happened again, several times.
I discovered this delightful fact: there are 24 pools for the Paris Olympics, including competitions pools and warm-up pools. Wow!
28 july 2024 — the rhythms and rules of the waves, the moon
Side to side rocking heading east from the big beach to the first buoy, the current pushing me a little to the north. Choppy, but no water crashing into or over me. Somewhere between the last orange buoy and the first green one, rough. Mostly breathed to my right. The buoy and other swimmers were lost in the waves. Draining. This is where my back would start to ache. The most challenging spot was rounding the green buoy closest to the big beach. Big waves wanting to push me under the buoy. It took 4 tries, but on the last loop I angled my boat-body right to avoid this pushing. Heading north, parallel to the big beach, the water rippled behind and over me. Mostly giving me a boost, sometimes sucking the energy out from under me. As I swam this last stretch, I wondered if I could learn to ride the waves or angle in ways that avoided the roughest contact.
I love the almost/half/barely-view of the first orange buoy after rounding the green buoy. I think I’ve written this before, but it reminds me of the faintest trace of the moon in the afternoon sky. Sometimes a faint orange, sometimes only the silhouette of something that makes the Sara in the back of my head whisper, moon.
30 july 2024 — Alice Oswald’s inkling of a fish
the inkling of a fish — mostly, all I get in the middle of the lake are inklings of fish: silver flashes below. I’m glad. Near shore, in the shallow water, minnows seem more like inklings of fish than fully realized fish. I love inkling as a hint or suggestion: the inkling of a buoy, a whisper from a fish, orange or come this way or over there
Plague Notebook, Vol 21 notes
1 july: types of water — pond / Mary Oliver and Maxine Kumin, sea/ Alice Oswald, river/ Alice Oswald and Cole Swensen, lake / Lorine Niedecker and Tony Hoaglund
not sure, sharp edges, but soft, leaky, eroding, porous
8 july: Lorine Niedecker’s collage technique in “Lake Superior” — putting together poem from different layers of lake’s history
Nature alone cannot explain this landscape, you need history too.
11 july: states of time — zone =time slows = peak physical, flow = time flies = peak mental
We can never be the fish, but in flashes we can be like the fish
drift dream
17 july: Alice Oswald says to look at things liquidly. What does that mean and how do we do that? How do I do that?
“To swim is to be a part of things” (Bonnie Tsui).
20 july: from “Swimming Chenango Lake” — the geometry of water — the shape and relative arrangement of the parts of something, the relationship of points, lines, surfaces, angles
22 july: rivering
23 july: “Swimming: a body slowing toward prayer and presence inside rhythm and weightlessness” (Lidia Yuknavitch).
27 july: to river (verb) — to move, slice through, transform, divide, break open, reshape, cut, unsettle, occupy, overwhelm, erode
28 july: the fish dimension