bike: 8.7 miles
lake nokomis and back
84/88 degrees
As the European grand tour cycling announcers say, it’s hotting up out there. Scott said that the dew point was 81 at the airport this morning. The record (for all recorded weather here) is 82. Yikes. Instead of running, I decided to bike to the lake and swim. I haven’t biked over to the lake when it wasn’t an open swim this summer for several reasons: 1. the milfoil around the buoys made it too annoying (and dangerous) to swim; 2. I was swimming a lot already at open swims; 3. and because I was already swimming too much, I injured my shoulder. But, the milfoil has been removed, or at least thinned out (hooray!): I can’t do open swim at cedar tonight; and my shoulder is feeling better. Another reason to come over here on my bike besides the facts that it’s too hot to run and I haven’t driven a car in 5 years: my Apple watch activity challenge for July is 5 bike rides of 5 minutes or more. Even though that’s not a challenging challenge, I haven’t achieved it yet this month because it’s been too hot, too smoky, and I’ve been too sick.
The bike ride was easy. I didn’t have to try and pass anyone and I could see well enough to navigate. The paths were not crowded. No big groups of kids or silver riders. No packs of runners. Part of the trail was closed, but I could see and follow the detour signs.
10 Bike Things
- the parking lot at the falls was almost empty, one 1 or 2 cars
- a bird near the lake — cheer up cheer up — a robin
- thwack thwack — the pickleballers are at it again, playing on the court at the rec center, no shade anywhere
- a handful of single runners sprinkled throughout my ride
- the creek under the echo bridge was low and bright and still
- an adult with a kid in a seat sped past on an e-bike
- orange paint around the cracks on the trail near my favorite part of the path
- just past that: trail closed for road (or sewer?) work on nokomis
- biking over some bumps on the part of the path sandwiched between the light rail and the creek, my chain was jammed — I slowed down, preparing to stop and fix it, but it unjammed itself
- minneapolis park workers out doing some work — mowing? cutting down limbs? I’m no sure
swim: 1.5 loops
lake nokomis, main beach
86 degrees
AQI: 57
A wonderful swim! The water was calm and not too warm. Only one other person was swimming loops, and they were doing it much closer in. No boats or paddle boards to watch out for. Hardly any milfoil, or the usual (from past years) and manageable amount of ghost vines reaching up from the bottom. A few more vines floating free near the surface. I swam at a relaxed pace, stopping to notice the quiet lake at the end of every loop. I listened to a dad talking his little kid — kid: am I going to grow taller? Dad: yes, you just need to keep eating your growing up food. I exchanged something (not words, but a feeling, mutual acknowledgment/recognition?) with a seagull that was perched on the far white buoy for the entire time I swam. Hello friend — are you waiting to catch a fish? A brief thought: how many fish are beneath me right now?
As I stroked beside the white buoys, I thought about how swimming in this deep-ish water off the big beach is a different experience than swimming across the lake. Here, with the shorter loop and the buoys beside me, I hardly have to sight. I can just swim until I reach a far buoy, then loop around it, and swim until I reach the other far buoy. Here, I barely need vision. For that reason, and because I’m not swimming far out into the middle of the lake, you might think that swimming here would be less scary. But, I’m always a little more on edge during these swims than the ones from shore to shore. Will I get too tangled in the vines? Are there fish lurking under the buoys?
At the end of my loops, I swam in between the faded red buoys and floated, my head resting on my yellow buoy. Then I sunk under the water and swam with my face just above the lake floor, studying the brown, sandy bottom. Ah! What a way to start the day!
Today’s color palette: white cylindrical buoys, faded pinkish-reddish spherical buoys, pale green water, bright blue sky, the clear bubbles and underside of water’s surface, a light brown sandy bottom.
a return to echolocation
Even as I’m trying to think about water and swimming, I’ve also returned to my manuscript from last year, which has gone through a number of names: Haunts, then Girl Ghost Gorge then Echolocate || Echolocated and now Echolocation. I was compelled to return to this project 2 months early (usually I work on it in the fall) because I noticed a call for manuscripts at one of my favorite presses. And I’m writing about it here because I realized, as I searched for past thoughts and words about this project, that even as I remember thinking about some poem or essay or fact that I’ve come across, I can’t find it on this log1. Did I write about it in a pages document or in Plague Notebook entry? If I don’t post it here, it’s more likely to get lost. So, more posting here.
As I fine-tune my manuscript, I want to weave in more direct references to echolocation and what I mean by making it the title of my collection. It’s literal and figurative. I’m writing about the location of echoes (the gorge and the trail above it), where echoes = the bouncing back of sound in wide open spaces and traces of the past/ghosts. I’m also writing about the act of echolocation, which is used by blind and low vision people to navigate the world. I’ve read about passive echolocation (hearing sounds/echoes that already exist to navigate) and active (creating sound with tongue or cane clicks or footsteps to bounce off of objects. I’m also interested in a third version of this, which is both (or neither?) active and passive: being the object or the solid thing in the world that can be located by others’ sounds. Does that make sense? Here’s a video that I just found that I’d like to archive and use to think more about echolocation:
- Not being able to find past essays/histories that I know I was reading and thought I was writing about has also come up with my “this isn’t the sea” project. I was almost positive I wrote about Dr. Christian Lambertsen and his SCUBA testing at Lake Nokomis but, after a long search, I couldn’t find anything. ↩︎