Tag: swim

aug 19/RUNSWIM

2 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
humidity: 94% / dew point: 70

Ugh — so thick! Oh well, there’s one good thing about this consistently hot and humid weather in the morning: it’s making me want to be done with summer and ready for fall and winter running. My calf almost cramped after 4 minutes of running again. I had to walk it off. I wonder what’s causing this?

Heard a lot of rowers on the river. And not just the coxswain this time; I also heard rowers cheering for each other. Was it a class? The U of M team? I stopped on the winchell trail to try and see them but I couldn’t. Too many leaves in the way.

Evidence of rain everywhere. Lots of mud, gushing and spurting sewers. The pipe that dumps neighborhood water down the ravine and into the river at 44th was loud. I decided to stop and record a video of it. In the background, you can hear the coxswain.

water falls / coxswain calls

When I wasn’t on the winchell trail, I listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist, including Beck’s “Time Bomb.” The first time I heard that song was in the Funny or Die video with Will Ferrell and ? (can’t remember the other actor) going around Los Angeles and high-fiving everyone. Tried to find a clip of it but couldn’t.

When I looked up “time bomb beck video” a promo video for charity: water came up from 16 years ago. The organization was seeking donations to help in drilling for water in Central Africa. I don’t know enough about whether or not this is a good (effective, responding to the needs of the people by asking them what they need) organization, and I couldn’t tell from the video, partly because I couldn’t see it very well, but its reminder, at the beginning, that water is life and its emphasis on access to water offers an important link between time and water and a powerful contrast between my experience, living among so many lakes, and the experience of others without easy access to water.

I am reminded of a passage in Anne Carson’s “1=1.” After describing a scene of a train car in Europe over-stuffed with people fleeing war zones, she writes:

 a scene so much the antithesis of her own morning she cannot enter it. What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears.

1=1/ Anne Carson

Impossible to answer, important to dwell within the discomfort of it.

hour entry: When John Adams wrote / Endi Bogue Hartigan

Another toll, another count of automatic weapon casualties, another occasion of America losing track of its math. I read today that when John Adams wrote “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together,” clocks were a tolling of public event, rung, an occasion or station in sun. I slept, and woke, I slept too long and woke. I tried to count the measured world by reading. Read “Thirteen Clocks,” read the late morning sun slant, read the current count outpaces past casualty counts, read “just three percent of adults own half of America’s guns.” Something automatic in measure, too automatic. I woke out of 9.25 hours of sleep I calculated automatically upon waking. I saw a crow out the window that was the occasion of a crow pecking frozen specks. I read the headlines leaking into headlines, saw the orchid sky calculating nothing. I have an inclination to stream and I don’t know what it means today. I have an inclination to lie in my husband’s shoulders crook and let the day snowdrift let the dimness become wide, so a shoulder is a kind of stream too. The argument is made that the streaming of time is a perception trick. The argument is made that we have moved past occasion to incremental measure that we are obsessed with measure and stricken. I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water. The early clocks were water clocks but it was shown that water was imprecise, was subject to pressure and pore—even streams of consciousness can encounter ducts and brim. I am conscious of my husband’s warmth because of more than his warmth. Do not mistake headlines for measure. We were held in God’s soft pocket. Do not mistake automatic grieving for water.

toll / automatic / occasion / track / count measures / measure counts / outpace / streaming time / from occasion to increment / obsess / to stream is to move through water not seconds or minutes or hours / water exceeds measure is imprecise is more than our grief

the imprecision of water clocks / “The history of timekeeping is the story of the search for ever more consistent actions or processes to regulate the rate of a clock.” / “Since the rate of flow of water is very difficult to control accurately, a clock based on that flow could never achieve excellent accuracy. People were naturally led to other approaches.”

source: A Walk Through Time — Early Clocks

precision / division / headline as occasion as increment as measured line between

a line to keep/to use: I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water.

Maybe this could be the title of a poem? Something about softness and imprecision and the inability to be contained in easily measurable ways. And how my vision loss has made for liquid looking (Alice Oswald), and a way to see the same or better than others in the water. Moving through water offers a different logic and makes the existing logic strange — distorted, weathered, unreliable, imprecise.

And now, instead of moving through water, I’m thinking of Bruce Lee’s short poem about being water:

Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless
like water 
now you put 
water into a cup
it becomes the cup you put
water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle you put 
it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or it can
craaaaasshh
be water my friend

Be water versus be like water. Metaphor versus simile. Metaphor removes the encounter with the other; you become the other (see Anne Carson and the anthropology of water).

people always believe that metaphor is more poetic. But I’ve always loved simile. One of the reasons is that simile keeps both worlds alive at the same time whereas metaphor changes one for another. So you get this beautiful kind of doubled feeling with the simile. 

The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself

Searching for something else, I just came across this excellent answer to the question, Do you carry a notebook?

AO: No, I don’t much. If I travel like now I do take a notebook. I find by the time I get back home I haven’t got the sort of liveliness. Mostly I try to take things into my head. I really believe in the sort of inarticulate ways of thinking. So the fact that you can read the whole day, all day long, and then when you’re composed it can come out again. I like that process of it not yet being in language, changing your mind round. And I’m more and more wary of the kind of willed and conscious act of writing. More and more I leave my mind to do it by itself. So I will, you know, go out and be kind of shocked by all the colours and pictures and smells and then purposefully not think of them linguistically. I think that the underneath mind will then do the work and that’s the mind I’m interested in. So the skill for me is then learning how to raid that underneath mind and then, when you do pick up a pen, you’re listening just hard enough so that you don’t use your surface mind. You get down to the mind that has taken everything in.

The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself

Instead of the underneath mind, the underwater mind, or the just beneath the surface mind? The water-logged mind?

swim: 3 loops (? cedar loops*)
75 minutes
cedar lake open swim
85 degrees

*a strange course set-up: the first buoy was halfway out in the lake, the second was close to shore and to the right of hidden beach, so I’m not sure of the distance. Judging my time and effort, I’m guessing that I did 3 nokomis loops.

note: I didn’t have time to write this entry right after my swim, so I’m writing it the next morning.

Another wonderful night with hardly any wind. Beautiful light. Warm water, except for when I stopped swimming to tread water and extend my feet as far below as I could. Then it was cold. Crowded tonight: the last free night of the season. The water was fast, flat, opaque. My goggles were fogged for a lap or two until I licked the inside, then they were clear. I wasn’t sure if that would work, but it did.

My favorite image: on the second half of the loop, heading back to the beginning, breathing to my right and seeing a line of swimmers in the distance heading towards hidden beach. What did I actually see? the rare flash of an arm, a pink cap, churned up water.

After 3.5 loops, I stopped to take a quick break and check my time. Oops, the workout never started. I remember pressing start on my watch, but sometimes this happens. Oh well. Even without the data, I swam for 30 minutes before turning on my workout.

After finishing the swim, drying off in the grass, I encountered another swimmer who had a strange request. A fish bit my mole, could you check to make sure it’s not bleeding? The other day, a fish bit me and when I got home I had a scab.

The fish bite? What? I can’t remember if I’ve written about it this summer, but I haven’t noticed any fish. Not one sighting of a silver flash, definitely no encounters. The other swimmer continued, I’m just so slow out there and they’re attracted to my moles. Yikes!

She joked that she was going to ask her roommate to make fish for dinner so she could get some revenge. With each bite she’d say, I’m not food, YOU’RE food!

aug 18/SWIM

5 loops (9 cedar loops)
95 minutes
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

A fabulous evening: no wind, sun, calm water. I felt so strong and buoyant for much of the swim. High on the water, a steady kick, strong arms. The light around 7 was that great late summer evening light. The sun setting earlier than in July — a chance to see a different sort of sparkle on the surface. Point beach was shallower than usual. I was able to stand up farther out than I ever have before — or, was I just standing in a different spot? The floor of this beach is very uneven. Lots of prickly vines, single strands passing slowly over my legs, clusters or clumps or knots almost getting tangled with my kicking feet.

before the swim

Continuing to read and think about Endi Bogue Hartigan’s on orchid o’clock as I experiment with what it could mean to swim one day in august. In process note #27, Hartigan writes this about the process of working on the book:

I dove into reading about the history of horology, clock systems, and theories/philosophies of time and my mind wandered through these histories for years, clock history being an incredible palimpsest of histories: religious, industrial, scientific, astronomical, governmental, economic, natural, more. The history of clocks and time measure includes everything from the capitalist puppetry of measuring industrial time to drive efficiency, to the synchronization with atomic clocks from computers where real time headline bleed into our screens and consciousness, to medieval monks creating mechanisms to wake for morning prayers. Time itself as a concept has no one definition. And while clock measure is cultural it is also so personal, is used to keep us close to our beloved ones and moments. I wrote from this interlay, and the more I wrote the more I wrestled with how we inherit these interwoven histories and constraints, but also fight against them and can slip boundless out of them. 

The mechanization and measurement of time. I’m thinking of the second verse of Oliver’s poem:

Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean, the mechanical part.

The mechanical part. The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! Regular. Ordering disorderly life. Ordinary (Oliver, Upstream). the hours on their rounds, twelve white collar workers who manage the schedules of water (A Oswald, Dart).

Precise. Neat little boxes. Nothing approximate about it, exact. The closest I can get to precision when measuring my encounter with lake water. The next closest is arm strokes, but only because I’m steady with my strokes and rarely stop or vary it. My Apple watch records this data. It even distinguishes breast stroke from freestyle. How?

It’s 150 strokes o’clock. It’s 30 breaths o’clock.

Where does an Apple watch fit into the study of clocks? To my swimming one day in August?

Later in her process notes, Hartigan describes the three forms she uses in her book:

The forms I arrived at became a way of moving with different paces in time, moving in primarily three different forms/paces: hour entries which are prose-like and which move at a slower loosely-shadowed mental pace that allows for sentences; second entries which are like little insect legs notching forward with alliteration and gap-jumping nonlinear narratives; and a variety of lyrics that often use the slash as an entrance. They work together and of course the forms mix and disrupt their own boundaries too. The slash was important to my mental movement. 

Very cool. I’m thinking about my own forms and how to express different modes of swimming in the lake. Inklings, which is the chapbook I’m working on, are short 5 syllable, 5 line, flash encounters with the lake. Brief glimpses, approximations, things witnessed in the midst of motion. Then I have some shortened sonnets — 5 syllable 14 line poems represent more sustained encounters. What other form to use, and what does it represent?

hour entry: “calendaring” is a verb/ Endi Bouge Hartigan

“Calendaring” is a verb. You can “clock yourself in.” These terms like rows of hothouse orchids living in some God-forsaken pre-purchase interval steam. New verbs for new measures, new signs of transaction as home, this moon hour spent “off the clock,” but tracked, this noon hour packed in screen-time and foam, this stem of the orchid holding itself up as an orchid. you can even check off “orchid,” you can list for Tuesday, “unnatural hothouse mixture of purple and green.”

clock yourself in / measuring data / transactor or transacted or transaction? / tracked / tricked / off the clock / on the clock / in the clock

calendar / 7 days / every day / any day / a certain day / day after day / all day / once a day / 30 days has september

orchids in rows / hothouse / swimmers doing loops / a dredged-out lake / unnatural green / fertilizer run-off / blue-green algae o-clock / an exchange — a perfect lawn for an unswimmable lake

during the swim

Thought about days and remembered my “On This Day” practice. I should use that in my thinking and writing about one day in August. Also thought about another way, in addition to minutes, strokes, and distance, that I use to measure duration: active calories. Finally, as I counted my strokes between breaths — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left — I thought about counting as a comforting practice and about counting and accumulation (minutes/hours accrued) versus counting as a repeating of numbers with no accumulation (1 2 3 4 5 breathe). Of course, there is accumulation with these strokes and I keep track of it on my watch: total number of strokes. But, the act of counting in the water over and over is different.

aug 17/SWIM

4 loops (8 cedar loops)
95 minutes
cedar lake open swim
69 degrees

Would it rain? Would they cancel the swim? It seemed uncertain when I woke up to gloom, but the storm stayed south and the water was great. Smooth, mostly calm, not too crowded, easy to see. The first 3 and a half loops felt so easy and fast. I stopped at hidden beach for a quick break and a chance to see the lake from above the water for more than a brief flash every 5 strokes. The beach was quiet, empty. I could hear wind in the trees, then some bugs. I think I saw a few people getting ready to do open swim. They were up in the grass putting on wetsuits. Started swimming again and did another 3 loops before taking a minute or two break at hidden beach again. swam 1.5 more loops before deciding I was done — my legs decided for us. Nearing the first buoy, my legs felt like they were about to cramp, so I stopped kicking and dragged myself in for the last 50 feet or so.

strange vision

Several times, something strange happened with my color vision. Looking up quickly to sight, I noticed the lifeguard’s kayak. Instead of red in looked white and (almost) robin’s egg blue. Later, getting closer to more than one swimmer, their swim cap was white and the same blue instead of bright pink. Both with the kayak and the caps, when I got closer they returned to normal — red and pink.

10+ Things

  1. white sky — sometimes I could see the sun through the clouds, but it never emerged
  2. a swirl of vines, passing over my head, shoulders, torso, lingering near my ankles
  3. the swimming area at hidden beach was wide and long and almost empty — at least one other open swimmer was standing in the shallow water
  4. for the first 4 loops, the water was all smooth, during loop 5 it was much choppier heading to hidden beach
  5. a bird in the air — was it big or small? I couldn’t quite tell. I’m thinking small
  6. opaque water
  7. a scratchy vine, pricking my arm
  8. noticing the surface above the water from my vantage point: submerged, only my eyes out of the water, like an alligator
  9. stopping at the little beach: a dog barking, a collar clanging
  10. making note of the procession of swimmers on the other side of the course, heading to hidden beach when I was heading from it — a slow and steady line of swimmer
  11. after the swim, walking past a big puddle on the dirt/gravel road, its surface had scales on it from the wind

I never got completely lost in the swim, although I had moments where I wasn’t thinking about my stroke or breathing or sighting.

Thinking about time, last night I started reading Endi Bogue Hartigan’s on orchid o’clock. Here’s the opening poem, which I think will be a great inspiration for me in playing around with “one day in august.”

I’m talking about the rotation/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

—The predictable commencement of annual flooding of the Nile River is said to have formed the foundation of the ancient Egyptian calendar. Calculations were made using nilometers, vertical water-measurement devices, influencing taxation, crop planning, and more.

I’m talking about the black cows in the pasture along the highway between here and the office: some days the black cows’ snouts are pointed in the same direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the evening, all 200-300 or so, parallel dipping their snouts: some days they are helter-skelter; some days the shadows are crisp some days the shadows are swallowed but they have shadows on all days; and the wet eyes of the cows have an angle with which they lean into the wet grass, so they are a kind of dials to themselves and their light, visible to themselves or not. I might be comforted driving by saying cow shadow o’clock, saying east black cow o’clock, I might be comforted by talking about their rotation.

/it is child eyelash o’clock /it is having to look o’clock it is
Nile flood o’clock /it is percolate o’clock

/it is morning birds plus socket sound of car closing / 21st century pastoral
o’clock it is flashflood fear o’clock /it is TV van at the shooting site rim

/it is miscount of the dead o’clock
/it is remember to call remember to call find a corner to make a call o’clock

/it is the blue jay screech o’clock /it is having to look o’clock
/it is innocent eyelash o’clock /it is the clock continuing despite

o’clock /people emptying from their eyes
/it is yesterday’s rose-dew o’clock

/it is tearing the work blouse off its hanger o’clock/ it is
tearing and not /it is that blouse again that headline again it is

everything I forgot creeping up in tides
/it is people split and swelled

confiding overflow o’clock /it is the shadow of a gun / the shadow of
the cow o’clock /it is what is allowed in the shadow

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness
o’clock /it is glued to the headline o’clock

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock /it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another
curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into their
lives o’clock the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

/it is child-wake, it is flood of what’s at stake o’clock,
/it is the morning rupture the American rupture that

shadow-bleeds and swells /it is the felling of the shadow o’clock
/I’m talking about the black cows.

Wow!

I found this helpful essay by Hartigan about the book and the process of creating it: process note #2: on orchid o’clock

And here’s an earlier book of hers that might be interesting to check out: Pool (5 choruses)

aug 15/SWIM

4 loops (8 cedar loops)
100 minutes
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

A great swim. I think I’ve only ever swum at cedar lake in the morning one other time, in august of 2019 when lake nokomis was closed for the rest of the season because a few kids pooped near the big beach and the e-coli was crazy high. I liked it, although it took some adjusting. In the late afternoon, the sun is always in my eyes on the back half of the loop. This time, in the morning, it was in my eyes during the front half. The first loop felt great, the second a little harder as I worked on my stroke and breathing properly, but by the third loop I had locked into a steady rhythm. I wasn’t paying attention to my stroke or breath, I was just moving through the water.

10 Things

  1. an orange glow on the water just below the orange buoy
  2. orange at the edge of my vision as I swam
  3. something big and white through the trees and on the shore. When I was swimming, it just looked white, but when I stopped to study it, I realized it was a house
  4. a vine landed on my shoulder and I was able to whip it off with my hand mid-stroke
  5. a small bird flying fast above me
  6. someone with a bright pink safety buoy, swimming wide around the course
  7. the surface of the water: blue with soft ripples
  8. only a few clouds
  9. lifeguard as landmark: on the edge of the course
  10. lifeguard as obstacle: too close to the orange buoy

In the later loops, I started reciting the Alice Oswald lines I’d memorized last month. Struggled a little, but managed to remember most of them. Even as I struggled with the lines, the act of reciting them distracted me — or, did it focus me? — and I entered the flow –everything water and motion. In my head, as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left 1 2 3 a slight head lift to sight 4 5 breathe right, I linked this flow state with some sentences from Anne Carson’s “1=1”:

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. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic.

Oh yes, for much of that 100 minute swim, I was in it, in the water, in my life, in motion, where motion = the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action.

Speaking of motion, I found this from Susan Tichy this afternoon:

All I wanted for the poem was openness, a merging of muscle-memory with the skittering of words down the page, to know as a process of motion.

Susan Tichy

Does muscle-memory = those ten thousand adjustments? In the early loops, my adjustments — of my head for better breathing, elbows for better power, hips for more buoyancy — were conscious and took me out of myself, but in the later loops, I didn’t think about how I was stroking or breathing and sighting, I just did it.

In her mention of skittering of words down the page, Tichy is talking about her efforts to write about mountains. How to describe it in terms of today’s lake water? Bobbing on the page? Gliding across the page, directed by currents, re-routed by waves or lifeguards or other swimmers?

aug 14/RUN

3.5 miles
locks and dam #1
73 degrees

Another hard run. Hot! Lots of sweating and stopping to take walk breaks. Ran to the bottom of locks and dam #1 for a great view of the river. I can’t remember its color — blue, I think — but I remember the small waves on it and the faint wake from a long gone boat. Oh, and the single white buoy and the roar of rushing water one way and the ford bridge the other.

At the bottom of the locks and dam, I noticed some bright orange leaves:

fall is coming / 14 aug 2025

Not the greatest picture, but I’ll post it anyway. So orange! Too soon!

Saw someone emerge from the trail that dips below the road to cross the path and wondered if they had just come up from the new trail that descends deeper into the gorge. Encountered 2, maybe 3, roller skiers, walkers, runners, a few bikers. Below the road I stopped to walk and listen to the acorns falling from the tree and thumping on the ground. Then started running again over acorn shells.

I thought about my Swimming, One Day in August project and had an idea: what if I tried swimming in bde maka ska and lake harriet? Or, some other lakes nearby? Or, one of the clearest lakes in the state, Square Lake, in Stillwater?

a few hours later: Hooray! Just received an email that all future open swims will be at Cedar! So as long as Scott can drive me over there, I don’t have to miss a single one.

a ramble on lake water testing

A revelation just last week. Minneapolis Parks tests the lake water weekly, and testing the water is better than not testing the water. But the slow and rigid system of testing only on Mondays and getting results on Tuesdays (e-coli) and Wednesdays (algae blooms) combined with the fickle changes in quality based on weather and other environmental factors, means the testing is not very accurate for what the conditions are at any given time. On an abstract level, it seems obvious to me that you can’t rely on tests to guarantee safe water, but on an experiential level — that is, being in the water swimming for over an hour at a time roughly 6 times a week for 11 summers — I needed an unquestioned faith in those tests and the park’s ability to let me know when it was/wasn’t safe to swim in order to get in the water.

And, mostly it is safe in the water. And it is clean. I get very irritated when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about says to me, eww, how can you swim in that dirty water!? Minneapolis Park workers and volunteers do an amazing job of keeping the water quality high. And this is partly due to their regular testing. But, these tests can’t guarantee anything.

What am I trying to do here? I’m not blaming the parks department; these tests are expensive and it would be difficult to test regularly enough to keep up with the quick shifts in wind and rain and the groundwater problems (like unstable sewer systems) that have existed from the beginning of the lake’s modern shape in the 1920s when workers excavated peat and used it to build up the surrounding neighborhood. Not to mention climate change and erratic weather and an excess of nutrients getting into the water from lawn fertilizers. And people feeding ducks who poop in the water which increases the amount of e-coli. No, I think Minneapolis Parks, especially Minneapolis Aquatics, are amazing.

All of this is complicated and messy with no easy answers. And it’s scary. I’ve been wondering for a few years when it’s going to happen — because it seems inevitable that it will happen — that lakes will no longer be safe to swim in, unfiltered outside air will no longer be safe to breathe. And this is how it happens, I think. Not all of sudden, but slowly. More days with bad test results and beach closures. Or inaccurate test results and water that is pea-soup green and slimy and that might get you sick.

I suppose this last paragraph sounds depressing, and it is, and also it isn’t. I love swimming in lake nokomis, and I would do a tremendous amount to keep swimming in it. Maybe it’s time to figure out what I can do to help keep it safe.

aug 13/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
68 degrees / 73 degrees

Ahhh! What a morning! A relaxed ride. Again, no worries about what I could and couldn’t see. On the way there, I thought about metaphors (inspired by the lines below). An idea, which is not new, but is good to remind myself of: in poetry, it’s not all about meaning with words, but the movement and shifting they create. Thoughts, experiences, ideas flow freely until they bump into words. Words direct the movement (from encounter to revelation or understanding).

The most memorable thing on the bike back. Climbing the hill near the rec center and where bikes cross the parkway, I heard — HEY ASSHOLE WATCH OUT! — a car and a biker stopped in the road, the biker yelling at the driver for not stopping, the driver apologizing. Then — you’re a Minnesota driver, that’s what YOU are! I didn’t really see what happened, but I know it’s hard to see all the bikers when you’re driving. I also know that drivers don’t always look. The driver’s apology seemed sincere; the biker’s yelling was very loud and aggressive. And what’s up with insulting Minnesotans?

earlier today

Heard from an open window, a woman talking to someone, presumably a young kid: it‘s actually a t — saTurday

Returning to some lines from a poem I posted a few days ago, Difference/ Mark Doty:

nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,

sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. 

swim: 2 loops (8 mini loops)
50 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
73 degrees

Wow wow wow! What a swim. This might be one of the top swims of the summer, and the one that fits best with Mary Oliver’s words in Swimming, One Day in August:

it is time now, I said,
for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
among the flux of happenings.

…

I went down in the afternoon
to the sea
which held me, until I grew easy.

I think I swam 8 loops. I stopped a lot to tread water and listen to the silence. So quiet! I was all alone, but not. So relaxing. I felt completely at ease, which is not a feeling I have that often. No wind, no waves, the surface flat and still except for the bubbles I was creating that popped on the surface. A few seagulls perched on the white buoys — hello friends! A few clouds in the blue sky. My fingers frequently got caught on milfoil reaching up from the bottom, but it was almost like we were high-fiving or greeting each other — nothing menacing about the vines today. There were 2 metal detector dudes chatting and detecting. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, so no idea about what they found. Neither of them yelled out excitedly, I got it!

10 Things

  1. seagulls — in the sky, on the buoy
  2. water like velvet
  3. a thin skin of something on the surface in the swimming area
  4. the contrast between the sloshing as I swam freestyle and the silence as I tread water and bobbed
  5. the only thing I could see under water were bubbles
  6. the surface: almost a mirror, flat, blue
  7. the roar of one plane overhead
  8. workers fixing the picnic tables — they pulled off the tops and the seats earlier in the week — having fun and listening to country music
  9. standing in the swimming area, facing the sun, closing my eyes and still seeing the reflection of the light on the surface
  10. thinking it was almost too silent — why was there no noise? — then hearing the pounding of a hammer from the workers near Painted Turtle

NOOOOOOOOO!! Got an email this afternoon that both beaches at Lake Nokois are closed immediately due to blue-green algae. They test the water every Monday and, as I just learned, the results for e-coli come in on Tuesday, but blue-green algae comes in on Wednesday. It might clear up before next week, but they won’t test again until Monday, and won’t have the results until Wednesday. So the earliest they can open up the lake is next Wednesday. I’ll miss 4 open swims. Then Thursday will be the last open swim of the season. Such a bummer, but at least I got my magical morning, and I didn’t encounter any algae. I saw it on Monday, but I think it’s already cleared up.

swim: 3 loops (6 mini loops)
65 minutes
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees

Other than the abundance of scratchy, clingy vines, the water was perfect. Calm, smooth, not too cold (or too warm). So relaxing! The water was a little greener than usual, but no algae blooms. Hopefully it will stay that way. There were a few pockets of very cold water near the far buoy. The sun was making the water sparkle. I stopped a few times to enjoy the silence out in the middle of the lake. Encountered a kayak and a paddle boarder who seemed extra tall standing straight up and above me. A strange sight — a giant walking on water.

Only 2 more cedar lake swims this season and no swimming at all until next Monday. Boo.

aug 11/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
69 degrees (there) / 72 (back)

I’m getting serious about my 24 hours of swimming in a month this week. Decided to bike over the lake for a short morning swim. The bike ride was great. I only had to pass one person! I didn’t have any moments of panic when everything seemed a little fuzzy. As usual, the bike ride back was easier and seemed to go by much faster. Biking down the hill between Lake Nokomis and Lake Hiawatha, I noticed another redone path leading down to the dock. Someday I’ll run over here and check it out.

5 Bike Things

  1. a group of kids congregating at the bike safety course that used to be a tennis court
  2. creek water rushing by near the spot where kids like to swim
  3. some sort of rock music that I couldn’t identify coming from a bike
  4. the marsh area near my favorite part of the creek path didn’t have any water, just mud
  5. passing my the wooden bridge at lake nokomis — an intensely sour rotten fishy smell — yuck!

swim: 6 mini loops / 1.5 lake nokomis loops
35 minutes
main beach lake nokomis
70 degrees

A wonderful morning for a swim. Calm, empty water. There were a few kayaks and swan boats, but otherwise, I was the only human in the water, at least near the bench. Plenty of vines and fish below me, ducks nearby, planes and seagulls above. I’m swimming again tonight, so I didn’t want to do too much this morning.

5 Swim Things

  1. a plane flying directly overhead, looking like a shark
  2. swooping seagulls
  3. a kayak crossing in front of me
  4. ghost vines reaching up
  5. thin strips of light extending below, diagonally

I recited Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August” and felt the deepening and quieting of my body. Had to give myself a little pep talk during loop 2 — no, there are NOT any giant turtles or things with sharp teeth lurking below, waiting to dart up and drag me down. I rarely have these fears, and they don’t make me panic, but occasionally when I’m swimming alone, off of the main beach, a what-if thought creeps in. What if there is something down there waiting for me?

The lake was great. After I finished, I stood in the swimming area and took it all in. At the edge of the shore, I noticed the water was a bright green — uh-oh, hope there aren’t algae blooms!

swim: 3.5 loops
70 minutes
cedar lake open swim
79 degrees

Double swims today. The water at cedar was choppy. Mostly, I loved it. The only parts I didn’t like: having to breathe on only one side more often and the stretch where the water seemed to be pulling me down. It was harder to stroke. Otherwise, it was great. Oh — except for all of the vines. Lots of full body scans today, with a vine traveling down my body as I swam over it.

5 Cedar Things

  1. a young kid hiding in the buoy near point beach
  2. a lifeguard in a kayak near hidden beach, close to the far buoy — part red blur, part dark silhouette
  3. the idea of orange in the distance as I tried to sight — only a tiny orange dot
  4. cloudless sky
  5. 2 girls laughing and swimming at the beach

added the next morning: Just remembered something I really didn’t want to forget about last night’s swim. Standing in the shallow water, preparing to start my swim, I overheard parents with their 2 young boys — 5 or 6 or 7? They were trying to get them back into their kayaks.

mom: we talked about this. we can’t take the kayaks unless you paddle all the way back. get in the kayak.

kid 1: I’ll get in the kayak if you buy me a nintendo.
kid 2: yeah, a nintendo.

Damn. . . .I didn’t stick around to see what happened, but I’m betting the mom wasn’t falling for this shit.

aug 8/SWIM

4 loops
70 minutes
78 degrees
AQI: 37

Another great swim, even if my goggles kept leaking. I had to stop several times to fix them. The water was not too rough but wasn’t still either. It offered a gentle rocking. My sparkle friends were abundant today and coming at me, like swimming through stars or light like it looks in a time lapse video. Mostly it was cloudy, but sometimes the sun came out and the surface of the water sparkled. From a bird’s view above, I imagine they were able to watch it turn from pewter to silver to pewter again.

The buoys near the main beach were in close, which I like. It means the course is longer. Was it? I’ll compare these different days, all swimming 4 loops:

8 aug: 2010 strokes / 1.78 miles
22 july: 2347 / 2.29 miles
17 july: 2660 / 2.64 miles
11 july: 2020 / 1.89 miles

Okay. I was wrong. Today’s four loops was the shortest 4 loops out of this sample of 4 4 loop swims.

10 Things

  1. a sloshing sound of water — was it my arms piercing the water that made this sound, or my head turning to breathe or my torso being rocked by the water?
  2. a plane
  3. opaque water
  4. bubbles around my hands
  5. my feet feeling like rudders
  6. the sky, white and thick with clouds
  7. later the sky, split open, the sun peeking through
  8. sparkles on the water
  9. the far off dot of the green buoy not looking green but white
  10. the area around the white buoys thick with milfoil

Took a screen shot of my path today. The off-course lines are when I went to the swimming area at the big beach to fix my googles.

4 loops at lake nokomis / 8 aug 2025

A scalene triangle, almost an isosceles.

Today I’m working on adding to my inklings (inkling poems / 5 line, 5 syllable small poems that spread rumors, drop hints, whisper, are approximate/vague/rough in their descriptions). Today’s inklings are about sketching different points on the course. One of the inklings, which serves as an intro to the larger goal of describing my course is title, “Plotting the course.” As I swam, I realized that this has a double meaning. Plotting as in identifying/marking points on the course and plotting as in create a story/plot for my experience swimming around the course. With that in mind, I’d like to write more about the story/stories I want to tell. Of course, plotting also means secret planning to do something/hatching a scheme. Will that meaning factor in too?

aug 7/SWIM

5 loops
90 minutes
lake nokomis open swim
86 degrees

Yes! A wonderful swim, and another hour and a half to add to my goal of reaching 34 hours by the end of the month. The water was choppy, which I liked, except for when it made it hard to get a stroke in and I felt like I was sinking. The water was thick and filled with my sparkle friends. Several times it felt like the buoy kept getting farther and farther away, until I broke the spell and suddenly had reached it. I saw some menacing sailboats and 1 or 2 paddle boarders. The light during the last loop was very cool — why? I guess because it was giving very chill twilight vibes. Noticed a few planes flying low and lots of seagulls and ducks. A few flashes down below — fish?

I felt strong and can tell that I’m getting stronger as I do more longer swims. A thought — could I possibly manage 7 loops in 2 hours? That would be amazing!

A few lines from two poems discovered this morning:

There is the clarity of a shore
And shadow,   mostly,   brilliance

summer

                the billows of August
(from “From the Sustaining Air“/ Larry Eigner

The clarity of a shore and shadow. Not sure about the shore, but I like the idea of shadows bringing clarity. They do for me.

2

I am pointless. This I come to know
by pressing ear to night’s machinery.
Outside, the words rub each other
until they are dull: calibrate, resurface,
surface, invest, investigate, snowy, open,
environ, woman, wooden, system.
I look where little nodes of language cling,
lichen-like, to what will have them.
(from “Rose-crowned Night Girl”/ Emily Skillings

I read this line about being pointless and it helped me to think about pointless meaning more than useful or not worthwhile. To be pointless is to not have points, to be smooth instead of rough, nothing sharp about you. My vision is point-less but not pointless. Everything softens with my fuzzy gaze.

added after the swim: During loop 4 or 5, I started thinking about pointless again as a way to indicate a dot — it’s a star without points. Earlier today I was working on a poem that describes a dot as a distant star. After thinking about pointless I thought about how the star/point, which was the far-off buoy, wasn’t always there — it flickered.

added 8 aug 2025: Just remembered a few more things. After the swim, I met Scott at Painted Turtle for a beer. We watched the ducks in the water, bobbing and floating and almost getting into fights with seagulls. We also watched the final swimmer being escorted into shore by 3 lifeguards. I told Scott that being the last swimmer, that is, staying until the very end of open swim, is a goal every year. I think I’ve done it once. Then we watched the green buoys heading in for the night, looking so much smaller than they do in the water when you’re right next to them.

aug 6/RUNSWIM

2.2 miles
2 trails
68 degrees
dew point: 64

Humid. It rained last night — everything is wet — but there must been wind, too, because small branches and leaves were scattered over parts of the path. No big trees.

10 Sounds

  1. Bird
  2. the coxswains speaking through their bullhorns
  3. a faint radio with someone singing, some vibrato
  4. the steady trickle out of the sewer pipe near 42nd
  5. good morning, excuse me / morning! no, excuse me (passing a walker)
  6. morning! a greeting from Mr. Morning!
  7. good morning / good morning (greeted by an older runner)
  8. the whirr of a motor on an e-bike zooming by
  9. another runner’s music coming from her phone as she ran by — some poppy upbeat song that I can’t remember
  10. who run the world? girls! Beyoncé from my headphones and my mood: Energy playlist

Listened to the poem I wrote yesterday before I headed out for my run. This is my tentative ending:

tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight
and to rarely see

swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
60 minutes
cedar lake open swim
81 degrees

Choppy today. Sometimes hard to stay high on the water. Lots of vines. Saw some planes and birds above, no fish below. The surface looked silvery. Sometimes the sun was out, sometimes it was behind a cloud. Once a big, hulking cloud, looking like something other than a cloud from my perspective half-submerged in the water — a monster, like godzilla?

Forgot to recite Mary Oliver or think about the deepening and quieting of the spirit, but I felt it. Relaxed, happy, strong. Swimming for an hour wasn’t difficult.

Found this description of how we are both part of and separate from water saved on my reading list:

Nature—the non-built environment, creatures—is a realm of supreme “otherness” with which we are already always in strange relation. We plead for communion with this nature; it cannot answer us; so we project that onto it, that feeling of harmony and oneness at a shore or a vista. We are both a part of that natural sphere and stand distinctly apart within it, in our creaturely and industrial/technological dominance over it. You are both part of that sphere, and stand painfully apart, with your consciousness, language, cumbersome car and computer.

Moheb Soliman on “On the water”

Now I’m thinking about Anne Carson and her definition of anthropology (as in, “Anthropology of Water”). I wrote about it on 13 july:

encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I.

added on 8 aug 2025: I forgot to mention a delightful thing that happened on the way over to cedar lake: a vee of geese — 20? — flying low over Bde Maka Ska then just above us — and, lucky me, I had the moon roof open to watch! — then heading towards Lake Harriet.