This morning, at the pool, John said, Soon you’ll be swimming in the lake! Another month? And my heart beat a little more quickly. I’ve been thinking of those lake swims lately, the water like silk over the shoulders, the company of dragonflies, birds, cutthroat trout. Early yesterday I was sorting out some files on my computer and saw an essay I haven’t yet been able to publish. One journal felt it was too long, another “not engaged enough with its subject”, etc. It began as a meditation on the kingfishers I see on many summer mornings and then it gathered a few other things into its basket of meaning. Here’s a section:
10,000 years ago, or 8,000 years, or more, or less, swimmers plunged into a river or a lake in a valley now long become desert. Their bodies arched, as mine arches when I swim each morning in Ruby Lake. Someone painted them onto rock, the joy of their swim beautifully captured, someone who watched them carefully, maybe lovingly. One of them is diving or plunging, another drifts. They are buoyant in red granite, swimming over time in a river no longer in existence. Rainfall patterns changed (it hasn’t rained here significantly for 4 months), people migrated south (California is burning, flooding), vegetation changed due to shifts in solar insolaration, and what was once a verdant swimming hole became a barren desert, what’s now the Egyptian Sahara, near the Libyan border. I am buoyant in green water in a forest where the iconic trees, Western Red Cedars, are dying. (We are dying, Egypt, dying.) The swimmers at Wadi Sura stroke through time to where I am trying to write about the deep joy of my own swim, when I am in the water, looking up the sky, listening to loons, the soft swoop of swallows as they feed on mayflies or mosquitoes, the joy of the swim, and the sadness I feel at the changing climate of our planet.
During his desert explorations in 1933, the Hungarian cartographer László Almásy found the cave of the swimmers, in the company of cartographers. His association with the cave is commemorated in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient. In his own booki about the Sahara, Almásy proposes a theory of climatic shift in the desert, from temperate to xeric; his ideas were not supported by his editor. And yet. Yet. The swimmers in the cave at Wadi Sura move through time, from the water of their genesis to the sere sandstone of today’s Gilf Kebir plateau, one of the driest places on the planet.
On the mornings when smoke haze softens the distant mountains, deadens the air, makes breathing more difficult, when the temperatures break records day after day so that I am already looking ahead to winter, I think of those swimmers in their beautiful moment, intact on a cave wall, the source of water, a river, a lake, long gone. On the news, water levels historically low in the South Thompson River, Cowichan River, Sooke River, Similkameen, Nicola, Coldwater. July, 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on the planet. I remember driving up a dry roadbed to the McAbee site in what’s one of the driest areas in British Columbia, dry, dry, tiny junipers and sage on the hill, rattlesnakes in the rock mounds, and seeing the evidence of lush forests, deep water, taxa including chordata —Eohiodon rosei, the mooneye fish, eosalmo or fossil trout (related to Eosalmo driftwoodensii, the tiny proto-salmon)–, arthropoda (true flies, earwigs, wasps, bees, mayflies, dragonflies, moths), plantae (ferns, horsetails, rhododendrons, willows, ginkgo, pines and dawn redwoods, oaks and grapevines), and realizing that our time (their time) happens in a blink of an eye, though hurricanes rage, wildfires turn a landscape to smoke and ash, and the earth would be fortunate if we left our only mark in stone.
Note: the images are from the Cave of Swimmers at Wadi Sura. I found them online, unattributed.
...Theresa Kishkan 