This year I am counting the days. Counting the days in the body of the lake. From “Kingfisher”, an essay I put up on Medium:
On June 6, 2023, a day I was swimming, Russians blew up a dam in Kakhovka, resulting in wide-spread flooding of the Dnieper River. Farmland, homes, businesses were damaged. Residents downstream were evacuated. At least 60 people lost their lives and others were unaccounted for. Known minefields were washed away, creating uncertainty about the locations of the explosives. Heavy metals sitting at the bottom of the reservoir held by the dam were subsequently released into the water column, contributing to the huge environmental devastation of this event. What humans will do to others, though the pious have said, Never again.
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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 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.
...Theresa Kishkan 