This was the lake yesterday and the dark head is me, swimming. The air was 9 degrees. The water might have been a little warmer but not much. I loved every minute — the long strokes from one set of cedars to the other, the young merganser who swam past nonchalantly, the clouds above the dark islands. Yesterday, in the lake, I thought I might last forever, swimming my slow lake km. each morning. I loved smelling the hardhack hanging over the water, distant smoke from someone’s woodstove, the sudden tang of dried salal berries when I bent to towel off my hair.
But this morning I wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was even cooler, both the water and the air. I couldn’t find my place in the small swells of the lake. After about 2/3 of my usual swim, I came out to wrap my towel around me. I don’t want the season to end but I wonder if I am up to the shifts of temperature, the late rising of the sun (John points out we could come later in the day but it’s not the same), my body’s inability to get warm afterwards. This morning I am disappointed in myself. I have a wetsuit and might continue the early swims wearing that but I don’t love swimming in a wetsuit. It’s hard to actually submerge my body and it’s harder to breathe deeply with the suit’s constriction across my chest.
And the lake doesn’t feel quite the same either with the layer of neoprene between me and the water.
What I’ll miss when I finally stop lake swimming and return to the local pool with its uncertain schedules and sudden closures because of lifeguard shortages, anyway, what I’ll miss is how all summer my morning swims allowed for deep complex thinking. Oh sure, there are small disadvantages to entering that particular state of being. Some mornings I’ll be back-stroking with my eyes closed, working my way through a complicated puzzle, and then I’ll open my eyes to discover I’m far out in the water. But the wonderful synthesis of thinking and movement is worth the dislocation, the drift. The moment when the movement in the distance in not just ripples but an animal, an otter, and it sees you just in time to veer away.
(While I was writing this, a bear just loped past my window.)
We’ll see what happens tomorrow. In June, the end of summer felt so far away. We were feasting on garden greens, anticipating the raspberries, beans, tomatoes, squash, abundance of basil, the tart grapes, the Merton Beauty apples. The arrival of families, lamb on the barbecue, towels on the railings. Today I can’t get warm. There are tomatoes still, and basil, and apples in the back room, picked all at once when we realized the bears were anticipating them too. And maybe uncertainty is part of swimming, the possibility of the unknown. I think of Carl Phillips’ beautiful poem, “Swimming”:
…how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still
feel like that…
