Swimming, Thinking, Reading

New Year got off to a brisk start with a very short barefoot walk across the snow and a very quick dip-swim in Ward Lake. The air was around 36 degrees F and the water 42 degrees F. While these temps might cause you to shiver, they are more “do-able”—even enjoyable—if you’ve been swimming every week or so year round. But believe me, there is no shortage of shivering and goosebumps among the swimmers!

I started lake swimming when I moved to Washington State 15 years ago, then made it a summer habit 10 years ago, and a year-round habit 3 years ago. In that time, “wild swimming” has become an international craze, especially in the northern climes of the globe. The Outdoor Swimming Society is responsible for much of the popularity of this pastime, with an inspiring and useful website as well as a Facebook page with nearly 88,000 followers. There are wild swimming groups near me—Olympia Wild Swimming and Western Washington Open Water Swimmers among others—with regular swims in Puget Sound and local lakes.

We all seem to agree that full immersion in really cold water is good for our health, well-being, and sense of camaraderie, especially during the pandemic. It’s easy to stay at least 6 feet apart from fellow swimmers—though masks really don’t work. For some, neoprene covers every inch of their body except the face. I don’t think the CDC has issued any guidance on the efficacy of wet masks. Yet.

For the past several years, I’ve also been talking about writing a book on lake swimming in Washington—a combination of natural history and personal narrative. But, surprise! There are many wild swimmers out there with stories to tell as well. In fact, there are so many books on wild swimming that an unofficial genre has emerged: the swimoir. Here’s a list of a few new titles.

Just some of the wonderful already published books—non-fiction, guides, and “swimoirs” on wild swimming. (Photo by M.M Ruth)

As a reader, this is fantastic! As a writer, this is a problem. It makes me wonder what there is left to say. It makes me doubt the world (or the world of niche of readers) needs another book on wild swimming. It makes me question my purpose for writing such book. It adds more pressure to write something that justifies the resources and risks associated with publishing, marketing, and selling it. These questions should always be asked, over and over, before and during a writing project.

One of the main goals in mind for my previous books—A Sideways Look at Clouds and Rare Bird—was to connect my reader more deeply to the natural world and to draw attention to overlooked natural wonders (clouds and an endangered seabird known as the marbled murrelet, and to inspire my readers to learn about and protect some part of the natural world that spoke to them. The goal for a book on lake swimming in Washington is essentially the same: to connect people to the lakes and rivers we typically just walk around, hike to, picnic near, or cross over but never dip a toe in. Seems like I should have finished that book by now, right? (The answer is yes). But, when when I wrote my books on clouds and the marbled murrelet, I didn’t have to reset or re-evaluate every six months when a new cloud book or murrelet book was published. Because none were published. Wild swimming is a different beast. And, the mightiest of beasts so far is the extraordinary lovely little 2020 chapbook by Alexis Wolf called Body of Water.

Body of Water by Alexis Wolf finds its perfect form as a chapbook—”smaller and simpler by design.”

A chapbook is a small paperback book or pamphlet—a perfect format for poems or short essays. The essays in Body of Water are as pure, refreshing, and brief as at the perfect cold-water swim. This chapbook, published in 2020 by Two Plums Press in Portland, is just 81 pages long—but several fewer pages of actual writing thanks to front matter and actual blank pages. Such restraint! Such a suitable format for Wolf’s spare, precise, evocative writing about her experiences swimming in lakes and rivers near her former home in Seattle and new home in England. I do not know if Alexis Wolf aimed to write a 200-page book and then shrunk it down or preferred not to publish her essays in literary magazines or as blogs. But I sense that Body of Water is exactly as long as she wanted it to be—not one word more, not one word less. Wolf’s essays are brief and, like a real-life swim, the effects continue to ripple long after your immersion in and emergence from each.

And now, a new year to navigate the ripples and waves—literal and figurative—in a changing world where the need for true words and meaningful actions has never been greater. Onward!

Body of Water is available through Two Plums Press. Learn more about Alexis Wolf on her website.

Some Letters and a Few Words

The past year has been an interesting one in the board-game world. Once I got over the thrill of figuring out which four- and six-player games can be played over Zoom, I discovered some new two-person games to play. Some were hits (Hive, Azul, Patchwork) others were flops (anything with many tiny bags of teeny pieces). The games I most enjoyed playing, however, were Scrabble and Bananagrams—two games involving square letter tiles and word making. Both were a welcome relief from a day crafting complete sentences.

What so fascinates me about these two games is how completely differently they are played. Scrabble requires an orderly taking of turns and tends to be contemplative and strategic. It favors the player with a huge or specialized vocabulary (and knowledge of those “only used in Scrabble” words such as jo, aa, xi), the ability to plan a few turns ahead, play defensively, and to exercise a degree of restraint. Over and hour (or three) players build off each others’ words on a gridded board. Once you lay down your tiles, there’s no picking them back up. Each word adds to the static connections of words on the board.

I learned to play Scrabble from my grandmother. She was an excellent player and quite patient. I can still hear her saying, “Oh, honey, you don’t want to put that there, do you?” when I would lay down an as ‘S’ or unwittingly set her up to play on the triple. My grandmother was a resourceful woman, having lived through the Pandemic of 1918, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, a divorce, Vietnam, strokes, heart attacks, surgery, cancer, and likely many other woes she never mentioned. She always made the best of the hand she was dealt—in life and in Scrabble.

Bananagrams is exactly the opposite. It’s a high-speed, frantic, shouty, grabby game in which you do not build impressive high-scoring words on a board. You create your own words, one letter at a time, from a communal “bunch” of face-down letter tiles on the table/desk/floor in front of you. You do not wait turns. You just grab a face-down letter tile when someone/anyone yells “peel” (or “go” like we do because, it’s somehow quicker to say!) If you can make a word (even “a”), you shout “go,” and everyone takes another tile. The player to make the first two-letter word calls “go” and everyone grabs a tile. It goes on and on like this, with each player making words in a their own word grid and—here’s the part I love—breaking up the words and reshaping their word grid when needed to accommodate a new letter.

For instance, you’ve been able to make “U-N-I-T-E” out of your letters but then pick a “Q.” You don’t just sit there and wait for the letters that allow you to place the Q above the U and spell another word while everyone else’s hands are flying. You just bust up U-N-I-T-E, quickly rearrange your letters to spell Q-U-I-T-E and tuck the N beneath the I to spell “IN” and yell “go!” When a player grabs the last tile, they yell “I win.” If you are me, you fall back in your chair, wipe the sweat from your brow, and decide to play Scrabble to bring your blood pressure down.

What I love about Banagrams is that it helps you practice, flexibility, (healthy) detachment, open-mindedness, and spontaneity during the game and afterward. It’s all about speed and not getting attached to the words you’ve laid out, especially a long word to which you’ve connected many other words. If you get too focussed on holding on to that word, you’ll accumulate so many letters (as others are shouting “go”) that you can’t work into your grid. What to do? Let go! You have to bust up your big word—and thus much of your grid—and begin spelling out new words with you new (and existing) letters.

Over the past several months just thinking about Scrabble and Banagrams has inspired me to completely deconstruct the book I am working on only after spending the previous months feeling very commited to a structure that was obviously not working. Getting to the “break it up” moment took a while, but everything is coming back together nicely.

So, my fellow writers and all the problem solvers and “creatives” out there—find, borrow, buy these two games. If you live near Lacey, WA, find your way to Gabi’s Olympic Cards and Comics, which has pretty much every game on the planet though “game” isn’t part of their name.

Note: Though this blog appears under the “Washington Wild Swimmer” heading, the book I am currently working on is about a different kind of wild swimmer—a seabird known as the Pigeon Guillemot. This bird is the wild and crazy cousin of the Marbled Murrelet and I’m tinkering with a new form of natural history writing. Meanwhile, I am swimming weekly in a local lake (in what we call “bioprene”—no wetsuit) and thinking about what stories to tell about Washington’s glorious lakes.