It's the Water. Just Water.

The Summer of ‘21 was a good one for wild swimming. After two years of swimming in lakes whenever I could, I’ve finally broken down the barrier of “it’ll be too cold.” No lake or river was too cold for me this summer—perhaps because I’ve disassociated pain with cold, or because I have learned just how long to stay in before I get too cold, or because I am okay with a 30 second “swim” involving a wool hat and jogging in place afterward.

Beyond getting acclimated/habituated to the cold water, I have started to crave it. I still kinda dread it, but that’s a very small part of the whole experience.

I’ve swum in many new lakes and rivers in Maine, Vermont, and Washington this summer. All very cold and very wonderful in different ways. It was during a swim this summer in my local lake that I felt overwhelming gratitude for being in the water. It occurred to me as I was swimming under water that I was experiencing just one thing: The water. Just water. It was all I could feel, see, and hear. One thing.

The lake is too deep to see to the bottom so I was just looking into water and more water. With my head underwater, there was little sound but the splashing sounds I made. I was surrounded by one thing. I was moving through one thing. I was struck that this experience felt unusual. When was the last time I was completely enveloped in one thing? Even coming up for air exposed me to hundreds of things all at once—things I was lucky enough to experience, such as other people on the lake, the trees, the homes, the docks, the ducks, the boats, the boat ramp, the sky, and—of course the clouds. But I didn’t want to think about them just then. i was tired of thinking and processing.

Cold-water swimmers talk and write about the boost in mental clarity they often experience after a swim—one of the many benefits of this increasingly popular pastime. I think they are describing the after-effect of the swim, when your circulation is restored and “fresh” blood is pumping into your brain. I have certainly felt this—from feeling really awake to positively euphoric. I had not until my underwater swim wondered about the benefit of experience just one thing. Full immersion in the lake—even for a few minutes— felt like the perfect antidote to the “busy” mind, to multi-tasking, to a day of sensory overload, a day of too many screens and too many images. Meditation will also quell a busy mind but I am not practiced enough to have meditation feel like a very welcome sensory-deprivation tank.

For those readers who are wild swimmers or lap swimmers, may I recommend a few stretches of swimming underwater? Just a few breast-stroke/frog kicks through the water with no goal in mind except to experience the simple and extraordinary pleasure of one thing.

Stages of a Winter Wild Swim

My friend and I had planned a swim on Saturday but it took until Tuesday to finally get in the water. The air was 42 degrees F, the water 46. This does not add up to 100, which is the number someone recommended as a guide to “swimmable” water in “tolerable” air, but we had done 88 before and so proceeded. Someone asked me recently why I swim in really cold water. I will try to explain. 

There are three parts to the swim: the before, the during, and the after. 

The “before” includes picking a day and time with my friend; dreading the swim (four days’ worth for this particular swim); getting into my bathing suit, fleece, wool socks, wool hat, and dry robe; dreading the swim some more; making hot tea; driving to the lake; standing at the edge of the lake waiting for my brain and body to get in sync and to decide that at this moment right now…now…now (oh, one more photo)…that at this moment now the “before” stage is over. 

Self portrait of author while author’s hippie-hatted brain struggles to convince author to stay out of the 46-degree water. Shortly after photo was taken, author told brain to “get over it.” (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

Then the “during” begins with accompanying my bathing suit and wool hat into the water, slowly, up to my waist. My friend is similarly clad and nearby, but she moves more peacefully and steadily. We dip our hands in, splash water on our arms, rub our cold wet hands on our faces, look at the lake and clouds and trees. We talk to ourselves and to each other. We say things like, “Okaaaay!” “Here we go!” “We can do this!” And we do. We just drop so that the water rushes over our shoulders. I flip onto my back and kick and paddle my hands like egg-beaters and try to not scream and sing an operatic off-key note but usually fail. That I am in this very cold lake is bizarre. That I am not crying or weeping or miserable is astonishing. That I am smiling and laughing with my friend is a wild and wonderful gift.

Yes, I am very cold. 

Despite my constant thrashing, my hands tingle to the point of discomfort. Is this pain? I am not sure. It’s a feeling. But it’s a sign that if I get out much further in the lake or stay in much longer, my hands—and then arms and legs—will not work well enough to get me back to shore. Keep in mind we are about 30 feet from shore but in water over our heads. We stay in maybe ten minutes then breast stroke toward shore. My friend hands me her wool hat, she dives underwater, and emerges with an even bigger smile. I am not there yet, but soon. I am still seeking and hoping to destroy my idiopathic resistance to putting my head under water.

The “after” of the swim begins when our feet touch the bottom of the lake—about ten feet from the shore—and we lunge for our dry robes, exchange wet suit for dry fleece pants and sweater, and then wrap our hands around a cup of hot tea.  We talk. We warm up. We admire the colors and textures of the water, the reflections of the clouds, the harmony of water and sky and trees. 

As we begin to feel a bit of post-swim euphoria (endorphins? relief? gratitude?), we slowly head to our cars where one of us will undoubtedly say, “That was perfect. We should swim again soon.” We are vague about when. Here in the “after,” I am not quite ready to start another “before”. I think of a stanza in Wallace Steven’s poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird:

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

At the lake, we do not have to choose. We enjoy both the inflection and innuendo, the whistling and the silence, the water and the air, the during and the after. 

The “after” is a really wonderful time and is in no way sponsored by dryrobe, though they do make the before and after quite pleasant, even toasty. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

“I Need to Show You This Lake...

…only I can’t tell you where it is and you can’t tell anyone once we show it to you.”

Over the summer a few of my fellow lake-swimming enthusiasts have been kind enough to take me to their secret lakes as long as I promised not to provide the name or directions to others. I’ve found these secrets easy to keep because Washington state boasts thousands of swimming lakes. I feel lucky to live in a landscape so pervious, pock marked, glacier scoured, and potholed that the secret holders are not depriving anyone of the experience of lake swimming.

Most of our swimmable lakes are accessible by public boat ramp, dock, beach, or trail. The secret lakes require way-finding skill and sometimes a bit of bushwhacking. Trail markers and cairns are entirely absent.

None of the secret lakes I’ve been to have official names and don’t always appear on maps. They become known because someone discovers them and then they tell a friend who tells two friends and so on. And, while I might tell you about these lakes, I cannot for the life of me retrace my steps to return to them or describe the roads and routes and landmarks that would get you anywhere but lost.

Photo by M.M. Ruth

So it was this past when when two friends guided me on a hike-scramble to this beauty. It was the clearest water I have ever swum in—so clear that it is easy to forget it is water. So clear that, as one friend said, “it’s hard to remember not to breathe it.”

It was what I might once have called “freezing” but now, after months of lake swimming, I’ll call it perfectly delightful cold. We swam, floated and swam some more. When the clouds parted and the sun shone down on the lake, we warmed up on the rocks on the far shore. The lake was silent save for the occasional squeak of a pika and the clattering wings of the grasshoppers echoing against the rocks and cliff. There was no human presence at all—just wilderness all around.

While the sun warmed our skin it also warmed the thin skin of the lake. When we slipped back into the water, the top few inches of the lake had noticeably warmed. To preserve that layer of warm water, we swam slowly without kicking and churning up the cold water beneath. I stretched out on my back and floated, spinning slowly around to memorize the contours of the shore, hill, and peaks and to take in the last bit of summer’s warmth.

I left the water and walked down the sandy shoreline toward my towel, lunch, and thermos of hot tea. I walked slowly, scanning the edge of water for newts. Something caught my eye. There on the beach, scrawled in the sand in all capital letters:

ONLY

WITH

SOUL

Banks Lake

 Standing on the rim of the spectacular Dry Falls canyon 400 feet high and 3 miles wide and looking down into still pools of water, it is hard to imagine what was once the world’s largest waterfall flowing over this rim. “Flowing” hardly describes what the water was doing. It was churning, chewing, rushing, gushing, flooding, scouring, plucking, wrenching, and muscling its way through the layers of volcanic basalt of the Columbia Plateau on its way toward the Pacific Ocean. Where did all this water come from? During the end of the Pleistocene ice age, between 18,000 and 15,000 year ago, when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered much of North America, a glacier a half a mile thick advanced southward from Canada into the Idaho panhandle where it blocked the flow of the Clark Fork River. This caused the river to back up into the mountain valleys and form a vast lake known as Glacial Lake Missoula, in what is today western Montana. At its peak, this lake was 2,100-feet deep and held over 530 cubic miles of water (as much as Lakes Eerie and Ontario combined). When the ice dam broke up, all that water was released across the landscape and emptied Glacial Lake Missoula in a matter of a few days. The water flooded across the Columbia Plateau at speeds of up to 65 mph, carrying with it huge blocks of ice, massive boulders, columns of basalt, trees, animals, anything in it is path. The water eventually followed the course of the Columbia River, south and then west to the Pacific Ocean.

These epic ice-damming-and-flooding events happened not once, but as many as seventytimes during this period. Known as the Missoula Floods or the Spokane Floods, these flooding events created a landscape as magnificent as the more eloquently named Grand Canyon, thought that natural treasure is the work of the relatively slow and patient work of the Colorado River, not the multiple cataclysms of a single lake. 

The floods created a regional landscape known, unfortunately, as “channeled scablands.” Yes, the floods did carve channels in the basalt. Yes, the eroded-but-remaining ragged basalt “islands” between the channels could appear to resemble raised scabs on skin, but really? 

The name “channeled scablands” was coined in the 1920s by the now-famous geologist J. Harlen Bretz, who proved to the very-resistant scientific community that ancient cataclysmic floods –and not eons of slow erosion--created this unique landscape. Though “scabland” was already in use by the locals, I wonder if anyone (Harlen’s wife, Fanny, perhaps) suggested that perhaps “Glacial Glorylands” or “Channeled Heartland” might have been a better choice.

Glacial Lake Missoula was not the only glacial lake within the channeled scablands stretching across Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. In Washington, Glacial Lake Columbia formed 50 miles north of present-day Coulee City, when a Pleistocene-era glacier blocked a section of the west-flowing Columbia River that drained through this area. The Columbia was diverted southward where it augmented the work of Glacial Lake Missoula carving a series of canyons known today as “Grand Coulee.” 

Map from National Geographic’s “Channeled Scablands.” Read excellent story here.

Coulee is a geologic term, describing canyons or ravines formed by water erosion or floods. Coulee is derived from the French couler, meaning “to flow.” The only explanation I have read for why this very American piece of real estate has a fancy French name comes from my trusty Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests the word may have entered the lexicon through French fur trappers in the Oregon region, trappers who were presumably used this word while tramping through steep terrain en route to blessedly flat beaver ponds and meadows. 

The Grand Coulee features two main canyons. The northern canyon holds Banks Lake and is filled with water diverted from the Columbia by the Grand Coulee Dam. The southern canyon holds no lake but several small lakes. These groundwater-filled lakes are not for swimming or fishing but for stretching our imaginations. These ponds were once the deep plunge pools of the diverted and flooding Columbia River as it reshaped itself into a 3.5-mile-wide waterfall that dropped 400 feet from its lip. Though these falls would have once dwarfed Niagara Falls, the retreat of the Columbia River to its old channel left us with the more stunning and less touristy geologic wonder now known as Dry Falls.  

Had the northern half of the Grand Coulee not been dammed in 1942, Banks Lake would likely look very similar to Dry Falls: a steep-walled coulee of exposed basalt and worn bedrock holding small lakes. Imagine the southern end of the Dry Falls coulee being dammed and then being filled with water diverted from the Columbia. When you swim in Banks Lake, this is what you are swimming in.

The construction of the Grand Coulee Dam began in 1933 during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to get Americans back to work after The Depression (it employed 12,000 during several years of construction). This U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project was initially conceived to create a storage and delivery system of water for farmland irrigation, but now the dam also generates hydroelectric power (it’s the largest producer in the U.S.) and has created popular recreational lakes. Behind the dam is Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake Recreation Area and below are Banks Lake, Lake Lenore, Soap Lake, and several smaller ice-age lakes that offer fishing, swimming, boating. 

These lakes are partly natural. The wide channels were carved by ice-age flooding but the lakes are not fed by groundwater, rain or snow melt, or an inflow stream. They are fed by an artificial canal that flows upstream of the Grand Coulee Dam. Though the Columbia River itself no longer not flow through Banks Lake, it’s water—via the feeder canal—does. 

This this aerial photo above shows the Grand Coulee Dam, the feeder canal in the center, and the 27-mile-long Banks Lake in the entire upper half of the photo. Banks Lake is actually a reservoir. Twelve of the world’s largest pumps draw water from Roosevelt Lake and pump it into Banks Lake. From there the water is delivered via siphons, pumps and thousands of miles of waterways (canals) to irrigate 600,000 acres of farmland south of the lake. If you squint at your Washington road atlas, you’ll spot the Main Canal as well as the “Bacon Siphon” south of Banks Lake. (Yes, The Bacon Siphon would make a good name of a roadside diner. Down-the-rabbit-hole history on naming of Bacon here.

Water from the Columbia River is diverted from the Grand Coulee Dam and pumped up into Banks Lake via this engineered canal. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

When I moved to Washington in 2006, the Missoula Floods popped up in conversation every once in a while (the Bacon Siphon never did), but I retained only that these floods were humongous and originated in Montana. Even when, a few years later, I made my first trip to eastern Washington with friends for a late-summer “swim tour” of Banks Lake, the geologic history of coulee country and the channeled scablands just washed over me. I believe I was so preoccupied with the Big Swim, with keeping pace with my serious long-distance swimmer friends, and with not getting hypothermic and drowning that I did not fully embrace the terror of water, ice, boulders, and basalt, that was the legacy of the now lovely and becalmed Banks Lake.

What I remember of my Banks Lake swim a decade ago seems like a dream. It was September and post peak tourist season. It was 90-degrees hot, sunny, dry, and the landscape was nothing like western Washington. We parked near a campground at Steamboat Rock State Park and then walked down a deserted trail to a white sandy beach. The three of us got in the water and set our sights across the narrow passage in Devil’s Punchbowl to the east side of the lake. When we noticed a lull in motorboat traffic, we swam like mad across the passage and then entered a cove. The cove was a narrow labyrinth of half-submerged boulders. The labyrinth was too narrow for a kayak and, in places, just wide enough for a single swimmer. 

During our swim, we pulled ourselves out of the water and onto the sun-warmed rocks to take the chill off. Once our goosebumps were gone and our skin was dry, we slipped back into the water and the rest of the world slipped away. This was unlike any place I had ever been or dreamed of. We swam for hours here and further south at Lake Lenore. We were floating the ice-age channel filled with water from the Columbia River. We were swimming in the landscape. This is one of the things I love most about swimming in lakes. I’m in water but I feel nestled in the solid Earth.

I spend a lot of time walking in forests and, short of getting inside a hollow tree or digging myself a hole in the forest floor and lying down in it, I have not yet managed to reach that immersive state that I do in a lake. Though I am working on imagining I am inthe sweet moist atmosphere of the forest, I am still walking among trees and shrubs. 

In hindsight, I am glad that I swam unencumbered by the geologic history of this place, by familiarity with the workings of the Grand Coulee Dam, the network of irrigation siphons and canals, the flooded towns and lost homesteads, and impact on the Colville tribe that fished the Columbia River above the dam, the meaning of the word “reclamation.”

I cannot remember the clarity of the water, whether or not there were submerged plants to swim through, or if I could see the bottom of the lake. Alas, I’ve lost any photographs I might have taken on this trip. My memory has been distilled into “it felt really good.” The water. The rocks. The depth. The sun. But mostly the water.

I’ll post on Banks Lake again after I find my way back to the labyrinth this summer. My poorly timed spring visit proved to be too early. My once deliciously liquid lake was still frozen.

Nice to have Banks Lake locked in ice for my tour of my Ice-Age Geology tour of the Grand Coulee. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

FOR FURTHER READING…

Just some of the readily available books on how our friend, the water molecule, ganged up on the Columbia Plateau. (Photo by M.M. Ruth)

Can’t Get Enough?

Check out the Washington State Department of Natural Resources’s beautiful Washington’s Ice-Age Floods story map.

And here are some maps and resources from the Ice Age Flood Institute on the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.