How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Plunge

“Wild swimming” and “open-water swimming” both take place in lakes, ponds, rivers, bays, and oceans, with “cold-water swimming.” Cold-water swimming takes places in natural bodies of water, too, but it is accompanied by xtreme bravado and/or a wetsuit, yelping and/or cold-water acclimatization training, and the risk of both hypothermia and euphoria. At least this is what I thought.

This winter, I have read Lynne Cox’s Swimming to Antarctica(not a metaphorical title). I’ve watched many videos of crazy-happy people dipping into icy lakes in Speedos and wool hats. I stood idly and warmly by while 300 people jumped off a dock and into a lake during the New Year’s Day 2019 Polar Bear Plunge. The water as 40°F that day. No one really “swam,” but they were immersed in that water for at least 30 seconds, which counts for a lot in my book. The Polar Bear Plungers looked ecstatic as they waded back to shore—either because they were glad to be done or because they had quickly reaped the benefits of a dip in cold water: adrenaline rush, exhilaration from increased endorphin levels, and reduced cortisone levels. Or they knew that they would later benefit from increased mental fortitude and clarity, boosted immune system, supercharged metabolism, reduced inflammation, less pain from rheumatism, fibromyalgia, and asthma. What’s not to like about cold-water swimming? 

Just some of the 300 swimmers who joined the New Year’s Day 2019 Polar Bear Plunge in the extremely-cold-by-any-standard Long Lake, in Lacey, Washington.

You have to get into cold water.

Really cold water.

But how cold is “cold” water I wondered. “Cold” is very subjective, it turns out. Some people consider water below 70°F “cold.”  Others use a standard of 64.4°F to define “cold”—or really “too cold.” This is the temperature at which hypothermia is believed to set in for those people not acclimatized to this temperature and who are suddenly immersed in such chilly water, typically when cast overboard from a boat. Some rare swimmers are acclimatized and habituated to swimming as low as 45°F and do not become hypothermic. Is 45°F “cold” or “too cold” for them?

Cold? Cool? Bracing? Refreshing? Too Cold? It’s up to you to decide.

Because I am planning to write about the natural and human history of several lakes in Washington, I wanted to be prepared for swimming in them when I did my “field work.” I figured I would have to work hard to join the ranks of the elite open-water wild swimmers who frolick in those 45°F waters year-round. I was dreading it. I worried about not only becoming hypothermic but also about just being plain uncomfortable. But wait! 

I swim in cold water! I’ve swum in the Tenino Quarry Pool for crying out loud! The water temperature is between 50 and 55°F. In 2018, I swam from April to October in lakes and rivers around western Washington. I doubt any of them were over 65°F. Only once did I feel the water was too cold and that my safety was at risk. I returned to shore as quickly as my sluggish body would let me.

The perception of cold is influenced by many factors: Air temperature as well an individual’s acclimatization and habituation to cold water, physical condition, body size and build, body mass index, attitude, alcohol level, psychological makeup, swimming ability, can affect an individual’s response to the water. The importance of knowing how cold is too cold for yourelates to yoursafety, which is really about and how far and how quickly yourbody temperature drops and you become hypothermic. The temperature of the water and how long you are in the water must both be factored in. A 2-minute dip into 50°F water is one thing, but a 20-minute swim is another. 

On the excellent LoneSwimmer blog, I found references to a smart and flexible guide for clarifying “cold.” Using the “Combined 100” method for ranking “cold.” If the combined temperature and water temperature (in Farenheit) is less than 100. For example, when the water temperature is 60°F and the air temperature is less than 40°F, it’s cold. But on a 70°F day, 60 is merely “cool.”

Now that I have convinced myself (sort of) that I am not a wimpy swimmer or an Xtreme cold-water swimmer, I can stop worrying about the semantics and look forward to a long season of wild, open-water swimming in water that may or may not seem to be cold. I have to remember to carry a thermometer to test the water and air temperature before I enter a lake. And I have to pay close attention to how my own watery body responds to being in the water. Relaxing into a nice long swim is a valid response. So is yelping, swearing, and thrashing, and shivering yourself warm. 

 Meanwhile…while you are learning what “cold” means for you, please look at this helpful chart and info on hypothermia from the Minnesota Sea Grant program’s website:  

Write here… 

Floating in the Universe

After that delicious first plunge into fresh water, one of the great pleasures of a swimming lake is floating on your back, buoyant, relaxed, warmed by the sun on one side of your body and cooled by the water on the other. 

Over the past several years, I have spent much time floating on my back, mostly to watch the clouds. I float pretty well but am always aware of my legs sinking and my neck straining a bit. And the locations of the few fishing boats, canoes, and other swimmers. And the happy voices of people swimming and cavorting around the lake. Floating is deeply relaxing and meditative but it is not a ‘sensory-deprivation’ experience. I’ve always been curious about sensory-deprivation tanks and what would happen to “me” when deprived of all distraction and sensory input. So I signed up for a 90-minute float at Oly Float near my home in Olympia.

Oly Float does not use the words “sensory deprivation” or “tank” (which sounds more like torture than pleasure). They call it “flotation therapy” and “sensory relief therapy.”  Their website extols the benefits of floating: relief from pain, increased natural production of endorphins and other “happy” chemicals in our bodies, improved sleep, greater athletic performance, deepened self-awareness. This time of year, everyone could use a mood bounce and I’m always trying to get a better night’s sleep but I was simply curious to experience the beautiful feeling of total weightlessness and buoyancy in the water without the distractions of a popular outdoor recreational lake.

So in I went into a surprisingly large private room with a shower, changing area, towels, and a surprisingly small wooden door leading into a surprisingly small “tank.” It was not a tank but an 8’x 5’ space. That space was blue and warm and inviting. That space included the 8’ x 5’ pool of water and a ceiling that was 7 feet above it. I showered, put in ear plugs, and held the grab bar as stepped in. I expected to step down a few steps like I was entering a hot tub, but the water came up to the middle of my calf. What? How was I going to float in 10 inches of water? There was 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) in there, that’s how. I wasn’t aware of a briny smell or any salty stinging on my leg so I moved into the floating position I hope to assume for the next 90 minutes. I turned off the blue light and closed my eyes.

It took me longer than I thought to find the best position for floating. My lower body relaxed quickly and my legs all but disappeared. It was my neck, where I seem to hold all my tension, that would not relax. As the rest of my body relaxed into oblivion, all I was was my neck.  I tucked a foam pillow under my head. I changed the position of my arms a few times. I put the pillow aside. I held my arms above my head and because but I was pretty sure they were going to float out and touch the sides of the pool (sensation!).  I took a lesson from the sea otters who wrap rooted giant kelp fronts around themselves to stay anchored while sleeping at night. I wrapped my shoulder-length hair around my fingers in a coil. There. Anchored.

And then my small space became as large as the universe and I was floating in a galaxy of stars. This was not a galaxy of my own invention. It was the galaxy of stars in which the young Ludwig von Beethoven imagined himself floating in the final scene of the film, “Immortal Beloved.” It is a stunning scene—the older, now near totally deaf composer is listening to a public performance of his Symphony No. 9 and, during the “Ode to Joy,” he goes into a reverie that takes him back to his childhood. The scene is at night and the young Beethoven is at the edge of a lake. He wades into the water, gets on his back and is floating there in the dark water. Thanks to some simple special effects, the viewer is given a bird’s-eye-view of the scene, with Beethoven’s pale body outstretched like a star in the middle of dark water that becomes a star-studded dark sky. 

Scene from “Immortal Beloved. “

While my body was floating in relatively tiny artificial space, my being was in the middle of the Milky Way with one of the most beautiful pieces of choral music ever written. I have never learned the words to this ode, which is a good thing as I might have spent my 90 minutes singing them in my head.  Luckily, the music didn’t float through my head either. It was just me and the pure experience of floating in a universe of joy. 

After my luxurious float, I found the scene from “Immortal Beloved,” which I had last watched perhaps 10 years ago. The scene in the lake captured the sensation I had experienced. Was it Life imitating Art? Art imitating Life? Or just Life? 

I have friend who, no matter what you are talking about, manages to work in the refrain “We are all stardust.”  I know it’s true in the grand scheme of things and a existentially depressing given that I usually hear “We are all dust in the wind” (remember this sad 1977 hit song from the band Kansas?). But somehow that 90-minute float turned this all around and now I feel grateful to the stars (and the Epsom salt) for the once-and-future moment when I’ll be back among them.

 Here is a 7-minute clip of Immortal Beloved. The first part is unhappy memories from his childhood, but then you just might end up happily floating in your own salty tears.

Taking the Plunge: Lakes of Washington

The lake above is where I ended my last book, A Sideways Look at Clouds. I was floating on my back contemplating the watery bodies that are the lake, the clouds, the human body. And this is where I am beginning my next writing project (hardly anything I can call a book at this point).

The Washington landscape is a feast of lakes that are scenic, ecologically significant, life-sustaining, and a source of joy for a wild swimmer. “Wild swimming” the name for swimming in natural lakes, ponds, rivers, sounds, bays, and open ocean. It’s a big deal in England. There’s the Outdoor Swimming Society to prove it.

Ever since I moved to Olympia in 2006, I have been swimming in lakes around the state. Though my pursuit of lakes to swim in has been casual, not purposeful, I’m up to about 30 lakes so far and am only just dipping my proverbial toe into the thousands of lakes our state has to offer. So where to begin my research? The usual places for this natural-history writer. In the library and in the field.

Every writing project begins with a gentle plunder of my public library and mining of resources on my own bookshelves. And a map.

The subject of lakes, lake ecology, limnology, lake swimming, and the pleasure of swimming and being in water is not new territory. The research is potentially endless and the physical territory where lakes are found is vast. The same was true with the clouds—only the clouds were more variable and ephemeral and required several (as in eight) years to capture in my book. A writer has to begin somewhere—to get to know the territory, to cast a wide net, to explore, brainstorm, dream. That’s where I am now.

This winter, I have been reading, taking notes, gathering resources, signing up for newsletters and emails from organizations monitoring lake water quality, watching films about people swimming in really cold water, and marking this summer’s swims on a state map. In 2018, I began swimming in late April and continued into early October. The real “wild swimmers” who swim year round would rightly call me a “mild swimmer,” so I hope to develop the skills to extend the swimming season and increase my tolerance and enjoyment of very cold water. I am not sure how to accomplish this. Probably cold showers are a start. I hear they are invigorating.

Brrrr.

Maybe this should be the working title for my book! Brrrrr: A Wild Swimmer’s Plunge Into the Natural History of Lakes in Washington.

Back Issues

It was barely light outside at 8 o’clock this mid-January morning. I was in my bathrobe reading  The Olympian, which used to take me as long to read as it took me to drink a cup of coffee. But it has sadly shriveled, like so many daily papers, and this morning it’s a three-sip paper.  But I am in the mood to read. With no magazines or books within reach, I stare into the room for a while and look out the east-facing window for signs of the sun.  My gaze falls on my tidy stack of Orion magazines, spines facing out, on a shelf across from me. I try to remember what I read in those beautiful, thoughtful, ad-free pages. As a nature writer, I know I found inspiration and camaraderiein every issue, but now the specifics are lost and I just have warm fuzzy feelings about this treasure chest of the finest writing about nature, culture, and place. And about the physical presence of these magazines.

Each issue is squarely and tightly bound so that each one stacks neatly on top of the other without sliding off each other and off the shelf the way issues of the New Yorker do. The issues of Orionseem to cling to each other with magnetic force, which is part of the reason they persist on my shelf—unlike the slip-sliding New Yorkers I recycle or tuck into the magazine rack at my local YMCA. 

The Orions on my shelf are all that’s left from my on-again-off-again subscriptions, plus a few issues I had bought at my local food co-op when I had let my subscription lapse, minus those I had loaned or given away to friends. What was in those particular persistent issues that gave them staying power? What important and urgent ideas had I not taken to heart or acted on? Which writers and stories had I wrongly forgotten? What lovely heart-breaking stories were trapped in those pages that were now reduced to decorative dead weight on my shelf? 

I walked across the room and kneeled down in front of the Orion stack. There were just fourteen issues covering a decade between 2008 and 2018. I picked up the top three from the stack and returned to the sofa and my coffee. It was time to act. Time to move ideas from the page into the world. Time to move back issues forward. 

January/February 2015. Starting in the back of the issue I read reviews of four books I haven’t read. I dog-ear the page to remind myself to put Diane Ackerman’s The Human Ageon hold at my public library. I felt I have done this before. Perhaps not. Perhaps I did and let the hold expire. I hoped that when it arrives at the library I do not hear myself say, “Oh, yeah. I’ve read this.”

I turned to the front of the magazine and read the Preamble (the editor’s letter) and the Lay of the Land (charming short “reports from near and far.” I became transfixed by a black-and-white image of tree stump. The title is Against Forgetting. The caption tells me the artist joined two images—a wax rubbing of a tree stump and a inked human fingerprint. The wax rubbing is reduced in size and the fingerprint enlarged so the tree’s growth rings and the whorls of skin look uncannily similar. It is a breathtaking illustration. I cannot turn the page. I do not want to cover up the image with the next page. Should I order the book? Track down the artist, Nina Montenegro, and inquire about obtaining a print? How big would such a print be? How much would it cost to frame it? Where would I hang it? Once hung, would I love it for a while and then, after so many months, stop noticing it, stop seeing it, and then forget about it altogether. Is getting a framed print a meaningful response to this piece of art? Do I need to be reminded how much I love trees, intricate patterns in nature and how we are similar to trees in so many other ways? I cut the image out of the page for my friend, Anne. 

Anne and I share deep druidical respect and passion for trees and forest conservation. We spend much of our time together walking in the woods, admiring trees, and appreciating everythinng they represent. Anne will love this image for the tree rings and fingerprint equally. One afternoon over tea, I presented her with the cut-out image, she had a good laugh and then recalled the details of the story about her fingerprints.

Anne was born in Canada and has lived in the U.S. for more than thirty years. In 2016, she began her application for U.S. citizenship. She passed all the requirements and tests with flying colors but she failed the fingerprint test. Her fingerprints were too faint to be positively identified as hers. She made three separate trips to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services office an hour away to have her fingerprints recorded as part of her background check. After each trip, she was told that either the inking or the electronic scanning failed to yield a set of acceptable prints. Anne was also told that our fingerprints wear off as we get older. Anne did not consider herself “old” or at least not old enough to have worn her fingerprints off. What recourse did she have? She had to make a trip to the local police station to obtain a signed document confirming she had no criminal record. 

Anne became a U.S. citizen shortly afterward. What all her paperwork does not make apparent is her role as an upstanding citizen of the natural world; as an admirer and advocate of the border-crossing ecosystems, the forests, individual trees, and the birds that perch and nest in those trees wherever they are rooted; and her deep and unforgotten connection to the land and landscapes she visits. Anne is also an oral historian, a graceful and careful storyteller, and a popular columnist for the local Audubon chapter newsletter. She has a smooth writing style no whorls or spirals could possibly improve.