Welcome to the Blue Million Miles: Dispatches from a Swim Through Alabama. You can listen to an audio version of this intro post above or you can read it below — they’re the same, give or take a field recording and music by the Skull Island Inquirer.
Like all the best swims do, my first this year came spur of the moment. This was a few months back, late March. After one of those Zoom calls. If you’ve ever Zoom-ed then surely you know the kind I’m talking about. The rare experience that might justify the use of a word like ennervating. Anyway, after I hung up, I realized there was a window of time before I had to go pick up my daughter. Typically when that happens, I fill the time by crawling under my desk and groaning.
You might hear that and think that I must have been in a bad place. I’m not sure that I would say that, though. I wouldn’t say I was much of anywhere, really. Not fully oriented to time and space. Maybe you’ve felt something like that lately? An… uncanniness? The latency of the video call carrying over, off-screen. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s that I work in a basement office with no windows, and I’d been sitting there for months, trying — and mostly failing — to track down sources for a story, hearing every variety of “This phone is no longer in service.” (which, by the way, there are way more variations than I’d imagined or ever really thought possible.) Maybe it’s that the past two years have taken a toll on me that I haven’t really admitted to yet, haven’t worked through. And I haven’t slept or written much lately, leaving my sense-making faculties at an all-time low. So okay maybe it is just me. Maybe.
But also maybe not? Doesn’t something just seem a little off? The number you have dialed is no longer in service.
Which, I mean, go figure. You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to try and account for the bad vibes, as it were, the strangest of the moment — one of illness, neglect, death, insurrection, war, despair, collapse, isolation. And it’s like the weight of all that, it exerts a gravity, creates its own tide, and we’re caught in it, headed out to sea.
I feel that, anyway.
But so that day, after the video call, for whatever blessed reason, instead of my usual brooding, drifting, I thought to go swimming instead.
There’s a state park on the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, that park has a lake. That lake has a roped-off section for swimming. And, that afternoon, I had the place to myself. I walked through the shallows until the water came to mid-thigh then I plunged, dolphin kicking for as long as my breath would hold. I surfaced out by the rope. This was March, but, you know, Alabama March — the water was already bathwater warm in parts, still bracing cold in others.
I paddled an easy, aimless breaststroke for a time, admired a scrim of pollen on the water’s surface, watched the clouds above glide into the tree line. I climbed onto the concrete jetty just to be able to dive into the water again. I couldn’t tell you how long I was out there. Time had escaped me, but for once it was welcome.
Two years ago, while I was waiting for Ozzie to be born — Ozzie, that’s my daughter’s name — I sat down to write her a letter. Or, if not a letter, exactly, just…I wanted to set down on paper what I knew about life. Epiphanies. Insights I’d gleaned. Some fatherly advice.
I had one pearl of wisdom off the top of my head. Once, while we were having dessert together, my father looked at me from across the picnic table and observed that I had come to know one of the deep truths of the universe: that you should always let your Klondike bar melt a bit before eating.
So I wrote that down. Let the Klondike melt a little. Got it.
Okay. But what else? Huh. I bit my knuckle. Doodled. Did I really have nothing else to impart? I had to stand and pace the room in order to beat back the antsiness that turned to panic that turned to dread about the person I’d become, the life I’d squandered. How unqualified I was to be responsible for another life, a young innocent child who may not even like Klondike bars.
Then, with forehead-slapping clarity, it came to me. I sat back down and wrote this sentence:
You should swim whenever the opportunity presents itself and you should live in such a way that you’re creating those opportunities with regularity.
And…that’s it. I’m looking at that page in my diary right now and that’s all I wrote down: Let the Klondike bar melt and swim whenever possible. And you know what? Looking back, I stand by it.
Do you know that Loudon Wainright tune? “The Swimming Song”? This summer I went swimming, it goes. This summer I might have drowned. But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around. Love that song. Find yourself in deep water and there’s nothing to do but swim. You’re weightless, buoyant. Like you’re on another planet. Or back where you were when you first came into this one.
That afternoon in March, when I finally clambered out onto the bank, I was goose-pimpled and humming. Glad I’d taken my own advice for once. And so it was with soggy shorts and an idiot grin I hadn’t worn in some months that I went to pick up my daughter from daycare.
There’s a book by the environmental writer Roger Deakin called Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain. Published in 1999, the book chronicles a series of swims in the rivers, ponds, pools, and seas throughout the country, with digressions into memoir, natural and cultural history. For Deakin, swimming — wild swimming, that’s what they call there (say what you will about the English, they know how to turn a phrase) — was a subversive activity, one that allowed you to “regain a sense of what is old and wild…by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official versions of things.” It affords a “frog’s-eye view” of the world, as he put it. If you’re in search of something, wild swimming’s not a bad way to go looking for it.
About a decade after Waterlog was first published, Joe Minihane, a freelance writer in London, retraced Deakin’s steps, revisiting the swimming holes documented in Waterlog. Those trips became the basis for Minihane’s own book, Floating: A Life Regained. As the subtitle might suggest, wild swimming became a balm for Minihane’s anxieties about work and life.
No surprise, maybe, that I related to Minihane — saw my anxieties about how to work, how to write, how to move through the world reflected in his own. Did I see the spine of his book on my shelf that afternoon when I knocked off early and hit the lake? Not consciously, but the mind is funny like that.
I mention those two swimmers, those two writers, those two books because this summer I’m going to take my own advice and follow in Deakin’s and Minihane’s footsteps — err, breaststrokes: I’m going to swim through Alabama, seeking out the best swimming holes the state has to offer — Appalachia foothills to Mobile Bay; Double Spring to Wildwood Shores. I’m gonna hold my breath and kick my feet and move my arms around.
And I’ll chronicle those trips here.
I should say: I’m not a southerner by birth. I don’t carry the weight of that particular circumstance. But this summer starts my tenth year living here — the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I love it here. And hate it, too. And, for better and for worse, the place has had a profound impact on me, my work, and my understanding of my place in this country. I apprenticed as a writer here and wrote my first book here — a book about this state and its tortured past. I fell in love here, got married here, became a father here, and am raising my child here. So, I keep asking myself, where am I, exactly? What’s it like to be here, now? Is there a there still there? What’s become of this place? What’s it becoming? I don’t want to retreat from life. I want to get back out in it. A meander through its waterways seems as good a way to do it as any.
If you’ve spent any time in Alabama, it might seem self-evident that someone would want to seek out the best swimming holes here. If you haven't spent much time in Alabama, the notion that you’d want to do much of anything here might seem strange. But despite its national reputation as a shittown, a backwater, Alabama is also a place of staggering beauty. One of the most biodiverse places in the country. And it’s full of choice swim spots. Or, you know, the ones that haven’t been ravaged by chicken plant runoff and coal ash.
So I’m off to go see what I can see; swim where I can swim. You can follow along here, every other Monday.
