Mouths Closed, Beaks Open at Munn Lake

Last week I set a goal of not screaming or singing off-key as I entered the chilly waters of my local lake. To add some pressure to meet this goal, I set up my camera so it would record any vocalizations. There might be a wee bit of audible whimpering, but nothing to match the geese and ducks. Enjoy this 3 minute video!

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)

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.

One Number and A Few Words

Yes, 46 degrees Fahrenheit. This was the water temp of Munn Lake (Thurston Count, WA) on Tuesday. THis is 10 degrees cooler since my last wild swim in late October.

I feared that missing my weekly wild swim for nearly two months would have softened me up too much and turned me into a summer-only swimmer and hygge devotee. But my brain remembered that getting into very cold water was not life threatening and could even be pleasurable. So I was all in when my wild-swimming buddies and I planned a swim on the sunny day after the rainy winter solstice..

An hour before our swim, my brain began whispering a panicky ”bail out!” That’s when I knew it was time to put on my bathing suit, my layers of fleece, and my wool hat and socks. Time t o put the tea kettle on. Time to pack my towel, thermometer, dry robe, cell phone. Time to vacuum the house while singing to drown out that little voice in my head. As long as I kept my body moving, I gave myself no opportunity to stop, think twice, and cancel.

The lake was beautiful and calm and 46 degrees according to my thermometer. The air was a bit cooler though the sun and lack of wind made it feel warmer—even warm. Stripped out of our fleece and dry robes, my two friends and I waded slowly into the water in our bathing suits and wool hats. “Slowly” is key here as a “get-it-over-with” plunge can cause body shock and other problems (see risks here). My friends and I like to feel the water on our goosebumpy skin. So we don’t wear wet suits, swim socks or gloves, or other protective gear. We just slip in, stay pretty close to shore, and try to feel the water, the cold, the buoyancy. We like to loll, tread water, look around. When seabirds do this it’s called “loafing.” We also like to marvel at where we are (seabird may do this as well). And, best of all, we like to feel the warmth of the winter sun on our closed eyelids. With a bit of imagination, you can imagine that warmth radiating all over your body. We know it’s possible to confuse “warm” with “numb,” and even “warm” with “cold,” so we don’t stay in long—usually five or ten minutes in winter.

Today, I might have lasted four minutes. I have to admit my numb lower half was fine, but I put my arms in too quickly and they were not happy (aka they hurt). I retreated to the shore; my friends went out further and stayed in longer. One even put her head under (no cap!) which made her smile even bigger after her brain freeze thawed.

Once together onshore, we shared hot tea and conversation in the sun. We talked about “blue mind,” (the theory that being near water makes you happier), about the few people fishing on the lake, about the bald eagle flying over (were they nesting already?), the osprey calling nearby (was it mating season?), and very low angle of the sun, the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, about the holidays and the new year.

Standing there at the edge of the lake, I thought about how we mark time these days. Early in the pandemic, we joked about “Blursday” describing the days of the week that blurred into each other as our routines were upended, our weekends lost their place, the hours we set aside for work and play became more fluid. For me, it was a novel and not so unpleasant way to experience time. But then the fall and winter presented us with new questions: how do we mark the seasons if we cannot celebrate the holidays the way we always have? Stripped of the usual transcontinental travel at Thanksgiving and Christmas, of gatherings with family and friends, of stringing up lights, of preparing feasts to share, how would I mark these holidays? What did these holidays mean when whittled down to the bare minimum? What new and perhaps more meaningful traditions could we start? There’s the rub. Traditions take time and should evolve organically and not just dropped in to keep us distracted. Which brings me to Jupiter and Saturn and a radical idea.

Our two largest planets, which are normally hundreds of millions of miles apart, have been moving closer to each other all month and have just recently overlapped in the sky. The last visible conjunction of these two planets occurred 800 years ago (in 1226). Our healthy obsession with seeing this phenomenon in the sky reminds me of the total solar eclipse of 2017 when people gathered by the thousands in and near the “totality” zone to witness this spectacular event. These distant events mark huge expanses of time and, being relatively rare, garner the attention rightly due to them. But, but, but…what about the moon and its phases? What about the tides—low, high, spring, neap, king? What about the migrating birds, the leafing trees, flowering plants, cooling lakes and frozen rivers? Knowing the timing of these and other natural phenomenon used to help us mark time across the day, months, and seasons. Can we reconnect with some of these time-honored (is that a pun?) ways of marking time? Can we feel the way time flows through us and the rest of the natural world and without being accused of “going all pagan” as we try to get in better sync with our planet?

There at the lakeshore, we celebrated the lake, the eagle, the osprey, the air, our skin, the sun. We looked fondly on the cottonwood tree—once green and fragrant, then gold, and now bare. We leave the lake warmed, connected, re-connected. With a deeper sense of place and time, we move into brighter days.