Lake Tahoe, June 1, 2023

The Viking

Joy In Reverent Waters

You can choose joy.  I did.  It welled up from all around, it was within, and it carried me.  I heard the joy.  For a few hours on a sunny morning, I rode a sonic, aquatic wave that existed in time, not across space.

Water is our essential human resource.  It guards the womb before birth.  It surrounds the heart in life.  Tears punctuate our pain, happiness, and the sorrow of another’s death.

In one of Fellini’s films, the actress Anita Ekberg whispers “The Romans called it Acqua Felice,” as she listens to the trickling murmur of some pagan grotto.  The name refers to the first new aqueduct for modern Rome, completed in 1586 by Pope Sixtus V.  As in antiquity it carries water above ground, as well as for miles underground, to provide relief, life, once again to the sparse hills around the city.

Last week I swam across the cool pristine waters of Lake Tahoe.  I heard the powerful acqua felice of time, connecting the ancient, when rivers of ice shaped mountain ranges, to the modern.  Was it mystical?  Unlikely.  Meditative, certainly.  Prayerful, reflective, invigorating?  Surely.  Most of all, the experience was reverent.  It was joyful.  I chose joy and subsequently the timeless waters of the Lake of the Sky gave me more than I deserve.

***

Pre-dawn preparations were made below Cave Rock on the southeastern shore of the lake.  In addition to an experienced driver and an observer, a crew of three joined the adventure.  A yellow silicon cap snugged over earplugs pressed tightly into each outer ear canal.  The tympanic membrane, insulated from vibrating air or water – is relieved of its purpose.  But there is sound.  Humans have two ways to hear.  Evolutionarily older, we also collect sound through the jawbone and passes it to the inner ear for processing.  It is the same in sea mammals.  It is how a blue whale can be heard by her brethren up to a thousand miles away.   

I heard the lake.  It spoke to me and in turn I whispered responses.  The stories, in burbling song, are not age-old.  They defy the ages.  They are the timeless liturgy, millions of years in the making, that transmutes the wisdom of Nature’s God into the resonant splendor when we take our life outdoors.  It is there for you too, if you will listen.

The water is an intensely sensuous environment.  When I started at 5:19 a.m., it was 11.5 degrees warmer than the 44-degree air.  At that temperature, medical science tells us that capillaries constrict and endorphins flow freely.  In combination, these should dull the sensations across the skin.  But medical science cannot explain everything.  There is no formula for wonder and entering the water in the near-dawn light, my entire body was bathed with the feeling of a light electric current.  Everything was alive, more alive than ever.

It is natural to move through the world in a vertical position.  To swim, is to seek balance in a prostrate posture.  But unlike an initiate to Holy orders, my reverence was not stationary.  Breathing was rhythmic and forceful.  My arms twirled to pull me on and through the altar instead of lying before it.   

Typically, an altar is solid.  It can hold a book with the very Word of God, or the sacraments which are alternately gifts and sacrifices.  It is the where we place the offerings from this world to heavenly powers.  By contrast, a liquid altar is itself the offering of buoyancy.  It is not solid and nothing is placed on it.  To swim at the altar of big, open water, is to immerse in it.  It is the portal through which we can move toward timelessness.

My vestments were simple: a navy loincloth made of nylon.  Special oils – a combination of Vaseline and lanolin – marked my neck and a few areas subject to chafing.  In preparation the night before, I had done a ritual cleaning of the body by shaving my legs.  Favorite totems were selected for the journey; for the experience I wore a new cap that had been given to me on a recent adventure with my wife and a favorite pair of goggles.  Special foods had been selected.

Swimming across Lake Tahoe was not a religious experience, but it may as well have been.  English adventurer George Mallory liked to bathe in the Kashmiri streams when preparing for his attempts on Everest.  He called swimming, like mountaineering, an “emotional and spiritual necessity.” 

***

Lake Tahoe, the lake we know, took three to four million years to develop.  More than three million years ago retreating glaciers scoured the basin.  Faulting elevated the Sierras to the west of the lake.  Then approximately two million years ago, Mt. Pluto erupted.  The resulting debris damned the lake which slowly filled.  At 1,645 feet deep, its depth is second only to Crater Lake in the United States.  Its purity is unparalleled with visibility to depths of more than 75 feet.  The lake was born of upheaval and epochal forces that were as violent as its beauty is tranquil today.

I swam from Cave Rock across the lake on a southwesterly course to Emerald Bay to the Vikingsholm.  Starting at 5:19 a.m., it took 5:51:34 (unofficial) to cross.  For the first two hours, I fed every 40 minutes and then switched to 30-minute intervals.  The feeds were Skratch, Gu or Gu Roctane, twice I had an almond butter packet, and once I ate a banana.  The target for feeds was 285-300 calories an hour.

All told, the swim is 10.63 miles, or 17.1 kilometers.  The water temperature was stable until the last two miles when it dropped from 57.7 to 54. 5 degrees.  Throughout the morning, the water temperature was documented 13 times and it was between 54.5 and 55.5 degrees 11 times.  My initial stroke rate was 62 strokes per minute.  Subsequently, it was observed ten more times and each time it measured 66 strokes per minute. 

Once the sun came up, my hands and forearms looked like they had a spotlight on them under the water.  My wedding band glimmered.  Looking underwater I could see the bottom of the kayak or the dipping of the paddle from yards away.  The water is that clear.  It tastes like Evian.

The swim finishes at the head of the only inlet on the lake shortly after passing the only island in the lake, Fannette Island.  Elevated a few feet from the natural beach is Vikingsholm Castle, a mansion built in 1929 during a single summer by an heiress named Lora Knight.  It is anyone’s guess why she wanted a Scandinavian castle with 38 rooms on a remote bay surrounded on three sides by mountains and flanked by a waterfall.  But an imitation fjord does make a vivid backdrop for an epic swim.

From the mouth of Emerald Bay to the Vikingsholm is 1.7 miles.  As I approached the mouth of Emerald Bay, a slight current flowed out.  There was a teasing breaze coming over the starboard beam and I entered the bay from the north side of the mouth where the water was the calmest.  The water temperature was dropping, likely due to the production of Eagle Falls which prodigiously pours into the bay.

The final 1.5 miles of the swim were more difficult than the first nine miles combined.  I could hear the waterfall, but could not find its location.  Boat traffic picked up and while I could see the forested backdrop at the head of the bay, details did not come into focus for nearly an hour.  While the water temperature did not present problems, the altitude was a constant drain on energy.  The effect was cumulative.  Even at a low-intensity, wholly aerobic pace, I felt my heart thumping away and lacked entirely the ability to accelerate.  Technique faltered and diminished efficiency.

While planning the swim, I thought it would be a two-hour swim followed by an experiment for several hours.  The hypothesis was that the cool water would not pose difficulties.  The longest swim I’ve done in similar temperatures this year was about 1:50.  Last week I swam four hours longer.

I got the two-hour swim.  For nearly the next three hours, I also got a successful experiment.  I learned how my body responds to hours of cold-water swimming.  What followed during the final hour was a genuine adventure because it was not clear how things would turn out.  I tired.  My form suffered.  In the main, it became an endurance test of the mind more than the spirit or the body. 

This particular swim is called The Viking.  There have been 92 documented crossings by more than 70 people since it was inaugurated in July 2015.  On June 1, 2023 I made the earliest swim across Lake Tahoe by 18 days.  However, of those other 92 Viking swims, 35 were faster than me.

***

The first swim across Lake Tahoe was in 1931.  Myrtle Huddlestone swam 10.5 miles from Deadman Point, Nevada to Tahoe City, California.  After swimming all day, she swam alone through the night to finish in 22:53 and won $700 (almost $14,000 today) for her effort.  In the morning, her son rowed out to meet her and urged her on for the last two miles.

Then, as now, the lake is home to trout, bass, bullhead and other, smaller creatures.  I saw geese and at least two types of duck.  I believe it is still a place where people go to listen to time.  When I swam I didn’t mark time like a metronome.  The rhythm of my breath and my hands entering above my head may have signaled the fish or fowl, but to me they were as silent as the deepest reaches of space.  Instead I heard time itself.  Time that called out through the bottomless curtains of green light that would fold, lift, and swirl upon itself.  Time that is crisp and clean, ionized by millennia upon millennia of purifying natural filters.

I found the timelessness of joy. 

The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote a book about his life up to 1931, the year of his conversion, the year Myrtle Huddlestone pioneered swimming in Lake Tahoe.  In Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life he writes, “I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.  But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.”

He understood that joy is a gift.  To swim Lake Tahoe, with acqua felice, is just such a gift.  My experience was to encounter time, reverence, and joy.

Be Positive, Swim Negative Split

I’m now two weeks removed from the Catalina Channel. The wonder has not faded, but I don’t want to lose track of the details. One of those details involves the swim plan. I prepared a seven page document for my crew, the captain of the Pacific Star, and the official observers. It covered nutrition, roles, clarity about decision-making authority and stated as plainly as I could my goals for the swim.

The goals for the swim were the first section of the document.

1. Anticipate, recognize, and mitigate risks as they emerge. 
2. Use clear thinking to make decisions on behalf of crew and swimmer.
3. Swim from point A to point B according to applicable channel swimming rules.
4. Visit with a pod of dolphins, reflect on the sunrise, provide experience for future adventures.
5. Widespread, joyous, and profound fun had by all.
6. Document the swim for later analysis, learning, and to help create memories.

Later, in a long section labeled “General Plan of Attack” the following paragraphs appear and explain how I mentally mapped something as audacious as a channel swim.

I typically take 45-70 minutes to loosen up and find a groove that can be maintained.  The first two hours will be swum conservatively – at an easy pace.  I do not plan to have a split taken at the 12-mile mark, but as a general rule, my approach is to negative split the crossing.  I’ve been working on descending big long sets during the past month.  A conservative start, the anticipated psychological boost of sunrise seven hours after the start, and the raw anticipatory energy that comes during the last 20 percent of any endurance race is the essence of this plan.  The core of a negative split strategy is how it feels in the water, not the times and paces and stroke count.  I’ll do it mentally if not mathematically.  In addition, I won’t be able to do it without the crew making the major (and minor, too) decisions about feeding because after a time I’ll lose the ability to keep track of how much I’m taking in, what seems to work after six and eight hours and etc.

To create a mental map for myself of the crossing, I’ve broken it into four unequal segments.  Segment one is from the island and will proceed until we’ve done one cycle of the feeding schedule – approximately 2-3 hours.  The second segment is the longest and it will proceed until sunrise.  This is the segment where the swimmer will likely zone out and the crew is relied upon for alertness. This segment may be 5 to 7 hours long depending on start time.  Segment three begins with the sunrise.  If the water conditions allow for it, I’d like to pause or take a feed in order to see the sunrise.  Segment three concludes approximately three miles offshore where the water temperature should drop from the high 60s to the high 50s.

The fourth segment is simply to swim in to shore from the continental shelf.

Looking at the data available, including the captain’s log of our location at each hour after the start, it appears that I even split the swim and possibly, narrowly, even squeaked out a negative split. This plan was something that I reiterated with the crew just prior to our departure. I wanted to swim slow and smooth to maximize the experience and maximize the probability of a successful crossing.

For the first six hours, I kept telling myself not to go more than 50 percent effort. Over and over I checked my perceived effort. How hard was I working? After the first six hours I adopted the following plan for each 30 minute segment: I would start with :30 to :60 seconds of drills and then build from 40 percent effort all the way to 80 or 85 percent before the next feed.

In retrospect, it was good for the body to finally open up the throttle a bit albeit in a controlled manner. It also helped regulate my mental energies because the build and the idea that I could look forward to a break soon with a feed gave me something forward looking to focus on besides all my own dreamery about color and memory and the absolute mindbending conflation of the stars above with the bioluminescence below.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Reverie of the Sea

I.

Wild is all around us. Sometimes it is in the mind and especially so when we are suspended between unmitigated risks and uncontrollable forces.

On earth, the greatest unexplored wilderness is the sea. Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the planet with most of the waters unmapped and uncharted. The ocean teems with nearly a quarter million known animal species and an estimated six times as many other species.

California’s great mountain man, John Muir, wrote, “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.” To step into the night sea intending to swim a channel is to go without baggage. Marathon swimming allows the essentials – plain suit, goggles, a cap – and no more.

A week ago, I swam the Catalina Channel. For 11 hours and 18 minutes, I swam the 21 miles. What I found was bigger than words and cannot be captured by a photograph. It wasn’t a conquest or a mere adventure. Rather I discovered a glimpse at the expansiveness of our world.

For hours I tracked the moon across the southern sky. I gazed into the Milky Way. I looked down into a deep cobalt abyss of darkness. Explosions of bioluminescence fragmented off my hands like so many miniature planets of blue, green, and white. I swam into a horizonless dawn and later attempted to leap from the water to mimic a pod of dolphins swirling under and around me. In these things, in the repetitive action of stroke upon stroke, metered by rhythmic breathing, I found that at the heart of my wild encounter was a calm; I was joyous and, in that joy, I was at peace.

II.

Insulated means, literally, made into an island. John Donne knew; I am not an island. Neither was I ever isolated because a tremendous amount of time and energy went into insulating me from all manner of risks.

A friend told me, with her understated wisdom, that marathon swimming is not a solo sport. For 21 weeks I prepared physically which meant my family bore the burden of an often tired, soggy, and hungry person wandering about the house and using the car to routinely drive to Annapolis to swim.

I went to California with a crew of five. The escort ship, the Pacific Star, is outfitted for diving trips with an open back deck and twin QSM11 Cummins diesel engines. Two captains and two mates alternated four-hour shifts keeping us on course and monitoring weather, water conditions, and traffic in a busy shipping lane. Furthermore, the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation posted two official observers on board to document the swim and make sure we adhered to all applicable rules.

For the first two hours, I paused every 40 minutes to eat or drink. For the next eight hours, the feeds were on 30-minute intervals. They were tethered to a kayak and tossed to me by a crew member who took a three-hour shift keeping an eye on me in all conditions. While the feeds varied – primarily of an endurance formula of Scratch Labs, warm water, Gu gels, banana or almond butter – the aim was for approximately 275-300 calories an hour in a mixture and pattern to maximize absorption. Once the crew surprised me with a tiny delicious Snickers bar that was well worth the extra time it took to chew and swallow.

To begin the swim, the Pacific Star took us on a sunset cruise from San Pedro to Catalina Island. We arrived around 10.30 p.m. and made final preparations. The boat was turned about and off the back deck approximately 50 meters was the rocky shore of a small inlet of Catalina Island. Low clouds hid most starlight and the swells were manageable but irregular at two-to-four feet. The wind was blowing at 12-15 knots complicating the shape of the water. The water temperature was 69 degrees and the air was warmer. I jumped off the back deck, swam approximately halfway to shore and smashed my right hand into an underwater rock. I paused long enough to attempt an examination of what I was sure was a bloody gash along the length of the palm-side muscle below the pinky finger. With goggles, darkness, and a healthy dose of adrenaline, I couldn’t see my own hand. It turns out, I gave myself a nasty bruise and a tiny, superficial cut below the thumb.

The protocol to start the swim is to clamber onto the rocky shore, walk clear of the waterline, gather oneself, raise an arm to the sky, and then lower the arm when you step into the water. All the while the boat’s crew shine a spotlight on you and the observers ready their stopwatches. I followed this protocol, more or less, and also punctured the bottom of my right foot as I stood up. After unartfully putting my hand into an underwater boulder, I decided not to check for any damage. I figured less known by the crew at this time the better. At 10.38 p.m., we were underway. Family and friends could watch the swim’s progress online because we had placed a satellite spot tracker on the boat.

I learned quickly that swimming at night in the ocean is different from the practice swims I had done. I had close to no depth perception.

Many times, I was convinced that I was swimming at a right angle to either the kayak or the boat. Only after this happening on successive breathes did I realize that it would be impossible to get perpendicular to both within three strokes. Obviously, my judgement was impaired by the dark. The boat is 66 by 22 feet and hard to miss. It is also humbling to see it get rolled by swells coming in off its port side beam when you are trying to swim parallel on the starboard side.

After 17 weeks of a 021-week training program, I was confident about the swim by late June. I had done the work. My fitness matched the expected demands. My skills had expanded and improved. I had experience too, including with swims that didn’t go well.

Maybe I got lucky. I know well that nature is indifferent to how I feel about a situation. My confidence is not considered by the sea. She is powerful and can confound the most knowledgeable sailor. To enter the water off Catalina is to surrender control. The captain, the observers, and my crew chief each had the power to end the swim at any time, for any reason. To surrender to the sea is a bigger emotional step. Nature doesn’t have a face. There is no reasoning, no conversation to be had, there is no probabilistic risk analysis. There is, however, incalculable beauty and power.

Despite this surrender, and perhaps because of the confidence, from the moment I started I knew the end would come beneath the sandstone cliffs of Smugglers Cove. What I could not know in that moment, as I was tossed by the swell a few yards off of the island, is the profound beauty that would be revealed in the coming hours. I also had no idea how little struggle I would face while crossing.

III.

It is difficult to develop the proper metaphor to describe swimming across the Catalina Channel. I find myself using the word “big” a great deal. It was a big night.

The mental calm was big enough to block out things going wrong with a feed or the sting of a jellyfish. The sound of my breathing underwater was big enough to overwhelm the idling, yet powerful engines of the Pacific Star. The sky was so big as to defy definition. The depth of the channel, I know, reaches to 3,000 feet. Yet even in the morning with a bright sun overhead, my vision was likely limited to a few dozen feet below. The biggest pelican I’ve ever seen soared effortlessly a few dozen feet above our heads. Needless to say, in the middle of the channel when land cannot be seen in any direction, the water took on its own dimensions beyond big.

It wasn’t like a birth or baptism, each of which suggest a transformation and a journey, though I came out of the water different than I entered and clearly made a journey. Swimming the Catalina Channel was more like a creation, a conception, a marriage of myself with the water. It was our big bang.

There was a kaleidoscope of color. Yellow lights in the galley of the boat lit silhouettes all night while green and red glow sticks illuminated the kayak. There was an occasional blast of white light off the back deck to my left and the sepia splash of the Milky Way accented by the clean yellow-white light off the moon to the right.

The water would shift from periwinkle to a translucent, hazy blue and back again. For as much as these colors showed me the world, they also lit up my mind. At various times I was consumed with color-related memories like Dana’s phlox at our home in Raleigh, bluebell flowers along a favorite running trail through Manassas Battlefield, and my daughter’s eyes that seem to change from green to brown depending on her mood.

Though it must have been approximately five hours, after the clouds cleared I tracked the moon in a gentle arc across the southern sky and it was the key to a series of memories about our favorite vacation place in Maine and how the moonlight reflects on Panther Pond. I don’t think I actually saw much in the dark night, but I remembered a great deal.

The most stunning visual element of the swim was certainly the starbursts of bioluminescent plankton that would streak off my fingers and hands with each entry, for hours on end, and then gently float past. They were white and blue and green. Transfixed, I imagined tiny cosmic capsules of motion, life, and time suspended for a flashing, passing moment.

We had waves that could not be seen in the dark. I was lifted, pushed, and twisted and yet it all happened in a state of suspension because I was floating. Eventually the swells weakened, later a horizon emerged and it became more difficult to see how the stars above paralleled the brilliant starbursts below. But for those many hours, I was centered in the cosmos of the Catalina Channel.

I swam for nearly half a day in the liminal space between memory and motion.

IV.

To state the obvious, the Pacific is salty. I did not taste so much as develop new textures. Lips dry out, despite being constantly submerged. My lips tightened and swelled (as did the rest of my face). The salt was ever present and the shape of my tongue was ever changing. It grew rough and dimpled like a sponge. It was soft, swollen, and tender like a sensual mouth kiss. And then again, each time I closed my mouth after a sip of air, it felt like an overcooked cauliflower would fill the space inside my mouth.

I was tickled by the occasional bit of seaweed. I inadvertently touched a fish. Salps chained together provided endless wonder about simple systems in complex combinations. After the first (of five) jellyfish stings zinged me on the ribs, I remembered the tight feeling of skin abraded by the straps of a red life jacket that I wore as a child before learning to swim in a country pond.

In a meditation on pain and suffering C.S. Lewis writes, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” I went to Catalina and swam, but did not suffer. There was no shouting. I heard His whispered songs of joy warbling through the water.

I watched in wonder as a pod of dolphins streaked all about. They raced underneath me and surfaced beside us like playful dervishes.

I listened to a symphony of joy: the drum of my heartbeat and thrum of regular exhalation, the gurgle of hands entering water, the slap of a paddle, the splosh of waves crossing unexpectedly across my head, the gentle vibrating tum tum tum of a lazy kick, and the click click nickering of dolphins.

It was a big, wild night that went into the day. It was my reverie of the sea.

Requiem for Uma

Dry leaves crackle as a breeze comes through from the south. The sign says no dogs allowed. But she is here, always.

We brought her ashes to this little corner of forested land. They blew over a bend in the creek where Uma loved to chase sticks.

Things change. The forest changes. Uma was followed by Storm the wonder dog and now Tilly. But she no longer changes. The beauty of a good romp in the woods is the same.

The initial crunch of gravel gives way to the whisper-slide sound of pine needles underfoot. Descending to the creek, the wind picks up and the leaves get bigger — red maple and birch. Running easy through the soft air — the morning temperature rose with the sun and it was already in the high 40s — remembering our walks here, I stepped on a branch across the trail.

Expecting a gentle give and trampoline launch to my stride, CRR-ack!

The sound splintered the air and rose to the heavens. I laughed like I did when she would urgently find the muddiest bend in the water to splash.

And I loved her with my every fiber.

Wild Swimming

At Ullswater, near Penrith in England’s Lake District

Goofing Around

Highland Park Hijinks