Afleveringen
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Hey, everyone.
Some technical issues on my end meant that the last issue of the Blue Million Miles was text-only. I thought Iâd rectify that by making this one strictly for your ears. You might remember that last year I spent July 4th wringing my hands over the death drive coming through the speakers at the city pool that day. Well, this year I spent Labor Day at Chewacla, the state park here in Auburn, listening just as intently, albeit this time without all the woebegone analysis. So, without further ado, hereâs a field recording from the afternoon at the lake. A very good one, indeed. And hereâs to the workers.
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*clears throat*
Itâs always easier not to. Not to write. Not to swim. Not to write about swimming. Easier not to turn left off the state road and descend the mountain to the lake below. Itâs not like anyone will ever force you to. The excuses offer themselves too easily. And besides, entropy doesnât even ask for one, content to carry you down its current, you low-down lazy bum.
But here I am. Iâve done it. Iâve come to the waterâs edge. Lake Chinnabee. My trunks on. My shirt off. AndâŠmy only thought is of turning around. It is March. It is windy. And it is always easier not to. Even at the waterâs edge.
Chinnabee is a small lake. 17 acres, if that means anything to you. You could achieve the opposite bank in a few minutesâ swim. Quaint. âA pastoral valley of peacefulnessâ is how the forest service describes it. Sure.
Itâs smack in the middle of the Talladega National Forest. This is northeast Alabama. The mountains (insofar as that means anything here). The foothills of Appalachia, anyway. That famous trail officially ends 300 miles to the east at Springer Mountain, Georgia. But technically the range continues, or unravels really, across the border here before laying down on the coastal plain below. Thereâs a movement to extend the trail to Alabama; AT2AL itâs called. A puristâs vision, I guess, to trace the mountains down to the last peak, Mount Cheaha, which is just a few miles east of here, where I stand on the bank of this lake, the end of the end, the southern terminus, thinking about not swimming.
Then comes another thought. One that is at once stupid and profound. A holy-fool thought, to which I am too often inclined. This one having to do with time, and how we encounter it. How it shapes us. Namely that these mountains are very old and that it is a wondrous, almost inconceivable thing to be upon them.
The geological events that brought about the Appalachian mountains took place hundreds of millions of years ago, and involved great volcanic eruptions, the colliding of continental shelves, the coming together and the coming apart of Pangea. The Appalachians were once contiguous with a range that today stands in Morocco. Iâve just written that, but really I donât even know what that means. The timespace of these hills, itâs like theyâre in some kind of superposition. Iâm looking at rock that was once at the center of Pangea, at the center of everything. In a range that is thought to have once been as tall as the Himalayas, the tallest in the world. But time, in this case expressing itself as hundreds of millions of years of erosion and continental drift, has worn it down and spanned an ocean through it.
Iâd given a reading the night before, which is why I was up in this corner of the state. Iâd published a book a few years ago about Confederate monuments and the protest movements to remove them. It had came out in September of 2020, which you might remember as a time of global viral pandemic. So the book tour was virtual. And though I was lucky enough to do a good number of events discussing and promoting the book, they all took place on Zoom. So this reading in March was the first Iâd done in person.
The writer John Jeremiah Sullivan talks about reading old writing as a kind of vaudeville, an impersonation of yourself. And for me this was doubly so. The book was written years ago now and chronicles events and experiences that took place in the years before that, and whatâs more it renders a version of me that is even younger and more naive. I had wanted to trace an intellectual and moral development that took place over the past decade or so on questions of race and equity and how we face the past. And so reading it that night, as good as it felt to read in public and in person, it also felt tired, and a bit uncanny. I didnât quite recognize myself. Was it me? It was not not me, but also not quite me. Not anymore, anyway. Iâd written those words and had those experiences, sure but theyâd been so worked over, theyâd taken on a worn smoothness. The geological events that led to that book were now so far in the past, the eruptions and subductions worn down through time and repetition. My reading copy of the book dogeared, yellow, exhausted.
That project felt finally done. Funny to think that the first proper reading of this book might well also be the last. Point is, I woke this morning with a renewed if belated exuberance to swim and to write and to write about swimming and to turn left off the state road and descend the mountain to the lake below - easier though it may be have been not to.
By now Iâve dallied long enough for the sun to get up over the treeline and the wind has tapered off but Jesus it is cold. I am still thinking of not swimming even as I plunge. I surface, turn, float on my back and regard the great dome of the sky.
Thereâs a box turtle on a fallen log up by the marshy banks where a stream feeds the lake. The turtleâs neck is fully extended, as if on a string drawn to the sun above.
I feel compelled to nod to the turtle, who acknowledges by presence not at all, and I go back to floating.
Whence come the mountains? Whence come the ideas? It occurs to me that this sense of exhaustion Iâm feeling can only be cast off by exhausting myself anew. Itâs easier not to. But also, of course, worse. I swim to the shore and stand in the sun, drip-drying.
Thatâs when another stupid-profound thought hits me: Sure, this is the southern terminus, the end of the end of the trail, but I need only to turn around and there Iâd be at the start once more.
I head north up a trail that traces the lakeâs feeder stream until, after a mile or so, I come to a waterfall. And there for a time I stand beneath it, letting all that water come down upon me.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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To write about the waterways of Alabama is to wade through converging streams of fact and fiction, reality and lore, whatâs actually true and whatâs just a good story.
Let me give you an example: a few weeks ago, on an oxbow of the Alabama River just downstream from its confluence, I swam past an abandoned film set. Itâs a film set that was built to appear like a town once thriving and then run down. A stretch of houses halfway completed in order to appear halfway to ruin. Facades and porches finished and then weathered; floorboards unlaid and back doors never hung. The director of the film had come across the island while scouting for locations here in Elmore County, Alabama. There wasnât anything on the island then. Or nothing manmade, anyway. So they built it, weathered it, and left behind a new old town on the island.
The movie filmed here was Big Fish â a story of a sonâs quest to parse the truth from the fiction of his fatherâs tales.
The town is called Spectre; the town is called Jackson Lake Island.
The island is privately owned but itâs open to the public and has become something of a tourist attraction since the filmâs release. You can pay $3 and drive across the causeway to wander the film set. But it seems more popular as a recreation area. A place to camp, fish, boat, swim, or feed the herd of wild goats who have taken up residence on the island.
On a Sunday in August, that herd of goats descended on every car to park at a campsite. Ours was no exception.
We â me and Shaelyn and Ozzie, that eternally game and up-for-anything crew â made for a site on the far side of the island to spend the afternoon. After greeting the goats, I swam out into the channel. The water got deep quickly and I had to plunge earlier than I might have preferred, all things being equal. But you donât go wild swimming on your own terms, so I plunged and dolphin kicked and came up paddling a good ways out into the channel. Early enough in the day that the water was still crisp, refreshing if not bracing. The water was like tea â a little tannin-y without feeling at all viscous or algal or gross.
About halfway into the channel, I noticed what turned out to be a tree branch emerging from the waterâs surface but which at first and second glance Iâd mistaken for a water snake with its head raised. After a momentâs panic, I swam over to get a closer look.
The branch was still connected to the rest of the tree, which must have fallen from the opposite bank. Winded from the swimming and treading, I tried to stand on the trunk but its angle proved too steep, its surface too slick to get any purchase. I slipped, barely avoiding a faceplant on the log. Had anyone been watching from the bank, the Benny Hill theme song might have come to mind.
The felled tree was likely lingering damage from the tornado that touched down here last May. Another tree caved in the roof of the campgroundâs pavilion. The storm spared the film set, though. The feigned ruin still intact; the felled trees now submerged.
While Iâd been swimming, Shaelyn and Ozzie had been tracking the goats across the island. I swam back in and caught up with them and the three of us headed over to the film set.
As we approached, a child was tossing a pair of shoes into the air, trying to snag them on a line stretched between two poles â the makeshift gateway to the fictional place. The boy couldnât have been older than seven. He was immersed in his task. The shoes on the line, itâs a reference to the film. If you wandered through the forest and wound up in the town, theyâd take your shoes and string them on the line. The grass was so soft here, who needed shoes? And if theyâre gone, well, you couldnât leave.
Stories are seductive like that. Tell a good enough tale and you might never want to leave it.
But this kid, he hadnât tied his laces together. There was nothing to catch the line. He was just hucking his shoes into the air and watching them fall. After a few throws, though, heâd figured it out and after his successful throw, immediately took off.
We did a lap of the one-street ghost town but I hung back a ways. I watched Ozzie and Shaelyn walk through these fictions made real. They peered up at the shoes â all those wishes to stay in the enchanted town â then crane their necks around the doorways of the abandoned homes.
I was being visited by a memory I donât think Iâd ever before recollected. Iâd been relying on Shaelynâs memory of the film until it hit me: Iâd seen this movie too. On a date; weâd rented it from Blockbuster. That was back in 2005, when Alabama existed in my mind hardly at all, what I did know came mostly from fictions, exaggerations. And now Blockbuster has long since closed and my life has taken shape here â a husband, a father, an itinerant documentarian â and less than an hour from this fictional world.
Jackson Lake Island is just outside Millbrook. Elmore County. From there we headed for the county seat, Wetumpka. Wetumpkaâs got a quaint little downtown, bordered on one side by the Coosa River, the other by a state highway that runs along a ridge. Halfway up that ridge stands an imposing white Victorian home, turreted and gabled.
That house appears in the film, too. Itâs the fatherâs home. In the driveway are branded signs letting you know that this is the house youâve come to see but also informing you that you canât park there.
That afternoon on our way out to the next swimming spot, we drove by to catch a glimpse of the house. Halfway up the hill, I worried our little hatchback might not manage. It was a little hair-raising but the car prevailed.
That ridge on which the Victorian home stands, thatâs the result of whatâs now called the Wetumpka Crater. Or the Wetumpka impact crater, if you want to get technical about it, which apparently not everyone does. The craterâs more than four miles in diameter, the impact dating back almost one hundred million years ago â way before Blockbuster. The horseshoe shape of the craterâs perimeter indicates to geologists that the asteroid hit at an oblique angle.
Around the time that geologists were confirming the dating of the crater, the Auburn Astronomical society toured the crater and in their dispatch described the asteroid impact as âAlabama's greatest natural disaster in the last 81.5 million years.â Itâs massive, as far as craters go. And internationally recognized, as important old craters are.
But when I mentioned the crater to a biology professor at Auburn University, he laughed. âThat craterâs more famous outside the state than in,â he said. Point being that itâs sometimes hard to excite people about a crater from 81 million years ago if they only count the earthâs years in the thousands.
Through the lowest point in that crater runs the Coosa River and along a patch of shoals just north of town sits Corn Creek Park. We parked and clambered down the bank to a sandy beach.
We arrived at the river in the late afternoon, stayed til early evening. People were tubing, coming through on kayaks and canoes, their friends waiting on the shoreline with beers. The sun was setting, the water babbling. Bouquets of gloriously accented English and Spanish bloomed into the night and carried over the water.
People will ask why you love Alabama and itâs clear theyâve never imagined Corn Creek Park at dusk
.
Itâs lovely here. The place makes it easy to put out of mind what you see as you come into the park. You turn left off the state highway. To your right when you turn is one of the four state prisons in the county. More people are imprisoned here in Elmore County than in any other county in the state. Which means that, per capita, more people are imprisoned in Elmore County than in nearly any other county in the country. I can keep zooming out but I think you get the point.
It got late. As we started packing up, another family with a child about Ozzieâs age arrived. We chatted about how much our children loved to swim, about how nice it was that our children loved to swim. I wondered about the stories weâd hand down to our children about this place, about their place in it. Foolish to think weâd have any great amount of control of what happens in their stories but we had chosen to set them here. It will be home for Ozzie in a way it never will for me.
Even so, when I tell about Alabama, and especially when I tell Ozzie about Alabama, I want to emphasize the beauty, the love, the strangeness to be found here. But like all stories, that one is full of half-truths and exaggerations and convenient evasions â like the story just across the street, one of barbed wire, desperation and neglect, the vicious and punitive power wielded here, often against the most vulnerable.
Why do you love Alabama? Easier to tell it like Big Fish. At the end, the father â the teller of all those tall tales â is terminally ill, bedridden. But he wonât abide dying in the ICU. So they carry him out and down to the banks of the river, where he turns into a catfish and swims off into the shoals of the Coosa River.
Itâs a good story. But on the walk back up the river bank after setting him in the water, youâve got to pass an awful lot of barbed wire.
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This was supposed to be a love letter. An exaltation. A fanfare for the public pool. Iâd call upon the muses, pray they sing of the high dive and the snack bar. The smell of sunblock and laundered towel and chlorinated water evaporating on hot macadam. Of the gutter and the lap lane; the wet sandalâs âthock,â and the belly flopâs âsmack.â
And this was to be a recitation of its virtues on Independence Day, no less. With neither irony nor pollyanna in mind but rather, to go armed with the sobering knowledge of the countryâs fraught past and its perilous moment and still partake of the Republicâs finest achievements: encased meats, cheap suds, and the public pool.
Pools make people more legible. Peopleâs needs and desires become harder to repress. Thereâs the child, so excited by the prospect of a swim, that she cannot help but run across the pool deck, lifeguardâs whistle be damned. And the teenager who, on surfacing from a plunge, cannot suppress that vain little flick of his head. The parents desperate for a place where their adolescent children can while away a few hours. And the lizard need, across ages, just to get some sun. Itâs all there, right on the surface, at the pool.
So given all that, there was somethingâŠunnerving happening at the pool that day. Or, more precisely, happening on the poolâs stereo. Thereâs no PA system at the Samford Pool. Instead, they have one of those rolly suitcase amps hooked up to someoneâs phone. The poolâs small enough â 25 by 50 yards, roughly â that a single rolly suitcase amp can reach the far end of the grounds, no problem. And songs on the stereo that day, the nationâs 246th birthday, well, they certainly had a sense of moment to them.
While I rolled out my towel, Lee Brice was singing about driving a dead brotherâs truck. âI roll every window down / And I burn up every back road in this town / I find a field, I tear it up til all the pain's a cloud of dust / Yes, sometimes, I drive your truck.â A bit maudlin for the occasion but it sounds like the brother died in service. So, condolences. Tree of liberty, etc., etc.
But before Iâd finished putting on sunblock, Blake Shelton was singing about how whistling Dixie would get you heaven-bound and promising that âI don't care what my headstone reads / Or what kind of pinewood box I end up in / When it's my time, lay me six feet deep / In God's country.â Which, I mean, câmon dude. Inane but also just a bummer.
Okay, but here was Miranda Lambert to lighten the mood, maybe? Not so: âWhether you're late for church / Or you're stuck in jail / Hey, word's gonna get around / Everybody dies famous in a small town.â
Pretty bleak. Isnât today supposed to be a happy day? Or if you let the algorithm play long enough does it always land in a death wish? I looked around, a little confused, hoping to catch the eye of someone similarly put off. Slow day at the pool, though. Slow enough that the off-duty lifeguards had set up a basketball hoop and were shooting jumpers off the diving board. They seemed unfazed by the tunes. Inoculated, maybe. I hope not.
Maybe youâre hearing this and thinking to yourself, âOh please. Spare me the pointy-headed writer being annoying about country music.â But I love country music. And not just those Terry Allen and Gene Clark re-issues, either. Iâve tried to play music for almost twenty years now and the closest Iâve ever come to entertaining anyone was with a rendition of Toby Keithâs âShouldâve Been a Cowboyâ at karaoke night in an SEC college town. But this alienated, atomized, only-finding-meaning-in-consumer-goods-and-death country? I mean, to quote Greil Marcus: âWhat is this s**t?â
But the songs kept playing.
Now, youâre going to think I invented this next song but youâd be flattering my imagination. Every verse of this song is from the perspective of a dead soldier from a different war. But thatâs not all. Then â I kid you not â thereâs a coda with this whole chorus of the undead singing, âSet our spirits free (set us free) / Let us lay down our guns / Sweet mother Mary, we're so tired / But we can't come home âtil the last shot's fired.â
At this point, I would have gladly listened to âProud to be an American.â On repeat. I would have even considered letting Lee Greenwood give me a lobotomy. I mean, we live in a society, donât we? Might we hope for better? What irrepressible thing was the pool revealing today on the rolly suitcase speaker? That we might only hope for death.
No, but wait. Here was Zac Brown. Zac Brown, with a voice like James Taylor. He might show us a way to reclaim some civic pride even at this late hour of our democracy. Zac, you show us the way, wonât you? And, lo, Zac replied: âSalute the ones who died / The ones who give their lives / so we donât have to sacrifice / All the things we love / like our chicken fried.â
I went to the pool to indulge in some Americana. Maybe I was naive to expect anything less.
Still, this soundtrack to a small town death wish felt like a betrayal. Not just of country music â which, at this best, celebrates and ironizes rural life with a kind of pathos and wit not at all in evidence that day â but, more to the point, a betrayal of the Samford Pool. Which is to say it felt like a betrayal of public life. Of even the possibility of public life. The Samford Pool is run by the city and it sits right behind the public junior high school. Which really makes it the hub of public life in Auburn (such as it is). Itâs the most integrated place, by class and race, in this southern town. Itâs cheap to get in. Itâs well maintained. Its only shortcoming, really, is a lack of shade. At its best, it embodies the democratic enterprise â the idea that we might be more than consumers and candidates for the reaper, but citizens, too. That we might collectively endeavor to improve our lives by, in this case, providing a place for children to run on the pool deck, for teenagers to flick their heads, and for us all to get some sun.
And part of the premise of this swimming project is to go out beyond my door and find something vitalizing. So on the Fourth, I wanted to get my Walt Whitman on, and find that vitality in the public sphere. I wanted to find a meaning that came somewhere other than the specter of death.
Matthew Sitman touches on this idea in a recent essay calling for renewed civic culture. Sitman looks to the New Deal for instruction: âFranklin Roosevelt and his administration understood that despair could be countered and democracy fortified by a kind of social infrastructureâŠThey built theaters and public pools and commissioned murals to beautify public spacesâŠThey were also public goods that brought people together, and were ways of making communities easier to feel a part of and entertainment and culture enjoyable for more than the rich.â
And, on the flip side, we might read the closing of so many public pools in response to the gains of the civil rights movement as a tacit understanding by conservatives of the democratic power of the space.
So, all to say, I had harbored a small hope that, even in this eleventh hour, the muses might sing of something other than the inevitability of our demise.
But if only I would wrest my attention away from the music, they were doing exactly that, all around. Singing of gainers off the diving board, of shoulder tans turning the corner into sunburns, of my own daughter holding tight to a pool noodle and flailing her legs in something beginning to approximate a flutter kick. More people had arrived, the deck chairs filled, a hive hum of the group fortifying the air against the rolly suitcase amp.
A counter-melody to the algorithm, singing that for whatever its worth, for as long as there remains a collective will and the water to fill it, there is the public pool. Sing o muse.
Before we left that day, I needed a tonic, something to jar me from the malaise on the stereo. I decided to go off the high dive, something I hadnât yet done this summer. The climb up seemed higher than Iâd remembered. My stomach fluttered. So without delay, I ran off the board and into the air. And much sooner than Iâd expected the water had risen up to meet me.
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Prattâs Ferry Preserve is a put-in spot. A place to launch kayaks and canoes. Maybe more accurate (if a bit less pleasant-sounding) to call it a take-out spot, though, as Iâve seen far more boaters disembarking here at this point between two bends of the Cahaba River. A waypoint. A place for comings and goings. Iâve never done much of anything here, though. For us â my wife and I â it has been a place to idle, to float, and, yes, to watch the occasional kayaker paddle into shore.
Weâd started coming here in the summer of 2020 â the pandemic at a peak, the world suspended. Prattâs Ferry Preserve sits under a bridge in West Blocton, a small town in Bibb County about halfway between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, where we were living at the time. Itâs a quiet spot; weâll often have the place to ourselves. A good alternative to the wildlife refuge thatâs not too far away â beautiful when the lilies are in bloom but often crowded and too shallow to get a proper swim in. We had a go-to swimming hole in Tuscaloosa but, times being what they are, the e-coli was in bloom and we were forced to look further out. This spot isnât much to speak of â a gravel beach on one side, some trees under which to read, an embankment of rock on the other side, worn to a cross-section by river time. It became my custom to swim out across the river to the spot where the channel narrows and the current accelerates. I could fashion a sort of infinity pool, turning into the current and swimming upstream. I had to swim my little heart out just to stay in the same place. Moving furiously and not getting anywhere.
Shaelyn was seven months pregnant that summer and the weightlessness afforded by the water, the relief that came with it, was one of the few things to safely seek out and enjoy beyond our apartment door. How often have I looked from the riverbank out on Shaelyn wading in the water, her belly half-submerged, the current encircling her, framed by a simple beam bridge above, and wondering what to expect?
Expecting â thatâs what they say about pregnancy. Youâre expecting. A funny phrase, given the circumstances. Beyond the very immediate meaning of it â a child to be born â it was getting harder and harder to hazard any guesses about what would happen next. Or what wouldnât happen next. On the day weâd planned to be married, the Times ran the names of the first one hundred thousand Americans to die from the coronavirus. Weâd canceled the wedding, of course, and Iâd been furloughed. Shaelynâs job transfer hadnât gone through. There was no foreseeable future. Iâd look downriver but couldnât see beyond the nearest bend.
Itâs been two years since we first started coming to this spot on the Cahaba. Early this July, we went back. We took the backroads across central Alabama pastureland. The wet-towel humidity of a deep south summer day. The corridors of scorched pink mimosa and deep magenta crepe myrtle blooms flanking the county roads. The play of light and shadow across the tall clouds.
You canât step in the same river twice, we know that from Heraclitus. The riverâs moved on, of course, and besides, youâve changed, too. But Ozzie? Ozzie had never stepped in the river before. In any river. But today, framed by that same bridge, sheâd stepped into the current, too.
Earlier that day, weâd buried Ozzieâs placenta under an elm tree. Thatâs a sentence Iâd never expected to write. But so much for expectations. Maybe the idea burying Ozzieâs placenta sounds like a strange thing to do. It did a bit to me at first. Not so much anymore though. Ozzieâs placenta â I say that intentionally. Though it grew in Shaelynâs womb, it carries 50% of Shaelynâs genetic makeup, 50% of mine. Which is to say: Itâs Ozzieâs. I learned that from Angela Garbesâs book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. Shaelyn had read the book early on and then made sure I did, too. Here are some other things I learned from Garbes about the placenta: The placentaâs an organ, the organ that precedes all others. It grows to support the baby and tethers the mother and the child. Provides nutrients as she floats weightless in the womb. It exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide. It passes antibodies to the child and fetal cells to the mother. Oversees the comings and goings. And it lives in time. It will grow as the baby grows, but then it ages, too, stops growing, deteriorates. It has its own lifespan.
So when the midwife asked if we wanted the placenta, we gave it some thought. What would become of it if we didnât want it? The hospital considers it medical waste. âAfterbirth.â Theyâd pitch it unless we told them otherwise.
So we told them otherwise.
Shaelyn has an autoimmune disease. One that designated the pregnancy as âhigh risk.â It can result in heartblock, give way to stillbirth, or calcify the placenta. At our 38-week appointment, Ozzie measured small. Come back in two days, the midwife said, and weâll measure again. Two days later we came back and again Ozzie measured small. She wasnât growing. We were admitted. They induced.
September 12th, a Saturday, just before ten, Ozzie came. A few moments later the placenta followed. Our midwife swaddled Ozzie and handed her to Shaelyn. Then she showed us the placenta â deep red and bulbous â pointing to the places where it had calcified, where the Whartonâs jelly had dissolved. Thatâs the substance that cushions the bending of the umbilical cord and without which it becomes harder for the baby to get nutrients or oxygen. Those moments during delivery when Ozzieâs heart rate had stopped â those moments when everything had stopped â we could now attribute to that, the going of the placenta.
But she was here. Blinking, breathing, grabbing for the nipple. A little early, a little yellow, and a little underweight, but blinking, breathing, grabbing for the nipple.
They double-bagged the placenta and put it on ice. And they took Ozzie to the NICU. We spent a week quarantining in the hospital to be with her â I think I spent a cumulative thirty minutes outside that week â but almost immediately the routine of those days became ritual. Every three hours, the walk through the labyrinthine hallways of the fourth floor. The bright buzz of the clustered halogens in the drop ceiling. The scrubdown with the single-use brush and nail scraper. The unfathomable comings and goings, the miracles and tragedies happening everywhere all around in the whirr and beep and wail of the room. The drawing of blood from Ozzieâs feet, the nursing, the feeding, the recitation of Rolling Thunder Revue-era Bob Dylan songs.
After a week, Ozzieâs weight was up, her blood sugar, too, and they discharged us. The placenta, in a plastic gallon container, waited for us on the counter of the nurseâs station. We stopped at the cafeteria to break a twenty for the parking lot and on the muted television in the corner, the news that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died.
There was no one at the gate of the parking lot. We waited for what seemed like an age, dollar bills in hand, wondering if we were trapped when suddenly the gate lifted and we took Ozzie home.
We put the placenta in the freezer. And for a while, it became part of the furniture there. Every once in a while one of us would say to the other, we should bury Ozzieâs placenta soon. Definitely before we move. And after we moved we kept saying it: we should bury Ozzieâs placenta soon. And now, today, at long last, we had. Planted it under an elm tree. And then we went swimming.
That week, Ruth Bader Ginsburgâs replacement on the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right that had protected Shaelyn through this high-risk pregnancy. Its overturning now precludes the possibility of our having another.
But we have Ozzie and Ozzie is healthy. Wrong to say that the placenta gave out. It lives in time. And it saw her through. Sent her into water, weight, time. It came and went.
What now might we expect? What might Ozzie expect? In the foreseeable future, she can expect to swim, to join the current. She can expect the bend in the river and the unknown beyond.
Burying the placenta â as foreign a concept as it was to me and to the American medical establishment â itâs really not that uncommon. New Zealand, Indonesia, Ukraine, they all have customs regarding the placenta. In the Hmong tradition, the soul retrieves the placenta after death to wear as a jacket on the voyage to the afterlife.
âI like the thought of that,â Shaelyn said that day as we sat in the current, forty miles and two years downriver from the hospital where Ozzie was born, thinking of her jacket under the elm tree, that jacket thatâs fifty percent of her, fifty percent of me.
âThat when she leaves, sheâll come back to us.â
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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 â theyâre 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 youâve ever Zoom-ed then surely you know the kind Iâm 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. Iâm not sure that I would say that, though. I wouldnât say I was much of anywhere, really. Not fully oriented to time and space. Maybe youâve felt something like that lately? An⊠uncanniness? The latency of the video call carrying over, off-screen. Maybe itâs just me. Maybe itâs that I work in a basement office with no windows, and Iâd been sitting there for months, trying â and mostly failing â to track down sources for a story, hearing every variety of âThis phone is no longer in service.â (which, by the way, there are way more variations than Iâd imagined or ever really thought possible.) Maybe itâs that the past two years have taken a toll on me that I havenât really admitted to yet, havenât worked through. And I havenât 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? Doesnât something just seem a little off? The number you have dialed is no longer in service.
Which, I mean, go figure. You donât need to be an armchair psychologist to try and account for the bad vibes, as it were, the strangest of the moment â one of illness, neglect, death, insurrection, war, despair, collapse, isolation. And itâs like the weight of all that, it exerts a gravity, creates its own tide, and weâre 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.
Thereâs 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 â 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 waterâs 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 couldnât 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 â Ozzie, thatâs my daughterâs name â I sat down to write her a letter. Or, if not a letter, exactly, justâŠI wanted to set down on paper what I knew about life. Epiphanies. Insights Iâd 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 Iâd become, the life Iâd 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 youâre creating those opportunities with regularity.
AndâŠthatâs it. Iâm looking at that page in my diary right now and thatâs 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? âThe Swimming Songâ? 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 thereâs nothing to do but swim. Youâre weightless, buoyant. Like youâre 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 Iâd taken my own advice for once. And so it was with soggy shorts and an idiot grin I hadnât worn in some months that I went to pick up my daughter from daycare.
Thereâs a book by the environmental writer Roger Deakin called Waterlog: A Swimmerâs 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 â wild swimming, thatâs what they call there (say what you will about the English, they know how to turn a phrase) â was a subversive activity, one that allowed you to âregain a sense of what is old and wildâŠby getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official versions of things.â It affords a âfrogâs-eye viewâ of the world, as he put it. If youâre in search of something, wild swimmingâs 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 Deakinâs steps, revisiting the swimming holes documented in Waterlog. Those trips became the basis for Minihaneâs own book, Floating: A Life Regained. As the subtitle might suggest, wild swimming became a balm for Minihaneâs anxieties about work and life.
No surprise, maybe, that I related to Minihane â 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 Iâm going to take my own advice and follow in Deakinâs and Minihaneâs footsteps â err, breaststrokes: Iâm going to swim through Alabama, seeking out the best swimming holes the state has to offer â Appalachia foothills to Mobile Bay; Double Spring to Wildwood Shores. Iâm gonna hold my breath and kick my feet and move my arms around.
And Iâll chronicle those trips here.
I should say: Iâm not a southerner by birth. I donât carry the weight of that particular circumstance. But this summer starts my tenth year living here â the longest Iâve 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 â 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? Whatâs it like to be here, now? Is there a there still there? Whatâs become of this place? Whatâs it becoming? I donât 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 youâve 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 youâd 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 itâs full of choice swim spots. Or, you know, the ones that havenât been ravaged by chicken plant runoff and coal ash.
So Iâm off to go see what I can see; swim where I can swim. You can follow along here, every other Monday.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebluemillionmiles.substack.com
