Flow and ebb

So now Doug's gone. Maybe just for a year. Coming back briefly in the fall. We'll see.

Lake Natoma got emptier.

We'd been swimming together several times a week for 2 1/2 years. Doug's leaving for his native New England to help with his grandchildren.

"Fast" Karl left earlier this month. Though he had only been swimming with us for seven months, he was dedicated, and his dedication inspired even if his speed deflated.

On his last swam before heading for work somewhere in the Rockies, he laced twice the length of Lake Natoma, about 10 miles. Notre Dame swimmer; whatcha gonna do?

Karl's a mountain man who found California's ways strange. I don't think he's coming back. Except, of course, to swim the length of Tahoe, 21 miles, later this summer.

What did good ol' Heraclitus say? "You could not step twice in the same river."

To which I add, "Not even with the same toes."

Change: The only constant.

Toes come and toes go.

Sarah had already joined our core group of rogues before Doug and Karl took flight. It wasn't until she said it out loud that we finally acted on our shoulda-coulda-wouldas, swimming longer distances regularly. Once a week for the last month, Sarah has swum the length of the lake, and small various and sundry of us have joined in.

The length used to be a daunting once-a-year enterprise, borne out on the Fourth of July. Now it's oh-so-slowly becoming a routine change in routine.

David's the iron man now, literally and figuratively. We've been swimming together longer than I have with Doug; in fact, I think it was a winter morning on upper Natoma when Doug first joined David and me.

David is the exception to every rule: An Iron Man©® triathlete who eschews triathleticism … a wetsuit wearer who defies conventional wisdom and swims just about as fast without one, when we can get him to … the polite smiling contrarian who I guess really meant it when he said he wouldn't pay the measly $10 annual fee to our meetup.com group.

That's how we all met, though, through the Sacramento Swimming Enthusiasts page on the meetup.com site.

But we've become an ad hoc splinter cell, using text messages to gather, rather than the site. We're the few who like upper Natoma chiefly, where the water spilling directly from the bottom of Folsom Lake is always a little colder. It's much less crowded, free of beachgoers. Few rowing crews make it all the way up here, most staying on the 2,000-meter race course at the lower lake.

We're the few who swim Natoma year-round. Most swimmers on the meetup.com site prefer the lower lake during the evenings (too warm, too crowded) or what's left of dwindling Folsom Lake, where gather the three forks of the American River that release into Natoma.

I've met so many meetup people on my scheduled swims, whom I see once or twice more and then never again. They either decide against open water swimming, or figure out the group's not competitive and I certainly am not going to give them much of a race, or join the Folsom/lower Natoma/evening swim crowd.

It got me thinking of those who stuck out the cold water with me in the four years I've swum Natoma:

• Jim, whom I met at one of my first meetup.com swims, a Polar Bear event in mid-February. I forgot my goggles, my wife urged me to ask Jim for an extra pair, and we struck up an immediate friendship. Jim's the one who showed me not to take the open water so seriously, to revel in the realization that few people enjoy this or want to.
  
  When I first hit the winter choppy water of Folsom Lake I wanted to quit for good, and Jim's the one who told me to swim 10 stroke at a time, get my bearings, swim 10 more, and keep going — to let time get me used to the new adventure. I think of his help every time I swim through heavy water with confidence and a semblance of ease.
  
  We swam together most of two years, and many times he brought fast Kathy, a champion open water swimmer, which was a commitment since they had to come from two counties over. I swam in several open-water races with them that first year.
  
  Jim got a different job and different obligations, and Kathy's life changed around. I haven't seen them in a long while, nor have I raced since then.

• Brad, whom I still see, though he's more rogue than us, preferring mostly to swim on his own, and swim great distances. I first saw Brad at one of the Polar Bear swims four years ago. All of us huddled at the shore in our wetsuits, tentative penguins, when suddenly came Brad in just swim briefs and goggles, diving in and swimming away into the foggy chill while we stood and stared.
  
  Until that moment, I thought it may have been illegal to swim without a wetsuit. But I soon resolved to swim that way since I hated wearing my neoprene, and weaned myself out of it, shedding it for five, then 10, then 15 minutes in the cold water after each group swim.
  
  I still swim with Brad on occasion. It feels weird to drive home after my swim knowing he'll still be in for a couple of hours more. He's swum the length of Tahoe, and a mile in freezing water; whatcha gonna do?
• Stacy and I were the first long-term rogues, swimming off the meetup.com grid and venturing northeast to upper Natoma. It was exotic water when we first tried it out. Few boats and of course no swimmers, the only noise coming from the aggressive domestic geese that had been released to the wild to cadge visitors for food.
  
  Every swim was discovery and serendipity as we learned where the water was deep and where shallow. We learned to endure the cold water for longer and longer distances, and swim against current. We established routes under the new bridge, and downstream to Texas Hill, a little island where once Texas miners had come to dry-dig for gold.
  
  We swam many times when Stacy wasn't running or doing cross-fit workouts. We even swam the length of the lake one Fourth of July, me with my inflatable butt buoy and him with a modified boogie board he called his party boat, sailing behind him. It had a flag and a foam noodle arch and a stretch net to hold his food to the board. Even with a long fin below, the party boat capsized in the wind.
  
  Stacy once left for Tennessee to run a 30-mile race with his sister, and never really came back to swimming.
• Ryan made the fastest ever transition from heavily wetsuited swimmer to skin swimmer — 10 minutes. He's a concert organist from Canada who showed up one day in a thick wetsuit with some sort of shirt over it, gloves, booties and what looked like deep-sea diver's cowl.
  
  You don't need all of that, we said. Or, really, any of it.
  
  OK, said Ryan and in one swim he became a skin swimmer. He was just about the most joyful open water enthusiast, but he disappeared after a couple of months.
• Susie, her hair and smile dazzlingly white, also loved to whoop and holler and express on our behalf of the wonder of open water swimming. I think she sticks to the evenings and lower Natoma swims these days.
• Helen, whom I met in the early days. I don't think she swims much anymore, but she probably doesn't have time, seeing how she now runs races of 50 and 100 miles regularly.
• Myron, who was running the meetup.com group and cheerfully organizing Polar Bear swims and other activities, but who moved on to other things.
• Patti, who runs the group now and puts a lot of energy into keeping the group going.
• Special guest stars: Dave came all the way from Cork, Ireland, to swim in Upper Natoma last summer. Suzie, an ultra-marathon swimmer who launched the 24-hour relay swim in San Francisco Bay, last summer brought another marathon swimmer, Roxie, to explore upper Natoma. They laughed as they swim in too-shallow water past the first bridge and had to stand up on the slippery rocks.
  
  Lisa made a great arc through the northwest last week and stopped by my lake on her way home to the Bay Area. Lisa and David and Karl and I swam as part of team at Suzie's 24-hour relay swim in February.
  
  Nejib came from Tunisia swam lower Natoma last year, cold but not cold enough swim for peace in the Bering Strait. It didn't matter: He swim four kilometers in 39-degree water along the International Date Line. for his eventual 4-kilometer swim in the frigid water of the Bering Strait, a swim for peace.
• Kate, completing her residency at a nearby hospital, swam almost every day with us for five weeks. We'd met at the 24-hour relay swim. She pushed our distance a bit to get her ready for a swim across Tahoe later this summer.
  
  Late in our swims, she said she didn't like swimming under the bridges. Lisa said she didn't like the shadow the bridge cast through the green water.
  
  We've come to know the scary plants are just plants, the shallows just riprap, the current just something to relax in and pierce through for half again as many strokes, the chop just a fun reminder of being present in the water.
  
• I'm forgetting or misplacing some names, I know. The various Dans, Steve, Sean, all fast. Haven't seen them in a long time.

We've come to a happy peace about our relative speeds. If anything, I give the other swimmers a harder time for being fast than they do for my sloth. We collect at the shore, no matter our arrival times, and leave to drink coffee at the "adjective" Starbucks™® (so named because we sit outside next to the drive-thru and count how many descriptors drivers use to order their drinks), or good beer, or the occasional meal. Usually a going-away meal.

The only thing I could beat Doug at is cold-water endurance. Fortified with bioprene, I'd keep going while he'd turn back, and if we'd planned it right I'd leave my Thermos® of boiling water in his car so he could fight the intense shivers with a cup of cocoa. After winter swims it takes us a good 40 minutes of jumping up and down in the parking lot and sloshing hot cocoa all over ourselves before we're even ready to drive for hot coffee.

These days, though, with even the coldest water hanging in the low 60s Fahrenheit, Doug would swim well past our turnaround point and double back to meet me when I hit that point. The Thermos™ of hot water is more reflex these days; I pack it but we don't use it.

A go-getter whose actions speak louder than words, Doug has already created a meetup group in his homeland, New England Open Water, and has a swim already planned next weekend in Thoreau's Walden Pond. Twenty "BigWataSwimmas" have already joined.

The core group at upper Natoma has changed and shifted. Though I've been lucky of late to swim with someone else, I'll probably end up swimming by myself again many times. I know I'll swim many, many times with David and Sarah and Patti, and that a new swimmer or two will show and join our group. Most will leave after awhile. A precious few nuts will stick around for long run, and we'll keep on swimming, finding new routes, new swim adventures, different lives to talk about over coffee or beers.

That's the way it's been, the way it will be.

Gym membership, paid in full(er)

I am mostly wrong.

"Hey," I announced, "The state parks people have changed all their annual passes! Our pass is gonna cost less next year!!"

"No way," answered David, one of my swimming buddies, younger but much wiser. "The state is not going to make anything cost you less money."

He produced his Tom Whiz-Bang®™ device (my much, much, much better name for smart phones … all you phone makers can have my idea, free of charge … not that you'd ask permission) and showed, sure enough, the annual park pass we'd need costs more than last year's, which cost more than the pass from the year before.

Keeping more parks open, one frequent user at a time.

Our E ticket to Lake Natoma — our daily pass to our daily passion — used to be called the Golden Poppy Annual Pass, but with this 150th anniversary of the California State Parks, it's now the Commemorative Day Use Annual Pass.

And it costs $150. Maybe that's commemorative too.

"150 years" is printed as a hologram on the pass (gave my scanner fits). The commemorative pass depicts a ranger beside a car parked in a car-sized hole in a redwood tree. What better symbol of stewardship over a century and a half, after all, than a hole cut out of the heart of a tree so a car can drive through?

Mine is a conversation piece — I'm gonna get stopped all summer long by staffers at the entrance kiosks because the parks official who issued the pass accidentally lopped off a month and then wrote the correct month in.

"No, I didn't write that," I can hear myself insisting time and again. "I bought this directly from the state office and the guy said he made a mistake and don't worry about — what?! No, I'm telling you, I didn't write that, look at the notch he cut!"

But I digress.

The cheaper pass I found, called the California Park Experience Vehicle Day Use Annual Pass, is $75, and the state says it "provides access to many great state parks from the San Francisco Bay Area to Humboldt Redwoods, inland state parks and more."

Which is the state park system's way of saying "gets you into property you really don't care to see."

God, I'm vicious.

I'm not knocking Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park, which 118 years ago sent the country's first hydroelectric power by long distance, 22 miles from Folsom to Sacramento. It's historic, deserves preserving, some people are interested in it — and I love the idea that at the time people thought that electric current had to travel in a straight line and could not go around corners.

But it's not going to get overwhelmed with visitors. It's included on the $75 Park Experience pass, which won't get you into Lake Natoma, even though the powerhouse sits on the lakeshore (which is the American River in disguise). You can't go anywhere in the Folsom Lake State Recreation Area — of which Natoma apparently is the Lake That Will Not Be Named — without the $150 pass.

Nor can I get to the powerhouse, which I swim by three days a week, with my $150 pass.

Clever folks, those parks people.

I shouldn't complain, though. Even with the ever rising price, the pass is extremely valuable to folks like me, lucky to live near state parks. By the end of this month I will have gone to swim at Lake Natoma several more times than it would have cost me to wrestle with the lethargic and awkwardly designed ticket machines at Lake Natoma's entrances each day.

I'm losing money for the state. The ideal demographic are those holding the romantically flawed notion that a park pass will finally get their families to all those parks they've been meaning to see.

California's parks still still make money off us when we invariably drive by a state park we've always been meaning to see — and remember that the annual pass is in the other car.

I'm also partly right: To my surprise the state parks people also gave me a card, the Historian Passport Day Use Admission Annual Pass (these just dance off the tongue!), listed as a $50 value; so my annual pass could really be $100 if I work hard at it. The card will get me and three others into places such as Folsom Powerhouse State Historic Park.

Maybe I'll go.

To dust you shall return

We spent Sunday picking over our own bones, just like everyone else.

By the hundreds we came, on the new dusty trail we were making along a contour of the damp barren slope, above the quiet water, like nomads afraid to stray too far from sustenance.

But it's too late. The sustaining water of Folsom Lake is disappearing.

In a good year we'd be under 40 feet of water where we walked, near the southern shore of the lake known as Brown's Ravine.

This is not a good year.

Following the driest year in recorded history, 2014 has begun with a warm unwelcome spring, the sky this morning unblemished blue, with a yellow-brown, almost glowing edge along the horizon in every direction. The sky itself, it seems, is drying up.

Folsom Lake is going, going …

Our son and his girlfriend, visiting and wanting to hike, came with us to look for the remains of a Gold Rush town again exposed by drought.

Mormon Island formed in 1848 on a sand bar near where the south and north forks of the American River joined. The town comprised members of the Mormon Battalion, discharged from their duties in helping fight for the United States against Mexico, and Mormons brought to the area by Sam Brannan to investigate this land as a possible home for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

With not a lot to do, some of the Mormon men helped John Sutter build a lumber mill in the foothills, where the guy in charge of the project, James Marshall, first found gold. Even with carpentry and providing for their families, the men still had a lot of leisure time and spent it looking for more gold.

Mormon Island began as the site of the greatest placer (surface) mining find of the Gold Rush. Heavy gold sparkled from the riverbed, easy pickings. Sam Brannan became rich beyond reason by telling the world about it. Maybe the world wanted to believe that all the gold in California was so easily found. Whatever the reason, tens of thousands came, from every state in the union and every liveable part of the world, as I say on the Underground Sacramento tour.

When the world arrived, sick and gaunt but still lusting for gold — even when it realized getting any would require hard work — Brannan had all the necessary tools ready for sale, at the exorbitant prices the market would bear.

Brannan was also asking finder's fees from the Mormons of Mormon Island making claims on the gold finds, which have been reported erroneously as Brannan exacting tithes from the faithful and keeping them for himself. When the military governor of California told the Mormons Brannan had every right to ask the fees — as long as they were fool enough to pay them — the fees dried up.

Mormon Island, the town, burned up, as Gold Rush towns tended to do. It had a brief glorious existence — from 1848 to 1856 — including four hotels, three dry-goods stores (including one of Brannan's), five general stores, and a Pony Express station. It boasted of having hosted the first grand ball in Sacramento County, and a population of 2,500.

A few people still lived in the town limits until the mid-20th Century, but in 1955 Folsom Dam was built and the three forks of the American River stoppered into a sprawling lake for recreation, flood control, electrical power, urban consumption — all those marks of progress.

The bodies of the town's pioneers were moved to a cemetery high and dry. What little was left of their town disappeared under the dark green water for decades. Its outskirts have peeked out a few times since during drought.

Even with Folsom Lake at its lowest level yet, the center of the old town is still under about 90 feet of the water.

What visitors see now is the periphery, the uncertain edges of the town. So much might-have-been and could-be's. No one seems sure what they're looking at, as the rubble of foundations rise from the wet earth.

More people than would have shown up with their fishing/wakeboarding/party boats on a searing July day have made the pilgrimage to Brown's Ravine this winter Sunday of a three-day weekend. What the Parks and Recreation Department may have lost in boat haulage fees, it's making up in vehicle day passes.

"Go all the way to the end," said the cashier in the ranger kiosk guarding the entrance. She knew where we were going. Down a windy road, past scores of sailboats hauled out of the water months before and imprisoned in their own special parking lots. They'd bob in a marina normally.

The shopping-center sized parking lot, where boaters park after putting in, was filling with cars. Already we could see the dust clouds where clots of people roamed the same dusty trail over the next rise, where the lake had been.

We joined the caravan, the carnival, the strange spring frolic. Part of me felt like we had heard about the little child who fell down the dry well, and had come in our lusty curiosity to witness the anguish. Part of me felt like we were the kid down the well, waiting out the end. Just a couple of vendors and the funereal feel would have made it complete.

Groups of people took selfies and group photos amid the laid-stone foundations, cheery in their collective unknowing doom.

The state parks department has set plastic sandwich-board signs next to each conglomeration of artifacts, each discernible foundation of some building or another. The signs admonish visitors not to deface or take the artifacts, important as they are to the archaeological history of the place.

Were I the dad with the little kids, I would have been the one saying "Don't touch!" too many times. Most parents let their kids pick up all the rusted bolts and nails and discs of glass that someone has carefully set on every tree stump and wide piece of rock.

And what the hell? Why not? The artifacts aren't that particularly important. They may have come from last century; they may have come from last winter. No one knows, no one cares, except that they may be old.

They remind me of the old cars we kids came upon about a mile into the woods across the street from my childhood home. Maybe they were 15 years old, maybe 50. Bullet holes decorated each. Naturally we just knew a bloody gangster battle had taken place here, in what would have been a remote corner of Santa Barbara County. It made no sense, yet it made every bit of sense to us.

So it is with the tree-stump displays. Attach your own idea what they are, where they came from, who held them. No one's going to refute you; no one cares. Not even the parks people, even though their signs say otherwise.

As soon as possible, everyone wants these mysteries to disappear again under green opaque water. What's left of the lake seems like a live thing dying, thick and smooth like a sheen of oil. A boy navigated the muddy banks to throw a handful of pebbles across its surface, as if to awaken it.

Who knows how long the water will last, and what happens when it's gone?

I dream of the water rising again, so gently as to leave the nails and bolts and handles and glass bottle bottoms right where someone set them on their gray tree stumps.

In search of identity

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary (in my head, anyway) to try and brand the collective stupidity that is swimming our beloved Lake Natoma year 'round, I try. Lord knows I try.

Here's the latest try.

Photog phenom and former college roomie David Middlecamp tipped me to the following:

Curglaff, n. (of Scottish dialect, first recorded 1808): The shock felt when one first plunges into the cold water.

It's an odd obscure word, on a list of other such words making the rounds of the Internet. Since then a number of swimmers from around the globe, with whom I check in through a facebook™© page, have also pointed out the word.

I stole it while no one was looking.

Still futzing with it …

Lake Natoma near Sacramento in California is cold most of the year, though not nearly as cold as the pool and open water which swim friends are now plying in the United Kingdom, where it's at or near freezing. Some of them have created The Shiver Club, in which they videotape the "afterdrop," when blood returns from arms and legs to the body's core some five minutes after a cold swim. Even fully dressed and with hot beverage in hand, swimmers go into afterdrop spasms of uncontrollable shivering.

It's part of the fun.

Trust me.

We haven't had to shiver yet after our swims. Only in the last couple of days has the temperature turned, so water temperature may soon dip. It's hovered around 56 or 57 Fahrenheit the last few weeks, which is reasonable and cozy for those of us so accustomed.

We don't feel curglaff yet, in other words. (I'm now proposing it work as a verb too.)

But we will, and in the spirit of curglaff and its origin, I played with the inspiration of illuminated capital art and celebrated the lake, right down to the green water and egret and geese and the split tail, which makes walking the dog a bit of a chore.

I throw it on the pile of other indentities I've come up with from time to time for the lake, the result of conversations with other of the crazies (though mostly with myself).

I belong to an open water swimming group, vast in membership but much smaller in participation, and the bulk of those swimmers arrive in spring to swim in warmer Folsom Lake, which feeds Lake Natoma.

Usually most of those swimmers will come occasionally to Natoma in mid-summer; with drought and high demand this year depleting Folsom, the Folsom summer regulars had to finish up their season at Lake Natoma, which has been warmer than usual as a result of the low volume.

Some five or six of us swim Natoma all year.

Most of the identities I've fiddled with pay homage to the lake but not its primary qualities, that it's quiet and cold.

Nimbus Flat Earth Society promotes year-round swimming, but Nimbus Flat is just one end of the lake, and we swim at the upper end too. It's called Negro Bar, named for a Gold Rush settlement of African Americans along the American River. People pronounce the name as if it's Spanish — nayh-gro — which fits into California's Spanish and Mexican history. but perhaps you can see the problem using it as an identity.

I think Curglaff Club has staying power. Not that I won't keep talking to myself messing around with new ideas.

In a blue moon

A quick paint sketch of our view across the lake, cloud forming a creature before the moon.
Never has a restroom light seemed so inviting. We swam back toward it.

"What a coupla Boy Scouts!" is how swim buddy Doug admonished himself and me. And we are.

Old Boy Scouts, just looking for a place to swim under the full moon — a blue moon, not to return for two more years — in our home water. Which we did Tuesday, but not without prickles.

Because I mistook Doug's swim proposal for the September full moon, I neglected to invite any other usual suspects like the last time.

Last time, we swam at Folsom Lake, but a swim there now would require a 500 yard downhill hike across a spooky moonscape (is that ironic?) to very low, too-warm water. We went to Lake Natoma instead.

Of the three entrances to Lake Natoma, only the lower lake has parking just outside park boundaries. We pulled into the ride-share lot (with my wife Nancy and daughter Maura to join in the adventure and watch over us) to find the park gates still open, long after sunset. Hmmm.

The blue moon — also called the green corn moon, the full red moon and my favorite, the full sturgeon moon — was no moon at all, barely a smudge behind the flat sheet of dark cloud. Already this swim has a bad moon rising.

Doug ran back to his car to get his little blinking diver's light to attach to his swim goggles for the night swim. The rest of us continued into the park, where a couple of vehicles with their lights on remained. We had expected everything empty, dark and locked down. One vehicle turned away onto the lane that separates the main parking lots. The other one headed toward us.

Sure enough, a park ranger. We glowed in the motion-sensor lights of the restrooms we had just passed.

"The parking is off limits to vehicles and pedestrians now," said the ranger through her passenger window.

The parking? Do you mean the park? As pedestrians, we are not really parking. I played stupid.

"So … we can't walk in then?"

"No," said the ranger, repeating her statement. The parking is off limits.

It was like the Second Amendment, so strangely constructed I could interpret it to my favor if need be. You know, just in case I got hauled into court for swimming the lake. Your honor, I would say, I was not technically parking, so I was OK.

Doug jogged back through the shadows with his diver's blinker and escaped the ranger's notice. We walked back out, checked the ride-share parking lot, noticed the park gates finally closed … and went back into the park.

By then we imagined eyes on us — of the ranger parked somewhere out in the shadows, scanning with binoculars … of night patrol (that probably doesn't exist) at the amber-lit aquatic center across the inlet at the lower lake … of undercover rangers still at large in the park, or across the lake on the bike trail, nabbing trespassers.

"We better go stealth," said Doug. We wore our blinkies but kept them off. All the glow sticks, already activated, remained suppressed in Maura's plastic grocery bag. Nancy and Maura sat in the shadows as Doug and I slipped into the water — just about where a young man had drowned late in the evening a month before.

Even without the full moon, lower Natoma is not dark. Hazel Avenue is an overpass lifting over the dam, lit on each side by the amber sodium lights. A Chevron™® station and a McDonalds®© bloom white across the avenue from the park entrance. The city of Folsom glows to the east. The spire of the Mormon Temple lights up like a Christmas tree above the oak forest.

We were disappointed.

The water, though, was dark but for the bubbles of our wake. Doug designated 100 strokes to get out of the inlet and get our bearing, then we picked a saddle in the hills across the lake and swam toward it 200 strokes at a time. Doug cut his speed — it had to have killed him! — to stay near my side so searching for each other wouldn't be difficult. I counted strokes, trying to keep my mind off the giant white prehistoric sturgeons that don't even exist in the lake.

Two-hundred strokes, stop. Two-hundred strokes, stop. We were across, standing on the slippery rocks. The hillside behind us radiated softly.

Doug and me, post swim. Maura photo

As familiar as we are with the lake, we were still uncertain of landmarks in the uncertain light. The moon drifted out of the clouds, which formed a giant hand, then a lurching creature. Across the lake, the amber light of a restroom above the beach became our Polaris. We started across on 200-stroke beads. A bicyclist on the trail behind us with a powerful searchlight swept the beam up the hill, then across the lake, over our heads. Park ranger, you think? Nah, just someone on his bike, checking for skunks, I bet.

"Hear that?" Doug said on our stop, midway across the lake. Crisp, like radio chatter, people talking, somewhere on the water, invisible.

"There!" I said, pointing to the two lights on an eastern ridge which I suddenly transformed into the double-hulled chase boat from the aquatic center, bearing down on us. "Let's get to shore!"

"No, wait," said Doug. The lights, of course, never moved, remaining streetlights somewhere in the distance. The voices, though, drew nearer. Finally we saw the moving dark shadow across more dark shadows. A couple in a kayak, headed for shore. We let them pass, swimming breaststroke for a while before resuming our freestyle.

Nancy and Maura reported the lake alive with people, even though none of us was supposed to be there. Two kayaks slipped into the inlet and took out somewhere in the darkness; we saw the paddlers later in the ride-share lot, tying their boats to their car. A standup paddler carried her board out of the water and passed Nancy and Maura, who were lying on the beach to avoid detection. Nancy devised alibis in case a ranger found them.

The full-moon swim was a nice change, because swimming lately has felt like a chore. Though I have not swum open water long, it's long enough to know I go through these periods of malaise, and they pass. I can't help wonder about their source, though.

I wonder if it's the notorious and creative swims I've been reading about lately. This is the season for them. I wonder if psychologically I'm making myself victim of their herculean successes.

Daily, and sometimes multiple times daily, swimmers are crossing the English Channel. One woman yesterday, Wendy Trehiou from the Island of Jersey, swam across the channel and back again. It took her 39 hours of continuous swimming.

Not only that:

• A 20-year-old kid named Owen O'Keefe just swam 37 miles down the River Blackwater in County Cork in the south of Ireland — that's shortly after he swam 41 miles around the island of Jersey.
• Gábor Mólnar, a Hungarian living in Ireland, just swam 30 miles down the River Koros in his native country.
• A Utah native, Gordon Gridley, completed the Catalina Channel crossing of about 20 miles.
• Two English swimmers, Kate Robarts and Zoe Sadler, just completed double crossings, 21 miles, of Lake Windermere, England's longest lake.
• An team of 40 swimmers from Russia, Ireland, South Africa, Italy, the United States, Latvia, Estonia, Chile, Poland, England, Argentina and Argentina last week completed a five-day, 60-mile swim across the Bering Strait between the United States and Russia, in 41-degree water. 
• The same week, Nejib Belhidi completed his 2.4-mile swim between Little Diomede and Big Diomede islands in the Bering Sea.
• A tight group of Orange County swimmers recently attempted swimming around 27 piers in 24 hours, from Santa Barbara to San Diego counties. In the end, only one of the 14 was able to complete all 27, and it took longer than planned. Still.
• A team from the Bay Area-based Night Train Swimmers today embarked on a 228-mile relay swim from Point Concepcion to San Diego, hoping to set a new record for distance relay.

That's an incomplete list. Almost all the swimmers are raising money for charity.

In our night swim, I think of Gridley telling his support crew not to tell him how far he had swim or how close he was to his goal. "I just want to put my face in the water and swim," he said.

Here I am, in this short "pootle," as some of my virtual swim friends call it, struggling along for a mile and a half or so, out of rhythm, out of breath, wanting to know when I can stop, finding their feats beyond imagination. I can manage a mere fraction of what they accomplish.

And yet, I think, the bubbles seeming to fluoresce beneath me as I swim in darkness, maybe there's some more I can do. Maybe farther, maybe better, maybe for someone else's sake.

What's next?

Year of maniacal thinking

Where to now?

In 2012 I was to have swum from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge — or vice versa, tide depending — and completed a 10k open-water race.

I didn't.

I did:

• swim the length of my home water, Lake Natoma, finishing the 4.8 miles 30 minutes faster than my first attempt, the Independence Day before;

• cross Donner Lake for the second time, though many minutes slower than the year before;

• swim the Folsom Lake Open Water 2.4 mile for the second time, in about the same amount of time;
• use the full moon for light in a midsummer swim with friends at Folsom Lake;
  
• compete in several swims, including a three-mile race, at an alpine Oregon lake during a wonderful festival devoted to the sport;

• swim at least four times a week in Lake Natoma, through change of season and quality of light, through the slow rise and gradually painful fall in temperature, in fluctuating current, in mirror flatness, in heavy wind-churned chop, in summer clarity and winter murk, in heavy downpour and fog-white loneliness and the congestion of swimmers and darting devil-may-care paddle craft. I swam it with friends on the last day of 2012, and the first of 2013.

I hold the last most dear.

Take away all the rest, in fact, and I'd manage. Deny me my regular swims in Lake Natoma, though, and I'd mourn.

Every swim there is just the same, yet so different. From the south end of the lake, our swims hug the south shore, around a tiny island named (supposedly and as yet inexplicably) for Edgar Rice Burroughs, a distance that creeps up in my mind to 1.5 miles (it's probably just 1.3). From the north end on Saturdays, we swim across the narrow lake and then "upstream" around the trestles of a bridge and back in a big rectangle, about 1.7 miles.

With each swim I struggle and triumph, at different stages, to different degrees, for different reasons and periods — temperature, technique, hazards, work left to do at the office, going through my head constantly. Each high and low follows a cycle, its onset and duration a surprise. I learn little from each, except to know that they will return, sometime, in some way.

Long weeks will pass, for example, in which endurance suddenly escapes me. I'll go along fine for a half mile, a mile, and then one day just 100 yards will be hard. I end up counting strokes then, resolving to go 50, then 70, then 100, and on and on, for days, until I can resume my old stamina.

Sometimes the cycles are external. The stalwarts with whom I have swum the last year, for example, like to get in and swim as soon as we reach the water's edge; fast swimmers, they're soon way ahead. The swimmer I teamed with before (and if he's reading now, he needs to get his wetsuited fanny back out to the lake!) likes to get used to the water before starting out, kind of wade for a bit, let the cold take hold, which is more my style.

Lately a disturbing cycle has rooted, of slight dread. Not of the swim itself — once I'm in, then the struggles and triumphs, the sting of cold water on my forearms, the accidental swallow of green water, are so familiar. It's the going to and getting in that I resist lately. I overthink it and hyperventilate; I dawdle with the preparations (heat the water for the Thermos®© and for the hot drink on the drive over, pack dry clothes in one bag for the car trunk, and swim gear in another bag in the car seat so burglars won't be tempted to break in), so rather than getting in early before the fast swimmers arrive, I barely give myself time to start with them.

I know that sometime — who knows when? — this too shall pass and I'll be eager to jump in again. Maybe in three weeks or so, when the water will be its coldest.

Yet another cycle has waned (they often overlap): Call it acceptance, or resignation, or satisfaction of my Lake Natoma swim. It's been more than enough for me. And yet …

I'm curious again.

Last year began with big plans. Swim big, go farther, faster. I even attended a Bay Area workshop about swimming 10k races. Then I swam 10,000 yards in a pool just to see if I could finish within the time limit. I couldn't. I tried again; long before I could finish, an aquacize class had set up and moved my lane lines to one side of the pool while I was still swimming. The 10k race came and went without me, as did most of the other races I tried the year before.

I stuck to "destination" swims, mostly, so Donner's end-to-end course and mountainous beauty fit. So did the Oregon festival, even though the course was set by buoys, which somehow violate my notion of an open-water swim.

Something about the Oregon swims, maybe the high altitude, wore me down, making me tired for the Donner swim, and by that time all the fire I had stoked for big swims had died out.

I settled into the unsettled comfort of Lake Natoma, where I've been since. Out of the water, I read facebook accounts from swimmers around the world, their big plans for the new year. Ten miles here, 20 there, an English Channel crossing, a Catalina crossing, colder and colder water, much colder than ours. Amazing wild seascapes. More and bigger.

Now I'm thinking outside the pond. A 10k race doesn't appeal, but those iconic bridges still beckon. As does Alcatraz; I'd like to swim it again. To get a leaner, to get stronger. To think less and use what swim buddy Doug calls my "reptile brain." To swim outside my comfort zone.

Where to now?

Back to life, back to reality

One minute, 42 seconds.

That's what a year gained me.

What to make of it?

At the same time four dozen people, some I've "met" through facebook, were swimming 28.5 miles around Manhattan Island, and more than a couple of hundred others were running 100 miles across the Sierra in the Western States Endurance Run, I was completing a 2.4-swim race, the Folsom Lake Open Water (FLOW, get it?) event last weekend.

Endurance, I submit, is relative.

Last June, running onto shore after the first lap to fetch my old goggles because my new pair flopped uselessly on my face for most of a mile, I finished FLOW in one hour, 31 minutes and 53 seconds.

Last weekend, swimming straight through (I have a habit of stopping several times during my regular swims), I finished the same course in one hour, 30 minutes and 11 seconds.

An improvement of one minute, 42 seconds. Which may be moot considering the time it took me last year to change out my goggles.

Like I may have mentioned, what to make of it?

My thoughts take two tacks:

1.) What, me worry?

(Call me consistent … or terminally mediocre.)

2.) I could do better.

(Call me a cardiologist.) 

I swim, ultimately, because I can. It's exercise that I can do — and want to do — every day. I never tire of it … well, today I'm tired, but I'm only taking a break for the day.

For the better part of eight years, I have swum at least four days a week; and for the last year and a half, I have swum exclusively in the open water; and 14 days out of 15, I have kept to the cold confines of Lake Natoma.

I like being "the guy who swims year round in the cold water without a wetsuit" to tangential acquaintances (though, full disclosure, I'm not the only one, even in this neighborhood pond.) But that's all I really am in the swimming world.

So be it. I've written quite enough, I'm sure you'd agree, about the green adventure of swimming Lake Natoma, and I can't get enough of it. Saying these words aloud to a swim friend, I realize I'm addicted to the lake, afraid to leave it too long and face the pain of having to re-acclimate to the cold. The weeks of stinging fingers and arms will come next November, as the lake temperature drops below 50, despite my almost daily dip.

So I don't worry … usually. I have befriended several people who make the swims enjoyable by their camaraderie and shared shiver misery and, eventually, cups of coffee and time to talk about all the amazing things these people do besides swim.

In the grand scheme, besides, not a lot of people can or want to do what I do, and the few of us who do share in that singularity.

But I swim in part to go places, to check off a kind of bucket list. Not only can I add dimension to road trips and campouts now, I have the opportunity to join storied swims, along the ocean, in San Francisco Bay, in a long list of lakes.

Which leads me to the path of most resistance: I could do better.

Therein lies my liquid angst: I don't know how I can purchase more speed.

If you've stayed with me this far and know something about swimming and fitness, you may be right to say: Is that so?

The truth is, I'd stopped looking for answers. This has been an unsettling year for me and swimming. It's not that I haven't enjoyed it; it's that those bucket-list swims — one in particular — tied me in knots of consternation.

A new 10k swim (6.2 miles) made its debut at Del Valle Reservoir near Livermore earlier this month. I didn't go, though I was all afire about it back in January, when I attended a workshop for it.

As soon as I heard swimmers had to finish the race in 3.5 hours, I couldn't comprehend anything else during the workshop. Mind and body told me the same thing: I couldn't do it. So I went to a pool to find out, and finished 6.2 miles (437 lengths of a 25-yard pool, if you're scoring from home) and did it in under four hours.

Hmmm. I resolved to pore over my swimming manuals, review the notes from the January workshop, step off the landmarks where I swim and practice sprints in the cold water to build up endurance and speed, exercise my core … to find the speed I needed.

All those resolutions went where resolutions usually go. All that remained is dogged determination to swim, just swim.

On a shared facebook page, many swimmers from around the world post their pool regimen, complete with times and codes for negative splits (swimming the last leg faster than the first) and short rest times to strengthen their tolerances in the big sprints.

I have ignored all of it.

So it was with blissful ignorance that I reached the end of my FLOW swim, tired but energy in the tank, that I saw a swimmer ahead of me — and if that wasn't wonder enough, I was gaining on her! I sprinted as best I could, crossed the finish line ahead of her, shared congratulations in having finished — and had the gall to think I might place in my age group.

Even as a member of a rather large old-person's age bracket (more of us than the 20-somethings, which I can't decide is affirming or disquieting), the third-place finisher had raced to shore almost a half-hour before me.

Medals (and their lack) are no more for me than an excuse to write about them, so either way I benefit; or you suffer, depending on your perspective.

But I'm concerned about what medals represent: That I could be getting faster, which will get me to swim places and distances I dream of before the day comes I can't swim.

What to make of it?

Addendum: The winner of the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim last weekend, a Yale senior named Abigail Nunn, finished 28.5 miles in seven hours, 30 minutes and 26 seconds — more than 17 minutes ahead of the second-place swimmer. That's nearly four miles an hour, an astounding feat even discounting the aid of changing tides. It was her first attempt at the marathon swim. At my 35-minute pace, I could complete that course (assuming, of course, I could complete the course) in 16.5 hours, more than twice as long as it took Nunn.

New year, no water

In higher times: A mid-June Sunday. The lake would rise even higher
before summer was over. Photo courtesy of Thomas Petrie.

After greeting the new year with a swim at nearby Lake Natoma, I drove with my wife to Beal's Point on Folsom Lake.
 
I knew what I'd find because I'd been by two days before: Precious little. The water in the cove north of the point is almost gone, reduced to a muddy pond. It was like sucking on a sore tooth to go out there, inexplicably needing to revisit the pain.

Not long ago, we used to swim that cove, which is on the west side of the lake. It was about 1.3 miles round trip across the cove, to a bushy round oak tree on the opposite shore and back. We swam it in smooth water and in late-winter rain when storms had churned the surface into two-foot waves. We swam it when only a few runners up on a levee would yell down that we were crazy, and in the height of summer when ski boats would carve close by at high speed on purpose.

New Year's Day 2012: The whitish rocks on the levee behind were
under water in June, as were the trees, right up to the leaves.
Photo courtesy of Nancy Turner.

Now all that water, probably 30 feet at the deepest, is gone. The giant orange buoy which often served as a rest stop 500 yards out from the shore now lies impotently near the remaining puddle, at least another 400 yards away from where it used to float. I'm trying to figure out how the buoy, anchored to the bottom, moved so far away.

The bottom of the cove is a moonscape of dry, dry decomposed granite with a few knobs of granite sticking out here and there. Except for a small grove of trees that bear the misfortune of being flooded out winter through summer, no flora flourishes on this landscape. Almost no trash, even. I found a disposable lighter and an old juice box on one trek to the bottom of the cove, and that was it. I imagine most open-water swimmers wonder, even a little bit, what lurks below them in the opaque depths as they crawl along the surface. The answer in this case is, nothing.

This barren condition is normal, sort of; the emptiness largely artificial. Folsom Lake is a giant tool for water and flood control, a human-made reservoir collecting the snowmelt as it flows out of the Sierra into the three forks of the American River. From there, the water is let out into Lake Natoma (really the trunk of the American River) and held for release as needed into the American River, which flows into the Sacramento and out into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, then to the San Pablo Bay, then San Francisco Bay, and out to the ocean.

People like me spend disposable income and expend tremendous amounts of fuel to tow skiers on Folsom Lake, camp and hike around it, pull fish from it and swim in it.

I'd be about 20 feet under water, were there any water, right here.
The blue line marks the route we take to the tree in the distance.
The dots near the horizon on the left are horses and riders.
My après-swim ensemble, by the way, is all the rage in these parts.
My technique is flawless; though it looks like I've fallen and can't get up.

The people in charge of controlling the water supply had drained some of the lake to make way for winter's upcoming supply from snowmelt, and the cove at Beal's Point appears to be far shallower than the center of the lake, so it empties first.
 
Except winter is not obliging so far. December ended as the fourth driest since records were first kept during the Gold Rush. January opens dry and warm for this time in winter. Last year near-record snows fell and the reservoirs all over the state filled to capacity.

For now, Lake Natoma is high and cold, the water taken from the bottom of Folsom Lake. Its levels change by almost a foot from one day to the next as the water controllers regulate how much to send downriver, but the reservoir remains full for the most part. Though I have been swimming in the lake for nearly a year, I don't know enough about it to say whether its levels would drop in severe drought.

Selfishly, I think of neighbors on my block who water winter and summer, the runoff sheeting across the sidewalks and forming fast-flowing rivulets down the gutters into the drains. I multiply that by the number of households across the region likely doing likewise, never adjusting their irrigation cycles to meet water needs, and wonder if I could be swimming in this cove but for that.  

Winter, do your worst. Please.

Almost nothing, as far as the eye can see …

Works in progress, in more ways than one

At least one swim friend and I hope to make Lake Natoma our year-round pool.

For as long as we can stand it, Jim Morrill and I are trading in the rectangular, crystal clear, chlorinated, usually (too) warm, lane-lined pools of our recent past, for the wide open glassy water of Natoma, with its sycamore-choked shorelines.

If we manage to swim at Natoma into next February, we will have gone a full year in its green, cool water. That's a lot of progressively cold water between now and then, but I think we can make it.

Sometimes, of course, we'll concede a battle here and there, and succumb to the confines of a concrete swimming hole. Jim lives far from Natoma, and life will intervene, as it must, on his plans to swim the lake as frequently as he'd like. I know I have to cure myself of "terminal mediocrity" and will use the pool on occasion to practice swimming faster.

And come January, when the Natomas water temperature drops to 48 degrees or so, I might not be able to stay in for the usual 1.4 to 3 miles without a wetsuit; I'll swim until sanity lures me out, and go to the pool to finish the distance. We'll lose some battles but win the crusade, hitting the lake three or four times a week.

We want to commemorate our craziness by creating a "club," including a logo, the development of which you see here above.

We usually swim at the southwest end of the lake, known as Nimbus Flat, named after the dam that creates a lake of Natoma; hence the title of the logo at the top, Nimbus Flat Earth Society. You can tell by the other rough logo variations (right) that Natoma isn't really a natural lake at all, but the upper trunk of the American River, downstream from where the three forks of that river meet at what is now Folsom Lake. It's dammed above and below.

The uniformly calm water as a result makes it ideal for competitive rowing, and the lake plays host to collegiate crewing championships.

(You can also tell that this snaky lake doesn't fit conveniently into a logo.)

Natoma draws water off the bottom of Folsom, so it's cold most of the year, and swimmers and kayakers, particularly on the northern stretch of the lake, can feel a current, maybe 2 miles an hour tops.

Occasionally, we'll swim elsewhere on the lake, so maybe we want to identify with the entire lake, not just Nimbus Flat. Thus, Lake Natoma Knotheads or Nitwits.

Jim has swum from Nimbus to a place nearly midway at Willow Creek, a four mile round trip. I get in occasionally at the north east end of the lake at Negro Bar (named for African American gold seekers who built a settlement on the banks of the American River near Folsom), where the water is five to 10 degrees cooler than at Nimbus Flat, and swim under the new Folsom Bridge for about 1.3 miles.

We both have swum almost its entire length, 4.8 miles from Nimbus Flat to Rainbow Bridge. I've done it once, July 4 (video proof here); Jim and some of my swimming friends have done so several times.

When the year began I didn't think any of this possible. I thought I'd be lucky to get a few open water swims to get used to my Alcatraz swim in June, and spend the rest of the time in a pool. But as time went on, the reverse has happened. I was last in a pool in late June, about a week before the Alcatraz Sharkfest.

I welcome your suggestions for a good name for our lunatic group, something that will inspire me to create a logo, and I'll post them here. 

Swimming across America

Who knows what evil lurks in the floral depths of Diamond Lake?
Just plants … probably …

In my futile, doomed, disorganized, happenstance attempt to swim in every lake in America, I can at least cross two more off my list. It wasn't a big list to start with: Folsom Lake, Lake Natoma (Sacramento and Placer counties); Lake Tahoe (Nevada and California sides); Spring Lake (Sonoma County); Ozette and Cascade lakes (Washington state); (does San Francisco Bay count?). The list remained small because I had held to the wisdom, broken but a few years ago, to wit: "What fool would swim in a lake?"

(Lake Pend Oreille {Pon-du-RAY} in Idaho doesn't count. That was more of an organized attempted drowning when I was eight or nine; but that's a story for another time.)

(On second thought, if I include Lake Pend Oreille, I could try for a more bucket-listy swim-one-lake-in-every-state goal … )

Over a farewell-to-summer camping trip with my family the last long weekend, I swam in Lost Creek Reservoir (wonder why it's lost; maybe because the creek got turned into a reservoir?) and Diamond Lake in south central Oregon. Two more different lakes would be difficult to find, but I'll keep trying.

Neither lake caters to swimmers. Lost Creek Lake sets aside a paltry misbegotten swim area on the other side of steep peninsula from the narrow marina, where all the action, if you can call it that, was. The reservoir holds back some of the Rogue River, and the water level has dropped 20 feet from its max, leaving swimmers with a long, gravelly, weedy, desolate walk to the water.

At Diamond Lake, the swim area is even tinier, a rectangle of no more than 10 yards wide and 20 yards long on a narrow beach in front of its resort (where it's always yesterday, and the last good yesterday appears to have been 1964). I did not swim in Diamond Lake's swim area; since the water would have not even gone up to my waist, I would have had difficulty swimming there.

I swam in the middle of Diamond Lake instead, off the deck of a patio boat, the rental for which we splurged. I mean, how many chances are you gonna get to rent something called a patio boat (which is exactly as you would imagine, a floating patch of shaded indoor/outdoor carpet on pontoons, complete with deck chairs — it was missing a Weber™® grill — and an outboard motor on the back)?

We made a three-hour tour … a three-hour tour … around the lake, stopping to eat, stopping to look, stopping to swim, tootling along.

I didn't swim for long, because of the sudden realization, after I jumped in, that I would have a difficult time getting back on the boat. Much like an actual patio, the boat lacked rope ladders.

Knowing the effort back on the boat would be a pain, I didn't stay in the water more than long enough to note that it wasn't very deep (maybe 20 feet where we were) but very dark green and full of plants whose long tendrils crept just within the clearer water closer to the surface, to resemble fingers reaching up for my feet.

I'm not usually mindful of the flora and fauna below me as I swim, but these fingered plants made me want to get back in the boat quick. More and more these days, I'm mindful of the rhythmic risk-and-rescue that swimming is: Alternately submerging your face into the dark dense unknown and lifting it for a quick saving breath, just to risk all once again.

Shallower places along the lake were crystalline green, but I didn't get back in to look, a decision I regret.

Lost Creek Lake flat-out does not welcome swimmers. It's a powerboat/ski boat/jet ski lake (Diamond is a trout fisher's paradise where most boats plod along), so swimmers face high risks venturing beyond the swim area. My daughter spotted a floating swim deck in the middle of the lake (which seems stupid because of the high-speed boat traffic), but I didn't feel safe crossing the boats' paths to make the half-mile journey to the deck. My daughter and son and I were confined to the swim area, where the wind and chop had churned in the fine red dirt near the shoreline to a rusty murk.

It made me thankful for cool, green Lake Natoma, where a low speed limit discourages motorized boats. Except for a few racing kayakers who think it's funny to race right through a group of swimmers, most people on the lake leave swimmers alone.

Let me know of a swim-friendly lake in your state. Maybe I could make this a bucket list after all. Though I'd swim Pend Oreille again just to make matters kosher.

Alcatraz awaits …

Though I don't look anything close to the überswimmer on the right, I don't look like the dude on the left anymore, either.

Swimming longer distances more frequently, nearing the end of my quest to swim from Alcatraz Island to terra not so firma in San Francisco, has changed my shape to something in between.

Saturday, I reach the goal I set some seven years ago, swimming in Sharkfest 2011, weather willing (a friend planned to swim last year's event, which was canceled as the swimmers were ferried out to the starting line at Alcatraz).

Even four months ago, this seemed like a really stupid idea. I was swimming a bit more than a mile most days, but my open water experiences were exasperating tragi-comedies as I sputtered and thrashed in the cold water, and beat myself up over not being able to transfer my pool practice into the chill of lakes Folsom and Natoma near Sacramento.

But steady open water opportunities with the Sacramento Swim Enthusiasts, and encouragement from my newfound friends in that group, has closed the gap. I swim longer distances and practice against all those open water obstacles (no lines, no walls, no clear water) that can throw pool swimmers.  I decided back in February to figure out how to swim in the cold water without a wetsuit, and now I'm accustomed to it and plan to swim Alcatraz that way, in the tradition of the South End Rowing and Dolphin clubs at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, the finish line.

I'm also swimming for Team Hydro, raising money to find cures and treatments for hydrocephalus, a debilitating and life-threatening disease that affects more than 1 million Americans. I'm helping raise money. Wanna donate? Go to teamhydro.org, or my own Team Hydro Web page just for that purpose.

Alcatraz awaits. I can't wait.