Swimmingly

I drew this in July, six months before the 24-hour swim. That's how excited I was to return.

Swim No. 1, 9:58 a.m.: This must be how a musician feels, saving a lost guitar, tentatively retaking a rhythm, attempting a certain choreography of fingers, feeling rough but right.

Hitting the green water, salt once again in my mouth, tripped memory. First, around the wooden pier with its hinged ramp bobbing like a great hungry jaw. Ah, the buoys next, tall and cylindrical, in permanent cant, a row of crooked teeth stretching to the black grove of eucalyptus beyond. Somewhere at the end of the buoys is a box-shaped one with a flag on top and a thermometer tethered to it, a sort of Aquatic Park mascot. I can't see it from here; I just have to swim and find it, like last year. Here we go.

Brad Schindler has gone first, two laps. Then Cathy Harrington. For how long? I can't remember. So how long until I swim next? Two hours? Is that right? That can't be right. Ah, forget it! Just swim, fool!

I'm going three laps this time, three laps each time if I can. I don't think I could have done that last year. But that was last year.

Such a difference a year makes! Since meeting him at the first 24-Hour Relay Swim last January, Craig Lenning of Colorado became the first person in 47 years to swim from the Farralon Islands to the mainland, a 25.7-mile trek in treacherous waters west of the Golden Gate.

Since meeting him last year, Simon Dominguez, an Australian by way of the Bay Area, swam the English Channel.

Since last year, my relay teammate Lisa Amorao has racked up the miles and night swims and tricky waters, and bounded into this relay with abandon, night swims and all, recording it all on her GoPro™® camera for another much anticipated video of events. So did Cathy Harrington, who swam and swam and swam over the last year, and has swum up at our Lake Natoma several times, an opportunity lost if not for having met at the relay.

David Walsh and I have extended the miles at our lake since last year, and David shed his wetsuit even through the coldest water. I talked him into another relay. We were ready to do more this year.

An alternative design, meant to evoke the ever-moving, clock-spanning, rollicking nature of the relay.
As with the top illustration, you can "read" the illustration from any angle.

Marathon swimmer Suzie Dods created the relay, inspired by a long-ago event in Quebec called 24 Heures La Tuque. That event comprised two-person teams trading off 'round the clock for a full day. Suzie's version features teams of different number, from four to 10 this year, who divvied the swims in different ways.

Of the 40 or so swimmers this year, at least a fourth know each other from the facebook™® page, Did you swim today?

Swimmers ranged from common schlubs like me to world-class marathoners. Our team boasted Brad Schindler, who has crossed Tahoe and swum an ice mile, which is a mile in water 41 Fahrenheit or lower.

"Fast" Karl Kingery, who used to swim with me at Lake Natoma before finding work in Colorado, joined the team of four that, besides Lenning, comprised:

• Elaine Howley of Boston, last summer the first person to swim the 32-mile length of Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho and
• Sarah Thomas from outside Denver, who within six months in 2013 swam two lengths of Vermont's Lake Memphremagog (50 miles) and was the first "skins" swimmer to double-cross Lake Tahoe (44 miles)

They each swam in three two-hour blocks — just strolls around the block for them, I'm sure — compared to our team, the Fogheads, which swam five or six rounds each.

We kidded Karl that he was out of his team's league, but know he'll soon be amassing his own massive swims. Besides, we kid in admiration: Karl was swimming with torn ligaments in one knee, from a skiing accident the week before.

Swim No. 2, 2:26 p.m.: The good news — thanks to teammates Paul Springer and Lorena Sims, who know their way around cyberspace, the swimmers who make up the Fogheads know when they'll be in the water each round of the 24-hour relay, and for how long, and what they'll be doing at any other part of the relay. 

Lorena and Paul orchestrated a spreadsheet they could change on the fly from their handhelds, and it only took one round of us swimming for them to develop an accurate prediction of our endeavor.

The bad news — the data show I've got K.P. duty at 3, so I have to hold my second swim to one lap. I resolve to enjoy it, stretching out my arms for an extra glide, paying attention to how my hands enter the water and hold straight and wide. Someone over at Ghirardelli Square, the old block-long brick factory-turned-mall above Aquatic Park, has the gall to bake cookies and send their warm sugary splendor out over the water.

I can make a straight line out to the bay opening of Aquatic Park, with no real tide to fight, and Swim No. 2 ends too soon. Nothing really needs doing in the kitchen, it turns out, as everyone gets quiet in the rhythm of the long event, saving energy. I long to be back in the water.

I was trying to serve two masters with this one version: Something that will fit on a cap, and a taste of
the counterculture/spiritual still alive and well in San Francisco. Can you not tell how really, really
excited I was to come back for this event?

The inaugural 24-hour relay last year coincided with California's only real winter storm, a rollicking deluge that barely let up, and churned Aquatic Park's water so hard that swimmers were restricted to swimming along the beach through the night.

This year's relay followed days of unseemly warm false-spring days, par for the four-year drought, until the weekend promised: Rain! Some joked we should market the relay as a rainmaker. Swimmer Mark Spratt of Indianapolis took personal blame, or credit, depending.

Just something completely different. I wanted to do something inspired by
the Ohlone people who first inhabited what became San Francisco, but couldn't
find much beyond the spare geometry of basket art;besides, I feel
uncomfortable co-opting native art. This reminds me more of some the
Works Project Administration murals around The City.

Except for Sunday morning at the relay's end, though, the rains never really came. The Golden Gate Bridge gave its glory day and night, the Marin County end perpetually swallowed in fog or lavender-hued rain clouds. We never saw that bridge last year.

Stars competed for attention this year with lights of The City during the night swims.

As evening fell a cruise ship, the Star Princess, sailed out under the black span of the Golden Gate Bridge. The ship looked like a skyscraper laid on its side, lit top to bottom as if on the night before taxes are due.

Swim No. 3, 6:47 p.m.: First dark swim. Teammate Kelley Prebil has kayaked out to the buoys and attached blinking lights to help swimmers see the route better. They look like cartoon time bombs, as if Kelley has mined the swim route. But when the buoys bob wildly, the blinks frequently disappear, and navigation requires finding the buoys' silhouettes against the dazzling lights afar. I zig and zag, stopping too often to guess where the buoys might be, hoping I don't hit one.

The famous flag buoy at the end of the row has been moved, I'm convinced of it, as darkness begins its trickery.

I manage to crash into the same swimmer I collided with last year, just in a different part of the course.

Cigarette smoke gives way to marijuana smoke, wafting from somewhere in the blackness of the eucalyptus groves. The ocean, flowing hard into the Bay now, gives me fits. Try as I may to reach the gap between the city pier and the breakwater, I end up far to the east each lap, which resembles not a triangle but a loop like one of those breast cancer ribbons.

The kayaker at the first buoy compliments me on my butt buoy, a bright orange inflatable tow device swimmers use for safety. Borrowing a British swimmer's idea, I put my backpacking headlamp inside, turning the buoy into a jack-o-lantern and me into a low-altitude firefly. It works better than a blinking light, making me visible from a great distance.

So when the unseen beasties under water get me, the relay organizers will know where I was last seen.

The water is 55 to 57 Fahrenheit, far warmer than Lake Natoma right now and four to six degrees warmer than last year in the Bay. It's discomfiting, how comfortable it is.

San Francisco blazes relentlessly into the water, setting fire to the bubbles of my wake.

One late variation after it turned out my designs would
overwhelm a cap.

When all was new last year, I fretted unreasonably that I had to stay awake to make sure our team was swimming when it should and carrying out its volunteer duties.

Even after I realized that, of course, they're adults and would do more than their share to ensure the event goes on, I resisted sleep. The early morning hours were almost intolerable as a result, time having stopped, enthusiasm having drained away.

This year I played it smart, knowing not to worry about the Fogheads. After each swim I wound my way through a utility passageway of the Dolphin Club, around some sawhorses, to the hobbit door that opened to a handball court that served as sleeping quarters, and napped for an hour.

The relay's off hours passed in comfort of a hardwood floor and the joy of chocolate muffins on waking up.

Swim No. 4, 11:16 p.m.: San Francisco refuses to sleep. The Fontana Towers, twin condominiums above Aquatic Park that Alcatraz swimmers use to sight themselves back to shore, is still lit top to bottom.

Pot smokers refuse to quit.

The tide having slacked again, I can make my way to the opening of the park a bit straighter. The second leg of the triangle route, out to the opening, feels the longest, only ghostly sailboats to guide by, and a mesmerizing collection of lights out in the Bay, devilish as sirens, by which to sight. The buoy out at the opening is always farther away than I think.

The homeward leg feels downhill by comparison, over before I realize. I slide stern to stem past the Balclutha, a three-masted 19th Century sailing ship moored in the park, and feel like I'm sneaking alongside to do battle, cannons ready.

Next I must take care to swim wide of the mooring chains of Eppleton Hall, an early 20th Century side-wheel tugboat, its prow jutting out into the park. A quick adjustment and I angle back to the Dolphin Club dock.

Back at the dock on the first lap, I see Jim Bock, my friend from fourth grade, working the midnight-to-3 shift checking on swimmers as they pass. Jim is dressed in a banana costume. From the water I break into the opening lines of "Greenland Whale Fisheries," a ballad I heard Jim sing from the dock last year. I learned the song since and waited for this moment. We sing together. I flub a key line. My throat is scratchy and I'm a little loopy. All, though, is well.

My mind refuses to let me be, imagining beasts crisscrossing below, to nudge and nip. My hand hits a stick in the water. I think it's a stick. I quicken a bit and wait for the stick to chase me. Nothing.

When Lisa Amorao shot this Saturday afternoon, it'd be another three hours
and 20 minutes before I swam again, when night fell. I watched from
comfy heights as David Walsh got out ("went dry" in the relay lingo)
and Paul Springer got wet. 

Waves from a growing tide thumped against the pilings below, waking me from my cocoon on the handball court floor. Nap No. 3 done.

The relay had gone into hibernation, sleeping-bagged bodies on the main floor of the Dolphin Club, in among the varnished wooden rowboats, up on the little stage, even up in the locker room. It's a stark difference from 9 a.m. when everyone cheered the first round of swimmers.

In short time the event became a matter of quiet survival, hanging out on the dock in view of The City, or quietly talking around the tables inside, until it was time for each to swim again.

No matter the hour, swimmers could count on a slice of pizza and a cornucopia of grub coming out of the kitchen.

Swim No. 5, 4:18 a.m.: My goal is not to be the last swimmer at the end of the relay. It was a treat last year to be last on my team, to swim up to a crowd on the docks, cheering all the last swimmers as much in happiness for having taken part as in relief that we all had made it through.

This time I wanted to be done and have my sopping gear all packed, ready to cheer someone else from the deck instead. Using Paul and Lorena's projections, I resolved that if I did four laps, or three miles, I would be almost certain to be finished with my swim contribution by about 4:30. Cathy Harrington would be our last swimmer when 9 a.m. came 'round.

San Francisco is finally dark except for the Ghirardelli sign and the bulbs that outline the big old factory. The bubbles below me glow green on their own.

The lights on the buoys blink sleepily, weakly, barely now.

I'm cold. How can I be cold!? I have yet to complete the first lap and my head feels icy. I really, really need to hang out here for four laps, so I breathe slowly, stroke deliberately, trying to blank out the cold.

On the first lap out to the watery opening of Aquatic Park, a buoy swims by. It's round and dark, bobbing and bearded with vegetation, untagged by a blinking light. Where did that come from? How did I end up swimming by it? Great, now I've gotta watch for it each of the next laps, hoping I don't bash into it.

People are walking along the concourse on the edge of Aquatic Park this time of the morning. Someone is still smoking marijuana. In a lit doorway of the Maritime Museum, a man in a sleeping bag is screaming into the night.

Green flashes suddenly explode in my head. I am dreaming, or one of the buoys is following me, or a boat is sailing out of the park. No, it's a swimmer, blinking light on his goggle strap, going incredibly fast past me.

On my last turn around the buoy at the opening, I thank the kayaker and see, above her, dark figures standing on the pier, watching, like sentries on a battlement. At 4:20 a.m.

The cool heat of eucalyptus oil settles on the water, trumping all, calming me. The fourth and final lap is warm and normal. I conquer the Balclutha in one more sneak attack and make for shore as stealthily as an orange firefly can swim. A wave spits me out on the sand.

All told, I swam about 10 1/2 miles. The foursome that included "Fast" Karl each swam half again more.

The surest sign of the relay's success is that we want to do it again. Though the sides of my tongue are ground raw and can't taste — though a "greater than-"shaped welt of red has tattooed my neck — I want to do this again.

All the art I'd done wouldn't work on a cap, so I pulled this detail from
my first illustration of the famous flag buoy, and tweaked it for a new purpose.

Gang aft agley*

Along for the ride, past Coit Tower, behind kayaker Mark with the orange flag. All photos by Liam Turner

Despite my every sabotage, I did it — I swam the swim of my dreams.

Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge, on Sunday, six miles.

(Really, it was St. Francis Yacht Club to AT&T Park, where the San Francisco Giants play, about the same distance, but that doesn't trip off the tongue or evoke quite the knowing enormity. More on that in a bit.)

(Full disclosure: tide assisted. Hell, tide enabled: The measured swing of my arms and languid flash of feet were mere pantomime, the current doing all the work. More on that too, later.)

The idea of this swim became a water parasite digging into my brain shortly after I began open water swimming three years ago. It took hold soon after the infection that caused me to want to swim from Alcatraz.

As a result, I share the mania of many open water swimmers — at the sight of any body of water, I immediately wonder whether I can swim it.

With every infrequent crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge, the parasite's tendrils would entwine my neurons and squeeze. I'd take a measure out to the Bay Bridge, scanning the distance and the sailboats and ships chalking the serpentinite water, and try to picture myself making that long crossing. Such a long, long way.

Two years ago, Nancy and my swimming friend Jim drove out to Treasure Island, the human-made village hard by Yerba Buena Island, on which the halfway point of the Bay Bridge is anchored. Between Treasure and Yerba Buena islands is a human-made cove, and a coach with swim-art.com was leading a swim. Jim and I were the only "skin" swimmers, going without a wetsuit. Partway through the session the coach, on a stand-up paddleboard, asked if we were cold. A couple of the wetsuited swimmers said they were. Jim and I just looked at each other.

Cold? Bring it.

Happy with hope and hubris, trying not to hyperventilate …

Alight with hubris, Jim and I looked out on the sunset, the water of the Golden Gate bright fire, the orange span of the bridge sharp in the late light to the right, the Bay Bridge looming up and to our left, The City high and alive between, just across the water.

"Let's do this!" said Jim. "Bridge to Bridge!"

"Yeah, we gotta!" I said.

"I'm doing this, you in?" Jim said again last December. Swim-art.com was advertising a Bridge-to-Bridge expedition swim for June, and warning that the America's Cup (better known as Larry-Ellison-plays-with-his-toy-boats-and-lets-you-pay-in-installments-to-watch) would truncate the big-swim season. If you want to swim bridge to bridge, in other words, this was the only chance this year.

(Straight-up plug for swim-art.com: Though I know of other expedition swim guides in the Bay Area, I'm sticking with Leslie Thomas who runs swim-art. Almost all the coached and guided swims I've taken have been with her group, and the vibe is strong: This is swimming for the joy of swimming. It's not about racing, it's about being your best self in the pleasure of swimming. I'm not a racer, I'm just trying to be a swimmer. If that's your thing, look up swim-art.com)

"I'm in." I signed up right away. Six months to get ready, I remember thinking.

Thus began the best-laid schemes o' this mousy man, almost all gang aft agley. I needed to be trimmer, fitter, stronger to make this swim. This was no day at the beach, but a real swim. Do not trifle. So one by one, I tried and failed at every attempt to improve:

• Bought a medicine ball and stretch cord (with ergonomically sensitive plastic handles!) for building my core. I took them out to Lake Natoma twice, declaring it my own outdoor gym, where I would perform a battery of upper body exercises, alternating swim days with workout days. The medicine ball rolls around in the trunk of my car, banging the wheel wells in mocking reminder …
• Decided to start running. Pulled out a "Chi Running" DVD swimmer friend Stacy and given me a year and a half ago. Watched it twice on my computer. Bought running shoes and anklets. Anklets! Ran twice. The shoes are neatly stowed by my bedstand. Neatness is a bad omen …
• Found our old PX 90 DVDs. Re-learned how the DVD player works. Did the stretching session twice and the cardio once … 
• Pulled out my copy of "Lane Lines to Shore Lines," a wonderful if homespun DVD swimmers Gary Emich (1,000 Alcatraz crossings!) and Phil DiGirolamo made for open water swimmers, and Alcatraz hopefuls in particular. Watched 30 of its 70 minutes, stopping where the narrators describe the benefits of drafting off another swimmer. As if anyone could swim as slow as me …
• Finally found my DVD "Outside the Box: A TI Program for success in Open Water," by Terry Laughlin, developer of the maligned Total Immersion swimming technique I practice. Worried how far away I'd strayed from the technique. Never opened the box …
• Resolved to reacquire bilateral breathing skills (usually it's three strokes, breathe from the left side, three more strokes, breathe right, etc.). In the cold water I developed the bad habit of breathing every two strokes from my left side only. When I realized the swim would follow the flood tide into the Bay, I would be looking toward Marin County to the north, then Oakland and Alameda to the east, and I wanted to see The City on occasion too. I practiced bilateral breathing for maybe six minutes, choked on a lot of water, gave up …
• Thought about swimming nearby Folsom Lake on windy days to practice in heavy chop, but balked at the too-warm water …
• Made plans to swim the Bay. Went to one of swim-art's training sessions, never made it for another because of work or out-of-town obligations …
• Forgot my comfortably ugly Crocs™© at home, and had to walk around Fisherman's Wharf in heavy thrift shop slip-ons I use for my tour guide gig. In an array of sweatpants and fleece jacket and bright yellow beanie and decrepit dress shoes, I resembled a west coast, 21st Century Ratso Rizzo …
• Forgot my neoprene hood and made do with a silicone cap and two swim-art latex caps, which squeezed my head in a rubber vice …

In the end, the only thing I did right was swim, almost every day, in the cold water of Lake Natoma. It's the only exercise I've been able to stick with in the first place, so I stuck with it. In the last couple of miles I've managed longer distances, 2.5 miles instead of the usual 1.3.

Then the cold water abandoned me and I worried. Temperatures have risen ahead of schedule, and Lake Natoma hovers at 61-62 degrees Fahrenheit. The Bay was siting at 58-60, a shocking difference when it comes to water.

Ultimately, Jim couldn't make the swim, but wished me good speed.

I told almost no one, and then just matter-of-factly. I didn't want to come back from a failed swim and explain; either way, though, you know I'd blog about it.

Such a swim costs six to seven times more than a typical open-water race. It's a trophy swim, to be sure —my combined birthday and Christmas gift, so you don't hafta get me anything now — a chance to swim in one of the most beautiful places in the world. But that fee pays for a lot of safety. The lead boat, passenger boat, chase boats and kayakers dwarfed in number and precaution almost all of the open-water races I've joined.

Leslie Thomas and her team needed all of it Sunday.

Twenty-two swimmers and friends and family boarded the Silver Fox at the St. Francis Yacht Club. I stayed with my son, helping him move the last of his stuff into his new apartment in The City. He came aboard with his camera.

Though evening fell Saturday bright and sharp with a fine golden mist — picture perfect — the entire Bay disappeared Sunday, swim day, under a great suffocation of white shapeless fog. Leslie began the pre-race instructions in a cold wind with her back to the Bay, all of us scanning in vain for shreds of blue sky.

All we could see of the Golden Gate Bridge, made more menacing by its veil …

The Silver Fox hauled its human cargo out to the Golden Gate Bridge. I tried to keep a smile pasted to my face, as I thought of the great distance this boat was making just to get to our starting point.

The bridge was a kaiju, a great beast of expanding size in the shroud of mist. It planted one leg in the water before us, its other leg lost in long stride in the distance. It bellowed its great fog horn of warning. A fishing boat curled past and then in front of us at high speed, causing our boat to rock sharply side to side. Excited swimmers and their spectators got quiet. Leslie moved quickly about the boat, talking on the radio.

A pod of escorting kayakers was lost in the fog. Leslie blasted a canned-air horn and listened for the kayakers' whistles. A sailboat appeared suddenly close by and vanished.

By radio, a kayaker said they were fixed on a location and that the Silver Fox needed to come to them.

After a while I just closed my eyes, because in the whiteness I had lost any sense of where we were. The fog horn's bellow quieted, then honked again somewhere else.

A tugboat's coming under the bridge, Leslie said. We have to wait.

Finally I saw the lights of the tugboat, thinking once it passed we'd jump in and get going. Except the lights disappeared and dark vertical shapes pushed out of the mist in their place. Trees. We were on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate. Or were we?

Then the bright shape of a building, a familiar building: We were back where we started, at the St. Francis Yacht Club. We'd start from here.

A shortened swim. I was happy: At least we could swim. We didn't have to cancel.

Into the water, warm and soft compared to what I swim in daily. My arms disappeared to the shoulder in the milky blue-green water, plumes of tan silt falling in where strokes had passed. The water rolled heavily, but somehow despite my inefficient breathing technique, the water didn't choke me or splash my face.

Buddied with Liz, a startup developer, we joined with kayaker Mark to become the Full Moon Flooders — our impromptu team name — and swam into the void. Mark was the only marker to follow, in his green shortie kayak with the orange flag fluttering behind. I lifted my head every four strokes, far too often, unsure of my surroundings.

In an incomprehensibly short time, The City pushed gray and muted out of the fog, moving fast past me. We were in a "super moon" flood tide moving at 3 knots, more than three miles an hour.

Done! Not done? not done …

Pier 39, make a hard right we were warned, or we'd get pushed east to Treasure Island. Just follow me, Mark said. The Bay Bridge loomed, and like most landmarks I swim to, seemed never to get closer until finally it did. I crossed beneath its lofting, forbidding green span, finished, elated.

"We're swimming to AT&T Park," Mark said, motioning another half-mile away. My will had dissipated at the Bay Bridge, but with Liz close by, I pushed on, easing off my shoulders, relying on my hips, one stroke at a time, the current still pushing us.

Finally, finally, finally, the Silver Fox floated in the distance, the light towers of the ballpark looming behind. Apparently the much faster swimmers had blown past the Bay Bridge and just kept swimming, and we followed impromptu.

Six-ish miles in an hour and 28 minutes. It typically takes me that long to swim three miles, so you get an idea how strong the current was.

With neither shiver or shake I got back on the Silver Fox we motored past The City, retracing the route, the bridge, the piers, the Ferry Building, Coit Tower. We swam past all of them. My son handed me two Oreo™® cookies, Leslie Thomas' post-swim trademark treat, and we watched The City go by, then Alcatraz. The Golden Gate Bridge remained concealed and monstrous.

So happy to be here …

Knowing all the factors Leslie weighed to determine whether to stage the swim has made me all the more comfortable. We were in safe keep. The smiling faces of the kayakers shepherding our route confirmed this.

I'll be back. Bay Bridge to Golden Gate Bridge next, hoping for bright sun, but swimming in fog if fog be.

Doing what Dory says.

*To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, by Robert Burns

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 …

The year in liquid form

My my my, it's a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free — or a woman, if you are one
I like swimming in the sea
— Colin Hay, "Beautiful World"

Flag buoy, Aquatic Park, San Francisco, Dec. 26, 2011. (Note Santa hat
where flag usually is.) Water temperature 49.7º F. Bring it!

What an enabler, my wife! With a cheery heart, a smiling voice and, I'll wager, more prayer than I'm aware of, she causes worlds to open up, and bids me explore.

With trepidation, for example, she resigned to the idea it was OK this year for me to stop looking for a job in the closed and collapsing teaching profession, and to spend my energy rebuilding my illustration business. It's a tenuous — OK, often stupid — choice requiring faith and calm.

So, too, with another new world this year, swimming open water.

At first, Nancy accompanied me for this strange and new pastime, and still serves as ground support for races and big events. Since then, she has accepted the low odds of my getting chomped in two by a shark — or, in fresh water, by whatever aquatic pet some kid released into the lake to become a monster fattened on swimmers' flesh — and does her own thing while I swim.

And swim and swim and swim, five or six days a week, usually in Lake Natoma, where I plan to stay through the new year.

As I might have mentioned before, I never really thought it would be this way. Sure, I set sights on Alcatraz long ago, but never truly believed, not entirely anyway, that I'd do more than see the island through pay binoculars and wonder what might have been.

Still, moving toward that goal I joined a Sacramento-area swim group through meetup.com, which got me to an introductory clinic on swimming San Francisco Bay last November. Suzie Dods, a legendary member of the South End Rowing Club near Fisherman's Wharf, led Myron Dong (our meetup.com group's chief cheerleader and organizer) and me on a short swim around buoys in the water. I decided at the last moment to swim without a wetsuit, and felt great.

Then began the discombobulation.

Not all parties have weighed in, but I'm guessing this is the logo
we crazies will adopt for ensuing adventures …

The meetup group started swimming February weekends in Lake Natoma, in horribly chilly, thought-numbing water. I floundered in frustration, making the mistake of believing all those laps in the pool would steel me for open water. Cold trumps all. Now I warn new open-water swimmers against similar hubris.

I started in a wetsuit because I thought that's the only way a human being could swim winter water.

Two events changed that:

1. I look like a manatee in a wetsuit, except less dainty and curvaceous, and with a DayGlo® dome. Not usually vain, I draw the line at wetsuits, and swim without mostly because I'm stupid and stubborn. Plus I hate the constraint of a neoprene straitjacket on my arms and shoulders.

Wetsuits welcome, of course. We skin
swimmers just like to poke fun.

2. Wearing just a cap, goggles and jammers A guy named Brad Schindler sliced through our wetsuited group and disappeared into the winter mists, returning less than a half-hour later, having swum around an island I had yet to see but have circumnavigated dozens of times since. Before summer ended, Brad became one of only a couple of dozen people to swim the 22-mile length of Lake Tahoe without a wetsuit. Until Brad hit the water that February morning, it never occurred to me that I might be able to swim without a wetsuit. For the next month, for increasing periods after every swim, I splashed about without my wetsuit. After that month, and ever since, I've gone without.

On one of these so-called polar bear swims, I had forgotten my goggles, and was ready to drive home and call it a morning. I solve problems with expeditious caprice, and have to talk myself into taking a moment to think of better alternatives. This time my wife thought of it for me.

"Just go ask someone," she said, through gritted teeth. When I finally did, a guy named Jim Morrill lent me a pair, and I was able to swim.

In quick time I found Jim my opposite in people skills, joining in any and every conversation, meeting new people without a whit of hesitation. Without any evidence that I could swim more than 100 yards, he was excitedly inviting me on swims months and miles from that date. I was willing, but not sure how able.

This is a distant second … first off, we don't confine our
lunacy to Nimbus Flat at the south end of the lake.

On our first rough-water swim of the season in March, I got a third of the way out into a Folsom Lake cove before a wave, and then another, and then another slapped me in the face. I stalled, unable to breathe, then puked water and decided immediately that open water swimming wasn't for me. I had tried, dammit, but it was time to sidestroke back to shore and go home. Then Jim swam back to where I was, asked if I was OK, and said, "Let's just swim 30 strokes, take your time, and see how you feel." I did, and felt better, in control.

"Let's go another 30 strokes," he said, and off we went again. "See?" he said. "No problem, you're doing great." Thirty strokes by 30 strokes, I finished the mile swim. Maybe I'll be back after all, I thought.

I think of that every time I swim, now often by myself in 50-degree water: Here I am, piercing the green, cold peaceful waters, the forests quiet on either side of me, the water a vast sheet of glass, gulls and buzzards lofting overhead, and someone made sure I didn't miss out on this by not letting me quit.

Now Jim is the one with whom I swim most often, when we get the chance. We've swum Aquatic Park, Treasure Island and Keller Beach in the San Francisco Bay.

I swim almost as often with another new partner in lunacy, Stacy Purcell, who's a scientist by heart and profession. Curious what the cold water is doing to us, he has us taking air, water and body temperatures to track trends as the temperatures fall.

I like this, but acknowledge its weirdness. I embrace its weirdness.

This new watery world has brought a lot of new friends. In short time, for example, I'm sure to see, somewhere in the middle of a swim, a body coming toward me at high speed. That'll be Kathy Morlan, one of the fastest open-water swimmers in northern California. She's taking a winter break, having donated a kidney to her son over the Christmas weekend. On top of all her swimming medals, she wins Mom of the Year.

With friends and alone, I have swum from Alcatraz, the nearly three miles of Donner Lake, the nearly five miles of Lake Natoma and long portions thereof, and have swum just for swimming's sake an average of five days a week. We have swum in broiling sun and in sideways rain and in opaque fog. We've swum before dawn and long after the evening sky has reddened and purpled. We have endured rowing crews who can't see us, and ski boats who refuse to. I regret to say I have only gone out beyond the white breakers once, with a group out of Avila Beach. But I plan to change that, and soon. The open water has only made me want more.

Honestly, I enjoy coming out of the water on a December morning and someone on the shore asking, "How can you do that?! How cold is the water, really?"

Next year, I'd like to swim from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, about six miles with the tide. A couple of events have added 10k swims, and I'd like to be able to complete those. I'll swim Alcatraz again, at least once, and the length of Lake Natoma again. Crossing from Catalina Island to the mainland no longer seems impossible. Not next year, but who knows? Someday.
 

Feelin' groovy …

Just not today. I'm home from a 7 a.m. swim in which the surface temperature was 50 degrees F. The swim is never really so bad; it's the uncomfortable shivering after that I can do without. After another cup of hot water and a shower, I'll retrieve my bravado. My goal of swimming Lake Natoma year 'round remains the foremost challenge.

"I want to get stung by a jellyfish," I told Jim, meaning that if I did get stung, it'd be because I'd been swimming in the ocean long enough for the law of averages eventually to attack me. People, learning I'd been stung, would say, "Well, it figures, considering how often you swim in the ocean."

"Trust me," said Jim, a surfer since childhood, "you don't want to get stung by a jellyfish." But he takes my point.

Happy 2012. Find your adventure.

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.