A Lake Swimmer’s Guide to Pandemics
BY KIM FAHNER
Photo by Patrick Lalonde/Unsplash.
Lake swimmers will know the undeniable pull of any visible body of water when it’s viewed from the car window as you’re speeding down a highway. Hiking in the woods can lead a lake swimmer to start to salivate, to quietly assess the geography of the shoreline, to figure out where the best place is to slip into the water. You never expect a sand beach, and you usually don’t want one. Life isn’t a sandy beach, so rocky entry points are best suited for the health of the extended metaphor. If a lake swimmer is walking with a non-lake swimmer, all this goes on inside their mind—silent and secret—with sharp eyes and mind, sometimes managing a conversation even as the walking partner thinks the lake swimmer is paying close attention.
You can come to lake swimming rather late in life, as I did, coming to it after losing a significant amount of weight. As I shed the pounds of gained anti-depressant weight, I found myself less bothered by the shape of my body. I kept thinking, “I should go back to swimming. I used to really love it.” Finally, a few years ago, I felt confident enough to go and buy a bathing suit. Tankini. Not one piece, but also definitely not a bikini. So. A compromise between over-exposure and modesty. A middle ground. That is the beauty of the tankini.
There’s a black and white photo of my grandmother that was taken in her 20s, somewhere along the shores of Lake Ramsey. She’s wearing an old fashioned black bathing suit, the 1930s kind that has a basic style and which makes her look like she’s dressed in a strange fabric box that ends just at the top of her thighs. All of the girls in the photo wear the same type of suit. They sit in little clusters, perched on a rocky shore, birch and pine trees in the background, looking over their shoulders at the invisible person holding the camera. Who holds the camera? This is what I wonder. My mother’s family is gathered, towels spread out over Sudbury’s black rocks, everyone looking relaxed and happy.
Later in her life, in her seventies, I was always amazed at how my grandmother took to the water with a real sense of glee. She loved all of us dearly, but she especially loved the two sets of relatives who had backyard pools, and would do her lengths there in the mornings, if she was visiting. What I remember most about her is that she would often enter into the water with a smile, saying, “Refreshing! So refreshing!” In my mind, twenty-three years after her death, I can still hear her saying that and laughing surprisedly at her own reaction to the water temperature. Still, she swam, not minding cooler temperatures, and taking great joy in the weightlessness of water until her early eighties, before she fell ill.
Rule #1: Never swim when the sky is coloured in with rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning. Always check the weather forecast to see if you can manage to ascertain a storm-free time that best suits your swim safety. You can swim in the middle of a summer rain (and who doesn’t want to do that because it’s very poetic?), but you should never go into the water when the sky is more alive and petulant. To do so would be to tempt Fate, and Fate is a fickle mistress they say.
Now, in my late forties, when I swim in the early morning, I always say “Oh my God! So! Cold!” if it’s even a smidgen below 23C. Anything around 19C means that I’m going to wear a wet shirt. When I do that, I float along the surface of the water, pushing harder to move through the lake with my arms and legs, but enjoying the way I feel—so buoyant—my body lifted from beneath by some force that I can’t quite understand. Either way, with or without a wet shirt, I feel as if I’m swimming into a painting. Whether it’s sunny or raining, I am lost to the sole intent of slipping into the water, forgetting that this is the summer of the pandemic. When I swim, I am like a bird in the sky, freeing myself from what happens on land.
In the water, there is no virus. Gravity doesn’t reign here, and neither does Covid-19. For an hour, while my body tires itself out with this repetitive motion, I can focus on my strokes—on how my legs, feet, arms, and hands work together in synchronicity. I etch out asterisks with my body as if they are marginalia in the spare white space of a printed page. I swim into a ribbon of sunlight that glimmers on the surface of the water, heading towards the sound of a loon call at dawn. This, I often think, is what it must feel like to enter into a Group of Seven painting. This, too, I imagine, must be the only place where I can escape the pandemic.
In the water, there is weightlessness. In the water, there is respite, beauty, and hope.
Rule #2: You must remember that, sometimes, you will come upon the leaves of water lilies, or long pieces of weeds. I call the weeds "ribbons." Still, they can startle you if you aren’t expecting them, so you need to be mindful. Branches are a whole different story…
Today, I could see a flutter on the surface of the water. Slight ripples, but not much else at 7:15am. The tiniest of little white butterflies. There, struggling against the slightest of ripples, was this tiny thing, just trying to find its wings. My friend Nancy swam ahead, not even knowing what I was up to off to the side.
In Irish folklore—my mother’s ancestral line being rooted in names like Ennis, Kelly, Power, and Delaney—a white butterfly is symbolic of a person’s soul. Since the 1600s, killing a white butterfly has been considered—in many parts of Ireland—to be a sin, even a crime. (How anyone would know if you killed one would be the question, but, if you are of Irish descent, you know that you don’t mess around with “the stories.”) After all, to encounter a white butterfly is to say hello to the soul of someone you’re likely related to, someone who has arrived to pay you a visit. This visitation is a gift, so you would naturally want to try to save such a tiny thing.
I swam over, reached out my left hand, scooped it under the fluttering thing, let it find its space to rest.
“Nancy? I’m just going over there…” I shouted it at her, knowing my voice would carry more loudly to shore, rather than to her, the wind picking it up and tossing it aside.
“What? What are you doing?” She couldn’t hear me, put her hand up to her ear to say so. “With what?”
“A butterfly! It’s a white butterfly! I’m going to swim it over to Margaret’s dock, leave it there, and hope its wings dry so that it can fly away!” Nancy just laughed, shaking her head.
I swam awkwardly then, mindful of hoping the pace of my swimming wouldn’t mistakenly push the little butterfly off my hand. Able to rest now, it no longer struggled, but was like a piece of bent origami in the boat of my palm. The only thing that told me it was still alive was a slight shiver of wings, a twitch of its antennae. After what seemed a very long time, I made it to Margaret’s dock, hefted myself up onto it, and placed the butterfly on the far right edge. “Now, listen here…just rest until your wings dry…and then go where you need to go.”
“One hundred yards, I think!” Nancy guessed afterwards, shaking her head at me on the dock. “You swam one hundred yards with your hand raised up out of the water, just kicking your legs and using your right arm to push you along. It was…quite amazing to see…and all for a moth…” Astounded, that someone would carry a tiny white butterfly across the water of Long Lake.
“It wasn’t just a moth. It was a white butterfly. Someone who came to visit me…”
That morning, I sent Margaret a message on Facebook to tell her the story, hopeful that she would understand and go down to see if the butterfly had managed to fly away. She wrote back, later in the day, “Your friend has flown. You can breathe easy now.” Margaret got it. She has Celtic blood in her, too.
Rule #3: You should be mindful of the currents in a lake or river. You wouldn’t think there would be currents in a Northern Ontario lake, really, but there are. They can look to be really subtle on the surface of the water, but then be quite rough underneath.
It was the summer of 2018 that brought me to rediscover my childhood love of lake swimming. I was living in Kingsville, Ontario, that year—taking time away from formal classroom teaching to work on researching and writing my second novel, which is partly set in Southwestern Ontario. Throughout the summer months, I came home to Northern Ontario once or twice. The times I came home were good visits, to check on my house and to see a few close friends. My friend Nancy lives on the edge of a beautiful lake that sits on the outskirts of Sudbury. I was home during a heat wave, so she invited me for a morning swim with her friend, Kirsti. These two had been swimming together for over twenty years, so to be invited into that pairing—as a weaker swimmer—was an honour. They had measured out the long distances they had swum and the time spent swimming, and fashioned it into an equation of days spent in the water—at Long Lake—from June until sometime in mid-September. Their cut-off point for swimming—for temperature—is always 18 or 19°C. Below that, and it’s time to mourn the loss of summer and welcome the arrival of fall. That these two swimming women let me join them felt like I’d been given a secret password to a special door. For me, it would soon blossom into a love affair with water that I hadn’t even known I had been missing. It was, I think, a bit of divine timing, to have found the water, and my swimmer’s body, in my late (and very perimenopausal) 40s. To swim with two wise and witty women was—and always will be—a bit of divine timing.
Deciding to come back home to live here permanently in December 2018 meant that I could look forward to a full summer of swimming at Long Lake. That first summer of morning swims was exploratory, but the summer of 2020 would be the time of looking forward to swimming as a way to escape the stress of the pandemic. Quarantined from mid-March, when the temperature finally rose to 21C in mid-June, I trundled down to Nancy’s house to start swimming again. In an early July heat wave, I began to swim twice a day, but soon realized that my knee was protesting. I am 49 now, turning 50 before the arrival of the next new year. Perhaps it is just to be expected, but the meditative nature of the various swimming strokes calms me when I most need to just be in the moment rather than worrying to get ahead of myself. The pandemic has taught me many lessons, one of which is that I need to be physically active to stop myself from being too much in my head. Swimming in the times of the pandemic has taught me other lessons, ones that dovetail to the minutiae of life as we now know it: nothing is certain, but there are times when we can float and try to breathe through things that are more difficult.
Rule #4: Swimming into a lake full of rougher water, into whitecaps or swells, is something that might seem daunting at first, but which really isn’t all that bad when you start to think about it. You can’t avoid stormy weather, but you can mind what’s headed towards you. Not always, but most times, you can sense what’s coming for you, emotionally. If you struggle against the water, against any ripple or wave, then you’ll likely just make it worse for yourself. That old saying, “What you resist persists,” is tried and true for a reason.
Yesterday’s swim was one that took me into a silvered sky and lake. Before rain and thunder, but still I felt called to go, to submerge myself in ‘something greater than.” In this pandemic year, which will be a footnote in human history someday, there are only certain things that can soothe this troubled heart. There are the trees, yes, that arch overhead and shelter me with their leaves. There are the rocks, too, that let me sit upon them and think of what came before this.
What came before? I ask myself this. What’s been lost?
Before, there was a family that was large and full of love, but now too many have died, disappearing over the last twenty years at a rapid rate that was unexpected. Big Irish Catholic families die off quickly, and in waves. Before that, there was a family history—from Pembroke, and then of moving northward and being rooted in a rough landscape shaped by rocks and mines. It was a bleak contrast to the greens of the Ottawa Valley, and of Ireland before that. To have come across the sea, after a famine, and to end up here, one wonders why and how and “What were they thinking, then?”
My dead relatives traveled much less frequently than my own generation would—with the marked exception of my twin great-aunts who undertook one momentous pilgrimage to the holy sites in Ireland while they were in their seventies. The promise of possibly seeing Our Lady at Knock in Mayo was too seductive for them to resist. I can still recall a conversation at the kitchen table in the Kingsmount house my great-grandfather had built in the 1940s.
“We got the holy water, and we prayed the rosary, but she didn’t come to see us!” That they even considered trying to hike part way up Croagh Patrick still amazes me. “We thought about it. There was a very old woman, that day we were there, and she had walking sticks, and bare feet, if you can imagine! Can you imagine!? She would have been cleared of all her sins!”
In my life, I traveled to Ireland, England, and Scotland three times before my parents died. After they died, there was a new life of travel, of getting on planes and seeing new things, of going beyond what had been set out for me. It was all adventure and exploration. There were Russian domed churches next to painted canals in St. Petersburg; women in babushkas and beige trench coats; open faced sandwiches in the restaurant at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside of Copenhagen. And there were visits with koalas in Australia, and time amidst the beauty of Rotorua in New Zealand. Beyond that, the places where my heart most sings—the west of Ireland and the beauty of Newfoundland. There, in Ireland, the images of long bog roads that lead to the sea, of sea pinks that bloom against the edges of cliffs, of sunsets that sink into the Atlantic so beautifully that you weep without knowing it’s happening. And in Newfoundland, the majesty of the icebergs in late May, sailing off the coast and shaping and reshaping themselves as they go, and the dips and dives of puffins up in Elliston on a warm spring day.
These, though, are all things from the “before times,” the time that was lived before the virus arrived. Will there be an “after”? No one seems to know. In the midst of this new time, of a too brief summer trapped inside the strange amber of a global pandemic, there is the gift of swimming long distances in lakes I have known only in a cursory fashion since I was a little girl. In the moment of it, in the sweep of arms wide around me, and of the kicking of legs and feet through navy blue water in early mornings, there is strength and peace. Now, as a woman, there is a depth I didn’t know was possible.
Rule #5: You should not swim immediately after eating something. You must wait an hour to swim after eating. When I was a little girl, I used to think that—if you didn’t follow the ‘no swimming until an hour after you’ve eaten’ rule—you’d be dead for sure.
I am hardly the best or most efficient swimmer; this is because I am too easily distracted. Put me on the shore of a lake at dawn, or at night, with the stars above me, and I get unbelievably restless inside. It’s like I’m being turned inside out, energetically speaking. Put me on the shore of a lake during a rainstorm, or with a mist just above the surface of the water, and the same thing happens. I am taken by reflections in water, and by ripples, and by movement, and by its constancy in shape and form—even though it is always changing with shifting weather and seasons. Mostly, though, I am taken by the beauty that exists within the natural world. If I hear the call of a loon, I want to swim towards it—sometimes through mist, even—in hopes that I’ll be able to find it and swim next to it. It is, I think, a need for an immersion in the senses that grows with each passing year; the older I get, the more I want to feel the world brush up against my skin so that it leaves its mark on me.
I think of Mary Oliver when I swim. I always think of Mary Oliver when I swim, of how she connected the natural world with the aspects of the numinous. One was intertwined sensually with the other. There was no division. The human is woven into the fabric of the natural world, and then the natural world is woven into something unspoken, divine, and beyond definition.
And then I think of Gwendolyn MacEwen, the noted Canadian poet who often looks out of her author photos with kohl-rimmed eyes, wearing a mysterious kaftan and statement necklace. She was a mystic, an explorer, and a poet. That she died on my seventeenth birthday, on November 29, 1987, was something momentous. But I wouldn’t know her—wouldn’t find her—until years later, until I made my way to university and studied her work closely at grad school.
It is “Dark Pines Under Water” that has always stunned me. I can nearly recite it by heart, if I’m out in the woods or on the shore of a lake. MacEwen’s life was a palimpsest of pain and pleasure, of creativity and genius. She is the one who wrote: “This land like a mirror turns you inward/And you become a forest in a furtive lake.” Memory, she said, is “a row of sinking pines.” Then, in the end, she is prophetic: “There is something down there and you want it told.” In the pines’ reflection on the water, in their tall upside down-ness, MacEwen knew that a person could find herself reflected in the raw beauty of the wilder parts of a Canadian landscape.
She knew that the extended metaphor was one that called for the landscape to reflect an internal world that was cerebral and creative, but that was also wild and untamed—almost demanding to be mapped out. She longed for adventure:
“Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for.”
You did not intend to come here, but once you arrived, there’s no way that you could avoid engaging with the story that you knew needed to be told. And, to be honest, no one said that story would be easily told in a pandemic time, but tell itself it would…
Rule #6: Breathing is the most important thing. If you fill up your lungs with breath, with air, then you will float. If you breathe in deeply before you enter a lake, then you will be able to take a minute to ask it for its permission. Always ask permission to enter into a lake. This is about consent. Ask for that gift with an open heart and mind. If the lake wants you to come in, you’ll feel it inside your body.
I alternate breaststroke, sporadically, with sidestroke and backstroke. Each one has its own particular glory. Breaststroke makes me feel balanced and symmetrical, sliding across the surface and looking towards the horizon. Sidestroke lets me kick harder somehow, but, if well managed, means that I can also stare longingly at the tinier houses on the lake’s shore. Not for me the big monster houses, but I look instead for the ones that are older, tucked in and back, with less showy decks and docks. I like character and history. Sidestroke lets me peer into people’s lives and imagine what they’re like. Backstroke is just as lovely because it lets me watch the clouds chase one another, or else turn my head slightly to see the feathered green of a tree serrate itself against the bright blue of a July sky. Any of the three strokes works and will get me the 1km to and from Nancy’s dock each morning. Afternoons lack the stillness that morning offers, so I prefer that lake’s silent, silvered mirror to the rush of later parts in the day. In mornings, there are paddleboarders and kayakers, but no other swimmers…except for those hidden beneath us, and those creatures who fly through the air—the kingfishers, ravens, tiny white butterflies, lady bugs, and dragonflies.
The breaststroke, they say, is one of the more complex strokes in swimming. Not in my book. For me, the breaststroke is my favourite way of entering into the painting of sky and water combined. With my nose and eyes hovering just above the skin of the lake’s surface, it feels as if I am floating between dimensions. My arms become something other, something winged or webbed. Something magical. Am I, then, human, selkie, or bird? Or, am I someone who can now allow herself to be undefined for a period of time?
In the photograph, there is no pandemic. It is a memory, captured in sepia tones with cursive writing on the back: ‘Alice at the lake.’ A memory. A whisper. A ghost.
In the photo, my grandmother sits perched on a Lake Ramsey rock. She looks over her shoulder towards the camera. In her hands, a leaf, a twig, or something that keeps her fingers busy while she thinks. In the photo, my grandmother has a face that reminds me of mine. She is beautiful. She has eyes that peer into yours, if you let them, and she has stories that she has yet to live, and some that probably needed telling even then.
In another photo—from that same day or some other, there is a towel next to her on the rock, pooled up at her feet. She reminds me of myself, perched on a rock and caught up in her thoughts.
She looks out to the water:
In the water, there is weightlessness.
And, in the water, there is respite,
beauty,
and hope.
KIM FAHNER lives and writes in Sudbury. Her most recent book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac Press, 2022). She is the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of The Playwrights' Guild of Canada. She may be reached at www.kimfahner.com