On this beautiful summer morning, I joined about 200 other swimmers for the Greenwich Point Mile Swim. Finished at 24:46.
Salty Orientation
While swimming yesterday to Gull Island during the late afternoon flood, I thought about orientation. Much of my recent scholarly work has focused on the challenge of orientation at sea in the early modern period, when the problem of landlessness caused many ships to arrive at places they’d never intended, including the bottom of the sea. The sun and stars helped, except on cloudy days, but mainly for latitude only, at least until the invention of Harrison’s marine chronometer in the 18c.
Being in the water rather than on it changed the kinds of data I could use to find my way across warm, slightly choppy waters to and from the island. I did use the sun’s glare, visible beneath the surface, by steering into it on my way back. But I also timed my swim through the gradual increase in the height of the swell, as I got farther away from the shelter of Kelsey Island, and also a dramatic change in water temperature. Once I finally cleared the wind shadow of the island — the wind was a bit west of south yesterday — the cooler water from out in the Sound blew in, and all of a sudden the temp dropped at least two degrees. It felt good, actually, to swim the last 300 yards or so in cooler, faster-feeling water, even though the swell was up too.
It made me think about things like color and salinity and depth and temperature, all roughly measurable by early modern mariners. Even if they didn’t have good thermometers yet — Robert Fludd may have built one in the 1630s, and Galileo at least knew how in theory, but I’m not sure when they first appeared on boats — one thing I proved to myself yesterday is that human flesh is a decent enough rough temperature gauge. There are all sorts of physical properties of water that can help place humans in the watery element.
Which makes the human body itself a kind of oceanic orientation device, an awkward and inefficient one, perhaps, but really we’re not very good at measuring or locating ourselves on land either.
Books about sailors’ craft, early modern and more recent, talk about “feel” and a mariner’s intuition. Maybe we need to take this sort of seamanlike feel more literally?
Swimming to Gull Island
Here’s a google map of my summer high tide swim. I start at Johnson’s beach, the cover at the center-left of the image. I swim along the shore roughly eastward until I get to the point where the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox used to live in the 19c, then strike out for the uninhabited Gull Island, which you can see in the center-right of the image.
I imagine it’s about 1 – 1.5 miles round trip. About 30 minutes swimming time. As the water gets warmer, I might try some longer swims in and around Branford.
The Gulf Stream
Here’s an image of Ben Franklin’s map of the Gulf Stream, the ocean current Matthew Fontaine Maury famously called “a river in the ocean.”
It moves roughly 500 times as much water as the Amazon, and when it cools in the North Sea, its sinking brings nutrient-rich colder water up to the surface. (The Gulf Stream’s waters, like most tropical waters, are nutrient-poor and therefore clear.)
I’m reading an interesting book of popular science right now, The Gulf Stream by Stan Ulanski of JMU. Eventually I’ll write an article on the cultural poetics of this ocean current and its massive impact on early modern relations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. More later.
“No two people can understand each other”
Says Nina to her father Almayer at the turning point of Conrad’s first novel, which I listened to the audio of while driving from SF to LAX last week. She’s about to abandon him to a lonely existence on a bend of a Bornean river — probably northeastern Borneo, Kal-Tim, on the Mahakam River, it appears — so that she can flee with her Balinese prince. Almayer’s great hope was to make one last financial strike, perhaps find Rajah Laut’s gold mine, and then present Nina to Europe. She’d rather go to Bali.
In many ways the plot reads like a rehearsal for the second half of Lord Jim, with the addition of Almayer himself and a happy ending for the multi-ethnic couple. (Jim, I suppose, is his own Almayer as well as Prince Dain.) A young novelist in 1895, Conrad balances his dark visions of human insufficiency with the storylines of romance.
Conrad wrote a trilogy about Rajah Laut and Indonesia — Laut, a fictional white rajah along the lines of James Brooke of Sarawak, was Almayer’s patron, and he figures in the other novels as well — The Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Rescue (1920).
Avery Aquatic Center
One highlight of the West Coast swing that’s been keeping the Bookfish quiet was a swim last Wed at Stanford’s Avery Aquatic Center with the Master’s Swim Program there. I swam in the 10-lane, long course, deep water practice pool with about 25 other folks in the 1 pm practice, one of three held that day. I’ve never swum in an Olympic-caliber facility before, & it’s pretty amazing.
Coach Tim, who very kindly let me join the group as a visitor since I don’t yet have a US Masters card, ran us through a bunch of drills I’ve never done before. “Vertical flutter kick” is what it sounds like, and also combined with spins from the hips every 3 seconds to work on the long stomach muscles that cant the torso from side to side. Also a 15m “forward arm travel” kicking on my side after each turn on a 300m set.
Swimming long course — 50m rather than 25 yards — puts you in a much better rhythm, much more concentration on how you move through the water. I wonder if there’s such a pool anywhere in CT? Maybe at UConn — though part of the fun was also being outside, which of course we aren’t likely to have for east coast training.
Something else to put on my West Coast itinerary for next year, and all the years to come.
Nothing but takes
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.
I don’t want to write anything but takes.
Those lines from the great Julio Cortazar have been swirling about in my mind since reading some fine meditations on writing by Jeffrey Cohen and larvalsubjects. Still swirling as I gear up for my own summer writing — metis, poetry, swimming, air, brown ecologies…
Cortazar gives us the abandon, risk, and play that fuel the manic act of writing. Listen to his words — danger, pleasure, risk, love, flight, imperfection. The joys of not knowing exactly where you’ll end up.
I think I need to re-read Cronopios and Famas.
Blue Empire
Capitol Hill Oceans Week
Got back last night from moderating a great discussion of recent oceanic books — here’s the video — at CHOW, Capitol Hill Oceans Week. It was an unusual chance for me to rub shoulders professional with oceanic folks very different from my usual crowd of humanists and literary scholars. The rooms were full of scientists, foundation and NGO employees, and a few DC political activists or think tank types.
I’ll write a later post on the five books we talked about in my panel — At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, Demon Fish, Four Fish, Seasick, and Cold — but for now I want to think about how scientists & humanities types might think together.
The gala dinner featured a bunch of creative speakers — cartoonist Jim Tommey, creator of Sherman’s Lagoon, two prolific IMAX filmakers and surfer from Laguna Beach who have a new One World One Ocean foundation, which by being at the dinner I think I’ve joined, which looks like fun — but the headliners were power brokers. Two Senators spoke, Mark Begavitch from Alaska and John Kerry, each of whom paid tribute to the late Ted Stevens, who received a Lifetime Oceans award largely due to his work on the Fisheries Act, though an old photo revealed him to have been a CA longboarder back in the 50s. He was not really an environmentalist, and was quite hostile to marine sanctuaries — but it was a nice bipartisan event.
The most interesting talks besides the Author’s Coffee I moderated included a rant from a North Carolina-based fisherman who insisted, against the scientists present, that the mid-Atlantic region was drastically underfished at present, a young Aleut from Bristol Bay trying to build support to keep a massive open pit gold mine away from the mouth of the Yukon, and someone from the Island Institute in Maine, where I’ll be in October, who’s been working to save the working harbors of her state, in part by following the model of Community Supported Agriculture. Also some grim news about loss of land to flooding in the Eastern and Western Shores of Maryland that I’d not known about. I also met a great bear-like man from Alpena, Wisconsin, who did 122 volunteer dives in Lake Michigan last summer for the Thunder Bay Sanctuary and its cold, clear, wreck-rich waters.
More thoughts later on humanities and the sciences.
Oceans Week in DC
This Wednesday, June 8, is, as you all know World Oceans Day. If you’d like to watch me moderate a panel on recent ocean-themed books as part of Capitol Hill Oceans Week, you can watch the event live here. My panel is 8:30 – 10 am on Wed.
To see the books we’ll be talking about, go here.
For a list of other events, go here.
Happy Oceans Day!
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