The Blue Million Miles Podcast

*clears throat*It’s always easier not to. Not to write. Not to swim. Not to write about swimming. Easier not to turn left off the state road and descend the mountain to the lake below. It’s not like anyone will ever force you to. The excuses offer themselves too easily. And besides, entropy doesn’t even ask for one, content to carry you down its current, you low-down lazy bum.But here I am. I’ve done it. I’ve come to the water’s edge. Lake Chinnabee. My trunks on. My shirt off. And…my only thought is of turning around. It is March. It is windy. And it is always easier not to. Even at the water’s edge.Chinnabee is a small lake. 17 acres, if that means anything to you. You could achieve the opposite bank in a few minutes’ swim. Quaint. “A pastoral valley of peacefulness” is how the forest service describes it. Sure.It’s smack in the middle of the Talladega National Forest. This is northeast Alabama. The mountains (insofar as that means anything here). The foothills of Appalachia, anyway. That famous trail officially ends 300 miles to the east at Springer Mountain, Georgia. But technically the range continues, or unravels really, across the border here before laying down on the coastal plain below. There’s a movement to extend the trail to Alabama; AT2AL it’s called. A purist’s vision, I guess, to trace the mountains down to the last peak, Mount Cheaha, which is just a few miles east of here, where I stand on the bank of this lake, the end of the end, the southern terminus, thinking about not swimming.Then comes another thought. One that is at once stupid and profound. A holy-fool thought, to which I am too often inclined. This one having to do with time, and how we encounter it. How it shapes us. Namely that these mountains are very old and that it is a wondrous, almost inconceivable thing to be upon them.The geological events that brought about the Appalachian mountains took place hundreds of millions of years ago, and involved great volcanic eruptions, the colliding of continental shelves, the coming together and the coming apart of Pangea. The Appalachians were once contiguous with a range that today stands in Morocco. I’ve just written that, but really I don’t even know what that means. The timespace of these hills, it’s like they’re in some kind of superposition. I’m looking at rock that was once at the center of Pangea, at the center of everything. In a range that is thought to have once been as tall as the Himalayas, the tallest in the world. But time, in this case expressing itself as hundreds of millions of years of erosion and continental drift, has worn it down and spanned an ocean through it.I’d given a reading the night before, which is why I was up in this corner of the state. I’d published a book a few years ago about Confederate monuments and the protest movements to remove them. It had came out in September of 2020, which you might remember as a time of global viral pandemic. So the book tour was virtual. And though I was lucky enough to do a good number of events discussing and promoting the book, they all took place on Zoom. So this reading in March was the first I’d done in person.The writer John Jeremiah Sullivan talks about reading old writing as a kind of vaudeville, an impersonation of yourself. And for me this was doubly so. The book was written years ago now and chronicles events and experiences that took place in the years before that, and what’s more it renders a version of me that is even younger and more naive. I had wanted to trace an intellectual and moral development that took place over the past decade or so on questions of race and equity and how we face the past. And so reading it that night, as good as it felt to read in public and in person, it also felt tired, and a bit uncanny. I didn’t quite recognize myself. Was it me? It was not not me, but also not quite me. Not anymore, anyway. I’d written those words and had those experiences, sure but they’d been so worked over, they’d taken on a worn smoothness. The geological events that led to that book were now so far in the past, the eruptions and subductions worn down through time and repetition. My reading copy of the book dogeared, yellow, exhausted.That project felt finally done. Funny to think that the first proper reading of this book might well also be the last. Point is, I woke this morning with a renewed if belated exuberance to swim and to write and to write about swimming and to turn left off the state road and descend the mountain to the lake below - easier though it may be have been not to.By now I’ve dallied long enough for the sun to get up over the treeline and the wind has tapered off but Jesus it is cold. I am still thinking of not swimming even as I plunge. I surface, turn, float on my back and regard the great dome of the sky.There’s a box turtle on a fallen log up by the marshy banks where a stream feeds the lake. The turtle’s neck is fully extended, as if on a string drawn to the sun above.I feel compelled to nod to the turtle, who acknowledges by presence not at all, and I go back to floating.Whence come the mountains? Whence come the ideas? It occurs to me that this sense of exhaustion I’m feeling can only be cast off by exhausting myself anew. It’s easier not to. But also, of course, worse. I swim to the shore and stand in the sun, drip-drying.That’s when another stupid-profound thought hits me: Sure, this is the southern terminus, the end of the end of the trail, but I need only to turn around and there I’d be at the start once more.I head north up a trail that traces the lake’s feeder stream until, after a mile or so, I come to a waterfall. And there for a time I stand beneath it, letting all that water come down upon me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebluemillionmiles.substack.com

This was supposed to be a love letter. An exaltation. A fanfare for the public pool. I’d call upon the muses, pray they sing of the high dive and the snack bar. The smell of sunblock and laundered towel and chlorinated water evaporating on hot macadam. Of the gutter and the lap lane; the wet sandal’s “thock,” and the belly flop’s “smack.”And this was to be a recitation of its virtues on Independence Day, no less. With neither irony nor pollyanna in mind but rather, to go armed with the sobering knowledge of the country’s fraught past and its perilous moment and still partake of the Republic’s finest achievements: encased meats, cheap suds, and the public pool.Pools make people more legible. People’s needs and desires become harder to repress. There’s the child, so excited by the prospect of a swim, that she cannot help but run across the pool deck, lifeguard’s whistle be damned. And the teenager who, on surfacing from a plunge, cannot suppress that vain little flick of his head. The parents desperate for a place where their adolescent children can while away a few hours. And the lizard need, across ages, just to get some sun. It’s all there, right on the surface, at the pool.So given all that, there was something…unnerving happening at the pool that day. Or, more precisely, happening on the pool’s stereo. There’s no PA system at the Samford Pool. Instead, they have one of those rolly suitcase amps hooked up to someone’s phone. The pool’s small enough — 25 by 50 yards, roughly — that a single rolly suitcase amp can reach the far end of the grounds, no problem. And songs on the stereo that day, the nation’s 246th birthday, well, they certainly had a sense of moment to them.While I rolled out my towel, Lee Brice was singing about driving a dead brother’s truck. “I roll every window down / And I burn up every back road in this town / I find a field, I tear it up til all the pain's a cloud of dust / Yes, sometimes, I drive your truck.” A bit maudlin for the occasion but it sounds like the brother died in service. So, condolences. Tree of liberty, etc., etc.But before I’d finished putting on sunblock, Blake Shelton was singing about how whistling Dixie would get you heaven-bound and promising that “I don't care what my headstone reads / Or what kind of pinewood box I end up in / When it's my time, lay me six feet deep / In God's country.” Which, I mean, c’mon dude. Inane but also just a bummer.Okay, but here was Miranda Lambert to lighten the mood, maybe? Not so: “Whether you're late for church / Or you're stuck in jail / Hey, word's gonna get around / Everybody dies famous in a small town.”Pretty bleak. Isn’t today supposed to be a happy day? Or if you let the algorithm play long enough does it always land in a death wish? I looked around, a little confused, hoping to catch the eye of someone similarly put off. Slow day at the pool, though. Slow enough that the off-duty lifeguards had set up a basketball hoop and were shooting jumpers off the diving board. They seemed unfazed by the tunes. Inoculated, maybe. I hope not.Maybe you’re hearing this and thinking to yourself, “Oh please. Spare me the pointy-headed writer being annoying about country music.” But I love country music. And not just those Terry Allen and Gene Clark re-issues, either. I’ve tried to play music for almost twenty years now and the closest I’ve ever come to entertaining anyone was with a rendition of Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” at karaoke night in an SEC college town. But this alienated, atomized, only-finding-meaning-in-consumer-goods-and-death country? I mean, to quote Greil Marcus: “What is this s**t?”But the songs kept playing.Now, you’re going to think I invented this next song but you’d be flattering my imagination. Every verse of this song is from the perspective of a dead soldier from a different war. But that’s not all. Then — I kid you not — there’s a coda with this whole chorus of the undead singing, “Set our spirits free (set us free) / Let us lay down our guns / Sweet mother Mary, we're so tired / But we can't come home ‘til the last shot's fired.”At this point, I would have gladly listened to “Proud to be an American.” On repeat. I would have even considered letting Lee Greenwood give me a lobotomy. I mean, we live in a society, don’t we? Might we hope for better? What irrepressible thing was the pool revealing today on the rolly suitcase speaker? That we might only hope for death.No, but wait. Here was Zac Brown. Zac Brown, with a voice like James Taylor. He might show us a way to reclaim some civic pride even at this late hour of our democracy. Zac, you show us the way, won’t you? And, lo, Zac replied: “Salute the ones who died / The ones who give their lives / so we don’t have to sacrifice / All the things we love / like our chicken fried.”I went to the pool to indulge in some Americana. Maybe I was naive to expect anything less.Still, this soundtrack to a small town death wish felt like a betrayal. Not just of country music — which, at this best, celebrates and ironizes rural life with a kind of pathos and wit not at all in evidence that day — but, more to the point, a betrayal of the Samford Pool. Which is to say it felt like a betrayal of public life. Of even the possibility of public life. The Samford Pool is run by the city and it sits right behind the public junior high school. Which really makes it the hub of public life in Auburn (such as it is). It’s the most integrated place, by class and race, in this southern town. It’s cheap to get in. It’s well maintained. Its only shortcoming, really, is a lack of shade. At its best, it embodies the democratic enterprise — the idea that we might be more than consumers and candidates for the reaper, but citizens, too. That we might collectively endeavor to improve our lives by, in this case, providing a place for children to run on the pool deck, for teenagers to flick their heads, and for us all to get some sun.And part of the premise of this swimming project is to go out beyond my door and find something vitalizing. So on the Fourth, I wanted to get my Walt Whitman on, and find that vitality in the public sphere. I wanted to find a meaning that came somewhere other than the specter of death.Matthew Sitman touches on this idea in a recent essay calling for renewed civic culture. Sitman looks to the New Deal for instruction: “Franklin Roosevelt and his administration understood that despair could be countered and democracy fortified by a kind of social infrastructure…They built theaters and public pools and commissioned murals to beautify public spaces…They were also public goods that brought people together, and were ways of making communities easier to feel a part of and entertainment and culture enjoyable for more than the rich.”And, on the flip side, we might read the closing of so many public pools in response to the gains of the civil rights movement as a tacit understanding by conservatives of the democratic power of the space.So, all to say, I had harbored a small hope that, even in this eleventh hour, the muses might sing of something other than the inevitability of our demise.But if only I would wrest my attention away from the music, they were doing exactly that, all around. Singing of gainers off the diving board, of shoulder tans turning the corner into sunburns, of my own daughter holding tight to a pool noodle and flailing her legs in something beginning to approximate a flutter kick. More people had arrived, the deck chairs filled, a hive hum of the group fortifying the air against the rolly suitcase amp.A counter-melody to the algorithm, singing that for whatever its worth, for as long as there remains a collective will and the water to fill it, there is the public pool. Sing o muse.Before we left that day, I needed a tonic, something to jar me from the malaise on the stereo. I decided to go off the high dive, something I hadn’t yet done this summer. The climb up seemed higher than I’d remembered. My stomach fluttered. So without delay, I ran off the board and into the air. And much sooner than I’d expected the water had risen up to meet me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebluemillionmiles.substack.com

Welcome to the Blue Million Miles: Dispatches from a Swim Through Alabama. You can listen to an audio version of this intro post above or you can read it below — they’re the same, give or take a field recording and music by the Skull Island Inquirer.Like all the best swims do, my first this year came spur of the moment. This was a few months back, late March. After one of those Zoom calls. If you’ve ever Zoom-ed then surely you know the kind I’m talking about. The rare experience that might justify the use of a word like ennervating. Anyway, after I hung up, I realized there was a window of time before I had to go pick up my daughter. Typically when that happens, I fill the time by crawling under my desk and groaning.You might hear that and think that I must have been in a bad place. I’m not sure that I would say that, though. I wouldn’t say I was much of anywhere, really. Not fully oriented to time and space. Maybe you’ve felt something like that lately? An… uncanniness? The latency of the video call carrying over, off-screen. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s that I work in a basement office with no windows, and I’d been sitting there for months, trying — and mostly failing — to track down sources for a story, hearing every variety of “This phone is no longer in service.” (which, by the way, there are way more variations than I’d imagined or ever really thought possible.) Maybe it’s that the past two years have taken a toll on me that I haven’t really admitted to yet, haven’t worked through. And I haven’t slept or written much lately, leaving my sense-making faculties at an all-time low. So okay maybe it is just me. Maybe. But also maybe not? Doesn’t something just seem a little off? The number you have dialed is no longer in service.Which, I mean, go figure. You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to try and account for the bad vibes, as it were, the strangest of the moment — one of illness, neglect, death, insurrection, war, despair, collapse, isolation. And it’s like the weight of all that, it exerts a gravity, creates its own tide, and we’re caught in it, headed out to sea.I feel that, anyway.But so that day, after the video call, for whatever blessed reason, instead of my usual brooding, drifting, I thought to go swimming instead.There’s a state park on the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, that park has a lake. That lake has a roped-off section for swimming. And, that afternoon, I had the place to myself. I walked through the shallows until the water came to mid-thigh then I plunged, dolphin kicking for as long as my breath would hold. I surfaced out by the rope. This was March, but, you know, Alabama March — the water was already bathwater warm in parts, still bracing cold in others. I paddled an easy, aimless breaststroke for a time, admired a scrim of pollen on the water’s surface, watched the clouds above glide into the tree line. I climbed onto the concrete jetty just to be able to dive into the water again. I couldn’t tell you how long I was out there. Time had escaped me, but for once it was welcome.Two years ago, while I was waiting for Ozzie to be born — Ozzie, that’s my daughter’s name — I sat down to write her a letter. Or, if not a letter, exactly, just…I wanted to set down on paper what I knew about life. Epiphanies. Insights I’d gleaned. Some fatherly advice.I had one pearl of wisdom off the top of my head. Once, while we were having dessert together, my father looked at me from across the picnic table and observed that I had come to know one of the deep truths of the universe: that you should always let your Klondike bar melt a bit before eating.So I wrote that down. Let the Klondike melt a little. Got it.Okay. But what else? Huh. I bit my knuckle. Doodled. Did I really have nothing else to impart? I had to stand and pace the room in order to beat back the antsiness that turned to panic that turned to dread about the person I’d become, the life I’d squandered. How unqualified I was to be responsible for another life, a young innocent child who may not even like Klondike bars.Then, with forehead-slapping clarity, it came to me. I sat back down and wrote this sentence:You should swim whenever the opportunity presents itself and you should live in such a way that you’re creating those opportunities with regularity.And…that’s it. I’m looking at that page in my diary right now and that’s all I wrote down: Let the Klondike bar melt and swim whenever possible. And you know what? Looking back, I stand by it.Do you know that Loudon Wainright tune? “The Swimming Song”? This summer I went swimming, it goes. This summer I might have drowned. But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around. Love that song. Find yourself in deep water and there’s nothing to do but swim. You’re weightless, buoyant. Like you’re on another planet. Or back where you were when you first came into this one.That afternoon in March, when I finally clambered out onto the bank, I was goose-pimpled and humming. Glad I’d taken my own advice for once. And so it was with soggy shorts and an idiot grin I hadn’t worn in some months that I went to pick up my daughter from daycare.There’s a book by the environmental writer Roger Deakin called Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain. Published in 1999, the book chronicles a series of swims in the rivers, ponds, pools, and seas throughout the country, with digressions into memoir, natural and cultural history. For Deakin, swimming — wild swimming, that’s what they call there (say what you will about the English, they know how to turn a phrase) — was a subversive activity, one that allowed you to “regain a sense of what is old and wild…by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official versions of things.” It affords a “frog’s-eye view” of the world, as he put it. If you’re in search of something, wild swimming’s not a bad way to go looking for it. About a decade after Waterlog was first published, Joe Minihane, a freelance writer in London, retraced Deakin’s steps, revisiting the swimming holes documented in Waterlog. Those trips became the basis for Minihane’s own book, Floating: A Life Regained. As the subtitle might suggest, wild swimming became a balm for Minihane’s anxieties about work and life.No surprise, maybe, that I related to Minihane — saw my anxieties about how to work, how to write, how to move through the world reflected in his own. Did I see the spine of his book on my shelf that afternoon when I knocked off early and hit the lake? Not consciously, but the mind is funny like that.I mention those two swimmers, those two writers, those two books because this summer I’m going to take my own advice and follow in Deakin’s and Minihane’s footsteps — err, breaststrokes: I’m going to swim through Alabama, seeking out the best swimming holes the state has to offer — Appalachia foothills to Mobile Bay; Double Spring to Wildwood Shores. I’m gonna hold my breath and kick my feet and move my arms around.And I’ll chronicle those trips here.I should say: I’m not a southerner by birth. I don’t carry the weight of that particular circumstance. But this summer starts my tenth year living here — the longest I’ve lived anywhere. I love it here. And hate it, too. And, for better and for worse, the place has had a profound impact on me, my work, and my understanding of my place in this country. I apprenticed as a writer here and wrote my first book here — a book about this state and its tortured past. I fell in love here, got married here, became a father here, and am raising my child here. So, I keep asking myself, where am I, exactly? What’s it like to be here, now? Is there a there still there? What’s become of this place? What’s it becoming? I don’t want to retreat from life. I want to get back out in it. A meander through its waterways seems as good a way to do it as any.If you’ve spent any time in Alabama, it might seem self-evident that someone would want to seek out the best swimming holes here. If you haven't spent much time in Alabama, the notion that you’d want to do much of anything here might seem strange. But despite its national reputation as a shittown, a backwater, Alabama is also a place of staggering beauty. One of the most biodiverse places in the country. And it’s full of choice swim spots. Or, you know, the ones that haven’t been ravaged by chicken plant runoff and coal ash.So I’m off to go see what I can see; swim where I can swim. You can follow along here, every other Monday. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebluemillionmiles.substack.com