The countdown to a fine season of swims

May 31, 2023

It has been seven months, almost to the day, since I took my last swim at The Big Eddy, a swirling opening between flights of rapids on the Spokane River west of town. From June to October it has been my near-daily swimming spot on the river for the past 15 years or so. (That’s me, below, from a photo my son took moments before a June plunge a decade ago.)

I grew up in the tropics, so it was a radical event to learn, with my body, that not all water is 75 degrees. The shock of diving into water much, much colder than it ever is in Panama requires a certain amount of stoic resolve and acceptance, at least for the minute or so it takes to adjust to the utter lack of warmth.

At some point, in early to mid-October, it becomes formidably cold (I wear a swim cap, but not a wetsuit) and I retreat until something like summer returns the following year. Sometimes an early snow delivers the memo that it’s time to put the swim gear away. Especially at my age (I’m 66 now) a lot can happen in seven months (i.e. melanoma this past winter, thankfully caught early) so I’m more wistful about the whole process of waiting to return to the water. I’m increasingly in touch with mortality and give quiet voice to small prayers.

The river is a window into wilderness and diving in means instantly leaving a zone of ordinary obligations and conversations for a realm where nothing ordinary has much sway or application. It’s an addictive form of escapism, but it’s also good for my mental and physical health. I have rheumatoid arthritis; the cold water dampens the inflammation and the internal flood of endorphins is a natural pain killer. I get to swim with beautiful redband trout (including my buddy Oscar, in the photo above that I took while swimming with him last fall). When I’m done, I bike the four miles back to town with the vigor of a teenager.

I lived through a bad fire in November and had to move, even closer to downtown—though still within bicycle range of where I dive in. I’ve had to reshuffle my belongings as part of the transition and discovered, yesterday, that my swim fins didn’t survive the chaos of the fire, although my goggles, snorkel, etc., were safely tucked away. So I get to go fin shopping this week.

As I do every year, I watch the river roar in April and May with the incredible power of the spring run-off from the upper watershed in Idaho. It looks lethal, and it truly is worthy of great respect, in every season but all the more so in the spring. I could describe it, but I’ll just borrow from Spokane author Jess Walter who word-paints the scene this way from his 2020 novel, The Cold Millions:

“I cannot give account of this river except that it was wide and fast, a torrent out of the mountain lake from which it drained, a blast of angry water over hard rock bed, eager to ocean. And even when we emerged in a slower stretch or our boat snagged a tree limb, we could not disembark, for the banks were bouldered or hung with brush and no snag could hold us.”

Calmer waters are now returning as the river returns to its banks. I’m looking forward to my reunion with Oscar and/or his offspring. It’s really only a matter of days now.

Diving osprey

Bull moose in the shallows, last September

Blue-eyed crawfish, near the north bank

Beneath the waves in the rapids

Boulders and cobbles deposited in the river by Ice Age floods

One of Oscar’s buddies, hunting in the rapids

Autumn leaves adrift at the spot where I spread some of my father’s ashes

—tjc