9/11 TIMELINE: Where Were You When?
‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making Guardian
Travellers are skipping the heated pool and rediscovering the pleasures of lakes, rivers, and seas—even in winter. From Slovak Dedinky Pleso to Como Lake
The Subversive Joy of Cold-Water Swimming
In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of Mellis, in Suffolk, and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed moat. It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a willow tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from dragonflies to newts.
In the mid-nineties, Deakin took inspiration from the protagonist of John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”—who traverses his suburban neighborhood pool by pool—and made an aquatic journey around England, Wales, and Scotland, bathing in seas, rivers, ponds, and lakes. Deakin wrote a book about that adventure, “Waterlog” (1999), which has become a classic of British nature writing. His prose is sensuous—“At seaweedy Kimmeridge I mingled with mullet too lazy to move”—and his sense of humor is as dry as his theme is wet. A leech, he observes, keeps changing shape in the water, “looping and stretching out its black stocking of a body, as women do when they’re testing tights for quality in Marks & Spencer.” The book also displays a lively erudition: when Deakin describes a swim off the virtually unpopulated island of Jura, in the Scottish Hebrides, he notes that George Orwell retreated there to write “1984.”
“Waterlog” is subtly political. Deakin was intent on challenging the privatization of once public waters. “The right to walk freely along river banks or to bathe in rivers, should no more be bought and sold than the right to walk up mountains or to swim in the sea from our beaches,” he writes. In one rousing passage, he yells back at censorious river keepers who chastise him for swimming in the trout-filled Itchen, which runs through the grounds of an élite boarding school: “I already felt invigorated after a really first class swim, and now I felt even better after a terrific set-to.” For Deakin, swimming in open waters is a subversive act—a way to reclaim nature cordoned off by capitalism, and to “regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands.”
Deakin died, from a brain tumor, in 2006. A year later, Walnut Tree Farm was bought by a couple, Jasmin and Titus Rowlandson, who have maintained his commitment to ungentrified country living. There is still no central heating in the farmhouse; it is warmed by an Aga stove and an enormous open hearth, over which dinner is typically cooked. Last year, Titus, who restores classic automobiles in the barn, and Jasmin, a jeweller and a painter, began offering overnight stays in two renovated cabins on the property. In early November, I took the train from London to Suffolk, with the aim of swimming in Deakin’s moat. Heavy rain had fallen all morning, sluicing the windows of the train as it rolled through the port of Ipswich. Deakin’s book begins with an ecstatic moat swim in summer rain, amid “water sprites springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface.” A chilly, wet autumn day seemed considerably less enchanting.
By the time I reached Walnut Tree Farm, however, the rain had stopped, and low streaks of pinkish afternoon sun had emerged between torn clouds and the bare branches of sodden trees. After installing myself in the cabin I’d rented—delightfully kitted out with antique furniture, a wood-burning stove, and a well-chosen library—I put on my bathing suit, along with neoprene booties and gloves. Straightening my spine, I headed for the back-yard moat. Sixty feet in length, it had a gleaming black surface strewn with the golden disks of fallen leaves, like tarnished Anglo-Saxon jewelry inlaid with gems.
Descending the rickety ladder, I pushed off into the water and breaststroked to the deepest part, at the center, to avoid entanglement with hidden weeds and roots. The cold was searing. I could feel the muscles of my upper back constricting; my clavicle and upper ribs seemed ready to shatter, and my toes and fingers started to numb, despite my high-tech gear. I swam a few lengths, trying to appreciate Deakin’s frog’s-eye view, though, to the extent that I could identify with a frog, it was with one placed—in the reverse of the fable—in a slowly chilling pot of water, to see if it notices when it starts to freeze to death.
Despite the cold—and despite the two hours it took me to warm up afterward, stoking the wood-burning stove and drinking as much tea as I could handle—my brief swim in the moat was a starkly beautiful experience. I felt fantastic. Deakin swam in the moat nearly every day, except when it froze over, and it was easy to see how he’d got hooked.
I was not the only reader of Deakin to have been seduced in this way. “Waterlog” helped spur the rise of what has become known in Britain as “wild swimming”: wading briefly or churning doggedly in outdoor waters, rather than doing laps in indoor pools. According to the most recent figures collected by Sport England, a group that urges physical activity, half a million people in England are engaging regularly in wild swimming—nearly twice as many as reported doing so just three years ago. Many participants claim that the activity is not only fun but also improves their mental health.
The sport’s attractions can be hard to imagine if your vision of outdoor swimming revolves around sunshine, warm water, fine-grained sand, and a trashy novel to read afterward. Britain has an abundance of “blue space”—a term used to characterize rivers, ponds, lakes, and seas by people who argue for the health benefits of having access to them. There are about forty thousand lakes in Britain, and it’s estimated that nobody in the U.K. is ever more than seventy miles from a stretch of coastline. But British waters are incontrovertibly cold. Sea temperatures rarely creep above twenty degrees Celsius, or sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and England’s freshwater bodies, which are often fed by underground springs, tend to be even chillier. Last year, by mid-October—generally regarded as the end of the outdoor-swimming season—the Serpentine Lido, the designated swimming spot in the Serpentine lake, in London’s Hyde Park, had dropped to the low fifties. The hardiest wild swimmers keep going even when water temperatures fall below freezing; they pack, along with a microfibre towel and a thermos of tea, an axe, for breaking a channel through the ice.
The vogue for outdoor swimming has been fuelled, in part, by the Internet. It’s easy to collect “likes” by posting a photograph of yourself waist-deep in a craggy loch. The British press provides travel advice about the most romantic swimming locales. The Guardian recently gushed about a spot at the foot of Mt. Snowdon, in Wales, noting, “Take a dip here and you are swimming with the Torgoch, a rare type of Arctic char fish that has survived since the ice age.”
In U.K. bookstores, shelves are devoted to the sport. One of the most popular guidebooks is the lushly illustrated “Wild Swim,” by Kate Rew, which offers a variety of suggestions for swimmers lacking a moat of their own. Why not sample England’s deepest lake, Wastwater, in the Lake District, which goes down nearly as far as Big Ben goes up? A telling photograph in “Wild Swim” shows a swimmer in the Blue Lagoon, in Abereiddy, Pembrokeshire; you’d think that the aquamarine water was in the Aegean, if not for the fact that the swimmer is in a wet suit.
Rew is the founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society, which was launched in 2006 and now has close to eighty thousand members. “Swimming is like going on a condensed holiday,” she told me recently. “It has that way of transporting you out of your normal world, and everything else that happens after that is a bonus.” The society’s Web site touches on wild-swimming etiquette (“Be considerate of your effect on other water users such as fishermen/women, boaters, nesting birds”) and offers safety tips, such as what to do if you get caught in weeds (“Slow down, try a modified doggy paddle and gently extricate yourself without kicking or thrashing around”). Rew told me that, personally, she dislikes being cold, and considers British water temperatures an inconvenience, though not a crippling one. “It’s not ideal,” she said. “The water can take your breath away, and you can’t stay in as long as you want to. But you make your peace with it.” She joked about how outdoor-swimming enthusiasts use cheery synonyms for “cold”—“bracing,” “invigorating”—in order to make the activity “seem like something you want to embrace, rather than something you want to shy away from.”
Wild swimming accommodates different levels of engagement. For triathletes, a lake may be just another medium to get through, like a hilly bicycle path, in an orgy of punishing exertion. For more moderate swimmers, a brief autumnal dip in the sea offers an opportunity for a social gathering, with a slice of cake or a nip of whiskey afterward. Rew told me, “Lots of people who love wild swimming barely swim at all. They just get in and bob about a bit. I think it is fantastic to swim any which way you want to—except judgmentally of others.”
The earliest records of swimming in Britain appear in accounts of the invasion of the Romans, in the first century. Tacitus describes Roman soldiers swimming in full armor, and Julius Caesar was said to have been an excellent swimmer. According to Susie Parr, the author of an enlightening volume called “The Story of Swimming,” manuals on military training that were disseminated in the Middle Ages stressed the usefulness of the skill.
In 1587, Sir Everard Digby, a scholar from Cambridge, wrote a treatise on swimming, “De Arte Natandi,” in which he shared techniques for keeping afloat and for getting in and out of water safely. The text, originally written in Latin but translated to English a few years later, was accompanied by woodcuts of nude swimmers performing a series of now unfamiliar strokes. One involved raising one arm and one leg out of the water simultaneously; in another, a swimmer is on his back, kicking his legs, froglike, while cupping his genitals. The strokes that we use today, from the crawl to the breaststroke, were not standardized until the nineteenth century, when England introduced competitive swimming as a sport.
Swimming in the sea became popular in the eighteenth century, and at resorts like Weymouth, in Dorset, bathers were wheeled across the beach in small wooden cabins, then descended down steps into the salty waters with the help of attendants, often women, known as “dippers.” In the Romantic era, swimming became an activity, like wandering across daffodil-covered hillsides, that was thought to offer a potential encounter with the sublime. The development of railways, in the Victorian era, spurred the growth of many seaside resorts, including Ramsgate, in Kent, where, a local reporter noted, “the men gambol about in a complete state of nature, and the ladies frolic in very questionable bathing garments within a few yards of them.”
In the twentieth century, many swimmers shifted to chlorinated pools. Affordable package holidays to resorts in Spain, where the water is warm and the sun reliable, further enticed Britons away from local waters. In any case, many British lakes and seashores had become horribly polluted. In “The Story of Swimming,” Parr reports that, in 1980, the U.K. had no inland waters that met the environmental standards of the European Economic Community’s Bathing Water Directive.
Since then, water quality has improved significantly, which has helped fuel the wild-swimming revival. A practitioner still needs to be choosy, though: a recent investigation by the London Times revealed that eighty-six per cent of the rivers in England contained pollution levels exceeding current E.U. standards. Another factor behind the popularity of wild swimming is its affordability: although you can spend more than a hundred dollars on a wet suit, the only essential equipment is a bathing suit. (Some purists insist, with a nod to historical precedent—and a touch of English-public-school masochism—that wild swimming is best done naked.)
Many enthusiasts join a club, such as the Brighton Swimming Club—the country’s oldest, founded in 1860. It offers swimmers company, which enhances safety, especially when the sea is choppy. It also offers changing rooms with hot showers, a welcome amenity for members after they have stumbled, goosefleshed and wind-whipped, up the shingled shore. Other swimmers assemble more informally. The Salty Seabirds, a loose, mostly female collective, also in Brighton, orchestrates daily meetups through Facebook. Its members descend on the beach in Ugg boots and flapping Dryrobe ponchos, looking like colorful seagulls. After hastily stripping down to their bathing suits, they wade in, and are soon up to their chins.
Others prefer to go it alone, feeling that swimming’s solitary, meditative quality is the best thing about it. Little focusses the mind so well as being in water so cold that, unless you are careful, your breath will literally be taken away. The gasp reflex, as the phenomenon is known, is the strongest argument against suddenly jumping or diving into frigid water, rather than entering it gradually while keeping your head above the surface.
When I moved, about a year ago, to a neighborhood of North London close to Hampstead Heath, new neighbors asked me if I was going to swim in the ponds, which were dug as reservoirs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Soon after the ponds were created, they became informal swimming holes; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dedicated ponds for men and women were established.
The single-sex ponds are fed by the waters of the River Fleet, which once flowed through London but since the nineteenth century has been channelled into an underground culvert. They are cherished, year-round institutions, and inspire an almost cultlike devotion in their users. (A third, mixed-sex pond, on the other side of the heath, is open only in the summer months.) A collection of essays about the Ladies’ Pond, “At the Pond,” was published last summer. It includes a contribution by the novelist Margaret Drabble, who spent time at the pond in the nineteen-seventies with an older lesbian friend who had once been a Cistercian nun. “I don’t think she liked swimming but she liked the ambience, with its strange mixture of permissiveness and purity,” Drabble notes. In another essay, the novelist Deborah Moggach writes, of the pond, that “slipping into its waters is slipping into bliss.” The Ladies’ Pond has been celebrated less reverently by a Twitter parody account, Bougie London Literary Woman: “Doing a recklessly vigorous breaststroke, I have lost my pendant to the Pond. It shall come to settle on the silt, next to my heart, perhaps, which I lost to those murky depths long ago.”
I’m a decent swimmer, having first learned in the unheated outdoor pool of my elementary school. I grew up by the English seaside, in King George III’s favored resort town of Weymouth, which has a wide, sheltered bay, but I swam there relatively infrequently in my youth—only when the warmth of the sun was sufficient to counter omnipresent sea breezes. It was not until I was in my thirties and living in Brooklyn—with Brighton Beach a short subway ride away—that I truly discovered the pleasures of outdoor swimming. Having left one seaside town behind, I found another within New York City—this one offering smoked fish and Czech beer at my favorite Russian restaurant on the boardwalk, where I’d retreat when I’d had enough of the water. But even at Brighton Beach I swam only in the summer, when the city streets were so broiling that I could overlook the murky water and the shreds of Styrofoam bobbing along beside me.
The ponds on the Heath were a different story. On a pleasant day in early May, I made my first visit to the Ladies’ Pond. It was only a few weeks after lifeguards had removed the buoy-strung rope that stretches across the water in the winter, restricting swimmers to a small area close to the dock. The rope goes up on the first day that the water temperature falls below twelve degrees Celsius, or fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit, usually in late October, and stays there until the mercury rises above that threshold. I got changed in an attractive Scandinavian-looking structure, built a few years ago, that includes hot showers. It replaced an older shack that is lamented by some longtime pond swimmers, who regard the showers as a decadence. The other women at the pond that day were mostly middle-aged or older; a few looked as if they might well have hung out there in the seventies, alongside Margaret Drabble. The water had climbed to fourteen degrees Celsius, according to a chalkboard at the water’s edge. A sign warned all comers that the water is cold and deep, and that entry is limited to competent swimmers. From a glass-fronted cabin on the dock, one of two lifeguards who are on duty throughout the year scanned the water watchfully. I descended a metal ladder and pushed off. For the first couple of minutes, I couldn’t stop gasping. I tried to focus not on my pounding heart or my tingling extremities but on the new green growth on the trees that surround the pond, providing swimmers, in summer, with verdant privacy.
Scientists who study immersion in cold water—typically defined as below fifteen degrees Celsius, or fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit—note different stages in the physiological response. During the first three minutes, the skin cools, giving the swimmer the sensation of burning or prickling. This can induce anxiety, but the greater risk comes after a while, when the cold begins to feel almost tolerable. Superficial neuromuscular cooling begins, which can cause “cold incapacitation”: your limbs—particularly your arms, which have a high surface-to-mass ratio—feel too weak to move, and your hands are too numb to grasp a dock or a ladder railing.
Swimmers sometimes worry about hypothermia, in which blood flow, neural function, and cellular metabolism are compromised, leading to a loss of consciousness. However, in temperatures above fifteen degrees Celsius, hypothermia does not set in for at least thirty minutes—by that time, most experienced outdoor swimmers will have long since made it to the shore. In lower temperatures, hypothermia takes less time. The rule of thumb is to spend only as many minutes in the water as the number of degrees, in Celsius. One is less in danger of slowly languishing, blue-lipped, amid the waves, like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic,” than of experiencing “cold shock”—a much more rapid onset of hyperventilation, during which a swimmer swallows and inhales water rather than air, and begins to drown. When cold shock is experienced in combination with other physiological changes, particularly those associated with diving into frigid water, some swimmers can have a heart arrhythmia, which, if there is an underlying cardiac condition, can prove fatal. Occasionally, a drowning at the ponds occurs. Last spring, there was one at the Men’s Pond. A postmortem investigation found that the victim, a local architect, had undiagnosed coronary heart disease, and suffered a heart attack in the water. One of his relatives told the press that he had known the dangers of cold-water swimming, and that “the last thing he would have wanted was for more safety measures to be put in place.”
I continued to swim at the Ladies’ Pond through the spring. A mother duck and her fluffy queue of ducklings circled the pond with me and the other swimmers. We were ignored by the heron that sometimes came to rest, heavily, in the boughs of a tree that bent over the water. Bit by bit, the water temperature rose; by late July, it had reached as high as twenty degrees Celsius, or sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The year-round swimmers tolerated the arrival of fair-weather newcomers: young women in high-waisted bikinis who shrieked as they entered the water, then lounged in the adjacent meadow, where topless sunbathing is the norm. (Although payment of the entrance fee to the pond, of two pounds, is only lightly enforced, lifeguards and other swimmers energetically defend a prohibition on photography.)
When, in September and October, the water temperature began to drop, I brought out my neoprene booties and gloves. I opted for a silicone bathing cap, rather than the woolly hats worn by many ladies at the pond. As the fall grew chillier, the community of swimmers drew closer. Not long after sunrise on a gray Halloween morning, I joined the members of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association for a celebratory swim and breakfast. We huddled on the dock as Jane Smith, a long-serving lifeguard at the pond, reminded us that this was a liminal moment at which the barrier between the living and the dead was particularly thin. She invited us to imagine the generations of women who had swum in the pond before us, and urged us to swim with them. Some members descended into the water in bathing suits and pointy witch hats, breaststroking around like black crows that had taken a turn for the aquatic.
Although special-occasion cold-water immersion is a tradition at the ponds and elsewhere—Coney Island hosts the Polar Bear Plunge on New Year’s Day, attended by thousands of dippers fighting off hangovers—serious cold-water swimmers recommend going in the water at least three times a week, in order to maintain the body’s acclimatization. By early November, my neoprene booties were necessary to prevent the cold of the concrete dock stabbing into my feet like knives. As a cautionary measure, I acquired a neoprene bathing suit, which was sleeveless with a zippered front, and had a dramatic cut suitable for a Bond girl. But, even when the chalkboard showed that the water temperature had dropped to five degrees Celsius, or forty-one degrees Fahrenheit, it didn’t seem worth the bother of putting it on. On such days, I circled the pond briefly, pushing aside the fallen leaves that hadn’t lasted as far into the season as I had. I stayed in just long enough to experience what might be called the smug reflex: the sense of satisfaction that comes from accomplishing, and even enjoying, something that most people would find unfathomably off-putting.
Advocates of cold-water swimming dwell less on its risks than on the health benefits that it allegedly bestows. Anecdotal claims are often made that swimming in low temperatures boosts the immune system, and enthusiasts swear that the mental-health benefits are transformative. A recent documentary about the ponds, broadcast on the BBC, included testimony from swimmers about the mood-elevating properties of a daily dip, or the ponds’ part in sustaining swimmers through cancer treatment or bereavement.
In fact, little research has been done on whether wild swimming benefits one’s mental state, although, according to Mark Harper, a doctor at the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, regular cold-water immersion has been shown to decrease inflammation, which is associated with ailments from pain to depression. In a phone conversation, Harper, a cold-water swimmer himself, explained, “By adapting to cold stress, your response to that cold stress becomes less marked—your blood pressure doesn’t go up as much, and your heart rate doesn’t go up as much. The benefit of that is that you may not react as much to stress in daily life.” Harper believes that even dipping your face underwater can have extra benefits.
It’s harder for a scientist to take empirical measurements of the physical or mental benefits of cold-water swimming than it is to measure, say, those of running, which can be done on a treadmill in a lab. Hannah Denton, a counselling psychologist based in Brighton, overcame practical difficulties by attaching a sound recorder to a tow float, so that she could interview half a dozen devoted practitioners in situ. All Denton’s swimmers were convinced that cold-water swimming was essential to their well-being, but they also all reported having experienced twinges of panic while engaging in it. As one respondent put it, “One minute, you are fine, and then literally the next second it is ‘Shit, I am too cold, I should have got out.’ And it’s literally swim or die.”
Denton’s respondents also noted that the sense of a close, and possibly risky, encounter with the natural world was part of what made the activity appealing. “All your senses get absolutely overwhelmed, and it brings on a bit of clarity,” one of her interviewees said. For people who have experienced trauma, the focus that’s required for cold-water swimming may be helpful, paradoxically, in generating a sense of calm and control. For other swimmers, cold water may offer what Nicky Mayhew, one of the co-chairs of the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond Association, described to me as the appeal of “safe jeopardy”—an excursion into discomfort and extremity for people who, in their daily lives, are fortunate enough to experience little that is discomforting or extreme.
Another problem with researching the effects of cold-water swimming is that any people who do it have clearly chosen to do it, which may well predispose them to think that it’s doing them some good. As Sarah Atkinson, a professor of geography and medical humanities at Durham University, observes in the book “Blue Space, Health, and Wellbeing: Hydrophilia Unbounded,” “An account of experiencing wild swimming might look very different from a less convinced and committed informant group.”
Shortly before dawn one Sunday morning in mid-November, I met Gilly McArthur, an illustrator who lives in Kendal, in the Lake District, a region of northern England much beloved by Romantic poets and wild swimmers. McArthur swims regularly in Lake Windermere, and she had volunteered to take me along, although her real passion is for ice swimming through the Lake District’s frozen tarns, or ponds. As we drove to Lake Windermere, McArthur took out her phone and showed me a photograph of herself taken the previous January, when she resolved to swim in ice every day. In the picture, she was nose-deep in a gray smear of ice and water, wearing glasses and a woolly hat.
McArthur is a member of an informal band of swimmers, the Buoy 13 club, named for a marker moored about five hundred feet from shore. As we descended through the woodland that borders the lake, she told me that usually there were only half a dozen swimmers; this weekend, though, the Kendal Mountain Festival, devoted to outdoor sports and activities, was taking place, and at least forty early risers were gathered at a boathouse and a dock by the water. Some were already down to their bathing suits; others were swathed in cozy robes. It was drizzling, and the air temperature was barely above four degrees Celsius, or forty degrees Fahrenheit. I peeled off my layers of clothing, pulled on my neoprene booties and gloves, and joined the dozens of swimmers wading into the water, which was black and calm. “At least there’s no wind,” McArthur cheerfully noted, as we started breaststroking toward the buoy. The water temperature was about six degrees Celsius, or forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, slightly milder than I had become accustomed to at the Ladies’ Pond. The scenery around us was spectacular, the lake extending north, under leaden skies, toward the brown-backed Langdale Pikes and, in the distance, peaks with a faint touch of snow. I swam on, chatting with McArthur, but within about twenty or thirty feet of the buoy I decided that I didn’t want to overdo it, and urged her to go on ahead of me.
Turning back, I suddenly realized just how far from the dock I’d come. I didn’t feel weak, or even particularly cold, but I pulsed with existential dread. I was conscious of not knowing how deep the black water below me was. There was nothing to hang on to, and only my own arms and legs to keep me afloat. Nobody was nearby. This would be a really stupid way to go, I thought, then reflected that this was probably the precise thought many people had just before suffering the consequences of an unwise, irrevocable decision.
A woman in a knit hat with a pompom was swimming toward me, heading to the buoy. As she drew near, I asked if she would do me a favor and swim alongside me as I returned to shore. A man who had already made it to the buoy and was on his way back swam up beside us. “I’ll swim you in,” he said, reassuringly, and stayed with me as I swam, my anxiety dissipating with each stroke. “There you go,” he said, when I was able to touch bottom again. I clambered out, shivering and shaken—and forever grateful to him, in spite of the fact that, as swimmers like to say, I wouldn’t recognize him with his clothes on.
An hour or so later, my nausea had abated and my teeth had stopped chattering, and I joined many of the Buoy 13 swimmers as they gathered at the town hall in Kendal for the Mountain Festival’s session on outdoor swimming. The event, hosted by Outdoor Swimmer magazine, was packed, with three hundred festivalgoers seated in the lofty Victorian room. The stage was equipped with a lectern and a video screen. The first speaker, Fenwick Ridley, was a tall, burly man with an abundant russet beard and prodigious shoulders. Ridley gave an account of swimming upstream on the River Tyne, in the northeast of England, from the city of Newcastle to Kielder Water, an enormous man-made reservoir in the country. He played a short film that he’d made of the seven-day trip, shot with a GoPro, which showed him struggling with exhaustion as he battled the current, and, in more lighthearted moments, adorning his beard with froth eddying at the water’s edge. Ridley acknowledged that there were times when the swim had felt alarmingly hazardous: there were strong currents, and boat captains did not expect humans to be in the water. “I was really worried, but I was also really excited to see what was around the bend,” he said.
Next up was a Kendal resident called Ben Dowman, who had devised a daylong challenge that combined ninety-six miles of biking through the Lake District with six miles of swimming, in four lakes. He’d needed a support crew with a van, because, though he could carry a wet suit while riding a bike, he could not carry a bike while swimming in a wet suit. The adventure ended with a half-mile swim across Rydal Water, a small, beautiful lake beloved of Wordsworth. When Dowman was done, he crawled, depleted, onto the bank. He recalled, of his swim, “My legs were cramping, and I was lying on my stomach in the water and wondering why my support crew wasn’t coming to get me. Turns out they thought I was savoring the moment, when actually I was just slowly getting hypothermia.”
The final speaker was a woman named Lindsey Cole, who, in late 2018, swam the River Thames dressed as a mermaid. She had strapped her feet into a monofin, as is sometimes used by free divers for a turbo-charged butterfly kick underwater. An iridescent blue-green nylon sheath extended from her waist to the flipper. For warmth, she wore a beige wet suit that matched her skin tone.
Her swim, which was done to raise awareness of plastic and other detritus in the Thames, began near the river’s source, in the Cotswolds. The journey was gruelling, she said, but sometimes surprisingly companionable: people occasionally appeared amid the reeds in the countryside and asked if they could join her in the water. She stayed overnight at pubs. While swimming through Oxfordshire, Cole spotted what she initially thought was a sheet of discarded plastic at the water’s edge, before realizing that it was mooing. She alerted rescue services, who helped the animal to shore. (“drowning cow saved from death by a passing mermaid,” read the headline in the Sun.) Swimming sometimes six hours a day, Cole took more than three weeks to finish the feat; as she reached the end of her journey, in Teddington, on the outskirts of London, she was joined by a small group of other swimmers, who slid into the frigid water to splash alongside her. In Kendal, Cole beamed as she told the crowd, “This was the first time I discovered the wonderful world of outdoor swimmers.”
Last February, Cole noted, she had biked from Devon, in southern England, to Loch Tay, in central Scotland, for the Scottish Winter Swimming Championships. Along the way, she stopped to take dozens of dips with wild-swimming groups throughout England and Scotland. In Clevedon, near Bristol, she joined locals for a quick swim and then for what they called “the debrief”—a long chat over mulled wine in a pub. At dawn near Sheffield, she and a group of ten women waded in the River Derwent while another woman piped on a flute. One dark evening in Skipton, in Yorkshire, Cole skinny-dipped with a group of strangers. In Newcastle, she swam with a novice winter swimmer who hoped that the frigid sea might help her overcome her grief about her father’s recent death. Cole swam alongside a thousand swimmers as she zigzagged across Britain; in the Shetlands, at the northernmost beach in Scotland, she swam with seals as well.
Occasionally, Cole’s path overlapped with the route pioneered by Roger Deakin, two decades earlier. She ended her journey in the Isles of Scilly, off the western tip of Cornwall, which is where Deakin had begun. In “Waterlog,” he wrote of “marvelling at the brightness of everything” in the Scillies: the white sand, the rocks glittering gold with quartz and mica. With witty precision, he referred to the sound of seagulls as “nature’s bagpipes.”
Deakin’s journey across the U.K., and his fidelity to his own patch of blue space in Suffolk, had led him to reflect on the British tendency toward insularity. “What a moated people we are, suspicious of Europe, and not at all sure about the Channel Tunnel,” he wrote. But the people Cole encountered were not guarded but open. Anyone was welcome to join their community, provided that she could embrace the chill. They were wild swimmers but civil people, making the best of what we have: an island home surrounded by cold, daunting waters. Like Deakin, Cole had emerged with an acute appreciation of her country’s restrained, marginal beauty. “To get to Shetland, it was a pretty gnarly trek, but it was really romantic!” Cole said. “So raw and rugged. And Scilly—the sand in Scilly glitters. It sparkles. It’s really magical. The U.K. is pretty magical.” ♦
