Fall back

Barton Springs Early Swim Report 11/03/2024

I’ve had a half-written entry for a week. I’ve been working hellbent for leather on a book, and come home weary of my own sentence structure. I’m just at the place in my process where I’ve gone from pretty good, if I do say so myself! to what a pile of absolute garbage. This happens to me every time.

Also: Election Day.

I’m going on strike against the weather in Austin lately. Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t complain about such things in a blog—is this a blog? I think it’s a blog—about swimming year round. I am lucky to be able to do it. But really: it’s back to being above 70 degrees at 5 in the morning. I’m against it.

Ordinarily I walk up and go pretty directly to the pool. Last Sunday I puttered, and the sun was coming up as I got there, and so I decided to walk around the pool to my accustomed spot on the north side of the pool. (These days the north entrance doesn’t open till 7AM or so). As I walked,I passed a guy on the other side of the fence at the deep end—Barking Springs, it’s called, because you can bring your dogs there—and he was playing acoustic guitar and wearing a purple knit hat and looking most awfully picturesque. I wished I had a camera. Then I noticed he had a plastic human skull lasted to the neck of his guitar, and I hurried on.

I think plastic.

Fewer swimmers in the pool these mornings, which paradoxically means that more people swim into me or come close.

On any given morning I walk past many, many more people on the south side than I ever did on the north: more people get in that way habitually, I guess, and now the pre 7AM crowd has to. This morning when I got there—the same time as last week, except not, because of the time change, so 6AM by the clock—it was still dark, and I saw, for the first time in ages, the thing that has most frightened me about the south side: the humped silhouette of a raccoon bolting across the deck and up a tree.

Do raccoons climb trees? They’re great at it, apparently.

The cormorants are back, too, and the pair of Egyptian geese. One has lost its voice, and has an agreeable Fiersteinian honk.

Occasionally when I teach a student forgets that they’re not invisible and start doing something they shouldn’t—homework for another class, texting, in one memorable case eating an enormous submarine sandwich at 10AM—but the truth is I believe myself to be invisible most of the time. Two weeks ago , I realized—as people’s good mornings and how are yous got warmer and full of recognition—that perhaps I am not. In warmer weather I don a flowered surf poncho, a distinctive article of clothing, and I realized I was, to others, the middle-aged lady in the flowered poncho. Not only was I not invisible, I had made myself visible.

Last week as I was left a nice passing woman said, “Excuse me: are you a writer?” Yes, I said tentatively. “You write,” she said, and then she tried to describe this very Substack. Like many writers who are also assholes, for some reason I can’t answer simple questions simply. I knew what she was talking about but somehow I couldn’t fill it in, the same way that, when somebody says, “Are you Elizabeth McCracken the writer?” I cannot say yes. I have to say, “Well, I am a writer.” (There was a time in the early 90s when people often came across my name and thought I might be Elizabeth Macklin, who is a fine poet; I am not she.) At any rate, eventually the nice woman at the pool (hello, nice woman! I have forgotten your name), said, “Ever since you described what you wore, I’ve been keeping my eye out for you.”

I looked down at my vast boiled wool dress. I looked at my compatriots all around in their toweling robes and athletic wear. For the first time I understood what a truly peculiar garment an ankle-length wool dress it is to wear over a bathing suit in Austin. Cassock-like. I was not invisible.

Yesterday I went to REI, hoping to find a waterproof flashlight to light my morning arrivals. A helpful guy showed me possibilities. He suggested a headlamp and I explained that it would be antisocial. Then he found what he thought was perfect: a small collapsible lantern. I pictured myself in my cassock, swinging a lantern like Diogenes, and turned it down.

Connected to my feelings of invisibility: it never fails to confuse me when people on the concrete plane refer to things I have written on the internet. By what witchcraft did you divine that?

I am feeling strangely hamstrung and superstitious about Tuesday. Every now and then I’m buoyed by hope; then overcome by feelings of doom. You don’t need a lantern to find honest people, but holy cow the liars are loud.

See you all on the other side. I will be the one wearing…oh, perhaps I will keep it a surprise.