Insoluble Thoughts

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report, 11/27/2023

First swim for nine days—me and mine were traveling—and I nearly skipped it for lack of sleep. I hadn’t quite finished rereading Utz by Bruce Chatwin for my graduate seminar today, and I kept dozing off while reading it and dreaming up new, inferior plot twists. It took a lot longer to finish the book that way.

A glorious dark morning, with a round moon and clear sky, 39 degrees when I got to the pool. I’m never sorry when I think about skipping a day and end up going (so long as I am not attacked by geese) but I was particularly grateful for the cold, quiet water today.

As I swam I thought about Gabe Hudson, who died last week, a lovely man and brilliant writer. I’ve been thinking about Gabe all the time since I heard about his death on Friday—all the time, and yet I kept being surprised by sadness. Swimming makes thinking feel both more and less purposeful. Underwater, I could think about Gabe in a more focussed way. He was a writer, and a friend of writers—not all writers are friends of writers. . He worked hard to connect with readers and writers through his own work, through his podcast, through social media; his Twitter feed was full of kindness and useful cris de coeur. Everywhere on social media you can read tributes to him. I hope Gabe had an inkling of how much he meant to people. He was a big bright necessary light.

I saw no avian life at the pool this morning, and very little human life, and one raccoon at the end of my swim, running between the bars of the gates at the exit.

The moon was magnificent, with wreaths of mist laid upon the surface of the pool.