Hey, everyone. Some technical issues on my end meant that the last issue of the Blue Million Miles was text-only. I thought I’d rectify that by making this one strictly for your ears. You might remember that last year I spent July 4th wringing my hands over the death drive coming through the speakers at the city pool that day. Well, this year I spent Labor Day at Chewacla, the state park here in Auburn, listening just as intently, albeit this time without all the woebegone analysis. So,...

*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...

To write about the waterways of Alabama is to wade through converging streams of fact and fiction, reality and lore, what’s actually true and what’s just a good story. Let me give you an example: a few weeks ago, on an oxbow of the Alabama River just downstream from its confluence, I swam past an abandoned film set. It’s a film set that was built to appear like a town once thriving and then run down. A stretch of houses halfway completed in order to appear halfway to ruin. Facades and...

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...

Pratt’s Ferry Preserve is a put-in spot. A place to launch kayaks and canoes. Maybe more accurate (if a bit less pleasant-sounding) to call it a take-out spot, though, as I’ve seen far more boaters disembarking here at this point between two bends of the Cahaba River. A waypoint. A place for comings and goings. I’ve never done much of anything here, though. For us — my wife and I — it has been a place to idle, to float, and, yes, to watch the occasional kayaker paddle into shore. We’d started...

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...