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 justify the use of a word like ennervating. Anyway, after I hung up, I realized there was a window of time before I had to go pick up my daughter. Typically when that happens, I fill the time by crawling under my desk and groaning. You might hear that and think that I must have been in a bad place. I’m not sure that I would say that, though. I wouldn’t say I was much of anywhere, really. Not fully oriented to time and space. Maybe you’ve felt something like that lately? An… uncanniness? The latency of the video call carrying over, off-screen. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s that I work in a basement office with no windows, and I’d been sitting there for months, trying — and mostly failing — to track down sources for a story, hearing every variety of “This phone is no longer in service.” (which, by the way, there are way more variations than I’d imagined or ever really thought possible.) Maybe it’s that the past two years have taken a toll on me that I haven’t really admitted to yet, haven’t worked through. And I haven’t slept or written much lately, leaving my sense-making faculties at an all-time low. So okay maybe it is just me. Maybe.  But also maybe not? Doesn’t something just seem a little off? The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Which, I mean, go figure. You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to try and account for the bad vibes, as it were, the strangest of the moment  — one of illness, neglect, death, insurrection, war, despair, collapse, isolation. And it’s like the weight of all that, it exerts a gravity, creates its own tide, and we’re caught in it, headed out to sea. I feel that, anyway. But so that day, after the video call, for whatever blessed reason, instead of my usual brooding, drifting, I thought to go swimming instead. There’s a state park on the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, that park has a lake. That lake has a roped-off section for swimming. And, that afternoon, I had the place to myself. I walked through the shallows until the water came to mid-thigh then I plunged, dolphin kicking for as long as my breath would hold. I surfaced out by the rope. This was March, but, you know, Alabama March — the water was already bathwater warm in parts, still bracing cold in others.  I paddled an easy, aimless breaststroke for a time, admired a scrim of pollen on the water’s surface, watched the clouds above glide into the tree line. I climbed onto the concrete jetty just to be able to dive into the water again. I couldn’t tell you how long I was out there. Time had escaped me, but for once it was welcome. Two years ago, while I was waiting for Ozzie to be born — Ozzie, that’s my daughter’s name — I sat down to write her a letter. Or, if not a letter, exactly, just…I wanted to set down on paper what I knew about life. Epiphanies. Insights I’d gleaned. Some fatherly advice. I had one pearl of wisdom off the top of my head. Once, while we were having dessert together, my father looked at me from across the picnic table and observed that I had come to know one of the deep truths of the universe: that you should always let your Klondike bar melt a bit before eating. So I wrote that down. Let the Klondike melt a little. Got it. Okay. But what else? Huh. I bit my knuckle. Doodled. Did I really have nothing else to impart? I had to stand and pace the room in orde