Lake Monsters

[dawn_felagund]

Three summers ago, my parents were visiting, we went to the South Beach of Lake Willoughby, and I decided that I would swim across the cove, about a half-mile there and back. And I did. In the very definition of a slippery slope, I proceeded to say, "Maybe I should practice till I can swim across the whole lake!" which is 5 miles/8 km from end to end, North Beach to South.

I've always been good at swimming. In education today, you speak of "talent" at your peril, but I do truly have "natural talent" for swimming because my body shape makes me extremely buoyant. Where others have to work to keep above water, I just have to work to move through it. If I am in water over my head and stand upright, I will float naturally with the water just below my chin. (There's a picture of me "standing" in 300 feet of water below!) Of course, this makes swimming in deep water far less nerve-wracking. It is controversial how deep Willoughby actually is, but most can agree that it is very deep and very cold--over 300 feet deep, or about 100 m--and all can agree it is at least one of the deepest lakes in Vermont, if not the deepest entirely contained within the state's borders. Furthermore, there is all sorts of creepy folklore: an alleged monster (which may or may not be the same monster in Lake Memphremagog) and underground caverns that connect it to other glacial lakes in the area (which is how the monster moves between lakes). There is a story of a team of horses that fell through Willoughby's notoriously thin ice, only to be found later in nearby Crystal Lake. I have swam across some of the deepest sections, and it is a little uncanny to float with an abyss open beneath your feet, like something primordial may well emerge from beneath and nibble your toes. Even in the middle of the lake, you will come upon cold patches, the presumable exhalation of a subterrane untouched by sunlight.

All of this made Willoughby attractive to me, who loves the shadowy corners of the human imagination. It makes people pause when it comes up in conversation like none of our other dozens of lakes do: the cold, the legends, the breathtaking scenery that leaves little to the imagination about how the glacier ripped open the earth to make the lake ten thousand years ago, leaving raw rock as yet unhealed by vegetation.

After my half-mile foray across both South Beach coves--which I remember as challenging--I did indeed keep training. I swam laps along both beaches and occasionally struck out to nearby landmarks along either coast. In the offseason, I trained in cardio and long sets with low weights (to build endurance) at the gym. Delays with the modular classroom last year ended my training early, so I didn't cross at the end of the summer of 2019 as intended. This year, a warm winter meant I could get into the water earlier than ever, and a cessation of most social activities during covid meant that I could train often. A few weeks ago, I started swimming three miles of laps every other day at the beach.

I write all of this now with a confidence I didn't feel. It quickly became apparent that I was approaching a level of swimming ability where I could cross. Which means I should cross ... Right? Many people knew about my training. In the Northeast Kingdom, nearly everyone is involved in one outdoor activity or another, and usually more than one. I was the only one of my friends--hikers, skiers, snowboarders, runners, kayakers, cyclists--who was an open-water swimmer. My sport and my training and my goal especially drew attention. People knew about it and asked about it. It received the fascination of any endurance sport with the addition that it occurred in the water, the element at once sustaining and inimical to human life: the element of drowning, subsumption, effacement.

But the monsters in the lake aren't 23-foot eels or gaping caverns that can gulp down horses. Crossing the lake meant seeing myself in an entirely different way, and it most of all meant opening myself to the vulnerability that I was wrong, that I wasn't actually that newer, empowered person I was training (pretending?) to be. This was the monster nibbling at my toes, at times breaching the surface beside me as I swam my laps and contemplated the long five miles that stretched between the glacier-sliced mountains.

---

I have never considered myself an athletic person. Even as I became an accomplished skater, then dancer; even as I trained at the gym and watched gym rats get on the ab machine after me and lower the weight, I was never an athletic person, not in my own mind.

I swam three-mile workouts--still not athletic.

Athletics are attached, in my mind, to anxiety and shame. To ostracization. Just the other day, sitting at the counter at Martha's Diner, a clip came on the TV about softball. "I cannot imagine," I said to Bobby, "few things I'd want to do less than play softball. Or few things I detest more than softball." As is often the case, fear and vulnerability scab easily into hatred.

As a teacher, I realize very keenly the role I play in how young people see themselves. This growing awareness in the profession leads to the habit of addressing students as "authors" and "scientists" and "engineers": It is the surface expression of the deeper idea that, as educators, part of what we do is build students' capacities to imagine themselves within many different futures. Human endeavor does not begin but with an act of imagination: of seeing not only the possibilities but yourself an actor within them. It is perhaps the weightiest of our responsibilities as educators: that we shape students' self-image--eventually their identities--to allow for the full range of human achievement.

My identity was explicitly shaped in the opposite direction. I was a socially awkward kid and fairly unattractive in a middle-class suburb where a degree of urbanity and prettiness was expected of girls. I had no interest in either. So I was shaped into the mold of general awkwardness and was taught I was "bad at sports," especially by my PE teacher, with whom I was saddled for five years. It was borderline Orwellian at times. Then as now, I had above-average upper-body strength for a girl, and I remember once doing two chin-ups for physical fitness testing, and my PE teacher writing it down as 1.5. Because 1 + 1 = 1.5, I guess? And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia? He discouraged me and then claimed on my report card that I didn't try. He publicly shamed me, and other "ugwards" like me, at every opportunity in front of classmates. I've written here before about the time a classmate came late to class because she'd wet her pants--it was obvious, as she was carrying the clothes she'd been wearing in a plastic bag--and he harangued her about being late until she admitted in front of everyone that she'd "had a bathroom accident." These were the pedagogical tools in this man's kit. They were wielded against me many times. Not surprisingly, my peers came to see me as a person of little worth. I came to see myself that way too.

I have been angry about this for a long time because I know now that I should never have been treated that way. I was a little kid. But little kids have no sense of how the world should be; they only learn how their world is. So I learned. Five miles across a glacial lake and I'm still angry but now because I know it was a lie. I was never the awkward, athletically incapable kid I believed myself to be. I was always scrappy, intrepid, physically strong. I see that now. I didn't particularly like team sports but that's because I didn't particularly like team anything. Why would I, when the rest of my "team" was wantonly cruel to me? But I was always good at tumbling, skating, gymnastics. Swimming. Aged 12, I stood in silent shock as my skating teacher told my mom that I was progressing so fast in my second year in her class that I needed better skates. "Me?" I remember thinking. "She's not talking about me?"

---

The last week of July, this summer, I almost said the words to Bobby several times: "I want to set a date for my crossing." Then they'd slide back into my throat, unspoken. To speak it, to set it, gave it inertia.

As it was, I was more than half-considering training ad infinitum. Bandying about with friends every June about whether this would be the year I'd cross and then finding some excuse to derail me in August until it became one of those things that everyone knew I'd never actually do but we all kept up appearances and pretended. Beneath the looming specter of potential failure, it didn't seem a terrible idea.

There were also a number of people who had asked me to tell them when I set the date. They either wanted to kayak with me or meet me on the beach. In my mind, I rehearsed how I'd tell them I'd failed.

I remembered pop-flies coming at me in left field. My hand sweaty in its borrowed glove, eyes squinting skyward, half-imagining the accolades if I caught it ("Third out! Our turn at bat! Good catch, Dawn!") even as my brain stated matter-of-factly: "You're going to drop it." And dropping it. Every goddamn time. And the eyerolls and silent shared thought from the rest of my team, as the runner took second: This is why we didn't want her on our team.

It was much easier to just never try. To bask in the glow of friends' support for my training (I have friends now! This proves it!), to let them offer to kayak with me or meet me but never actually ask it of them--or, most especially, of myself.

---

My first memory of swimming wasn't a particularly good one. I'm not even sure it is a memory so much as a construction based on family lore. I was only three or four at the time. We had one of those tiny above-ground pools with frogs printed on the sides. My older cousins were watching me. I was "swimming." I was actually thrashing facedown in the water and drowning. My dad yanked me out even as my cousins chortled to "Look! Look! Look at Dawn swimming!" I have constructed a memory (because I doubt I actually remember) of sunlight dancing in zigs and zags across the blue bottom of the pool as I drowned. There is no fear in the memory.

People often think I took lessons or swam on a team, but I was never formally taught to swim unless one counts a week of swimming lessons at the Belair Athletic Club as part of third grade or a week at Beechmont Camp when I was going into fifth. But my mom swam, not in any formal but a beautiful and carefree way, with a joy that made her swimming as much a part of play as most families with their incessant bouncing about and splashing. She'd push off the wall, and my sister and I would clamor to be the ones to cling to her shoulders as she did. It felt like flying to soar through the water like that. We'd vacation at Willow Valley, and she'd swim the length of the pool and let us swim beside her, even across the deep end. She taught me bits and pieces of swim strokes until I knew them all. She's probably sacrificed a combined several weeks of her life to indulging, "Watch, Mom! Watch me!" It is fitting that she was present on the beach when I swam my first half-mile of training, watching me all the way. When I was in middle school, we graduated to a new backyard pool without frogs on the side and long enough to actually swim in. Following my mom's example, I swam. The kid who wasn't good at sports didn't doubt that she could swim forever. Sixty, seventy laps in the pool until I grew bored and would ask my dad the length of the pool to do the mental math and calculate how far I'd swam.

Open-water swimming is one sport in which women dominate, especially at the ultra-marathon levels (20K or longer). When a man did the 50-mile double crossing of Lake Memphremagog last year, I like to say he was the first man to do so, because the first two were women. Physiologically, we are built for endurance rather than short bursts of strength. Our body fat, especially in the hips and thighs, keeps us afloat better than men, with their lower body fat that tends to mass in their bellies. So it made sense that swimming was passed down to me from my mom as the way one comports oneself in the water as a woman: not splashing, not lazing upon a float, but pushing off and sending it.

---

"I want to set a date for my crossing."

And there it was. Martha's Diner again, casual, over breakfast.

One doesn't simply set and commit to a date for an open-water swim. Weather and conditions must be borne in mind, so we chose a range of dates and would monitor the weather to narrow upon the best one. Ideally, I'd have a north or a south wind and set out from whichever beach let me use it as a tailwind. I was willing to try with a west wind, since I'd be swimming the western shore of the lake and would be shielded by the mountains and forest for most of the swim, but an east wind--which would potentially slosh waves against one of my sides for the whole swim--would not even be considered.

One day in my range quickly asserted itself as ideal: Monday, south wind, no rain or storms in the forecast. Over the next week, I'd learn how often and subtly weather forecasts change. I'd refresh the National Weather Service forecast every few hours. Now it's a west wind. Now it's a calm wind. Now there's a 20% chance of thunderstorms--but two hours later, that's gone and the wind is light and variable, turning south in the evening. Light and variable--that sounds workable! I Google the term to be sure. Yes, I decide, better than a west wind. That night, sleepless at a 4:30 wake-up that would become routine as I approached my crossing date, it occurs to me that "light and variable" could end up varying to a north wind for much of the time.

I tell my friends what I'm doing. Like I put off setting the date with Bobby, I dance around this for a few days before posting about it with the reassurance that I don't actually expect anyone to be there but people have expressed interest over the years so ... And now it's happening. I have a little contact list of people who want to know about my plans. It's happening, gods, it's happening. I have a crew of kayakers. I have a group who wants to meet on the beach. It's really going to happen.

I wonder briefly what would happen if I just let the window pass and never alert my friends. Would anyone ask about it? On my friend Robyn's birthday, she's rented a cabin on the lake, so I swim out to Devil's Rock and back--my final swim before I cross, about 1.7 miles. It's an easy, beautiful swim. I use this to visualize my crossing. I forbid doubts and negative thoughts. "Long, easy strokes. Relaxed in the water." I say this to myself many times a day, imagining that effortless feeling that comes when it's working, when you're flying through the water. The doubts are there on the sidelines: that I haven't trained hard enough, that I'm not actually ready, that I'll fail. I start to rehearse what I will say to people when they ask about it and I have to tell them I failed, then I stop.

Sunday night, I bang my toe against the edge of the bathtub. It's a little filament of pain like the wire in an old-fashioned lightbulb. "I've done broken my toe," I think. "It doesn't hurt much now, but I'll wake up tomorrow, and it will be swollen up huge, and I won't be able to cross." I half-will it to happen.

---

Monday morning and it's a beautiful day. The last forecast I saw on Sunday had the calm wind forecast, which I've come to question similarly to the light-and-variable prediction. I sit down at my computer, click refresh on the NWS forecast for the twentieth time, squint my eyes, and ...

South wind. South wind, 5 mph.

I'm doing it.

I have four kayakers going with me. Robyn meets at our house, and we meet Amrita at the north beach, where we'll leave her car to take us back when I (hopefully) complete my swim. We arrive at the South Beach and they begin unpacking the kayaks and I head down the trail in my swimsuit, carrying my cap and googles, with only the sandals on my feet to hand off to Bobby before I start. I'm singular in my focus. A mom and two girls cut off a side trail in front of me at one point, and maybe my intensity is radiating particularly strong because they end up, after a few yards, stepping to the side to let me pass.

I wade out into the water and begin the process of fiddling with my cap, googles, and headphones while easing into the water and pretending I'm not cold. It's beautiful: calm, clear water that looks more like something out of the Caribbean than northern Vermont. The photo to the right shows the South Beach after Bobby, Amrita, and Robyn arrived in their kayaks. The mountain in the distance is Mount Hor; I'd swim along its base and onward to the other end of the lake. There aren't many people there on a Monday.

"Okay," I say to Bobby. "What time is it?"

"12:57."

"I'm sending it. Let's go!" I have two other kayakers on the way but have already told everyone to catch up with me if they arrive after I've set out.

"Hold on!" someone says. "We need a picture before you go!"

"Yes," I joke, "while I'm still smiling."

That's the one to the left, with the beach behind me. After everyone has snapped to their satisfaction, it's 12:58. "I'm sending it," I say and push off into a few strokes of breaststroke to warm up my arms in the water.

The night before, I woke at the predictable 4:30, imagining a north wind and thinking about when I'd make the decision to turn back. I swam out to the rockslide--a little over a half-mile--in a north wind earlier this year, and it was probably my hardest swim of the year. As I take my first few strokes, the north wind kicks up. Willoughby is particularly tricky with wind because the lake is long and narrow, and the steep mountains on either side create a sort of wind tunnel effect. I have turned back from swims because the waves were two feet high after being pushed down the length of the lake.

The first quarter-mile is already for questioning your life choices. I generally spend this time feeling like I'm thrashing through Jell-O and convinced that 1) I can't actually swim after all so 2) I'm going to fail. All of the successful training and progress to that very point were in fact flukes; this is really me. Don't I know it? The first quarter-mile going into the dreaded north wind and I was really questioning my life choices.

And then the wind shifted. The waves smoothed out. But I was still not relaxed in the water and still struggling to get started. I had music playing and had already committed to swimming "song sets": a full song before I was allowed to come up and check my surroundings. Normally, I swim 100-stroke sets. I decided to attempt a 100-stroke set, thinking that the familiar count would settle me in. It did. I began to relax in the water.

Somewhere in here, Brenda and Thomas--my last two kayakers--arrived. "I'm swimming 100 strokes in a set," I told them and started my next set, reached 100, and just kept going. I was swimming along Mount Hor at this point and really starting to move. I'd swim two-song sets and then come up for a couple strokes above the water, some free breathing, a bit of reorientation, some chatter and laughter with my kayakers. Then back down and another two songs.

I planned for my first snack break at about the two-mile mark, which is past the two mountains (that is Pisgah, which stands opposite Hor, behind me in the photo) and a ways into what I call the Long Dull: a stretch of forest on the west coast and roadway on the east coast without notable landmarks. Because I swam English Channel rules, I could not touch the kayaks, so I'd packaged my food in plastic container that would float when Bobby tossed them to me.

Having now answered a lot of questions about open-water swimming and what it's like to do something like this, the feeding (as it's called) tends to be the part people are most fascinated by. They are usually a little freaked out that I don't get to hold onto a boat while I take my break. In the photo to the right, I am actually "standing" in about 300 ft/100 m of water at this point. When I mentioned above being extremely buoyant, this is how I float if I let my legs dangle beneath me--not treading water--in deep water. It actually is quite restful--more restful than tiring my arms by hanging on a boat would be. However, in open, very deep water in a cold lake, no longer moving, I found that I got chilly pretty quickly, so the break was short before I was back to swimming.

Past the Long Dull, the lake widens to it's widest point. I would break away from the shore and swim across this cove here. This was the part that I expected to be toughest since it's possible a west wind could stir up some waves that would slap into the side of me. The first part of the cove crossing was pretty easy. I was starting to feel like I'd been swimming for a while but really wasn't fatigued or in pain yet. I stopped for another break--very quick because I felt myself get cold again. I was on target to finish with a really good time.

But as I completed the cove, something weird started to happen with the current. I'd been pointing toward a squarish white house for a while but now needed to swim more to the north of it. Yet every time I'd come up, I'd be pointing back at the squarish house, swimming into the cove. Amrita later told me it was so hard for them to watch me swim into the cove and then have to swim back out again. I felt like I was going nowhere, and I was indeed wasting a lot of strokes. But we were beginning to discern the first landmarks on the North Beach ... which is, sinisterly, the graveyard. (You can see it in the picture to the left as the plot of manicured grass dotted with little white bits that are the tombstones.) "Yes! The graveyard!" I said and pushed on, but it was hard going. I cleared the cove but the current was still weird and felt like the water was thick. Normally, swimming into a small current, I can "grab" the water and pull myself along at a pretty good pace, but I could not get a grip on the water. Add to it that I was now starting to get tired--I was at about Mile 4 at this point--and the sun setting in the west meant that I could not see any features on the shore to act as a reference point to tell me that I was moving. In water "shallow" enough to see the bottom--which might be 15 feet in Willoughby, which is exceptionally clear--you can tell your speed by how fast features move along the bottom under you. In deeper water, as I'd been in for the entire swim, glimpses of the coast going by serve that function. As it was, I couldn't grip the water and couldn't see if I was going anywhere and so felt like I was swimming in place.

At last, some features familiar from the North Beach came into view. I was still swimming too slow for my liking, but as I got free of the cove and whatever weird current was happening there, I did pick up a bit of steam. And one of the kayakers described that, as we approached the beach, they saw a crowd of people suddenly scurry down the beach toward the side where we were coming in. They were there to welcome me!

I came in to a cheering crowd who brought me flowers. I didn't even know a lot of them. Apparently, as my friends massed on the beach, their conversation drew the attention of others on the beach, who inquiring what was happening, were intrigued by my crossing and joined the cheering section. I began to be able to see the bottom and tried to reach it with my toes--not yet. A few more strokes and I could touch! Now just to slog through the water to the beach. My quads were not thrilled by me asking them to make that effort, but I walked onto the beach to meet my friends with my kayakers sliding onto the sand around me.

---

No one really prepares you for how your body will react to being pushed past its limits. Swimming five miles chafes your armpits. Who knew?? My neck also chafed itself against itself on the right side, just by how the skin creases, and left me with a mark that looks like the lake took me on a movie date back in the '90s and gave me a hickey.

I dreaded Charlie horses but, though both of my calves twitched with what I call "proto-Charlies," that fear never came to pass. A bad Charlie horse is the one thing I've discovered that can disable me in the water. Last year, I woman crossed Lake Memphremagog and hurt her arm a third of the way across and so finished the remaining 18 miles or so swimming one-armed. In my visualizations leading up to the crossing, I imagined myself swimming with just my arms to finish the swim despite Charlie horses in both legs.

Doing so probably would have chafed my armpits even worse, so I'm glad that didn't come to pass.

At times, that night, I'd touch my wounds and they'd sting beneath my fingers with well-earned pain.

---

If my life was a corny sports movie, it would have ended just as it did: the kid who suffered as an outcast grown into a woman with the kinds of friends who wait on the beach for an hour to cheer her arrival as she drowns the monsters that have plagued her in the lake behind her.

Then would anyone believe if a mom led up her young son by the hand to ask if I minded answering some questions for him? A little girl hovered in their wake. I answered the boy's questions (and the girl's, asked by the mom), and then she said, "You may not realize this, but they were fascinated by what you just did, and you've really showed them possibilities they never imagined existed."

My little wizened, battle-scarred, hurt-child-turned-vengeful-teacher's heart grew two sizes that day.

In reality, what I did was--if you'll pardon the pun--but a drop in the ocean of the world of open-water swimming. The English Channel is 21 miles as the crow flies (though the currents you have to fight make it inevitably longer). People cross--and sometimes double-cross--the 25-mile length of Memphremagog each year. My big accomplishment is a light training day for many open-water swimmers. But it was mine.

My friends began to disperse, some heading home and others to join Bobby and me for dinner at the Tavern. In the parking lot, Robyn, Amrita, Bobby, and I had champagne in compostable plastic cups. (The bottom photo shows, in the hazy distance, the two mountains I swam between on the first mile of my crossing.) Giddy with endorphins, I kept thinking, "I must remember this. I must remember this," and not let it slip into a haze of exhaustion ... and now two cups of champagne. "This really happened. I must remember it."

---

Self-deprecation is handy armor. I joked with Bobby that I wanted to cross as soon as possible so that I could stop training as soon as possible: the kid who was "bad at sports" and always got low marks for effort in PE class.

Before I crossed, I thought I'd know when I came out of the water if I'd ever try it again. And I told people that I was excited to meet my goal ... and to never have to do it again if I didn't want to.

Getting in the car to go to the Tavern that night, my triceps touched the seatback and just hurt. I think I'm done, I realized. I will keep swimming, but the extent of training required for even a five-mile crossing was not insignificant, and I didn't know if I was up for it again. And I proved what I wanted to prove, to myself and maybe a little bit to the people of my past, now relegated to imagination, as I squinted skyward and snatched that pop-fly out of the air for the third out.

Today ended Kingdom Swim Week, and Bobby and I were talking about it (at Martha's Diner, naturally), and I mentioned that they offered four marathon swims this year. "How long is that?" he asked, so I Googled it on my phone: 10K or 6.2 miles.

"Hell, I've done five now," I said. "I bet I could do that."