Pin Drop: Your local swimming hole

When it get this hot, it's time to find the shape of the Earth

Cummins Falls, in Central Tennessee / Brenton Rogers

The big news these days—the unrelenting news—is the heat.

Even up here in New York City, where Liz and I are winding down our final weeks in Northern exile, the temperatures cranked into the nineties over weekend, turning the sidewalks into an endless oven. Compared to many of my readers, stuck in the Southern heat dome, we’re lucky, I know. Ours was a brief reminder, though still visceral, of the unfortunate fact: this is the hottest summer in recorded history, the hottest summer in hundreds of thousands of years. Though we know with grim certainty that there will be hotter summers to come.

The Gulf of Mexico has become one of the key data points. One gauge showed temperatures over 100 degrees—as hot as a ski-resort hot tub. That gauge in question was an outlier, sitting in shallow and exposed water, hardly indicative of the whole of the Gulf—but this entire summer is an outlier. As of mid-July, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were as much as 5˚F warmer than normal. This has been devastating for corals; it’s terrifying for everyone along the southern coast, since warm waters are a key ingredient for hurricanes.

The climate news site Heatmap recently referenced the Gulf of Mexico temperatures in a subheadline: “Who wants to go to the beach when the water feels like a hot tub?” The essay’s take was that summer vacation is going to have to change, given that this is what we’ll face for the rest of our lives.

When I launched this newsletter, I meant to keep politics mostly out of it. I just wanted to celebrate Southern nature. Longtime readers will know I’ve failed on that front—if you love nature, you’ve got to fight for it, after all—but today, despite these first despondent paragraphs, I want to return to that spirit. Even in Florida, there is potential respite from the heat: go find a natural spring, where the water bubbles up from the underground aquifer, holding a bit of coldness.

Years ago, when I read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, I was inspired by his habits: he always travels with a sleeping bag, he wrote, in case he finds some nook for a campsite; he always packs his swim trunks, in case he finds a spot for a dip. The idea of spur-of-the-moment camping seems more suitable to the landscape traditions of Macfarlane’s native Britain than the expanse of farmland in the U.S. South. The swim trunks, though, struck me as a good idea. Since then, I’ve made it a point to commune with whatever waters I find myself visiting. There is no better way to baptize yourself in the beauty of our world—especially amid such crushing heat.

It’s a policy that’s carried me into some beautiful waters:¹ deep pools in the Buffalo River, in Arkansas; the tannic waters of Black Creek, in Mississippi. When it’s hot in New Orleans, I like to drive north to Bogue Chitto State Park. As I sat down to write this essay, I contemplated anchoring it around a specific swimming hole. I googled around and found countless listicles noting the best swimming holes across the South. And, sure, I’ve added a bunch of “want to go” pins to my Google Map, in case I steer near any of these sites on a future drive.

But to send you to one specific place, or even a list of places, is, I realized, not the point I want to make. This is about finding your waters. Sometimes you make do with what you’ve got: I’ve been known to leap into the Mississippi River at the edge of the Bywater in New Orleans; near where I used to live in the Mississippi Delta, there is a manmade waterfall, the result of carefully designed agricultural drainage systems, that is no doubt a spout of fertilizers, but offered blessed relief on hot days.

It’s probably worth checking warnings, and avoiding slow-moving water after a heavy bout of rain—which will deliver a dose of whatever chemicals lie across the surrounding landscape. Take a shower afterward. But as the poet Jim Harrison has noted, “how the water goes / is how the earth is shaped.”² In these hot days, as the earth’s shape seems to elude us, what better way is there to find it again?

Got some recommended Southern swimming holes? Essential swimming memories? Let us know in the comments.

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Recommended Reading

Novelist Benjamin Hale has a long and gripping essay in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine that is set in one of my favorite landscapes, the Arkansas Ozarks. It’s a dark tale—it deals with, I’ll warn you, a child murder—but it’s entirely entrancing

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Around the Southlands

• A necessary warning after mentioning that I swim in the Mississippi in New Orleans: you probably don’t want to do that right now, since the city is dumping raw sewage into the river, a last-ditch effort to keep them from backing up into homes. (Axios)

• You should also be careful in coastal waters these days. Over the past three months, three swimmers in N.C. have died due to exposure to Vibrio, which, as I’ve noted in this newsletter, likes warm waters. (WRAL)

• And in further alarming microbial wildlife news, leprosy now appears to be endemic in Florida. (Pensacola News Journal)

• The site of a former paper plant in central Louisiana may become a supposedly “green” methanol plant, where local forests will be converted into a biofuel. The proposal is, unsurprisingly, controversial. (Louisiana Illuminator)

• The Appalachian Trail has grown longer and harder—especially through the South. (Washington Post)

• The New York Times takes a look at a little-known work of environmental art, quietly—and intentionally—disappearing into the coastal marsh of south Georgia.

1. A few weeks back, on my honeymoon in Alaska, I set a new personal record: I leaped into glacial waters, south of Juneau, that were, by one crewmember’s estimate, somewhere in the upper 30s.

2. In “The Theory & Pratice of Rivers,” specifically.