I Make It Through To The Big Lake

I may be testing your patience, dear readers, but my daily swim in Little Norrsjön has become the pivotal moment of my days in Sweden, so here's more swimming writing.

For the sake of geography, I should say that Little Norrsjön is attached to Norrsjön (sjö - lake) where the river feeds in. If you imagine the attachment as a T-shape, the river is the long stem. It branches into a right and a left arm, the right arm feeding Little Norrsjön and the left arm feeding Norrsjön. In other words, it's possible to reach Norrsjön from Little Norrsjön by swimming into and through the arms of the river. 

I've been approaching the river's arms for a while, swimming up to the meeting point, seeing the eddying currents, and backing out again. The forces have just looked too strong for me. Getting to Norrsjön looked simple enough, but getting out against the flow of the river? This has seemed much less certain. 

The other day, P. took me on a walk through the forest along the river. We saw so many trees felled by beavers I was surprised the beavers had any time to rest from gnawing activity. It's an extraordinary sight - teeth marks going through to the central fibres of a tree trunk: the ones that eventually give up the attempt to remain vertical and allow the tree to fall. 

The outcome of our walk through undergrowth, on the most densely padded forest floor my feet could remember (moss, decades of needle and leaf fall, berry bushes) was to see the T of the river from land. Seeing it from this viewpoint gave us the idea that, if the current proved too strong for me, I could get out of Norrsjön and walk to Little Norrsjön, with some danger of scratching and insect bites, but nothing more serious.

So the day before yesterday, I swam through.

Emerging into Norrsjön felt like possibility: like entering a wider, more expansive world. I've known it was there all along, seen it from the shore, but to approach it from the river's arms intensified the experience of opening out. I paddled around a little, noted the houses on the far shore, and a potential future adventure. But I wanted to save my energy for the swim back, which was a useful thought as I had to struggle against the current in some places. The branches and grasses on the banks lent me a hand, and I pulled myself back to the centre and the turning current, and then went with the flow into the growing familiarity of the smaller lake. 

There's something about this short journey, lake to lake, that lends itself to meaning, and I've been mulling it over for the last couple of days, but I'll leave you to make your own way through, dear readers.

P. pointed out this isn't beaver-work but the photo below is ... 

Ant work

The softest moss-floor