Jarred Loose by Water:

A Year of Swimming in Oceans, Bays, Rivers, Sloughs, Estuaries, Lakes, and a couple of Pools

Coming 2028 from Sibylline Press

On a wild January morning, I waded into the wavy green-gray collage of the San Francisco Bay and swam until my extremities blanched white with cold. It was the best I’d felt in a long time, so I did it again the next day. And the next. For 365 days, I scrabbled and splashed my way into oceans, ponds, rivers, sloughs, lakes, bays, and the occasional pool. I did it because, facing fifty, I felt like a failure, and daily swimming emerged as a weird kind of solution to that problem. I did it because I needed more joy in my life. But the water gave me more than that. It reshaped my understanding of success and reconnected me with my body and the earth.

Jarred Loose by Water (70,000 words) is a book about how I confronted the mundane heartbreaks of middle age by flinging my body into bodies of water over and over again for 365 days. Facing fifty, an imminent empty nest, two struggling daughters, a slew of professional disappointments, and an alarming geopolitical world, I found myself metaphorically at sea, and so I decided to literally jump into some. I spent 2022 swimming every day. It was a journey that brought me to beautiful lakes, rivers, bays, sloughs, estuaries, oceans, ponds, and pools in three countries and across five states, but mostly it connected me with a small patch of the San Francisco Bay where I found solace, friendship, and community.

Open-water swimming tumbled into the mainstream when the Covid-19 pandemic closed public pools and restless swimmers took to their local wild waters. In my year of swimming, I met people around the world who habitually plunge into seas and rivers; each swimming for their own reasons, but all sharing a belief that being in the water is essential to their health and happiness. I especially mingled and interwove with the people, plants, birds, creatures, tides, and water that populate a little beach on the San Francisco Bay called the Albany Bulb. I practiced paying attention to what is around me and focusing less on the things I can’t control. I discovered the wonder of cold water immersion and learned to let the water buoy me into a better mindset. I also confronted the realities of climate change and experienced the grief and hope of living in this precarious time. Jarred Loose by Water combines my personal story with research, drawing on my background as a sociologist to make connections between my individual experience and larger social, environmental, and political forces.