I've been swimming in Walden Pond since I was a girl. I've heard tales of fresh water jelly fish in Thoreau's Cove, swum with the giant many colored carp, been warned about the snapping turtle in Ice Fort Cove and love watching the fish families soar through the underwater cairns that mark the shoals along the edges. At the corner of Thoreau's Cove (where you see the 50 on the chart), there is usually a sign posted with the water temperature.
In recent years there has been a great kerfuffle regarding the right of swimmers to continue open water swimming through this deep pond. Mostly it's had to do with one tragic accident and lots of folks with no common sense. A man had a heart attack and died a few years ago. The pond is listed as between 97 and 103 feet deep. Finding drowned swimmers or ice fishermen can be a costly and risky proposition. It requires divers who are used to cold (spring fed), deep and dark water. Plus they have to close down the park and deal with the liabilities. So for several years the option of closing it to open water swimmers was being poised and finally they came up with a list of rules and requirements that are just common sense (that is why you see many more people who are learning to swim distances doing so with float buoys in the pond).
But it's a magical pond...like I mentioned there have been recorded blooms of fresh water jellies! And there are the giant carp that live in Thoreau's Cove and you can even see them swimming slowly under the ice before a first snow makes it too cloudy to see them. It has the remarkable range of temperatures for one pond. The shallow edges and the very deep centers make the variables extreme. As you can see from the top graph, most swimmers not only go around the perimeter, but also criss-cross for more measured distances, many through the deepest part of the pond, thus the coldest. On a day like today, with hot sunshine coming down on your shoulders, many swimmers stuck to slicing at angles vs circling the edges.
In winter it's also other worldly. The ice fishermen come out after a long solid freeze and usually some snow. But I remember a winter as a teenager where it froze solid, but there had been no snow. Four of us took two sheets and skates to the pond. The wind usually blows from the West (coming over the train tracks just above the pond). We skated across, unfurled the sheets and sailed back to the beach. This was repeated until we were dog tired! One of my treasured childhood memories of Walden!
Now I love to spend a lazy afternoon swimming around the pond while my son or friends kayak around exploring different coves. Or just sitting and talking while listening to the languages of the world walk by...people who have read Thoreau's Walden translated into their language (most recent translation I'm aware of: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/america-and-iran-at-walden-pond/398579/ (article ) http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/iran-thoreau-walden-pond/399263/ (Video).
I believe that Thoreau was right about many things....nature, simplicity, self reliance, imagination, peace, transcendentalism and much more. But today while swimming close to 2Ms around the pond, catching snatches of peoples conversations at odd head-popping moments, trying to avoid other swimmers or kayakers heading on my course, I was also doing some green-black water swimming mediation. A carry over from last week's lesson from Dani Shapiro with the ' woods walking mediation'. I love swimming, writing, meditating, being out in nature and working towards goals in baby-steps. And the voice and words that came to me as I watched waves of light cut through the water around me were not those of the early North American writers, but rather a mid-century, South American soccer star:
Good night, swimmers, dreamers and hard workers, good night!
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