On a cold New Year’s Day, we put on scarves, gloves and heavy coats and went for a walk on the Yellow River, where a young woman was splashing mid-stream.
When we called from the bank, she said the water was indeed cold, but it was fun. She advised that you have to keep moving.
We took her advice, tightening our scarves as we moved on down the trail.
Roger Deakin, an English writer I admire, was an advocate of wild swimming — swimming in natural bodies of water, as opposed to pools. Wild swimmers tend to swim year-round. I’ve found there are enthusiasts in the Georgia Piedmont.
When my father was a doctoral student doing research in Norway in the 1950s, my parents rented a flat from a woman in her 70s who used to swim in the fjord, regardless of season. I had grown up thinking that winter swimming was a European pastime.
Among other wonders outdoors:
• I’ve been sampling the leaf litter, looking for invertebrates, and have been surprised how often I find small green plants beneath the litter. They don’t seem the worse for repeated nights of freezing weather or for lack of sunlight. I suppose a gardener would think the litter was deep mulch.
• The beech trees at Stone Mountain still have their leaves, a khaki-colored canopy where the surrounding oaks and hickories are bare. I wrote often about this last winter. I go see the beech stand, I guess, because I can scarcely believe it.
• At Panola Mountain, we saw fragments of hickory nuts on top of a downed pine log. There were perhaps 200 shell fragments on top of the log. I can’t imagine why squirrels have declared it to be the place for a picnic.
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