At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond

What an enchanting book! I cannot recommend this one more highly. A series of essays by different writers about the Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond in Hampstead Heath, London. The collection is organized around the seasons, and begins with essays by some of the pond’s year-round swimmers, many of whom are women over the age of fifty who have swum outdoors through decades of London winters. The writers in the collection weave stories about their own lives into their writing about the pond, moving seamlessly through different registers. Writing about the pond isn’t “just” writing about the pond, but it’s the return to the pond that makes the individual essays work as a whole.

Some of my favorite moments from the collection: from Ava Wong Davies’ “The First”: “As I push off into the wetness I disturb a tiny fuzzy duckling who’s paddling rapidly after its mother. I apologise and then feel ridiculous.” From Deborah Moggach’s “Nothing Much Except Joy”: “the atmosphere’s different with men around. Noisier, certainly - why do men splutter and grunt like walruses when they swim, and splash water everywhere even when they’re doing the crawl? And why does anyone do butterfly stroke, for goodness sake? It’s always the men, and they drench one’s hair.” From Sharlene Teo’s “Echolocation”: “Drifting forward I can hear crickets, ducks, water, female voices low and indistinct, and something buzzing overhead. Behind my eyelids summertime unspools into its various sticky components. The news cycle is a hell fire and like most people I can’t stop worrying about the future. I want to write fiction forever, but this seems unsustainable on a practical, financial level. The more seriously I take it the less competent I feel. Everything is a wobble.”

Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes by Jessica J. Lee

Jessica J. Lee did her PhD in environmental history on the Hampstead Ladies Pond, and I looked up her work after reading her essay in At the Pond. Lee’s memoir Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes is a beautiful chronicle of her ambitious year-long project to swim in fifty-two of Berlin’s lakes.

Jumping between musings on German history, explanations of lake ecology, and reflective memoir, Lee extolls the personal and intellectual benefits of wild swimming. Though the book made me want to find a local pond and swim through winter, it maybe wasn’t my favorite ever example of the possibilities of nature writing. I felt that the memoir threads were at times disjointed, and I wished there had been more of a linear chronology to Lee’s backstory. The book also felt slightly repetitive - though Lee talks about different aspects of the lakes in each chapter, fifty-two lakes is a lot of lakes. I’m interested in lake ecology, but I found myself craving the break that the memoir sections provided.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun is one of the best nature memoirs I’ve ever read. Liptrot grew up on Scotland’s Orkney Islands (at the very northernmost tip of Scotland), and the book documents her return to Orkney while in the process of recovering from a decade-long addiction to alcohol. Liptrot moved to London to escape the isolation of Orkney, but once there found herself increasingly isolated by her alcoholism. After losing countless jobs, friends, flats and relationships, Liptrot moves back to Orkney in an attempt to stay sober. She gets a job tracking corncrake calls, joins a wild swimming group, and takes up stargazing, finding new experiences to take the place of all the time she had previously lost to drinking.

The Outrun melds memoir and nature writing beautifully - Liptrot’s personal story is moving and well-developed, and the ecology and atmosphere of the Orkney islands are just as robustly captured. Liptrot shows how the way-of-life and community of the islands is entangled with and dictated by their ecology, and the book is a helpful reminder that nature is a powerful force. There is something peaceful and restorative about hearing the call of a corncrake or watching a seal pup play in the sea. Many of the books in this post focus on nature’s ability to heal personal wounds, but those healing experiences are also dependent on humans not destroying the world in their wake.