The Blue Million Miles Podcast Connor Towne O'Neill

Hey, everyone.
Some technical issues on my end meant that the last issue of the Blue Million Miles was text-only. I thought I’d rectify that by making this one strictly for your ears. You might remember that last year I spent July 4th wringing my hands over the death drive coming through the speakers at the city pool that day. Well, this year I spent Labor Day at Chewacla, the state park here in Auburn, listening just as intently, albeit this time without all the woebegone analysis. So, without further ado, here’s a field recording from the afternoon at the lake. A very good one, indeed. And here’s to the workers.


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*clears throat*
It’s always easier not to. Not to write. Not to swim. Not to write about swimming. Easier not to turn left off the state road and descend the mountain to the lake below. It’s not like anyone will ever force you to. The excuses offer themselves too easily. And besides, entropy doesn’t even ask for one, content to carry you down its current, you low-down lazy bum.
But here I am. I’ve done it. I’ve come to the water’s edge. Lake Chinnabee. My trunks on. My shirt off. And…my only thought is of turning around. It is March. It is windy. And it is always easier not to. Even at the water’s edge.
Chinnabee is a small lake. 17 acres, if that means anything to you. You could achieve the opposite bank in a few minutes’ swim. Quaint. “A pastoral valley of peacefulness” is how the forest service describes it. Sure.
It’s smack in the middle of the Talladega National Forest. This is northeast Alabama. The mountains (insofar as that means anything here). The foothills of Appalachia, anyway. That famous trail officially ends 300 miles to the east at Springer Mountain, Georgia. But technically the range continues, or unravels really, across the border here before laying down on the coastal plain below. There’s a movement to extend the trail to Alabama; AT2AL it’s called. A purist’s vision, I guess, to trace the mountains down to the last peak, Mount Cheaha, which is just a few miles east of here, where I stand on the bank of this lake, the end of the end, the southern terminus, thinking about not swimming.
Then comes another thought. One that is at once stupid and profound. A holy-fool thought, to which I am too often inclined. This one having to do with time, and how we encounter it. How it shapes us. Namely that these mountains are very old and that it is a wondrous, almost inconceivable thing to be upon them.
The geological events that brought about the Appalachian mountains took place hundreds of millions of years ago, and involved great volcanic eruptions, the colliding of continental shelves, the coming together and the coming apart of Pangea. The Appalachians were once contiguous with a range that today stands in Morocco. I’ve just written that, but really I don’t even know what that means. The timespace of these hills, it’s like they’re in some kind of superposition. I’m looking at rock that was once at the center of Pangea, at the center of everything. In a range that is thought to have once been as tall as the Himalayas, the tallest in the world. But time, in this case expressing itself as hundreds of millions of years of erosion and continental drift, has worn it down and spanned an ocean through it.
I’d given a reading the night before, which is why I was up in this corner of the state. I’d published a book a few years ago about Confederate monuments and the protest movements to remove them. It had came out in September of 2020, which you might remember as a time of global viral pandemic. So the book tour was virtual. And though I was lucky enough to do a good number of events discussing and promoting the book, they all took place on Zoom. So this reading in March was the first I’d done in person.
The writer John Jeremiah Sullivan talks about reading old writing as a kind of vaudeville, an impersonation of yourself. And for me this was doubly so. The book was written years ago now and chronicles events and experiences that took place in the years before that, and what’s more it renders a version of me that is even younger and more naive. I had wanted to trace an intellectual and moral development that took place over the past decade or so on questions of race and equity and how we face the past. And so reading it that night, as good as it felt to read in public and in person, it also felt tired, and a bit uncanny. I didn’t quite recognize myself. Was it me? It was not not me, but also not quite me. Not anymore, anyway. I’d written those words and had those experie

To write about the waterways of Alabama is to wade through converging streams of fact and fiction, reality and lore, what’s actually true and what’s just a good story.
Let me give you an example: a few weeks ago, on an oxbow of the Alabama River just downstream from its confluence, I swam past an abandoned film set. It’s a film set that was built to appear like a town once thriving and then run down. A stretch of houses halfway completed in order to appear halfway to ruin. Facades and porches finished and then weathered; floorboards unlaid and back doors never hung. The director of the film had come across the island while scouting for locations here in Elmore County, Alabama. There wasn’t anything on the island then. Or nothing manmade, anyway. So they built it, weathered it, and left behind a new old town on the island.
The movie filmed here was Big Fish — a story of a son’s quest to parse the truth from the fiction of his father’s tales.
The town is called Spectre; the town is called Jackson Lake Island.
The island is privately owned but it’s open to the public and has become something of a tourist attraction since the film’s release. You can pay $3 and drive across the causeway to wander the film set. But it seems more popular as a recreation area. A place to camp, fish, boat, swim, or feed the herd of wild goats who have taken up residence on the island.
On a Sunday in August, that herd of goats descended on every car to park at a campsite. Ours was no exception.
We — me and Shaelyn and Ozzie, that eternally game and up-for-anything crew — made for a site on the far side of the island to spend the afternoon. After greeting the goats, I swam out into the channel. The water got deep quickly and I had to plunge earlier than I might have preferred, all things being equal. But you don’t go wild swimming on your own terms, so I plunged and dolphin kicked and came up paddling a good ways out into the channel. Early enough in the day that the water was still crisp, refreshing if not bracing. The water was like tea — a little tannin-y without feeling at all viscous or algal or gross.
About halfway into the channel, I noticed what turned out to be a tree branch emerging from the water’s surface but which at first and second glance I’d mistaken for a water snake with its head raised. After a moment’s panic, I swam over to get a closer look.
The branch was still connected to the rest of the tree, which must have fallen from the opposite bank. Winded from the swimming and treading, I tried to stand on the trunk but its angle proved too steep, its surface too slick to get any purchase. I slipped, barely avoiding a faceplant on the log. Had anyone been watching from the bank, the Benny Hill theme song might have come to mind.
The felled tree was likely lingering damage from the tornado that touched down here last May. Another tree caved in the roof of the campground’s pavilion. The storm spared the film set, though. The feigned ruin still intact; the felled trees now submerged.
While I’d been swimming, Shaelyn and Ozzie had been tracking the goats across the island. I swam back in and caught up with them and the three of us headed over to the film set.
As we approached, a child was tossing a pair of shoes into the air, trying to snag them on a line stretched between two poles — the makeshift gateway to the fictional place. The boy couldn’t have been older than seven. He was immersed in his task. The shoes on the line, it’s a reference to the film. If you wandered through the forest and wound up in the town, they’d take your shoes and string them on the line. The grass was so soft here, who needed shoes? And if they’re gone, well, you couldn’t leave.
Stories are seductive like that. Tell a good enough tale and you might never want to leave it.
But this kid, he hadn’t tied his laces together. There was nothing to catch the line. He was just hucking his shoes into the air and watching t

This was supposed to be a love letter. An exaltation. A fanfare for the public pool. I’d call upon the muses, pray they sing of the high dive and the snack bar. The smell of sunblock and laundered towel and chlorinated water evaporating on hot macadam. Of the gutter and the lap lane; the wet sandal’s “thock,” and the belly flop’s “smack.”
And this was to be a recitation of its virtues on Independence Day, no less. With neither irony nor pollyanna in mind but rather, to go armed with the sobering knowledge of the country’s fraught past and its perilous moment and still partake of the Republic’s finest achievements: encased meats, cheap suds, and the public pool.
Pools make people more legible. People’s needs and desires become harder to repress. There’s the child, so excited by the prospect of a swim, that she cannot help but run across the pool deck, lifeguard’s whistle be damned. And the teenager who, on surfacing from a plunge, cannot suppress that vain little flick of his head. The parents desperate for a place where their adolescent children can while away a few hours. And the lizard need, across ages, just to get some sun. It’s all there, right on the surface, at the pool.
So given all that, there was something…unnerving happening at the pool that day. Or, more precisely, happening on the pool’s stereo. There’s no PA system at the Samford Pool. Instead, they have one of those rolly suitcase amps hooked up to someone’s phone. The pool’s small enough — 25 by 50 yards, roughly — that a single rolly suitcase amp can reach the far end of the grounds, no problem. And songs on the stereo that day, the nation’s 246th birthday, well, they certainly had a sense of moment to them.
While I rolled out my towel, Lee Brice was singing about driving a dead brother’s truck. “I roll every window down / And I burn up every back road in this town / I find a field, I tear it up til all the pain's a cloud of dust / Yes, sometimes, I drive your truck.” A bit maudlin for the occasion but it sounds like the brother died in service. So, condolences. Tree of liberty, etc., etc.
But before I’d finished putting on sunblock, Blake Shelton was singing about how whistling Dixie would get you heaven-bound and promising that “I don't care what my headstone reads / Or what kind of pinewood box I end up in / When it's my time, lay me six feet deep / In God's country.” Which, I mean, c’mon dude. Inane but also just a bummer.
Okay, but here was Miranda Lambert to lighten the mood, maybe? Not so: “Whether you're late for church / Or you're stuck in jail / Hey, word's gonna get around / Everybody dies famous in a small town.”
Pretty bleak. Isn’t today supposed to be a happy day? Or if you let the algorithm play long enough does it always land in a death wish? I looked around, a little confused, hoping to catch the eye of someone similarly put off. Slow day at the pool, though. Slow enough that the off-duty lifeguards had set up a basketball hoop and were shooting jumpers off the diving board. They seemed unfazed by the tunes. Inoculated, maybe. I hope not.
Maybe you’re hearing this and thinking to yourself, “Oh please. Spare me the pointy-headed writer being annoying about country music.” But I love country music. And not just those Terry Allen and Gene Clark re-issues, either. I’ve tried to play music for almost twenty years now and the closest I’ve ever come to entertaining anyone was with a rendition of Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” at karaoke night in an SEC college town. But this alienated, atomized, only-finding-meaning-in-consumer-goods-and-death country? I mean, to quote Greil Marcus: “What is this s**t?”
But the songs kept playing.
Now, you’re going to think I invented this next song but you’d be flattering my imagination. Every verse of this song is from the perspective of a dead soldier from a different war. But that’s not all. Then — I kid you not

Pratt’s Ferry Preserve is a put-in spot. A place to launch kayaks and canoes. Maybe more accurate (if a bit less pleasant-sounding) to call it a take-out spot, though, as I’ve seen far more boaters disembarking here at this point between two bends of the Cahaba River. A waypoint. A place for comings and goings. I’ve never done much of anything here, though. For us — my wife and I — it has been a place to idle, to float, and, yes, to watch the occasional kayaker paddle into shore.
We’d started coming here in the summer of 2020 — the pandemic at a peak, the world suspended. Pratt’s Ferry Preserve sits under a bridge in West Blocton, a small town in Bibb County about halfway between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, where we were living at the time. It’s a quiet spot; we’ll often have the place to ourselves. A good alternative to the wildlife refuge that’s not too far away — beautiful when the lilies are in bloom but often crowded and too shallow to get a proper swim in. We had a go-to swimming hole in Tuscaloosa but, times being what they are, the e-coli was in bloom and we were forced to look further out. This spot isn’t much to speak of — a gravel beach on one side, some trees under which to read, an embankment of rock on the other side, worn to a cross-section by river time. It became my custom to swim out across the river to the spot where the channel narrows and the current accelerates. I could fashion a sort of infinity pool, turning into the current and swimming upstream. I had to swim my little heart out just to stay in the same place. Moving furiously and not getting anywhere.
Shaelyn was seven months pregnant that summer and the weightlessness afforded by the water, the relief that came with it, was one of the few things to safely seek out and enjoy beyond our apartment door. How often have I looked from the riverbank out on Shaelyn wading in the water, her belly half-submerged, the current encircling her, framed by a simple beam bridge above, and wondering what to expect?
Expecting — that’s what they say about pregnancy. You’re expecting. A funny phrase, given the circumstances. Beyond the very immediate meaning of it — a child to be born — it was getting harder and harder to hazard any guesses about what would happen next. Or what wouldn’t happen next. On the day we’d planned to be married, the Times ran the names of the first one hundred thousand Americans to die from the coronavirus. We’d canceled the wedding, of course, and I’d been furloughed. Shaelyn’s job transfer hadn’t gone through. There was no foreseeable future. I’d look downriver but couldn’t see beyond the nearest bend.
It’s been two years since we first started coming to this spot on the Cahaba. Early this July, we went back. We took the backroads across central Alabama pastureland. The wet-towel humidity of a deep south summer day. The corridors of scorched pink mimosa and deep magenta crepe myrtle blooms flanking the county roads. The play of light and shadow across the tall clouds. 
You can’t step in the same river twice, we know that from Heraclitus. The river’s moved on, of course, and besides, you’ve changed, too. But Ozzie? Ozzie had never stepped in the river before. In any river. But today, framed by that same bridge, she’d stepped into the current, too.
Earlier that day, we’d buried Ozzie’s placenta under an elm tree. That’s a sentence I’d never expected to write. But so much for expectations. Maybe the idea burying Ozzie’s placenta sounds like a strange thing to do. It did a bit to me at first. Not so much anymore though. Ozzie’s placenta — I say that intentionally. Though it grew in Shaelyn’s womb, it carries 50% of Shaelyn’s genetic makeup, 50% of mine. Which is to say: It’s Ozzie’s. I learned that from Angela Garbes’s book Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy. Shaelyn had read the book early on and then made sure I

Welcome to the Blue Million Miles: Dispatches from a Swim Through Alabama. You can listen to an audio version of this intro post above or you can read it below — they’re the same, give or take a field recording and music by the Skull Island Inquirer.
Like all the best swims do, my first this year came spur of the moment. This was a few months back, late March. After one of those Zoom calls. If you’ve ever Zoom-ed then surely you know the kind I’m talking about. The rare experience that might justify the use of a word like ennervating. Anyway, after I hung up, I realized there was a window of time before I had to go pick up my daughter. Typically when that happens, I fill the time by crawling under my desk and groaning.
You might hear that and think that I must have been in a bad place. I’m not sure that I would say that, though. I wouldn’t say I was much of anywhere, really. Not fully oriented to time and space. Maybe you’ve felt something like that lately? An… uncanniness? The latency of the video call carrying over, off-screen. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s that I work in a basement office with no windows, and I’d been sitting there for months, trying — and mostly failing — to track down sources for a story, hearing every variety of “This phone is no longer in service.” (which, by the way, there are way more variations than I’d imagined or ever really thought possible.) Maybe it’s that the past two years have taken a toll on me that I haven’t really admitted to yet, haven’t worked through. And I haven’t slept or written much lately, leaving my sense-making faculties at an all-time low. So okay maybe it is just me. Maybe. 
But also maybe not? Doesn’t something just seem a little off? The number you have dialed is no longer in service.
Which, I mean, go figure. You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to try and account for the bad vibes, as it were, the strangest of the moment  — one of illness, neglect, death, insurrection, war, despair, collapse, isolation. And it’s like the weight of all that, it exerts a gravity, creates its own tide, and we’re caught in it, headed out to sea.
I feel that, anyway.
But so that day, after the video call, for whatever blessed reason, instead of my usual brooding, drifting, I thought to go swimming instead.
There’s a state park on the outskirts of Auburn, Alabama, where I live. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, that park has a lake. That lake has a roped-off section for swimming. And, that afternoon, I had the place to myself. I walked through the shallows until the water came to mid-thigh then I plunged, dolphin kicking for as long as my breath would hold. I surfaced out by the rope. This was March, but, you know, Alabama March — the water was already bathwater warm in parts, still bracing cold in others. 
I paddled an easy, aimless breaststroke for a time, admired a scrim of pollen on the water’s surface, watched the clouds above glide into the tree line. I climbed onto the concrete jetty just to be able to dive into the water again. I couldn’t tell you how long I was out there. Time had escaped me, but for once it was welcome.
Two years ago, while I was waiting for Ozzie to be born — Ozzie, that’s my daughter’s name — I sat down to write her a letter. Or, if not a letter, exactly, just…I wanted to set down on paper what I knew about life. Epiphanies. Insights I’d gleaned. Some fatherly advice.
I had one pearl of wisdom off the top of my head. Once, while we were having dessert together, my father looked at me from across the picnic table and observed that I had come to know one of the deep truths of the universe: that you should always let your Klondike bar melt a bit before eating.
So I wrote that down. Let the Klondike melt a little. Got it.
Okay. But what else? Huh. I bit my knuckle. Doodled. Did I really have nothing else to impart? I had to stand and pace the room in order to beat ba