Tag: swim

Collectanea 29.25 Topography-Hell-Cubs

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

Week of July 14, 2025

Travel

We traveled to Michigan this week, Sunday through Thursday, so Collectanea slipped from routine to resting pose. Laptop in backpack. Vary your compositional yoga. Trip was two very different Airbnbs in and around Washtenaw County, winding routes through Dexter, Chelsea, Manchester, Saline, and Milan, then through Pinckney, Gregory, and Unadilla. A swim at Pickerel Lake. Ice cream in Hell. A just so-so “glop” taco salad in Depot Town. A Zoom meeting from a cafe. Catching up with friends and family as much as time and coordination allowed. Great to see some yas; sorry to miss some yas! And then back to Virginia, across Ohio and for too long stormed upon in West Virginia.

Airbnb #1

Figure 1. Der hund, relieved to be out of the car.

Ice Water

Figure 2. Shifted plans and there was Sweetwaters delivering cool-off refreshments.

Anecdoted Topography of Ann Arbor Chance

Figure 3. Before brunch, Zola Bistro. Outdoor options, calling ahead to learn which places were easy-agreeable to Feta’s companionably sitting sidetable: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Jolly Pumpkin, Hell Saloon, too, were welcoming.

Airbnb #2

Figure 4. Portage Lake near Pinckney. Much to say about this place, but for that very reason, I’ll let it go, unsaid and unreviewed. No comment. No stars.

Take A Stick! Do Not Take A Stick.

Figure 5. Feta passed on Hell’s Doggie Library, perhaps because the offerings were not as appealing as the many sticks back at home, perhaps because she determined that this is exactly the sort of conditional enticement an officer of the devil would place before an unsuspecting canine. 😈

Downpours of Charleston, WV

Figure 6. Thunder and lightning and downpours and slow-downs for what felt like hours on the drive back to Virginia.

Cutie-pies, Cerberus

Figure 7. Back at the holler, Friday morning, this pair of black bear cubs playfully sauntered over the creek, along the yard, pausing, hummingbird nectar I smell?, at the walnut tree before heading up the embankment behind the mailboxes again.

Now What

The rest of July is a heap of review tasks and further syllabizing ENGL3844 into existence, plotting out two fall conference presentations, painting some more of the shed, keeping the hummingfeeders nectared, the tiny birdkin fueled, fed.

About Collectanea

Collectanea is a series I’m trying out in Summer 2025 at Earth Wide Moth. Each entry accumulates throughout the week and is formed by gathering quotations, links, drawings, and miscellany. The title of the entry notes the week and year (the eighth in this series from Week 29 of 2025, or the Week of July 14). I open a tab, add a little of this or that most days. Why? Years ago my habitude toward serial composition and, thus, toward blogging, favored lighter, less formal, and more varied fragments; gradually, social media began to reel in many of these short form entries, recasting them as posts dropped a Facebook or Instagram or Twitter (while it lasted), albeit with dwindling ripple effect into the ad-addled and algorithm-ambivalent streams. This space, meanwhile, began to feel to me like it wanted more thoughtfully developed entries bearing the shape and length of what you might find on Medium or Substack. But, because I am drafting toward a book project most mornings, I don’t quite have reliable essayistic bandwidth for Earth Wide Moth this summer. Collectanea, if it goes according to my small bites chicken scratch plan, will be a release valve for the piling up of too many tabs open, functioning as a shareable, intermittent (weekly?) repository for small pieces cut and pasted from stuff I am reading, and also as a scrapbook for illustrations. -DM

The vulture guardian, Hell, Mich. #travelogue #rollcall

A Lap at Pickerel Lake

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

Pickerel Lake, Gregory, Mich.

Go to Pickerel Lake when you can. Let it be summer, if you can. Preferably mid-morning or evening but not peak midday because the tiny eyelet cove will be crowded with like 10 Ann Arbourgeoisie and noisy with chatting and water play. Sounds carry across the lake. Only accessory you need is a New Wave swim buoy, just an innocuous $30 inflatable guardian against sinking, low drag, bright and sturdy on the water’s surface. Clip it around your waist. Wade in with the slow-steadiness of a Taurus plodding motion unbroken. And then make do with a modified freestyle path around the perimeter. You’re not much of a swimmer. Left first or right first makes no difference. The shoreline is all cattails and lily pads in alternating segments. A breathing flotilla meditation and reunion with tree friends at a distance, hi again. They’re not trees you’ve climbed or otherwise dwelt with, quiet there in the surrounds, except when the wind picks up, hi to you. Stick to the perimeter but not too close. Ten yards out. The northeast bend is where lily shoots reach from beneath at irregular spacing. Careful they will surprise you. Tentacled-seeming, those stems know how to tickle or wrap a limb. The swim basic sublime, danger! plant-matter touches land lightly ganglia shock like chimes faintly stunningly dinned and sound-waving from ancestors ninety or more generations ago so lovingly decomposing, dispersed, and rooting for you. After an hour, complete the loop, regain footfalls in sand, primate again lazy towel-off, swig of water, find car to unlock and drive on the dusty way.