On Swimming and the Origins of String, with a Bow to Herakleitos

By Theresa Kishkan

So when the backwash spewed him up again,
he swam out and along, and scanned the coast
for some landspit that made a breakwater.
Lo and behold, the mouth of a calm river...
—the Odyssey, 5: 436-40 (Fitzgerald trans.)

“Everybody knows about fire and the wheel, but string is one of the most powerful tools and really the most overlooked. It’s relatively invisible until you start looking for it. Then you see it everywhere.”
—Saskia Wolsak*

* https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string/

1.
On the day before my 69th birthday, I was swimming my slow kilometre, swimming in the pool 10 minutes from my house, the water shimmering a tropical blue, wind blowing the big trees just beyond the wall of windows, Stevie Nicks singing. Because of the open room and the body of water, music at the pool warbles, or maybe that’s because I wear a silicone cap over my hair and my ears are crushed by it. She took her love, and she took it down. She saw her reflection. A landslide brought her down.
    
Driving to the pool this morning, I was surprised to see snow low on the mountain’s shoulder. Yesterday was mild but overnight it rained and higher up, where the elk spend their summers and keen hikers climb every summer to sit on rock and look down on the Strait of Georgia, Agamemnon Channel, and all the islands in the distance, higher up it snowed. When I’d removed my sweater and jeans, kicked my flip-flops under the bench and quickly showered, I carefully descended the low stairs to the shallow area where children are taught to swim. The lifeguard said she was anticipating a group of little kids and she’d put out the lane divider so I could swim my laps without a child floating into my orbit on top of the green turtle or in the small blue foam canoe. When my lane is set apart from the rest of the pool, I find it easier to enter a meditative state, and this morning I followed my thinking, a line drawing me through deep water to shallow.

Some nights when I’m in my bed reading, awake in the dark hours, I hear the distant sound of rocks falling, rocks fractured by weather or maybe even small seismic shifts, and I realize I’ve heard a landslide. In daylight, there’s traffic on the highway, the radio playing, or a CD of Bach; I’d never hear anything else. Some mornings when I drive out for my swim, I see rocks tumbled down to the side of the road. I swim with the memory of landslides, fracture, granite glazed with frost.

I am not a life-long swimmer. Or maybe I am, in a way: I learned to swim when I was 6, at lessons at the Naden Pool in Victoria, available for free to the children of military families. And on hot summer days, I’d swim in lakes, the oceans I lived near—the Pacific, the Atlantic, for a sweet brief time the Mediterranean Sea—and rivers. But not so much swimming as cooling off, floating on my back or stomach. I didn’t have a purpose or a goal. I live near a lake and for years we’d go down for a swim in late afternoon, but then the little park which gives access to a small beach became busy, I couldn’t reconcile my early experiences of arriving with my husband and children, our dog, on an August day, with at most a handful of others there to share the shore with its wild spirea, tangle of water mint, snakes sunning themselves on warm rocks, with what came later: an official parking lot, sand brought in annually to create a proper beach, and hoards of people pulling wagons of gear to claim areas for the day. Change tents erected, lounge chairs set up, flamingos and unicorns inflated to sway and nod on the sand imprinted with deer tracks and the scribble of ravens.

But at the age of 61, I began to swim to save my life. In a way, a landslide brought me down. 

2.
In May, 2016, we went to Ottawa for the long weekend. Forrest, Manon, and grandson Arthur lived in Vanier in an old house they’d bought shortly after their marriage in 2012. We’d gone each year in late spring to help with various building projects: a deck off their kitchen, a pergola over the deck. On this particular visit, I remember I wore cowboy boots for the flight. The pair I own are comfortable and I like wearing them with dresses so I wore them with the intention of having them to wear out for a fancy dinner if we went while in Ottawa. I remember that my legs ached on the visit. We went for several long walks, which I normally love (and at home we went for a walk most days, sometimes on mountain trails, sometimes in the woods surrounding our home, and sometimes along the highway to the mailboxes and back), and my calves felt sore and maybe even swollen. By the time we were due to fly home, my ankles and feet were slightly swollen and I couldn’t wear my boots.
    
All that summer, I had periods when I’d notice that my ankles were swollen. I’d experienced this a little during three pregnancies but certainly not since. But I’d take it as a sign I should elevate my legs. That usually helped. I was busy that summer. I was a member of the organizing committee for a chamber music festival, which required many meetings, writing press releases, promotional materials, and a dear friend in Vancouver celebrated a 90th birthday in the middle of the festival weekend, which meant a quick overnight trip for the party. I’d published a novella in early May and was invited to the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, the weekend after the chamber music festival, to read from my work and talk to an audience of several hundred. Festival writers were generously provided with passes for the other events so John and I spent our weekend listening to writers read their work, having meals with friends among the invited writers, and maybe I wasn’t surprised at the end of the weekend that I felt as though I had some sort of bug. I coughed more than was usual, I experienced nausea, and if I sat with my legs stretched out in front of me, I noticed that my ankles were swollen. But there wasn’t really time to pay attention to these things because our Ottawa family was due to visit and we arranged to meet them in Vancouver after their late flight in readiness to bring them home the next day. Before we drove out to Richmond to the hotel where we’d booked a room, the same hotel they would be staying at, John was scheduled for a prostate biopsy. He’d had one a year or two earlier. Both were considered precautionary and because the first one had been very quick and routine, he didn’t anticipate the second one would be any different, though he found the fasting difficult. He felt a little light-headed when we arrived at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver, after catching a very early ferry in order to make the morning appointment. The biopsy was much more painful this time around and by the time the procedure was finished, John was weak and disoriented. We went for a very late breakfast and that was when I noticed how difficult it was for me to breathe.
    
It was difficult to breathe. We sat quietly after our breakfasts. I didn’t want to make a difficult day more difficult so I just crossed my fingers and hoped I would feel better after awhile. We checked into our hotel, rested for a time (and I noticed how I had to prop myself up on pillows or else I had chest pain and couldn’t catch my breath), and then met the shuttle bus delivering our family to the hotel. Arthur was not yet a year old and very sweet. He was also cranky and tired so we said goodnight and arranged to meet the next morning to walk to a nearby restaurant for breakfast for driving to the ferry terminal. It was not a comfortable night but I was excited to know that the others were in the same building.
    
By the time we got home the next afternoon, the pain was pretty constant. We had a simple supper and instead of preparing for bed, I told John I thought I needed to go to Emergency in Sechelt. After a chest xray, blood work, it was determined I had atypical double pneumonia. An antibiotic was prescribed, and rest. Driving home, I promised John I would rest, even though we had our family with us, and another member arriving in a day or two. I did rest. Others made meals, helped with the watering. We had a lovely day trip to Powell River where we visited secondhand bookstores and drove to the Laughing Oyster overlooking Okeover Inlet. Lunch was delicious. For an afternoon, I forgot what had happened. When I went for an appointment once they’d all returned to their homes, my doctor told me that the chest xray was actually quite ugly and she’d like me to have a CT or computed tomography scan. I’m not convinced this was just pneumonia, she said.
    
I remember driving down for the CT scan and then returning home after the library and some grocery shopping. I didn’t have a cellphone but I’d taken John’s. When I drove up our driveway, he was waiting on the deck, quite worried. Why didn’t you answer the phone, he asked. Because it didn’t ring! Apparently as soon as I’d left the hospital, the technicians viewing the scan noticed something serious. I returned their call and was told I needed to come back immediately. But that I wouldn’t be able to have a second scan until the morning. So is it reasonable to wait until morning to return, I asked. The reply was an uncertain, well, I suppose so. It was a long night, sleepless for the most part, and we drove back to Sechelt, 45 minutes on a long winding highway, for a second CT scan. Which showed a pulmonary embolism, and maybe something else. I had a bilateral ultrasound of my legs. A long day in Emergency, waiting for a doctor to provide an official diagnosis and a prescription for a heavy-duty blood thinner. The thinking was that I had developed a deep vein thrombosis—the probable time of this was the flight to Ottawa, with the resulting swelling of my ankles over the summer—and that the clot had broken away and travelled to my lungs. I remembered an intense cramping in my left calf late September and possibly that had been the clot breaking away.
    
My next appointment with my own doctor was sobering. She said that as well as the embolism, there were shadows or nodes on my lungs which could be a fungus, could be scar tissue from previous pneumonia, or they could be something much more serious. She wanted me to see a specialist, a respirologist at Lions Gate Hospital.
    
The respirologist was grave. He suspected metastatic lung disease, showing us the margins of the nodes, and he talked about various tests to determine what needed to be done next. He could insert a thin wire into my chest wall for a biopsy, he wasn’t eliminating that as a possible route, but first he would order a PET or positron emission tomography scan at the BC Cancer Agency. As John and I left the hospital, holding hands, I began to weep quietly in the rain. I thought of everything I loved—my family, including a tiny new grandson I’d only just met, my home and my garden, my life with its beauty and complications—and I experienced a sort of anticipatory sorrow at the possibility of losing it all.
    
Along with the lung issues, or maybe because of them, I had severe inflammation in one knee and found it hard to walk with any comfort. Our daily walks had to be abandoned. I hoped it wouldn’t be forever.
 
     I think John worried more than I did. By early December, he was having trouble sleeping. One morning I told him to pack up his towel and bathing suit and go to the local pool. Many years ago, when our children were young, we’d gone to the pool fairly often. They’d swim and we’d relax in the hot tub. But I wanted John to swim, to lose himself in the activity. I wish you’d come too, he said, but I was reluctant. I was reluctant to wear a bathing suit in public, to swim among others, most of whom I imagined were skilled swimmers. I was 61, nearly 62, and was unwilling to abandon my privacy about my body. Was it vanity? I’d like to say it wasn’t but maybe it was. When he returned from the swims, I’d ask how many were there and he’d say, only me. Or two others.
 
 Maybe three.
 
I wasn’t going to do it.

3.
​Along the TransCanada highway, the nets to hold back falling rocks, frost cracks, landslides, nets like fishnets but made of steel, hung from cable supports, melting snow falling through as water. 70 meters of highway sheared away, temporary bridge, deep new gully carved out by torrential water and debris. In my body, a clot moving through my bloodstream, unimpeded. Not a helpful clot but something rogue and dangerous.

​Proteins in your blood called clotting factors signal each other to cause a rapid chain reaction. It ends with a dissolved substance in your blood turning into long strands of fibrin. These get tangled up with the platelets in the plug to create a net that traps even more platelets and cells.*

​A plug creates a net. In my body, a net. If I could crochet, I’d try to replicate it with the Japanese linen thread I’ve seen in the fabric shop, drawn to the beautiful shades that look like they’ve been lichen-dyed or submerged in pale bark; I’d loop and knot and hold the net over my arm, up to the light, to see what happened as the clot broke away and travelled to my lungs.

* https://www.webmd.com/dvt/blood-clots

4.
But then after Christmas, I said to John, I’m coming with you this morning. I felt my own strength diminishing and who knew how long I would be able to make decisions about physical activity for myself. In my darkest hours, I saw myself frail and bald on a white bed, wishing I hadn’t been so vain.
 
In the water, I was light as air, though I’m not light at all on land. My right knee was nimble, my legs strong. My strokes were clumsy but I found a way to swim and breathe, swim and breathe, and I wondered why I hadn’t been doing this forever. How much time did I have left and why had I wasted so much of it?
    
The day before the PET scan, we went into Vancouver for the night. We walked from our hotel to English Bay and although my knee was still sore and stiff, I was stronger. We ate a delicious dinner and walked back, stopping at a bakery so I could buy a muffin to eat at 6:00 the next morning with a cup of coffee from the maker in our room. (I was required to fast for 4 hours before the scan scheduled for 10:00 am.) I remember I cried when John pulled up in front of the BC Cancer Agency. What’s wrong, he asked, and I said, Look, read the sign. It’s the Cancer Agency. You knew that, he replied, puzzled at the tears. I knew it, yes, but seeing the sign makes it seem inevitable, I wept.
    
The halls were wide and clean. People with walkers, in wheelchairs, leaning heavily against a partner: were these my people? My heart melted for them but I still had hope that maybe things would be different for me. When a kind nurse gave me my gown, led me to a dim room, helped me onto a recliner, and injected me with radioactive glucose, and asked me what music I would like to hear for the hour that it would take for the substance to travel throughout my body, I chose Bach violin partitas and lay back with eyes closed to listen.
    
I remember the exam table moving into the scanner, shaped like a doughnut, and how I knew I could not look. I knew I had to keep my eyes shut, shaping the name and face of each member of my family so I would not be alone. So I would not be alone, I thought of each of the books I’d written. My family and my books felt like gifts to a world I might be leaving. I could hear the Corrente of the Partita No. 2 in D minor as I kept still in the scanner, its quick running steps reminding me of the unsteady people in the corridor, whose feet once danced, who arms were once young and strong. And hearing the Corrente in the medical examining room, I was surprised to find the Venus of Laussel hovering over me in the confined space of the scanner, my arms tight by my sides. She stroked my face, my hair, she murmured soft words of encouragement. Float in this other world, I heard. You are loved in both. And when the procedure was finished, she touched my heel to propel me back into the light, back into my life, my blue gown abandoned by the chair.
    
Back into my life. That’s what happened. Because two weeks later I was seated across from the respirologist and he was telling me that there was no sign of cancer in my body, that the nodes on my lungs had disappeared, and that he wanted me, for caution’s sake, to have another CT scan in June just to make sure my lungs remained clear, but that he was essentially dismissing me as his patient.
​
Briefly I’d floated between earth and what was beyond. I had been thrown a life-line, a length of coarse twisted rope to haul me back.

5.
I was thrown a rope. I held it for dear life. My grip was so tight that the rope rubbed at my palms and blisters formed. But there was no letting go. And what was rope? I want to think about what a life-line might be constructed of, something so strong and reliable that you’d give it your trust. In a cave at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, on the Red Sea Coast, archaeologists found coiled rope, nearly 4000 years old, as sturdy and practical as rope in current use. Most of us don’t think of cordage as important and yet what would we have done as humans without it? About 120,000 years ago, in what’s now Israel, people were perforating shells and threading them with something, probably twined fibres, to bury with their dead. The fibres don’t often last as well as clay or shell but perforations in shells or bones or the pattern of twine on an ancient pot tell us how coils of string made from papyrus or reeds were part of domestic lives we can date by other means. Think of hooks dropped into deep water, strung on braided or twined fibres, think of logs lashed together for migrations, think of bodies decorated with bone beads or shells or feathers, tied to ankles or throats with sturdy string. 50,000 thousand years ago, someone attached three strands of string, braided or woven, made from the inner bark of a pine tree to a stone tool found in a site in France. In other sites, twined flax fibre. How far in time, and how near. I think of the string bags, the mats, the clothing possibilities—tied, buttoned, stitched. In a cave in Germany, mammoth tusk perforated with 4 holes: 40,000 years ago, someone fed strands of plant fibre or animal sinew through each hole, twisting it to make a strong 4-ply twine, as important a moment in human development as any. We are attached to earth by string, the lengths of bark, roots, the threadlike fibres of flax, sinew, strips of hide, of twisted hair, attached, we are decorated, shells at our throats, whippy willow twigs braided into our hair, our dearest possessions in a carrier bag woven of strong grasses and spring spruce root, and if we are lucky, our string will accompany us to the afterlife, threaded through stone beads in our place of rest. 

6.
There was a night when it sounded like the whole mountain was coming down. I held onto the edge of the bed, almost asleep, but wary. It was spring, it hadn’t stopped raining for weeks, and huge areas of the woods had been clearcut, the netting of tree roots and undergrowth gone, soil eroded, nothing left to intercept the force of water. The ground had been knitted together by trees and everything was falling out: rocks, logs left behind after logging, hollow wildlife trees where owls nested and in whose root systems bears overwintered, the debris of what had once been a forest.

7.
The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet. (Herakleitos, 44)
 
It didn’t take long for the swimming to become routine. Three mornings a week. At first I swam for as long as I felt like it. Then I decided to aim for a kilometer each morning. That meant finding a pattern I could follow so that I didn’t have to think about what I was doing because the pleasure for me was not thinking, or at least not about swimming. I didn’t want to count, I didn’t want to wear a special gadget that estimated calories burned or kept track of laps or heart rate, I didn’t want to eyeball the swimmer in the next lane and try to keep up or compare myself to others. I just wanted to enter the water, find my current, the one that would hold my body, allow me to think like water and not like a gadget, and I wanted to do that until I was tired enough to stop.
     
When I was younger, when my children were small, we’d go down to the lake near us for a swim most summer days. In those years the little area where we went was known to a limited number of people and we loved the wildness of it. But as I wrote earlier, it seemed that the place no longer felt familiar. Increasingly I let my family go without me. My mother had an expression: You’d cut off your nose to spite your face. And maybe she was right. When I realized, after beginning my regular swims at the pool, that I wanted to continue in summer when the pool was closed, that I should return to the lake again, I felt acute remorse for the wasted years. I found that by going early, around 8, I’d have the place mostly to myself. I loved the deep green water, the little trout that would rise and sometimes leap for insects in the clear morning air, I loved the kingfishers, the loons who’d warble and disappear, the osprey flying the length of the lake, and most of all, I loved how welcoming it felt to step into the water and push myself into its clean embrace. It was an embrace. We were bodies meeting. What was best was that I could go every morning, rain or shine. It was close, it was private, and I never felt more like myself. My body is 70% water, my bones 31%. I am home in it, submerged.
  
The beginning of the pandemic shut down the pool, briefly, but quite quickly a system was devised to allow swimming to continue in a safe way. You had to book ahead and your time-slot was 45 minutes. Limited numbers of people were allowed at any one time. So I swam through those hard months, thinking of my family, the work I was doing at home, trying to find a way to contain my fears for not just myself but for my community. I swam through the difficulty faced by my husband when a surgery went sideways, necessitating hospital visits, physiotherapy, and a lengthy recovery time. He swam too, finding in water a medium in which he barely noticed the newly-paralyzed foot that made him stumble on land. Some days I swam in the lake in winter too, or if not quite swimming, I at least plunged into the cold water to wake up every cell in my body. I’ve missed you, I told the lake. I can hardly wait until May. And during the following summer and the one following that one, and the next, we both swam almost every day, early, usually the only ones there. I can hardly wait.

8.
I find myself examining string, its construction. Begin with the fibres: hemp, flax or linen, cotton, jute. Twist them together, with your fingers or a machine, a spinning wheel, and then twist them with other strands, taking care to twist them in the opposite direction from the one used to make the ply, clockwise, counterclockwise, and you have twine, with more strength and durability than the single ply will have. And I find myself remembering a favourite fairy-tale from childhood, The Wild Swans, by Hans Christian Andersen, in which Elise has to knit shirts for her brothers who were bewitched by an evil stepmother (of course!) and turned into swans. The shirts must be knitted from fibre Elise is required to gather and spin from stinging nettles grown in a graveyard and she must remain silent for this work. Her hands become blistered and calloused but she manages to knit the shirts, apart from the sleeve of the youngest brother’s garment so he is left with a swan wing for an arm. I wondered if I would be capable of doing such a thing for my own brothers. About ten years ago, I was in a yarn store in a small town in B.C.’s Interior and I found some beautiful yarn of merino wool and nettle, which of course I bought, even though I don’t knit. My brothers are aging, their wings clipped. I don’t believe they would carry me across the sea on their backs.

9.
Within the bamboo hoop, my work is taut with tension, wrinkles eased out. My stitches too are taut, running across the fabric like lines of water. The beginning of a circle is also its end. (Herakleitos, 109.) Thread follows the needle’s lead, wide-eyed, a spiral of cobalt blue this time, deep red the last.

10.
There are gods here, too. (Herakleitos, 74.)

The way you feel after a swim in water that is full of weather somehow, lit green by sun and reflected cedars, pierced with dragonflies, shadowed by the mountain we live under, and wrinkled by light air movement this morning. You are never more yourself, but you don’t even begin to think that while you are there, your own reflection in the surface. You turn and turn in the water. If you are quiet enough, the mother merganser will pass very near with her newly-hatched ducklings, 17 of them, tiny and buoyant as a wish.

11.
For the past ten years, I’ve been using sashiko thread for quilting. Often I draw the three layers of a quilt together with spirals, beginning at the centre and working outwards until I have the sense that the spiral is big enough. I don’t plan. Sometimes I finish off the end of the spiral with a tiny shell button. Sometimes I continue the thread on a path across the surface of the quilt, meandering and turning, until it meets the path leaving another spiral. This is all intuitive and trying to describe what I do has me realize how little I know about the hows and whys of my quilting process. While I am sewing, I enter a meditative state, not unlike the place my mind goes when I am swimming in ideal conditions. By this, I mean that I am swimming in the lane I prefer, there are no distractions, there’s no turbulence in the water, which means that the alpha male swimmers have finished and are in the sauna or the hot tub. One in particular thrashes his way up and down the pool, creating waves everywhere. Another swimmer, a woman, described it as "beating the snot out of the water".

But the sashiko thread: it is intended for embroidery, but it differs from the kind of embroidery thread I used a bit in the past in that it is usually 4- or 6-ply but it’s not divisible. You don’t tease out a strand or two but use the thread as it is. There are different thicknesses of sashiko thread and you choose the one best suited for your project. It’s matte rather than glossy. Running a strand between the fingers is gorgeous. Sashiko means “little stabs” and as a technique, this style of stitching is not meant to be perfect. You don’t stitch to conceal a repair or to highlight your skill but to strengthen what is worn or damaged. Many of the traditional patterns of sashiko highlight elements from the natural world or else they draw attention to the spirit, to ideas of longevity and prosperity. It is an embroidery of resilience, of attention to what can be patched and restored and given strength. A threadbare textile, patched with care, is still worthy of our respect.
    
I unwrap the skein from its package and drape it over the back of one of the oak dining chairs. I draw off a length and snip it with my small crane-billed embroidery scissors. I have beautiful wide-eyed sashiko needles and I thread two at once so I can continue the work when the thread runs out, or at least I can continue two needles’ worth of work. Knot the end and make a start. Stitch around the beginning, stitch, circling the beginning, your fingers easing the needle along an invisible path. The secret is that there is almost nothing as satisfying as the feel of a spiral developing as you stitch, outward, outward, the spiral growing, the texture as you stitch marvellous in your hands, and when you have had enough of following the thread around and around, you let it venture forth into the body of the quilt, finding its way as you are finding your way, your thoughts becoming clear. The beginning of a circle is also its end. In your imagination, you are entering at the widest point and walking toward the centre. Which you have made yourself, with a knotted cotton thread.
    
20,000 years ago, people living in caves above the Inya River in southwestern Siberia made eyed needles sharp enough to perforate animal skins. (Bone awls, precursors to needles, were used as long as 76,000 years ago in Africa.) I think of those women, because undoubtedly they were women, threading a bone needle with fine sinew or twined flax fibre or gut or vein, and pushing the needle in and out of a skin, with the intention of making a garment rather than a simple covering. One of them had figured out how to make a single strand of fibre stronger by twining it, one of them had the patience to finely braid, one of them observed the intricate weaving of a bird’s nest and tried something similar with long stems of reed and the resulting basket was so handy and so beautiful that soon she was making them for her sisters. I think of her. I think of the one who mended a hole in a cape and took the time to use two different shades of thread and how she began to do that with all her mending. The one who took care to make her stitches even, the edges lining up. These are seams that changed us forever.

12.
Some mornings I swim away from the little beach area, following the shoreline, around the point where my children used to dive from the rocks, along the shore where a remnant stand of old growth cedar and Douglas firs remains. High in the air, a glittering. There’s almost no wind but something is moving a little, the light catching it, filament like spider web, and when I am almost underneath, I can see it’s fishing line caught in the branches of a cedar leaning over the water. I imagine the cast, long, long, the click of his shoulder as he flung out his arm, and how the last thing he expected (because the fishers I see are almost always men) was that his hook and line would snag on a tree. Not when cutthroat were rising to mayflies, no, and he didn’t want to cut his line; he pulled back, easing the reel, but it would not give.

It did not give. He cut the line and left it to shine and twirl while the trout idle and rise. He had plenty more line coiled in his reel, another hook, a lure, a worm from a yoghourt container perforated with holes.
    
Sinew and horsehair, catgut and silk, spun out from a spiral, and now a filament of nylon or polyethylene, hanging from a tree. Some mornings I swim away from the little beach.

13.
Bow-drills, traps, fishing line, traps, snares, hunting bows, carrying bags, storage baskets, lashing parts of tools together, preparing shelters, weaving, knitting, knotting, stringing beads for adornment and worship and burying the dead. Think of a man more than 5,000 years ago, alive in the Tyrolean Alps, a man found centuries later perfectly preserved in ice:

​Ötzi carried dozens of tools in his quiver and string and birch bark baskets, including an axe, a bow-and-arrow, a dagger, medicinal fungi, and a fire-making kit. A pouch sewn to his belt contained small tools including a drill, an awl, and a scraper.*

* https://theconversation.com/got-your-bag-the-critical-place-of-mobile-containers-in-human-evolution-142712

14.
Three mornings a week became five. Some mornings a woman swims in the lane farthest from me. She is long and lean and her movements are elegant. I watch her arms come out of the water as she does the crawl, almost as though they are pulled by strings, invisible strings, allowing exactly the same play for each stroke. I can’t do the crawl. Maybe we weren’t taught it at those lessons in the early 1960s at the Naden pool or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. I know I never liked to have my face in the water. On family swims at lakes or rivers, my brothers sometimes threw me into the water against my will and I remember how I panicked as I sank, then climbed my way to the surface again. When it was time to learn to dive, I resisted, because of my fear of not being able to breathe. I took a couple of lessons last year, from the woman who swims in that far lane (she is also a lifeguard), and almost immediately I could do the arm movements with something like grace. The hip-generated kick was no problem. But even wearing goggles and for the first time not minding my face being submerged, I couldn’t manage the breathing. I’d take in great lungfuls of air but I couldn’t let it out underwater. So when my head surfaced again and I’d try to breathe in again, I’d gasp. And panic.
    
I watch the swimmer move back and forth in her lane as though watching could offer me grace. And maybe it can. I find my own place in the water, a current, a seam (neatly stitched), and glide on my side, half-windmill on my back, frog kick in a modified breaststroke (face only just dipping into the water), back and forth, not elegant exactly, but consistent. One of the alpha males said, I’ve been watching you swim and you are very efficient. I took that word with gratitude, kept it hidden, kept it for moments when I was tumbled aside by the man beating the snot out of the water, surprised by water cascading over my face as I stroked on my back, mouth open, coughing a little at the intake of pool water as a result.

15.
In Baja last year, I entered a small gallery in Todos Santos and was drawn to a huge painting. It was mostly blue, many shades, the same blues I saw most days of my time there, vivid aqua, ultramarine, saturated cobalt, Egyptian blue. And fastened to the work, painted into it with impasto or maybe some sort of glue, was a fragment of fishing net. I stood in front of the work and brushed tears from my eyes. I had been swimming every day in Baja, first thing in the morning in a blue pool shaped like the symbol for infinity, and later in the day in the ocean, the wild Pacific and then the calmer waters of the Gulf of California at El Tecolote. I had been taken into the blue water, under the blue sky, and I felt cradled in it, a hammock of coarse rope, rocked by currents. The painting spoke of that relationship, the layered blue, scrap of net. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It looked like it was made of hemp rope, not the high-density polypropylene or polyethylene or nylon most fishing nets are made with now, giving them the capacity to go on forever in our oceans, abandoned or lost, marine creatures entangled in their filaments.
    
In some ways I was reminded of Polish textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s magnificent sculptural works, the ones known as Abakans. I haven’t seen them in person but read reviews of the 2022 exhibition at the Tate in London, Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, and was lucky enough to see a single piece, earlier than the Abakans but anticipating their organic mystery, in a textiles show at the Barbican Centre in late winter of 2024. In an ideal world, if I could travel at will, at the drop of the hat knit by Cowichan women and hanging on a hook by my front door, I’d have spent hours looking at these brilliant three-dimensional works, suspended in air, turning a little in drafts. They are like hollow trees, vulvas, caves, encompassing cloaks, wombs, embellished with lichens, entrails, long intricate veins or roots. One dark one, bifurcated, reminds me of my lungs seen in an xray image: the cilia, the primary bronchus, densely and richly textured. Deep charcoal, olive, red, saffron, woven of sisal, fleece, horsehair, flax, haunting in their, well, I can only say otherness. But it’s an otherness that we know and long for. Seeing them on film, I want to touch them, trace my fingers along their openings, enter their openings to leave the world behind. She knew fibre, was drawn to its possibilities and potentials, “I see fibre as the basic element constructing the organic world on our planet... It is from fibre that all living organisms are built, the tissue of plants, leaves and ourselves… our nerves, our genetic code, the canals of our veins, our muscles… We are fibrous structures.”*

Seeing the painting and thinking about the Abakans, I find myself wondering about how to make a partial turn from the quilting I love so well to constructing something organic and emblematic of the ideas I have constantly: the cradle of the earth, the lines connecting us to the living world, the temporary and permanent nests we yearn for and abandon. I think of gathering rope to add to the stash I’ve picked up on beaches, roadsides, and then somehow knitting it into huge bags to hold, well, what? Something, if only possibility. I think of those ropes at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, coiled in readiness, and I imagine the scent of them, ripe and redolent with that possibility.
    
Sometimes, when I’m swimming in the lake, a cirrus cloud formation will float over and I wish for it to settle on me like a net. Or I could turn over and lie in it, a hammock of sky, a bag cast out of the heavens.
    
Draw history through the eye of the longest needle in your basket, the twined thread—flax stem, inner bark of a pine, pounded nettle, strands of a coarse-haired sheep—and make the seam to hold the bag together. In it, the story of the blood clot, the blue lane of the pool, the tiny merganser chicks light as the air itself. This is yours, to give away or to keep.

* https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/magdalena-abakanowicz/exhibition-guide

16.
We do not notice how opposing forces agree. Look at the bow and the lyre.
(Herakleitos, Fragment 117)

A bow or a lyre. Both are purposed with string, one to give music, the other to kill. Which is which? In a song is a death. Can that be true? I am swimming on my back, a backward-turning, a tuning, thinking about lyres. Tortoise shells for the bowl in ancient Greece, built up with bone, wood, bronze, strung with sheep gut. In 1823, Harry Burton discovered harps in the tombs at Thebes, still strung with gut. Imagine preparing the intestines for strings. Pulled fresh from the animal, cleaned of fat and soaked in water, removing membranes apart from muscle, salting and storing, and then making into strings by splitting the gut with horn, the resulting ribbons, smooth ones and rough ones, stretched for even tension. A backward-turning harmony, Herakleitos wrote, and swimming on my back, I think of the strings stretched between the bowl, with its skin belly, and the crossbar, supported by two arms. My arms reach up as I imagine the shape. Imagine the strings, 3 or 4 in Homer’s time and as many as 12 later on, though the classical number was 7.
    
I am swimming on my back, a backward-turning, thinking about bows. Imagine a single string twanging. In summer, I was learning archery with my grandchildren, their grandfather, a former boy archer, teaching us, beginning with the stringing of our recurve bows. We have 3 but the largest one, dating from the early 1960s, currently doesn’t have a string, the mice having eaten it one winter as it rested between rafters in the workshop. The bow that was Brendan’s in his childhood and the one I bought for the smaller children before their arrival in August: we took these out to a rough lane behind the vegetable garden.
 
We learned to place the bow in front of our right ankle and behind our left calf, taking it from one curve to another, fitting the string onto the nock at each end. A backward-turning harmony, said Herakleitos. We learned to raise the limbs of the bow, where the energy is stored, learned to fit the arrow’s nock into the nocking point, and we learned how to pull back the string, find the anchor point on our faces (for me it was the corner of my lip), and then we learned how to sight as well as we could, aiming for the target positioned between two trees, a backdrop of old shower curtain and the paper target itself taped to a box filled with newspaper. (We have a target woven of sisal but John felt our arrows would go right through it without a proper backing, ideally straw bales.) Quick twang of the string. Thock as the arrow shot forth. Pock as it hit the box or, even luckier, the target itself. We took turns shooting and I thought of us as incarnations, the followers of Artemis, the green lane where we aimed for our target a place where elk once lay down in the night, heaving themselves up at first light when I came out to gather kale from the garden for breakfast eggs, a place where bears walk in fall, followers of Artemis (some believe her name comes from árktos, or bear, and there are cults associated with her), and where coyotes linger on summer evenings, their scats dense with salal and squirrel hair.

Over the shadowy hills and windy peaks she draws her golden bow, rejoicing in the chase, and sends out grievous shafts. The tops of the high mountains tremble and the tangled wood echoes awesomely with the outcry of beasts...*

The bow is called life but its work is death. Bows were once strung with gut or sinew or rawhide. In their strings, an ancient music, a difficult tension, the bow itself turned back, a turning harmony as we hold it up, our hands finding the right position for the arrow, grip on the riser, our eye on the target, tension in our left hand, strength in our shoulder as we pull back. We hope for our arrow to sail true. Watching, we rub our arms, feel the ligaments pull, as we pulled back, took the tension into our shoulders, our bodies adjusting to the requirements of the weapon. It will take awhile.
    
After the grandchildren return to their homes, I keep a leather glove by the door so that I can quickly go out when I have some time, its close fit and surface serving the function as a shooting glove. I thought I would order string for the oldest bow, the one that was my husband’s as a young teenaged boy, but the more time I spend with the smallest bow, I realize I’ve found the one that feels the most comfortable. I can string it easily, remembering Odysseus:

like a musician, like a harper, when
with quiet hand upon his instrument
he draws between his thumb and forefinger
a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly
Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,
so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
a swallow’s note. (21:407-14)

​Our target is in the shadow of the swallow’s house and listen, listen, even in quiet winter you can hear the hum and thock of the bow (there are gods here, too), its string alert, its lively arrows, and although everything is put away, the young buck steps up the green path tentatively, alert to the old music.

* http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0138:hymn=27

​17.
I am swimming on my back, one length of the pool, then four, then fifty. Outside, snow in the maples, a tumble of granite on the side of the highway where the mountain gave way, the wide field where the elk graze, a creek nearby where salmon push their way to the gravel beds each fall. My legs kick, clot loosened and gone, I swivel from my hips, I raise my arms one at a time, cutting into the water with the side of my hands. On the shelf in my bedroom, the tiny oyster shell I sometimes wear on my ankle in summer, a strand of 3-ply thread holding it in place. The shell and I both long for warm weather, the wild water of the lake I love. Joints are and are not parts of the body. They cooperate through opposition, and make a harmony of separate forces, said Herakleitos (Fragment 112.). I am proof of water’s surface tension, floating at the end of my swim.

Author's note: the passages of the Odyssey were translated by Robert Fitzgerald. The translated fragments of Herakleitos are Guy Davenport’s.

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​Theresa Kishkan lives on the Sechelt Peninsula with her husband, John Pass (a poet and winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2006 and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2012), in a house they built and where they raised their 3 children. She has published 16 books, most recently Euclid’s Orchard, a collection of essays about family history, botany, mathematics, and love (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017); a novella, The Weight of the Heart (Palimpsest Press, 2020), in which a young graduate student attempts to create a feminist cartography with the works of Ethel Wilson and Sheila Watson; and Blue Portugal and Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022), a collection of lyrical essays. Her books have been nominated for many awards, including the Hubert Evans Award and the Ethel Wilson Prize; her essay collection, Phantom Limb, received the inaugural Readers’ Choice Award from the Creative Nonfiction Collective in 2008. Her memoir, Let a Body Venture At Last Out of its Shelter, will be published in 2026.