My colleague and friend Jacob Smith wrote this swell book a coming up on a decade ago that I keep thinking about—Eco-Sonic Media. There are many things to think about written into Jake’s book. It was there, ten years ago, that I found out about how much water is used to keep internet servers cool—and now that amount is exponentially larger in the time of AI. Jake also writes about the first gramophone recordings, which were not used for playing music so much as bird song. For all our wish for civilization, safe as/in houses, we are always dragging outdoors into the indoors stuff like pine trees, picked flowers, ferns, pets, and birdsong. And then we go out and domesticate the outdoors, as much as one can, with borders, frames, fences, walls, beacons. Usually, by this time every year, they have installed the buoys along the coast of Chicago, swimmers on this side, motorboats on that. Why are they late this year, I’m wondering; short-staffed? Out of funds? Too rough, too cold?
I learned a new word this week, via Herodotus, that damned old wicked entertaining liar, who tells the story of Polycrates and his great maritime luck, all his ships full of loot, and a jealous adviser telling Polycrates to throw something valuable back in the water—and so the king threw a ring into the sea. Days later, he was served a fish and inside it, he found the ring, and I suppose there’s a lesson here but Polycrates isn’t the word I learned, the word is “thalassocracy”, a nation whose power, dominion, and influence are primarily derived from naval supremacy and control over maritime trade routes. A nation that cannot truly delineate its borders. All those offshore gambling casinos—the modern thalassocracy. It’s too cold for the Jet Skis as yet, nor the swimmers as yet, but when the buoys go in, you will see the borders of two new nations.
For now, the buoys have not been installed, so call those future nations “wilderness”. Last year, I watched them install the buoys and within an hour, though the water temperature was 54, I saw an old guy come out and he marched right in, swam and swam and swam around the rocks til I saw him no more. Clearly, this was his annual ritual, and I’ll be watching him claim the realm of swimmers. And I'm sure the water has been colder in previous years! The time of year when the selkies return to the lake after a winter of cable TV and deep dish pizza. The Evanston life guards will soon be chasing swimmers from that secret swimming place by the cemetery--"Git off nobody’s property!" Dear reader, you’ll be the first to know when the buoys go in this year.
Sounds like I’d love a winter with the selkies.
Thally-ho!