Total body contact recreation — activity in which the human body may come into direct contact with surface water to the point of complete submergence, including swimming, with the probability of water being ingested. Permitted where Escherichia coli does not exceed 130 per 100 mL as a 30-day geometric mean, or 300 per 100 mL on any single day.
Bureaucratic language for what you did every summer. Submerged in the filthy, angry water. Full contact. Probability of ingestion.
The particles catch the sun the way everything did. Suspended. Beautiful, if you didn't know what they were. The lake carries roughly 1.7 million plastic fragments per square kilometre at the surface — the highest counts of any of the five.
touch a particle · it resolves · 0 / 0
The sweetness and the plastic occupy the same layer. That was never a contradiction. That was the summer.
I don't think it's related. But I also do not think it isn't.
We moved closer to the lake. Whatever we brought, the ground carried the rest of the way. Fertilizer does the same thing — applied to a field, delivered to the water. Nobody signs for it.
Downhill is a direction and also a verdict. The nutrients arrive. The overreaction is scheduled for the next stratum.
I don't think it's related. But I also do not think it isn't.
A bloom is what a body does when it is given too much and asked to hold it. It floods green. It produces a toxin. It becomes unsafe to touch the thing that fed it.
Recreational Public Health Advisory · found text WARNING. Algal toxins detected. Avoid all contact with the water. Do not swim, wade, or allow pets in the water. Do not ingest. Microcystin above the recreational threshold of 8 µg/L. In 2014 the same toxin shut off drinking water for half a million people for three days.
My parents divorced right after we moved closer to the lake. The lake bloomed. Two systems overfed past the point of holding.
I don't think it's related. But I also do not think it isn't.
The heavy things don't flush. Tanneries, paper mills, the PCBs the Kalamazoo River is still cored for decades later. Palisades on the shoreline at Covert, humming. It all sinks and it all stays. Read a core from the top down and you are reading backward through time.
run a finger down the core · the strata answer
The house is not gone. It is a layer. The drive-thru is simply the deposit on top of it.
I don't think it's related. But I also do not think it isn't.
This far down the water forgets how to hold oxygen. Each summer the bloom above dies, sinks, and decays here, and the decay eats the last of the air. The central basin goes hypoxic. Nothing that breathes can stay.
The sentences lose their verbs the way the water loses its oxygen. What remains is only the nouns. The lake. The child. The window. The heat.
Central basin · last legible reading DISSOLVED OXYGEN · 0.0 mg/L · HYPOXIC · TEMP · 4.0 °C — the temperature at which water is heaviest · EXTENT ~ 8,000 km² · DURATION · lengthening
Summer outdoors in Michigan. You went in anyway. It's beautifully toxic.
The Means of Production · /kalamazoo
downstream from You Are Downstream