Local author's '50 dunks' adventure brings wave of self reflection in new book

As local author and former Sacramento Bee dining critic Kate Washington approached her 50th birthday, she found herself looking to reconnect with her childhood. Growing up in Chico, she swam the numerous lakes, rivers, and swimming holes that dot the North State. She decided to set up a challenge for herself: swim in 50 different bodies of water by her 50th birthday. Her rule was pretty simple; she had to fully immerse herself under water, take a photo of each dunk to document the journey. She dubbed it the "50 Dunk Challenge." 

At the time, she didn't know the radical effect it would have on her life. But years later, she has now chronicled the challenge into a new book and it's called “Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims.” The book launches Tuesday, July 7, with two local events happening this week in Sacramento and Davis. Washington spoke with Insight host Vicki Gonzalez about her adventures and the book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

Why swimming? Did you have a really close relationship with swimming growing up? 

I really did. A creek runs through the middle of my hometown. It's dammed to form a natural swimming hole that's free and open to the public all the time. We would go there. We would go up into the mountains camping, jump in the really cold creeks. [An] anecdote in my book is about a time when I was hesitating on the bank of one of those creeks and my dad pushed me in. My mom was furious, but I came up laughing and smiling and spluttering. And then my parents put in a pool when I was pretty young and like a good Gen X child, I swam in it all day without very much supervision at all. 

I just always loved the water but I never really got into swim team or any kind of like endurance or more athletic approach to it. It was always just play and fun. 

What are some of the ways that this experience has remade your life? 

While on a visit home to Chico, California, Kate Washington jumped in the waters of Sycamore Pool, also called One Mile, in Bidwell Park, June 2022.Kate Washington

It really brought me back into that childhood sense of wonder and of being in my body and of being in the moment. I went through some long challenges with grief over the loss of my mother many years ago, with my now former husband's ordeal with very aggressive cancer while our children were very young, and I was taking him through that and really giving everything to that. And I lost touch with myself and also with just fun and play and joy.

And just as we were emerging from that as a family, the pandemic hit and put us back into that isolation into not being able to go anywhere into the month of smoke where at one point I was so desperate to get outside that I tried to swim laps wearing an N95 mask which was not a success, I might say. It [was] so smoky you couldn't exercise without some protection and so just wanting to recapture some sense of freedom was the big impetus here.

Your newest book “Midstream,” is it a continuation of your previous book “Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America?” 

I think so. You know, it touches on the material that I covered in “Already Toast” and really what it is ultimately is a chronicle of getting out of the burnout that I describe. And “Already Toast” takes a really systemic look at that. It looks at the broader social conditions in America that affect all caregivers who are millions upon millions.

This book is much more personal in many ways, but it looks at my way of getting out of burnout. And I thought sort of unwittingly stumbled on some actual evidence-based strategies like getting into nature and getting into cold water that reduce stress and help people emerge. 

You set this goal about a year and a half before your 50th birthday, dunking yourself 50 different bodies of water. When you actually went through the process, maybe even completed it, did it surprise you? Actually coming up with this goal that seems pretty kind of simple and direct, but as you write it, it's pretty transformative to your life. 

It really was. I didn't expect it to be so profound. I just wanted to have fun and it snuck up on me slowly in a lot of ways. I think I started to realize that if I could take the time for myself to do that, to go out of cell phone range, to go to places often by myself where I couldn't be reached and take an entire day and just sit by or in the water and contemplate things, I could take that approach and set those boundaries and take more time for myself and do what I loved in the rest of my life. And that had immense ramifications across a lot of the ways I live my life.

How did you find the places to swim? 

Edwards Crossing on the South Yuba River.Kate Washington

I used to take my kids up to the South Yuba River, go to places around town. We're so fortunate to be blessed with a wild and scenic waterway right here in Sacramento. But I hadn't had time to go to a lot of the places. So I had a running list and then I started keeping another list and there are swimming hole guidebooks and I have a collection of those. There have been some new ones recently.

I've also spent time on like satellite maps like tracing rivers up or like reading blogs where they try to keep the location as secret but then I'm trying to piece it together from like where's that bend in the river? So, I found a few little secrets, but most of the places I went are fairly well known or easily found online. And there were a couple that I didn't divulge in the book, but most of them I do. 

Was that 50th birthday dunk emotional? 

It was. My birthday is in early October so it was still just barely swimming season. The river was getting a little colder but I saved my favorite spot at the South Yuba River that's a very well-known spot and often really crowded in the summer months.

I saved that one for last and I went on my 50th birthday. Pulled my daughters out of school. I'm sorry to the truancy officers, but they came with me and we all swam together and it was a really wonderful and meaningful way to do that. And the book ends on that dunk. 

This is your second book, but you have been a writer well before that. You were formerly a food writer, a dining critic. Listeners might remember reading your work in the Sacramento Bee. Is there any connection between you becoming an author and your prior work writing about food? 

I think so. Food writing was amazing training for writing about sensory matters, about description. You really have to mine a deep well of metaphor and think about how things really feel.

And it was really important to me in this book, I wanted to give readers the feeling that they might be there in the water with me and having that training. And then also I've lived in Sacramento now for 22 years and have been writing about food and about the local scene and various aspects of it all that time and being a professional writer just immersed in the city was also just a great background for this project.

“Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims” launches Tuesday, July 7 with an event at East Village Bookshop in Midtown Sacramento from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Washington will also be giving a talk on Thursday, July 9 at The Avid Reader in Davis from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.