• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Swimming, swimming....

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Sure. Or nearly drowned, caught in a sudden flood surge, or beaned by an ice floe. Or was out in a boat and got capsized. Lots of options there. Something for The Year of Swimming Dangerously. <g>
 
I don't imagine the water being fatally cold, just pleasantly cool on a hot day. But, if the river's coming down from the mountains, there would be snowmelt in it pretty much year round, so maybe....

For the purposes of your story, however you draw it up is fine, but I thought it interesting this past weekend, on the first warm days of summer, (85-ish) there were warnings put out about swimming in the local rivers here (Oregon, US). Seems the runoff from the mountains renders the river waters cold enough to cause potential issues for swimmers.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
The young people in this story do some foolish things, but I haven't made swimming dangerously one of them. Wouldn't be out of character for some of them, though. I'm not planning to kill off any of those characters, so if they do, they'll have to get lucky.

I suppose there could be a story going around about someone who tried it last spring or the year before, something like that, and died. That might make my characters think twice.
OK, writing this as someone who grew up near a town where a large river thundered over the falls into the lower part of the valley...

Oxbow lakes do sometimes form in valleys, but the valley needs to be very wide and the river won't be flowing all that fast. A narrower valley won't have oxbow lakes. You would build mills by the river, and there might well be some sort of quays where ships come alongside. Those quays can be sheltered by a form of breakwater, but building one is quite a big undertaking. More common, at least here in Sweden, was to build a quay or jetty by a patch of water sheltered by an island or sandbank. As for the seasons, well... It depends on what climate your setting has, but here in Sweden the rivers usually freeze. Even the waterfalls freeze towards the end of the winter. At the start of the winter you get a build up of ice particles in the water, which forms a sort of cold wet semi-frozen sludge. This can block mill wheels, and can't easily be cleared. It wasn't uncommon for people to drown when trying to clear it with shovels and picks. Once the river freezes all shipping, milling and sawmilling stops. However, then you can go out on the ice and go fishing etc. When the spring comes the ice starts to break up; this is the most dangerous time to be on the ice, because it's hard to judge when the ice stops bearing, so you often get drowning accidents. The ice break up can result in large ice floes going down river, and these are a danger to ships and any mills, quays or bridges they hit. The floes can also get stuck in bends or by bridges, building up a sort of dam which can suddenly give way, causing a small flood wave to head downstream. Once the ice is gone (or sometimes whilst it's going) you get the spring flood as the meltwater from the mountains arrives. This builds up and can cause a lot of flooding around the river. It happens every year, so the locals will be used to it.
 
Mad Swede I have a reading problem of my own: I can't read electronic text, no matter how hard I try, if it doesn't have a line's space at least once every 5-7 lines. I'm sure your post is interesting, but unfortunately, I can't read it after the first line.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
Mad Swede I have a reading problem of my own: I can't read electronic text, no matter how hard I try, if it doesn't have a line's space at least once every 5-7 lines. I'm sure your post is interesting, but unfortunately, I can't read it after the first line.
Better now? :)

OK, writing this as someone who grew up near a town where a large river thundered over the falls into the lower part of the valley...

Oxbow lakes do sometimes form in valleys, but the valley needs to be very wide and the river won't be flowing all that fast. A narrower valley won't have oxbow lakes.

You would build mills by the river, and there might well be some sort of quays where ships come alongside. Those quays can be sheltered by a form of breakwater, but building one is quite a big undertaking. More common, at least here in Sweden, was to build a quay or jetty by a patch of water sheltered by an island or sandbank.

As for the seasons, well... It depends on what climate your setting has, but here in Sweden the rivers usually freeze. Even the waterfalls freeze towards the end of the winter. At the start of the winter you get a build up of ice particles in the water, which forms a sort of cold wet semi-frozen sludge. This can block mill wheels, and can't easily be cleared. It wasn't uncommon for people to drown when trying to clear it with shovels and picks. Once the river freezes all shipping, milling and sawmilling stops. However, then you can go out on the ice and go fishing etc.

When the spring comes the ice starts to break up. This is the most dangerous time to be on the ice, because it's hard to judge when the ice stops bearing, so you often get drowning accidents. The ice break up can result in large ice floes going down river, and these are a danger to ships and any mills, quays or bridges they hit. The floes can also get stuck in bends or by bridges, building up a sort of dam which can suddenly give way, causing a small flood wave to head downstream. Once the ice is gone (or sometimes whilst it's going) you get the spring flood as the meltwater from the mountains arrives. This builds up and can cause a lot of flooding around the river. It happens every year, so the locals will be used to it.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I have a reading problem of my own: I can't read electronic text, no matter how hard I try, if it doesn't have a line's space at least once every 5-7 lines. I'm sure your post is interesting, but unfortunately, I can't read it after the first line.

I hate reading on screen as well. It messes with my eyes. But...no escaping it. The struggle is real :cry:
 
Better now? :)

OK, writing this as someone who grew up near a town where a large river thundered over the falls into the lower part of the valley...

Oxbow lakes do sometimes form in valleys, but the valley needs to be very wide and the river won't be flowing all that fast. A narrower valley won't have oxbow lakes.

You would build mills by the river, and there might well be some sort of quays where ships come alongside. Those quays can be sheltered by a form of breakwater, but building one is quite a big undertaking. More common, at least here in Sweden, was to build a quay or jetty by a patch of water sheltered by an island or sandbank.

As for the seasons, well... It depends on what climate your setting has, but here in Sweden the rivers usually freeze. Even the waterfalls freeze towards the end of the winter. At the start of the winter you get a build up of ice particles in the water, which forms a sort of cold wet semi-frozen sludge. This can block mill wheels, and can't easily be cleared. It wasn't uncommon for people to drown when trying to clear it with shovels and picks. Once the river freezes all shipping, milling and sawmilling stops. However, then you can go out on the ice and go fishing etc.

When the spring comes the ice starts to break up. This is the most dangerous time to be on the ice, because it's hard to judge when the ice stops bearing, so you often get drowning accidents. The ice break up can result in large ice floes going down river, and these are a danger to ships and any mills, quays or bridges they hit. The floes can also get stuck in bends or by bridges, building up a sort of dam which can suddenly give way, causing a small flood wave to head downstream. Once the ice is gone (or sometimes whilst it's going) you get the spring flood as the meltwater from the mountains arrives. This builds up and can cause a lot of flooding around the river. It happens every year, so the locals will be used to it.

Much better, thanks!

Sweden gets very, very low winter temperatures, doesn't it? As in well below freezing?

The coldest winters I've lived through are Sierra Nevada winters, which are, at the elevation I lived at, relatively warm. It gets cold enough for snow, but usually not very far below freezing, and it doesn't stay consistently at freezing or lower for more than a few days at a time. Under those conditions, moving water doesn't freeze. During a real cold snap, it might form some thin ice around the edges, but it's still flowing in the middle. That's the kind of climate, more or less, I'm envisioning for my setting. Weather wise, that is. Elevation and terrain may be more valley-like.

But water does come down from the higher elevations like you describe, in the spring and early summer. And Sierra Nevada lakes are always very cold, even in July and August, because they're full of snow melt.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
Much better, thanks!

Sweden gets very, very low winter temperatures, doesn't it? As in well below freezing?

The coldest winters I've lived through are Sierra Nevada winters, which are, at the elevation I lived at, relatively warm. It gets cold enough for snow, but usually not very far below freezing, and it doesn't stay consistently at freezing or lower for more than a few days at a time. Under those conditions, moving water doesn't freeze. During a real cold snap, it might form some thin ice around the edges, but it's still flowing in the middle. That's the kind of climate, more or less, I'm envisioning for my setting. Weather wise, that is. Elevation and terrain may be more valley-like.

But water does come down from the higher elevations like you describe, in the spring and early summer. And Sierra Nevada lakes are always very cold, even in July and August, because they're full of snow melt.
Yes, Swedish winters are cold. And dark.

You may need to think about how far north this place is in your setting, because it affects how much light and hence heat you get from the sun. At this time of year it never gets dark where I live. Even at midnight I can read a newspaper outside. And it can get very hot (+31C today). Of course, this also means that ripe berries are very sweet, because all the sunlight means they produce a lot of fruit sugars. Swedish strawberries are wonderful.

In the same way, it never gets properly light in the middle of the winter, at best its a sort of grey twilight. Thats true even in Stockholm. That means that in winter there isn't enough sunlight to warm things up because the sun is too low in the sky, so once it gets cold it stays cold until the sun starts to rise higher in the sky in the spring. So you get snow not rain and the rivers start to freeze after a few weeks.
 
You may need to think about how far north this place is in your setting, because it affects how much light and hence heat you get from the sun. At this time of year it never gets dark where I live.
Definitely not as far north as Sweden. They have nighttime in the summer. Shorter nights, but still nights.

I haven't assigned it a latitude. All I've established is that there are noticeable differences in daylight hours through the seasons, but not so much as to have midnight sun in the summer and endless night in the winter. And that the climate is four season, but that could be explained by the elevation if not the latitude.

That would be possible in most of the continental U.S. plus southern Canada. Which is a very wide range. And in most of Europe, too. Although this thread made me go to the atlas and look up those latitudes, and I was surprised to see how much farther north most European countries are than the parts of the U.S. with comparable climates. Overall, the climates seem to get colder farther south here.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
Definitely not as far north as Sweden. They have nighttime in the summer. Shorter nights, but still nights.

I haven't assigned it a latitude. All I've established is that there are noticeable differences in daylight hours through the seasons, but not so much as to have midnight sun in the summer and endless night in the winter. And that the climate is four season, but that could be explained by the elevation if not the latitude.

That would be possible in most of the continental U.S. plus southern Canada. Which is a very wide range. And in most of Europe, too. Although this thread made me go to the atlas and look up those latitudes, and I was surprised to see how much farther north most European countries are than the parts of the U.S. with comparable climates. Overall, the climates seem to get colder farther south here.
You're forgetting the Gulf Stream. That current makes a huge difference to the western European climate.
 
Top