The Lake: The Host (Interlude 1)

I talk about some lake-related things. 

Check out this cool water bottle with lamprey on it: 

https://eighthgeneration.com/products/traveling-waters-water-bottle

Differences between lampreys and eels:

https://critfc.org/fish-and-watersheds/columbia-river-fish-species/lamprey/differences-between-a-lamprey-and-an-eel/

7/4/26 photo of the Poplar River, which is near Lutsen and feeds into Lake Superior/ B Greenfield

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello. Welcome to this episode of Home with Brennan Greenfield. We are on an interlude. This week I am it's just me talking. I know when I listen to podcasts, I don't actually love when some of my favorite interviewers just talk themselves. So I'm going into that. This knowing that, but also part of this project is about me just including my voice in things, even when I often have thoughts of you have nothing to say, you have nothing to add, which are OCD related. So here we are, this week you get me. I've been living near Lake Superior since 2015, and some of the rivers I loved as a kid are connected to Lake Superior. Like the St. Croix River is a river that I've canoed with a friend and that I'm really attached to because a childhood friend had a house there and we would always play in the water like all summer long. And so that is one thing that connected me to Lake Superior before I moved up to Duluth, Minnesota. I guess all I would just say the lake's special to me, but also um I feel scared around it sometimes. And you'll hear like in some of the interviews I've done that I've been surprised at how comfortable other people I've interviewed are with the lake and not worried about just hopping in in any type of water. It's really nice out right now. It's summer in Duluth. It's the some of the most precious weeks of each year when it gets super hot and everyone is magnetized to go down to Park Point and maybe not go in the water. It's kind of chilly still. But then there are a few weeks where it suddenly feels warm because of the top layer that Sam Kelly talked about warming up from the sun during the summer. And when you go in the water, you definitely can tell, like you kind of stay curled up in a ball because if you stretch your feet down too far, you'll feel the chilly water with your toes. Um I I'm I'm having a high deciding whether to read a poem, and I'm not going to read it right now, but I'm gonna tell you, I'm really I've been really interested in sea lampreys. Um just because they were a useful metaphor for me when I was um trying to get over someone, and I thought of them as a lamprey because when I moved up here, the the way that I heard sea lampreys discussed as uh invasive species that were killing off a lot of the fish in Lake Superior because they have these mouths that they latch on with and are like vampire fish. So they had this bad reputation. But I've been, you know, that was a helpful meta for me for me to um get over someone, but now I am learning more about them. Um I found this week I was getting gifts for a research sharing event that we have, and then I found this really cool water bottle that lets sea lamprey be part of the family of fish. Not sea lamprey, sorry, it's a different type of lamprey, um, out on the in the Pacific Northwest area, I think. So I'll link it in the show notes so you can check them out. But I was also reading about the difference between sea lamprey and eels, and lampreys are very much older, they're like 450 million years old. So they're basically dinosaur fish. And they're just the biggest of four different types of lamprey that you could encounter. I don't know. I'm starting to say stuff I'm not certain about, and I think I'll just stop. But I just want to say that C lamprey are a thread in all of this. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening to me, and I hope you all have a great week. It's summer, there's some more interviews coming up, and I'll talk to you soon.