Prologue

(audio of swimming,splashing fades in)

Andreas Fath: People are attracted, they want to hear the crazy story of a professor swimming the whole river.   

(audio of swimming fades out, upbeat string music begins)

Ariel Lavery: In our last episode we explored the concept of legal personhood for rivers. But you can define rivers in other ways, by say like, what’s in the rivers. 

Andreas Fath: Each river tells you something about the society living along that river.

Ariel  Lavery: And with this season being all about rivers we’re going to look at how the character of a river is defined by what happens in its watershed, specifically with regards to plastic waste.

Austin Carter:  So how do plastics connect with the guy who swam the whole river?

Ariel Lavery:  Well, I spoke with a pair of research professors, who have made it their goal to educate the public, which isn’t a common thing among scientists, and even less so the way that they did it. But their research looks at just how much microplastic is actually in our waterways. Microplastics are the tiny particles of plastic that come from larger products. 

Austin Carter: Yeah, ok.  

Ariel Lavery: And they told me about some really interesting and exciting things about plastics also that I had no idea about.  

Martin Knoll: Plastic is a wonderful material. It’s even environmental. 

Austin Carter: Huh! But I still don’t know how this relates to the professor who swam the whole river.

Ariel Lavery: Ok, well, today you’re going to learn about him, and his research partner, and the epic swim that set a new world record!

(theme music fades in)

Martin Knoll: We hope he didn’t swallow too much water while he was swimming down the Tennessee River.  

Ariel Lavery: This season we’re focused on America’s rivers and what lies beneath their surface.  Today’s episode: Swimming for the River. 

Austin Carter: On Middle of Everywhere, Telling big stories from the small places we call home.

Ariel Lavery: I’m Ariel Lavery.

Austin Carter: And I’m Austin Carter.

Scene 1: Two scientists

Andreas Fath: My name is Andreas Fath, F-A-T-H.  I’m a chemist, and now I’m a professor for chemistry.  I’m focused on microplastic in water streams, in fish bodies and aquatic life.  I’m, um, named as an activist too, here, in Germany.  

Ariel Lavery: Andreas’ “activism” takes on a different form than you might expect when you hear that word.  

Andreas Fath: In my first life, let’s say I was, almost, a professional swimmer.  I made some German records, German championships in master swimmings.  

Ariel Lavery: And there’s a story behind why he chose to use his athleticism to elevate his science.

Andreas Fath: There’s a frustrating story behind that because when you change your work from industry to university…

Ariel Lavery: Andreas  joined the faculty at Furtwangen University in 2011.

Andreas Fath: In industry I was very successful.  

Ariel Lavery: …when seeking funding for his research…

Andreas Fath: I got 100 percent of success.  And in university I had zero percent of success.  So I combined my two passions: water chemistry with swimming.  And then I, one day, had the idea to swim the Rhine River.  I think I can reach more people with this combination instead of writing a research paper.  

Austin Carter: That’s a pretty great publicity stunt.

Ariel Lavery: So now you know you know about the professor swimmer who was getting people’s attention… 

Martin Knoll: And it turns out that he’s a bit of a celebrity in Germany anyway.  

Ariel Lavery: …but there was another person, another scientist, who completed this visionary duo for our story who was just as driven as Andreas to get the message out.

Martin Knoll: My name is Martin Knoll and I’m a professor of geology and hydrology here at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. My research mainly involves water quality for both groundwater and surface water.  

Ariel Lavery: Martin was really interested because he shares in Andreas’s passion for swimming.

Martin Knoll: I do! I was a swimmer in high school.  

Ariel Lavery: And, though his research passion is water quality, he’s a little new to the microplastics problem that Andreas is focused on.  

Martin Knoll:  I really didn’t know much at all about microplastics until I met Andreas Fath.    

Scene 2: Serendipity 

Austin Carter: So now we’ve met Martin and Andreas and we know that their passions sort of align,and we know what they’ve done together, but how did they get started?

Martin Knoll: I happened to be on sabbatical in Germany for a semester and near the end of my stay I was convalescing in an apartment because I had just done this 100 mile hike in five days and I had developed a pretty wicked stress fracture. So I was laid up. So I was reading the newspaper and I read about this crazy swimming professor who had, uh, just several months before, uh, finished this swim of the Rhine river. He swam the entire length of it from Lake Toma, the source of the Rhine up in the Swiss Alps, all the way down to the North Sea. 

Ariel Lavery: And he completed it in a record setting 28 days.

Martin Knoll: But what really impressed me most was that he conducted this very extensive water quality research program as he swam along on the river with this whole entourage of scientists and graduate students and so forth.  There was also within that newspaper article a little biographical sketch of Andreas, and, of course he was a swimmer.  I had been a swimmer in high school, so that was interesting.  He had grown up in the town of Shpija which is on the western bank of the Rhine River.  I had grown up just across the river on the eastern side in a little town called Musla.  So that was interesting.  He had studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.  I had spent some time studying there as well.  He has three sons.  I have three sons.  And when I read that I thought, my goodness, you know, this is an incredible coincidence.  I’ve got to reach out to this guy.  So I wrote him an email.  

Andreas Fath: He wrote to me at the end of 2014.  It was, uh, after Christmas.  

Martin Knoll:  He wrote back the next day and said, can I come down and visit you? I’ll be down there in two hours.  

Andreas Fath: By the end of the day, the end of our discussion he came up with the idea, hey why don’t we do the same project, the same swimming project on the Tennessee River?

Martin Knoll: It’s about the same size and length as the Rhine River.  

Austin Carter: That’s amazing that they came together and rallied around this idea of recreating Anreas’s project here in the United States. 

Martin Knoll: It was serendipity.  

Scene  3: Logistics

Austin Carter: So what was the next step for Andreas and Martin once they decided that they wanted to swim the Tennessee River and study how polluted it was?

Martin Knoll: So that was almost a two year process to get the whole, what we call Tenneswim, lined up.  

Ariel Lavery: When you learn about the logistics of getting through a single day, let alone an entire month, you gain a huge appreciation for what this meant. 

(quiet music fades in)

Martin Knoll: Well, of course Andreas was swimming every day and we were camping along the river as we went downstream. So Andreas swam about 20 miles a day on average.  We had a pontoon boat in the water, a kayak in the water everyday going alongside Andreas.  So that had to be stocked with scientists, graduate students, food…

Ariel Lavery: AND Andreas’s whole family.  

Martin Knoll: …all the sampling supplies. We had to understand what samples were going to be taken where.  What was the dinner going to be like that night?  Who was going to cook it? Who was going to do the grocery shopping?  Who was paying for the campground fees?  What campground was it going to be? So there were a lot of moving parts, uh, to this little expedition.  

Martin Knoll: What we wanted to create was an environment where Andreas didn’t have to worry about those logistics.  He was only able to swim, eat, and sleep.  

Ariel  Lavery: I was very curious about how many calories a person like Andreas burns when swimming 20 miles a day.  

Martin Knoll: The Tennessee Aquarium, some of their scientists there, tried to calculate his calorie burn.  And they estimated, between ten and twelve thousand calories a day is what he burned.  

Austin Carter: Wow, five or six times the average 2,000 calories diet for Andreas during that swim. That’s huge.

Ariel Lavery: (laughs) Yeah, how many stacks of pancakes do you think that is?

Austin Carter: (laughs) Probably a few.

Martin Knoll: Eating became, really, (Laugh) along with the water quality analysis, part of the central focus of the, of the trip.  These open water swimmers, they have to eat pretty much every 30 to 45 minutes.  So we always had to make sure there was somebody there to hand him a banana every time he stopped swimming because he could not get out of the water onto the boat.  That would take too much time.  Or sometimes we’d fly a drone out to where he was in the water that had potato chips or a banana or something suspended off the bottom of the drone.  

Austin Carter: That is crazy. I can only imagine what that looks like.

Martin Knoll: We pioneered this technique; one of my students did.  He was able to connect, ah, potato chips on a very long string off the bottom of the drone and fly it out to Andreas.  He became quite good at that.  

Ariel Lavery: This student, Clark Lupton, also took a lot of footage of the swim with the drone and generously provided some of that footage for us, which you can see on our social media.

Martin Knoll: Every day Andreas had to get firm ground under his feet, at least once a day, usually at lunch time.  He loved it if there was a marina around that had a restaurant.  

(western music fades in)

Andreas Fath: I went in with a whole wetsuit, in a bar.  I always ask my people, is there a marina and is there a bar close to the marina because if you eat only bananas it’s ok for some time.  But if you eat a real American burger…

Martin Knoll: He really means a, ah glam burger.  He likes, what they call in Germany adelberger, a really royal burger that’s got bacon and every… as much as what you can put on it, you know, that’s what he loved. Most of the rest of us wouldn’t be able to swim, you know, 50 yards after eating something like that, but, for him, that was perfect.  

Ariel Lavery: He was a big star at the marinas too! People were following the tracker or would see him sitting there in his wetsuit, eating his giant lunch.  

Andreas Fath: I was wet and everything and I was sitting there, and then people came to me, oh here is the swimmer, and sitting with me, and talking with me, and taking a picture.  

(quiet strumming guitar fades in)

Ariel Lavery: The people they encountered were also incredibly helpful.

Martin Knoll: And you know I get southern hospitality. I grew up in Tennessee.  But I had never seen it to this extent.  People would come out on their boats and on their jet skis and wish us well.  They brought us food.  They brought us water.  They gave our kids rides on the back of their jet skis.  They took ‘em fishing. They were just incredibly giving and friendly.  

Ariel Lavery: This incredible amount of support really helped keep Andreas’s focus on his swim.

Martin Knoll:  So, keeping him moving and keeping him healthy and happy, that was important.  The wet suit was an important part of that.  And you might think it’s crazy to wear a black wet suit in July and August on the Tennessee River because it is hot, and we did in fact have to, very often, dump ice cubes down the front and back of the wetsuit just to cool  him off. But the wetsuit provides a little bit of buoyancy, and that makes the swimmer more efficient.  The other thing about the wetsuit: it was, it was a psychological crutch for Andreas a little bit.  He was a little freaked out by what might be in the Tennessee River.

Ariel Lavery: The Tennessee River is one of the most biodiverse rivers of North America.  

Martin Knoll: There are big snapping turtles, there are these prehistoric fish called Gar, and paddle fish that are really strange.  

(suspenseful music fades in)

Ariel Lavery: And if you’ve never seen some of these creatures you should definitely Google them.

Martin Knoll: There might be alligators down in Northern Alabama. 

Ariel Lavery: He didn’t tell me any of that. (laughs) He didn’t…

Martin Knoll: He wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t tell you that. 

Austin Carter: I would not blame him for a second for wearing the wetsuit, if you've ever seen an Alligator Gar, it’s a pretty gnarly fish.

Ariel Lavery: When we come back, we’ll hear why Andreas also wore a piece of plastic on his body during the swim… and what their water samples revealed.  

Scene 4: The plastics

Ariel Lavery:  So we left off after learning all about the logistics of the Tenneswim.

Ariel Lavery: But we haven’t yet talked about Andreas and Martin’s research, which kinda demonstrated to people what microplastics are capable of doing to fish and aquatic animals. And us humans.  Here’s Andreas talking to an audience at the beginning of the swim.

Andreas Fath: (documentary audio fades in) … and I’m wearing a piece of plastic,  It’s a polystyrene membrane.  This is used over every chemical which is in the water could adhere to this membrane.

Austin Carter: what?

Ariel Lavery: (laughs) Just hang on. 

Andreas Fath: So you can take plastic bottles; you can crush them to small particles, make microplastic out of them in a controlled way.  And then, with a chemical treatment,  you can use these particles as an absorber for pollutants.  So you can use plastic litter as a filter material.

Austin Carter: Huh, so how does that really work? 

Ariel Lavery: Well, let’s get a little explanation about microplastics.  

Martin Knoll: So microplastics are what we call emerging contaminants

Ariel Lavery: Which means they are contaminants that are just beginning to be studied by people like Andreas and Martin.  And the microplastics end up in our water supply as a result of being broken down in the rivers.

Andreas Fath:  I could hear the Rhine working like a mill.  It breaks down plastic bottles from big parts to smaller parts, and you could hear this mill. It’s very noisy.  

(intense plodding music fades in)

Ariel Lavery: Wow.

Andreas Fath: The Rhine is capable of breaking rocks in the alps to very thin sand at the end at the beaches in the North Sea.  

Ariel Lavery: To be classified as a microplastic it needs to be smaller than 5 millimeters across.  That’s like the size of a lentil. And they end up being more harmful when ingested than you might initially think.

Martin Knoll:  Andreas likes to call these things, these microplastic particles Trojan horses because they get in your body and they unleash much more than meets the eye.  The microsplastics act like little tiny magnets onto which other contaminants can adhere.  So, if you just visualize this teeny tiny microplastic fragment in, say, a river… a river where there may be toxins, man made chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, heavy metals, those kind of things,  those things can glom on to the surfaces of microplastic particles.  And so, every little microplastic particle can potentially be this little time bomb.  

Austin Carter: Wow, so these tiny microplastics can kind of concentrate all of the other chemicals and pollution that shows up in rivers, that’s kind of amazing.

Ariel Lavery: Right? And scary. But let’s actually shift our thinking from how harmful these microplastics are to how we might actually benefit from them.

Austin Carter: Hmm? In what way can they be beneficial?

Ariel Lavery:  Well, remember that piece of plastic Andreas said he was wearing around his ankle while he was swimming?

Austin Carter: yeah?

Ariel Lavery: Well, that patch was meant to demonstrate both the scary way plastic can act like a Trojan horse, entering our bodies. But it was also meant to demonstrate the way plastic can be used to help clean up the water, by using this property of plastic to filter out these things.  

Andreas Fath: And the source is for free.  It’s litter.  People throw litter away because they think it’s not worth it to use this.  But it’s-it’s the opposite.  You can use plastic.  

(lighthearted guitar music fades in)

Ariel Lavery: Reusing the plastic to make something more valuable to us.  Upcycling.

Andreas Fath: Upcycling, yeah that’s the word.  

Martin Knoll: We’re not saying plastic is evil.  Plastic is a wonderful material.  It’s even environmental.  As long as you keep it in the loop of use.  As long as you don’t discard it and throw it out into the environment.  

Ariel Lavery: And Andreas is working with various companies to engineer plastic filtration systems now.

Martin Knoll: He’s a very good engineer.  It’s a great idea. It makes perfect sense.   

Scene 5: The Results

Austin Carter:  Ok so now we know about this amazing property that plastics have where they kind of attract all of the other contaminants and pollutants in the river. And that can help us filter out wastewater. But I’m really curious what Martin and Andreas found in terms of the samples from the Tennessee River. That was, after all, why they were doing this whole thing.

Ariel Lavery: Right.  Well, they ended up finding that the Tennessee River’s plastic content was WAY different from the Rhine.

Martin Knoll: Yes, that was a shocking result.  

Andreas Fath: Yeah, the unexpected was that it was 18,000 microplastic particles in 1000 liter of water.  In the Rhine we had only 200.  

Ariel Lavery: That’s 90 times the amount that was in the Rhine.  And even more shocking is that there are significantly fewer people living along than Tennessee than along the Rhine.  

Andreas Fath: It’s only 4.8 million people, which bring their wastewater into the Tennessee River.  And the Rhine was 48 million people.  

Ariel Lavery: 10 times more people!

Martin Knoll: With 10 times more people along the Rhine you’d expect a lot more in the way of contaminants compared to the Tennessee River.  And we did find that in terms of pharmaceuticals, and pesticides and a few other things, but when it came to microplastics it was the exact opposite.  When Andreas saw that number they redid the analyses a couple times in a couple different ways and kept coming up with the same number.  

Andreas Fath: So we are looking for an explanation for that.  

Martin Knoll: Why this big difference?!  There are some noticeable differences in terms of plastic in the watershed in the Rhine versus the Tennessee that, I think, just have to be part of the answer.  

(thoughtful music fades in)

Andreas Fath: Each river tells you something about the society living along that river.  

Martin Knoll: The character of a river is given to it by everything that goes on in the watershed.  So, people’s lives…

Andreas Fath: … the culture, about how people live, what they eat, what they use.  About their hospitals, about their wastewater treatment.  There are a huge story you can tell by looking into the inside.  

Austin Carter: It’s crazy for the Tennessee River to be so much more polluted than a major European river where so many people are living on its shores. But it does say a little bit about how easy, or how difficult, it is to recycle plastics in an area like ours.

Martin Knoll:  If you look at the Rhine and where it flows through.  It goes through four countries, Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands on it’s way to the North Sea.  In those countries there is a very rigorous recycling program.  So plastic gets recycled to a much greater level than it does along the four states that border the Tennessee River. There's also a really different culture of littering in both locations.  I mean just driving anywhere in the Rhine river watershed, and you just don’t see much roadside litter.  However, if you drive anywhere in the Tennessee River watershed you see a lot of roadside litter.  So I strongly believe that this difference in attitude about littering is a big component of the microplastic problem.  

Ariel Lavery: So legislation that promotes recycling programs or even embracing this upcycling model that Andreas has could still make a huge difference.

Martin Knoll: We know that can be done because we see it in the Rhine River.  

Ariel Lavery: But people have to buy into this in their daily life as well.  

Martin Knoll: …personal habits, the culture of littering.  That may be a more difficult thing to get at.  

(Jack Johnson song, “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.” fades in)

Andreas Fath: Jack Johnson told how to do it with the three Rs.  Reduce, reuse, recycle. 

 Scene 6: The River Today 

Ariel Lavery: I was really curious about how Andreas and Martin describe their experience living on the river for 34 days. That must have made them feel as if they really know this river’s character through and through. 

Martin Knoll: Certainly the Tennessee River today is not the river it was 150 years ago.  There are nine dams that really create a stair step system of lakes.  

Ariel Lavery: These lakes are obviously pretty still. 

Martin Knoll: And that’s not great if you’re an open water swimmer because you want current.  

Ariel Lavery: There are 29 total dams in the entirety of the Tennessee River system.

Martin Knoll: There are only a few places where, when you’re on a boat, and you’re looking around you do you get the feeling that, hey, I’m on a river.  And that’s the Tennessee River Gorge and certain places out in West Tennessee around Savannah, Tennessee before you get to Kentucky Lake.  

Ariel Lavery: Before this trip Martin had never seen the Tennessee River Gorge even though, when he was a teeneager he was working on the coal docks just upstream.  

Martin Knoll: … taking coal away, empty barges coming in.  It sort of had this industrial flavor to me at that time.  And that’s really the only way I, I really knew it.  

Ariel Lavery: But the Tennessee River Gorge is this incredible river landscape where industry is the last thing that comes to mind.  

(ethereal music fades in)

Martin Knoll: The river has cut this narrow beautiful gorge deep into the sandstone, and the limestone of the area there.  And so you’re in this narrow slot where the river is winding through, meandering through.  And you look up and you see, up the steep green wooded slopes, you see these beautiful cliffs that crenulate the top of the mountain there.  It’s just a spectacular area there and I was totally oblivious to that when I worked on those coal loading docks.  

Ariel Lavery: I really loved his description of the Tennessee river in the areas where it still resembles a river.  It makes me think even more about how we have affected not just the quality of the water in our rivers but we’ve really shaped their whole being.

Austin Carter: Yeah, a whole industry has been built around shipping on these rivers and controlling how and when and where they flow.

Ariel Lavery: Exactly. And it’s also affected by what those people vote for and the politics of the region.  Martin was reflecting on all the kindness and support they received and something struck him about that… 

Martin Knoll: Nobody wants polluted water.  It doesn’t matter what your politics are.

Conclusion:

Ariel Lavery: The swim ended in Paducah, Kentucky where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio.  

Martin Knoll: We were all, as they say in Germany, “fix and fantic”.  We were cooked.  We were toast.  We were done and 34 days on the river…

Andreas Fath: And I could finish it before my, uh, wedding anniversary.

Ariel Lavery: So Andreas and his wife got to enjoy their wedding anniversary in Paducah.

Andreas Fath: And I’m Duke of Paducah!  No privileges are combined with that so I still have to wash the dishes at my house all the time (laughs).

(bluegrass music fades in)

Martin Fath: After he did the Rhine swim he promised he wife he would never swim another river because, you know, it’s an undertaking.  It’s a huge undertaking and it disrupts family life.  Then he comes up with the Tenneswim.  And then he makes another proclamation, this is the last river, this is it, for real.  Now he’s swimming the Danube which is almost three times the length of the Tennessee River.  

Ariel Lavery: His Danube trip is set to debut in April of 2022 and then I’m sure he’ll go into swimming retirement.

Austin Carter: Oh, of course!

Credits

You can find all the images and videos we talked about in this episode on our website at middleofeverywherepod.org or on Instagram and Facebook at middle of everywhere pod and Twitter at rural underscore stories.  If you want to be even more involved in the conversation, sign up for our newsletter so you’ll always be the first to know about new episodes and interesting things going on at WKMS and in our region.  This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me, Ariel Lavery, with the editorial help from my cohost, Austin Carter. Our Editor is Naomi Starobin. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky.  Other scoring was from APM music.  Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. Thank you to our intern Annie Davis. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX.  This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.

(music fades out)