On Beaver Lake, the dawn of a new day can be marked with a few identifiers: a cool breeze, morning mist and the swim of Melodee Liegl.
Liegl, a biostatistician and marathon swimmer from Delafield, dips into the lake before the sunlight every morning. The emptiness of the lake makes it a clean slate, the perfect canvas for Liegl to become what she calls “a pen in the water.”
With careful planning and the tracker on her Garmin watch, Liegl swims words and shapes in the lake. In mid-July, she swam a the outline of Wisconsin.
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The challenge: she can’t check the swim pattern on her tracker until getting out of the lake when her watch syncs to her phone. In the water, there is no guidance or instruction beyond the directions ingrained in her memory.
For her Wisconsin swim, that memorization started with a map Liegl annotated with the number of strokes needed to complete each part of the border.
“I study it before I go to bed,” she says. “I look and I say, ‘Okay, I gotta go longer here, shorter here, turn here, turn there.”
The directions for her Wisconsin swim were precise. The Illinois border was 120 strokes long, followed by another 120-stroke trip up the coast of Lake Michigan before eventually veering to form Door County. On the northwest side, shorter stretches of 20, 50, 25, 25 and 40 swept through the water to form the border. “The peninsula was pretty tricky,” Liegl said. “Sometimes I went out too far east. And then I’m like, ‘No, no, it goes more upward and then down.’”
If you think this sounds too complex to get right on one try, you’re correct. “Each time I get out of the water, I’m like, ‘I nailed it today. I got it.’ And then I get out and I’m like, ‘darn it, I didn’t,’” Liegl said. “[On July 14], I did it, and I was so happy.”
Her first attempt on July 3 wasn’t perfect, but it had the basic shape. As she continued to improve it, making two attempts per day, the tracking shape grew increasingly closer to an outline of The Badger State.
On July 14, on her 20th attempt, she finally got what she was looking for.
After syncing the watch with her phone that morning, the screen lit up to reveal a red Wisconsin border looming over the surface of Beaver Lake. The total distance of the swim was 795 yards – over six football fields long. Liegl completed it in 16 minutes, 10 seconds.
For Liegl, it was the latest addition to her portfolio of water-waded penmanship. She started in 2020 by writing her name, “Mel,” in the lake. The resulting tracked swim now resides in Milwaukee’s David Barnett Gallery, where it is featured as a digital piece.
As time marched on, Liegl expanded her craft, swimming the shapes of a fish and heart as well as more elaborate writing, such as “Beaver Lake” and the names of family and friends.
“Words are hard because certain letters are more difficult than others,” Liegl said. “I even print out cursive worksheets, and I study and I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s where I’m getting it wrong.’”
Though habit and preference have kept Liegl a morning swimmer for over 20 years, the hour of the day is also of service to her artwork. A limited number of lights on the lake help her to hold onto a focal point and visual target, keeping her on course.
Liegl swims with a lighted, orange tow buoy trailing feet behind her, gliding along the lake just in case she has early morning company to alert. But that company is seldom. Liegl and the buoy are often alone on the water, accompanied only by fish that unknowingly sit within the frame of her artwork. However, they’re not alone in the finished product.
Through all of her endeavors, Liegl’s water works are intertwined with those closest to her, taking inspiration from her father and projects that the two have worked on together. Liegl also has written the names of her kids on the lake, gifting the completed, personalized artwork as Christmas presents. Also included in the cache of lake-sketched nametags are her parents and friends that have supported her work over the years.
Through each stroke and loop in the water emerges not just art, but a continued passion for early mornings on the lake, which, according to Liegl, is the driving force behind it all. “I always love the feeling after a swim.”
