Meet the Author: Matt Moseley
Communications strategist, long-distance swimmer and author Matthew Moseley releases his latest book, Soul is Waterproof: Adventure Swimming and Stories of Adventure.
Soul is Waterproof takes readers on Moseley’s swimming adventures around the world-from New Orleans, the Caribbean, Costa Rica, the Colorado River, the Sea of Galilee, and points between; he becomes an ambassador for water, passing along essential lessons about adaptability and durability.
He shows us why water--either too little or too much--will be the defining issue of our times. His account is a meditation on, a celebration of, and a love story with Earth's life-giving resource.
Reading Soul is Waterproof is like being on Moseley's support boat as stories and characters unfold around every bend. Put your life vest on and buckle up.
About Soul is Waterproof and Matt Moseley
His eighth-grade teacher. His first girlfriend. A box of shoe polishes and brushes his dad gave him for Christmas.
The tiny memories, photo reels clicking through on a mental projector, flow through Matt Moseley’s mind as he flows through the water. There’s nothing else to think about. Constraints of the modern world drift away, replaced by rushing spray.
Five hours. Six. Seven. As the time floats by, the long-distance swimmer’s human form washes away. He is a creature of the water.
“We are fish that live on land,” Moseley said. “They’re part of us, too. So going back in the water is not secret.”
Moseley has been chasing that “spirit fish,” as he calls it, since his postgraduate years. Now 55, he’s made a passion of swimming unconquered bodies of water, completing five never-before-done marathon swims to this date.
Moseley is taking years of scattered notes and articles on his swims and compiling them into Soul is Waterproof. The book will use Moseley’s most recent grand open-water adventure – a 40-mile, 14.5-hour journey down Colorado’s Green River – as the centerpiece for a look into a life in the water.
“You’re going on a river trip with Matt,” Moseley said of the book, “and it’s going to be really fun.”
At a press conference held before a 50-mile swim attempt across the Caribbean in 2015, a reporter raised his voice.
“Where’s the swimmer?” the reporter asked.
Organizers pointed to Moseley, a then-48-year-old Louisiana native and lover of fried catfish.
“He’s the swimmer?” the reporter followed.
“I’m not your normal swimmer,” Moseley said. “I’m really not.”
Moseley swam for his high school team in South Louisiana, but he wasn’t good enough for a college scholarship. So he stuffed his goggles away, started smoking cigarettes and put on a beer belly.
But while attending graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, his wife bought him a canoe for his birthday that came with a six-day trip down the Colorado River. On a whim, Moseley decided to dig out his goggles and bring his swim cap.
“It was really the first time it was like, ‘Woah, this is amazing,’” Moseley said. “There’s no coach, there’s no lane line, there’s no clock. It’s just me and the water.”
After some early adventures, Moseley’s open-water career truly began after a two-year recovery from a shattered tibia and fibula when a cliff jump went sideways. During that time, he became close with Mark Williams, a former F16 fighter pilot who taught him techniques for pain meditation. Williams is now Moseley’s longtime support paddler.
It would’ve been easy to fester as the bones healed. To pick up the beer and the cigarettes again and give up swimming for good. Instead, though, Moseley set himself a goal – he was determined to become the first person in recorded history to swim across Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans.
“I realized through that injury just how much I loved (swimming), how much I missed it, and how much it was a part of my life,” Moseley said.
For that first Lake Pontchartrain trek, Moseley partnered with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which had been working in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to clean up the lake and rebuild the New Canal Lighthouse.
It set a precedent. Ever since, Moseley has made a point of raising environmental awareness by picking swims across specific bodies of water. The Caribbean swim was marked by a partnership with the Scuba Dogs Society, which works to protect coral reefs. The Green River swim was done in the lowest river flows in history, demonstrating the effects of climate change on American rivers.
Moseley’s swims are events. He involves environmental organizations, rallies a volunteer support crew, and hails the media. They’re parades. Circuses, as one friend described to him.
“Bringing in that community, that team that he brings together … that’s an important part of who he is,” Williams said.
It offers an extra boost of motivation – when ten hours have passed and Moseley’s arms are barely clinging to their sockets, he can’t simply throw in the towel. The show must go on.
“It becomes so much more than you,” Moseley said, “that that really is an inspiration to keep going.”
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In the pitch-black of night, Moseley flickered in and out of the range of Williams’ light, eight-foot swells swallowing the swimmer whole and spitting him out again.
Currents foamed around Moseley, the wind whipping an intense spray. This swim, the jaunt across the Caribbean from the island of Culebra, was “never zen,” Moseley said.
“If you get separated from people in the open ocean at night, you are – to use a technical term – f—ed,” Williams said.
In between searching a cooler to find food for Moseley, waves of nausea hit Williams, the former pilot, forcing him to lean over the side of the boat and vomit repeatedly.
The swim, all 24 miles, was a struggle from start to finish. A parade, a champagne reception, and the mayor awaited Williams in his expected destination of Vieques.
Caught in a tropical depression, though, Moseley washed ashore short. Confusion took hold as he stepped on land. There was no champagne reception.
He’d ended up on Culebrita. Wrong island.
“You get in open water, anything can happen,” Moseley said. “And it usually does.”
Yet he never wants the swims to end, slogs as they can sometimes be. By the time he finished his trek down the Green River, Moseley didn’t want to get out of the water.
“I might be hurting like crazy and burned and swollen and can barely move my arms,” Moseley said, “but for some reason, man, it’s beautiful.”
He’s trying to translate that love into Soul is Waterproof, named after a phrase his friends started saying in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The book will interject some anecdotes about the origins of swimming, as well as messages on the overall importance of water as a modern issue.
But primarily, it’ll tackle Moseley’s personal journey, the ode to open-water swimming of a man who feels happiest when he becomes a fish.
“I just have this profound sense of gratitude, of being there,” Moseley said. “Feeling like the luckiest guy ever.”
Now Available on Amazon
Summer Book and Swim Tour 2023 for Soul is Waterproof
June 1, Beau Soleil Books, Lafayette LA
June 2, Lake Pontchartrain Swim; Book signing at Garden District Book Shop, New Orleans
June 8, CU Law School Getches Wilkinson Center 43rd Annual Law Seminar, Boulder CO
June 10, Explore Bookstore, Aspen CO
June 25, ‘Swimming with Hemingway’ swim and book event, Walloon Lake, Petoskey MI
July 8, American Rivers Southwest River Council, Flagstaff
July 14, Trident Book Store, Boulder CO
July 20, Colorado River Swim, Moab UT
Sep 22, Marie’s Bookstore, Durango CO
Dec 14, Colorado River Water User’s Association conference; Las Vegas NV
