Heidi Stevens: His wife told him to jump in the lake. More than 4 years later, he still is. 'There's just a lot of joy in jumping in the water'

Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service on Dec 31, 2024

Published in Lifestyles

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In the summer of 2020, when a pandemic gripped the globe and civil unrest filled city streets and dread clouded the air like a low-hanging fog, Dan O’Conor would get up every morning, drive to a parking lot at Montrose Beach and stick a hand-scrawled sign inside his windshield: WENT TO JUMP IN THE LAKE.

The sign was to keep his car from getting towed. The lake was to keep his sanity. Both worked.

Four and a half years later, he still jumps. Every morning. He threw a lakefront party on his 365th day of jumping—Jeff Tweedy from Wilco performed; Steve Albini and Jon Langford performed; a band of merry, ragtag Chicagoans jumped in too.

He’s coming up on his 1,650th day of jumping.

“It’s just something I do,” he said.

I went to watch him jump on a December morning. We met at Chess Pavilion in Lincoln Park, where North Avenue meets the lakefront and the skyline stands at attention, ready to take whatever you’re doing—biking, running, walking your dog—and up the dramatic flair by 1 million. It was 31 degrees.

“During the winter I actually enjoy it more,” he said. “I don’t know how you’d describe an endorphin rush, but you get this shot through your body like, ‘I know this is dangerous and I want to protect you.’”

He brings a shovel to bust up the ice when the lake is frozen. One winter morning one of his sons (he has three) was helping O’Conor when something fell out of his hoodie pocket and sank through the hole they just cracked open.

“I go, ‘Did you just drop a glove?’” O’Conor recalls. “He goes, ‘No, that was your phone.’”

A minor setback.

This whole thing was originally his wife Margaret’s idea. He was hungover and crabby that pandemic summer and she told him to go jump in the lake.

“She’s the idea person,” he said.

It shook him awake. He kept going.

“I can go down there and I can strip away all the crap and just focus,” he said. “I hear about all these health benefits and I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I still feel fat.’ But mentally it’s like windshield wipers. Like, ‘Alright I got a clear view to start the day.’”

He posts his daily jumps on social media, and he picked up a loyal following pretty quickly. He’s been on TV. He’s been in The New York Times.

“I got my 89-year-old uncle in Rhode Island reading about it,” he said. “That’s pretty wild.”

During the pandemic, he used the attention to drive support to the Chicago Independent Venue League, which worked to help struggling music venues survive. Now he dedicates every jump to a different musician, dead or alive.

On holidays, he hosts group jumps. At the end of 2024, folks jumped with him on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day/the first day of Hanukkah.

“There’s just a lot of joy in jumping in the water,” he said.

If he’s out of town, he finds a lakefront substitute.

“I’ve jumped in Lake Michigan in Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin,” he said. “One year we were out in Massachusetts and I did six New England states in one day—jumped in a pond in Connecticut, a river in Vermont, that kind of thing.”

He’s jumped in all five Great Lakes, the Potomac River and the Atlantic Ocean. In a pinch one time he settled for a swimming pool in Austin, Texas.

“I don’t see myself stopping,” he said. “It still feels good, you know?”

I asked if it’s changed his sense of self, all this rising before the sun and busting up ice with a shovel and maintaining a daily practice through highs and lows and lost phones. If it makes him feel, I don’t know, a little invincible.

“Not really,” he shrugged.

He lost his mom in July. He and his family were in Michigan when they got the call, a few days after visiting her at her memory care facility. The December day when I watched him jump, he’d been to three funerals that week—a friend’s mother, his sister-in-law’s mother and a cousin.

Jumping offered some consistency. A jolt, maybe. A reminder that pain happens and joy happens and surprise happens. And that’s what being alive means.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. That’s what I take away from O’Conor’s daily jumps, usually into the lake we both live near and love. It’s inspiring, whether he means it to be or not.

It’s a daily celebration of what we have, born from something that took away so much. I like the tone that sets—at the start of each new day, and at the start of this new year.