Thank you, Joel Pett and The Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento Bee last Sunday asked Joel Pett, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald Leader, to update his cartoon chronicling the history of the U.S. war with Iraq. Pett, one of the precious few cartoonists who try to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, drew the cartoon in 2007, and changed the final panels last month to mark U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Enjoy gazing, like I have, at all the connections, twisted and never-ending and otherwise.

So it goes.

New year, no water

In higher times: A mid-June Sunday. The lake would rise even higher
before summer was over. Photo courtesy of Thomas Petrie.

After greeting the new year with a swim at nearby Lake Natoma, I drove with my wife to Beal's Point on Folsom Lake.
 
I knew what I'd find because I'd been by two days before: Precious little. The water in the cove north of the point is almost gone, reduced to a muddy pond. It was like sucking on a sore tooth to go out there, inexplicably needing to revisit the pain.

Not long ago, we used to swim that cove, which is on the west side of the lake. It was about 1.3 miles round trip across the cove, to a bushy round oak tree on the opposite shore and back. We swam it in smooth water and in late-winter rain when storms had churned the surface into two-foot waves. We swam it when only a few runners up on a levee would yell down that we were crazy, and in the height of summer when ski boats would carve close by at high speed on purpose.

New Year's Day 2012: The whitish rocks on the levee behind were
under water in June, as were the trees, right up to the leaves.
Photo courtesy of Nancy Turner.

Now all that water, probably 30 feet at the deepest, is gone. The giant orange buoy which often served as a rest stop 500 yards out from the shore now lies impotently near the remaining puddle, at least another 400 yards away from where it used to float. I'm trying to figure out how the buoy, anchored to the bottom, moved so far away.

The bottom of the cove is a moonscape of dry, dry decomposed granite with a few knobs of granite sticking out here and there. Except for a small grove of trees that bear the misfortune of being flooded out winter through summer, no flora flourishes on this landscape. Almost no trash, even. I found a disposable lighter and an old juice box on one trek to the bottom of the cove, and that was it. I imagine most open-water swimmers wonder, even a little bit, what lurks below them in the opaque depths as they crawl along the surface. The answer in this case is, nothing.

This barren condition is normal, sort of; the emptiness largely artificial. Folsom Lake is a giant tool for water and flood control, a human-made reservoir collecting the snowmelt as it flows out of the Sierra into the three forks of the American River. From there, the water is let out into Lake Natoma (really the trunk of the American River) and held for release as needed into the American River, which flows into the Sacramento and out into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, then to the San Pablo Bay, then San Francisco Bay, and out to the ocean.

People like me spend disposable income and expend tremendous amounts of fuel to tow skiers on Folsom Lake, camp and hike around it, pull fish from it and swim in it.

I'd be about 20 feet under water, were there any water, right here.
The blue line marks the route we take to the tree in the distance.
The dots near the horizon on the left are horses and riders.
My après-swim ensemble, by the way, is all the rage in these parts.
My technique is flawless; though it looks like I've fallen and can't get up.

The people in charge of controlling the water supply had drained some of the lake to make way for winter's upcoming supply from snowmelt, and the cove at Beal's Point appears to be far shallower than the center of the lake, so it empties first.
 
Except winter is not obliging so far. December ended as the fourth driest since records were first kept during the Gold Rush. January opens dry and warm for this time in winter. Last year near-record snows fell and the reservoirs all over the state filled to capacity.

For now, Lake Natoma is high and cold, the water taken from the bottom of Folsom Lake. Its levels change by almost a foot from one day to the next as the water controllers regulate how much to send downriver, but the reservoir remains full for the most part. Though I have been swimming in the lake for nearly a year, I don't know enough about it to say whether its levels would drop in severe drought.

Selfishly, I think of neighbors on my block who water winter and summer, the runoff sheeting across the sidewalks and forming fast-flowing rivulets down the gutters into the drains. I multiply that by the number of households across the region likely doing likewise, never adjusting their irrigation cycles to meet water needs, and wonder if I could be swimming in this cove but for that.  

Winter, do your worst. Please.

Almost nothing, as far as the eye can see …

The year in liquid form

My my my, it's a beautiful world
I like swimming in the sea
I like to go out beyond the white breakers
Where a man can still be free — or a woman, if you are one
I like swimming in the sea
— Colin Hay, "Beautiful World"

Flag buoy, Aquatic Park, San Francisco, Dec. 26, 2011. (Note Santa hat
where flag usually is.) Water temperature 49.7º F. Bring it!

What an enabler, my wife! With a cheery heart, a smiling voice and, I'll wager, more prayer than I'm aware of, she causes worlds to open up, and bids me explore.

With trepidation, for example, she resigned to the idea it was OK this year for me to stop looking for a job in the closed and collapsing teaching profession, and to spend my energy rebuilding my illustration business. It's a tenuous — OK, often stupid — choice requiring faith and calm.

So, too, with another new world this year, swimming open water.

At first, Nancy accompanied me for this strange and new pastime, and still serves as ground support for races and big events. Since then, she has accepted the low odds of my getting chomped in two by a shark — or, in fresh water, by whatever aquatic pet some kid released into the lake to become a monster fattened on swimmers' flesh — and does her own thing while I swim.

And swim and swim and swim, five or six days a week, usually in Lake Natoma, where I plan to stay through the new year.

As I might have mentioned before, I never really thought it would be this way. Sure, I set sights on Alcatraz long ago, but never truly believed, not entirely anyway, that I'd do more than see the island through pay binoculars and wonder what might have been.

Still, moving toward that goal I joined a Sacramento-area swim group through meetup.com, which got me to an introductory clinic on swimming San Francisco Bay last November. Suzie Dods, a legendary member of the South End Rowing Club near Fisherman's Wharf, led Myron Dong (our meetup.com group's chief cheerleader and organizer) and me on a short swim around buoys in the water. I decided at the last moment to swim without a wetsuit, and felt great.

Then began the discombobulation.

Not all parties have weighed in, but I'm guessing this is the logo
we crazies will adopt for ensuing adventures …

The meetup group started swimming February weekends in Lake Natoma, in horribly chilly, thought-numbing water. I floundered in frustration, making the mistake of believing all those laps in the pool would steel me for open water. Cold trumps all. Now I warn new open-water swimmers against similar hubris.

I started in a wetsuit because I thought that's the only way a human being could swim winter water.

Two events changed that:

1. I look like a manatee in a wetsuit, except less dainty and curvaceous, and with a DayGlo® dome. Not usually vain, I draw the line at wetsuits, and swim without mostly because I'm stupid and stubborn. Plus I hate the constraint of a neoprene straitjacket on my arms and shoulders.

Wetsuits welcome, of course. We skin
swimmers just like to poke fun.

2. Wearing just a cap, goggles and jammers A guy named Brad Schindler sliced through our wetsuited group and disappeared into the winter mists, returning less than a half-hour later, having swum around an island I had yet to see but have circumnavigated dozens of times since. Before summer ended, Brad became one of only a couple of dozen people to swim the 22-mile length of Lake Tahoe without a wetsuit. Until Brad hit the water that February morning, it never occurred to me that I might be able to swim without a wetsuit. For the next month, for increasing periods after every swim, I splashed about without my wetsuit. After that month, and ever since, I've gone without.

On one of these so-called polar bear swims, I had forgotten my goggles, and was ready to drive home and call it a morning. I solve problems with expeditious caprice, and have to talk myself into taking a moment to think of better alternatives. This time my wife thought of it for me.

"Just go ask someone," she said, through gritted teeth. When I finally did, a guy named Jim Morrill lent me a pair, and I was able to swim.

In quick time I found Jim my opposite in people skills, joining in any and every conversation, meeting new people without a whit of hesitation. Without any evidence that I could swim more than 100 yards, he was excitedly inviting me on swims months and miles from that date. I was willing, but not sure how able.

This is a distant second … first off, we don't confine our
lunacy to Nimbus Flat at the south end of the lake.

On our first rough-water swim of the season in March, I got a third of the way out into a Folsom Lake cove before a wave, and then another, and then another slapped me in the face. I stalled, unable to breathe, then puked water and decided immediately that open water swimming wasn't for me. I had tried, dammit, but it was time to sidestroke back to shore and go home. Then Jim swam back to where I was, asked if I was OK, and said, "Let's just swim 30 strokes, take your time, and see how you feel." I did, and felt better, in control.

"Let's go another 30 strokes," he said, and off we went again. "See?" he said. "No problem, you're doing great." Thirty strokes by 30 strokes, I finished the mile swim. Maybe I'll be back after all, I thought.

I think of that every time I swim, now often by myself in 50-degree water: Here I am, piercing the green, cold peaceful waters, the forests quiet on either side of me, the water a vast sheet of glass, gulls and buzzards lofting overhead, and someone made sure I didn't miss out on this by not letting me quit.

Now Jim is the one with whom I swim most often, when we get the chance. We've swum Aquatic Park, Treasure Island and Keller Beach in the San Francisco Bay.

I swim almost as often with another new partner in lunacy, Stacy Purcell, who's a scientist by heart and profession. Curious what the cold water is doing to us, he has us taking air, water and body temperatures to track trends as the temperatures fall.

I like this, but acknowledge its weirdness. I embrace its weirdness.

This new watery world has brought a lot of new friends. In short time, for example, I'm sure to see, somewhere in the middle of a swim, a body coming toward me at high speed. That'll be Kathy Morlan, one of the fastest open-water swimmers in northern California. She's taking a winter break, having donated a kidney to her son over the Christmas weekend. On top of all her swimming medals, she wins Mom of the Year.

With friends and alone, I have swum from Alcatraz, the nearly three miles of Donner Lake, the nearly five miles of Lake Natoma and long portions thereof, and have swum just for swimming's sake an average of five days a week. We have swum in broiling sun and in sideways rain and in opaque fog. We've swum before dawn and long after the evening sky has reddened and purpled. We have endured rowing crews who can't see us, and ski boats who refuse to. I regret to say I have only gone out beyond the white breakers once, with a group out of Avila Beach. But I plan to change that, and soon. The open water has only made me want more.

Honestly, I enjoy coming out of the water on a December morning and someone on the shore asking, "How can you do that?! How cold is the water, really?"

Next year, I'd like to swim from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge, about six miles with the tide. A couple of events have added 10k swims, and I'd like to be able to complete those. I'll swim Alcatraz again, at least once, and the length of Lake Natoma again. Crossing from Catalina Island to the mainland no longer seems impossible. Not next year, but who knows? Someday.
 

Feelin' groovy …

Just not today. I'm home from a 7 a.m. swim in which the surface temperature was 50 degrees F. The swim is never really so bad; it's the uncomfortable shivering after that I can do without. After another cup of hot water and a shower, I'll retrieve my bravado. My goal of swimming Lake Natoma year 'round remains the foremost challenge.

"I want to get stung by a jellyfish," I told Jim, meaning that if I did get stung, it'd be because I'd been swimming in the ocean long enough for the law of averages eventually to attack me. People, learning I'd been stung, would say, "Well, it figures, considering how often you swim in the ocean."

"Trust me," said Jim, a surfer since childhood, "you don't want to get stung by a jellyfish." But he takes my point.

Happy 2012. Find your adventure.

The Mark Trail reaches a dead end?

Back in the states, suited up, Mark Trail begins to undermine his existence.

NooooooooooooOOOOO!

All this insipid strip needs is one more day — one miserable day! — to reach five straight months of nothingness. And it's just going to peter out now? A storyline equivalent of sap rising in a tree has ended, not with a bang or a whimper. What's less than a whimper?

This story held so much promise! Well, not promise exactly, but interest. No, not that either. Let's just say it held stubbornly to a space in the Sacramento Bee comics section, below the fold.

To recap: Almost five months ago — five months! In time as we humans perceive it! — outdoor magazine writer Mark Trail found a wounded goose with a gold leg band inscribed with a Bible passage. Lengthy uninteresting investigation brought him and his mottled crew of friends and co-workers to an idyllic valley in remotest Canada, where mountain lions lie with the mountain goats and all is peace under the rule of a buckskin-clad old woman named Mother McQueen. Yes, that one, mama to Canadian Mounted Police Officer McQueen.

Except nosy reporter Kelly Welly, on evidence so thin it didn't even exist, concluded that Mother McQueen's muzzled bear — kind of a diss on this dystopia — is trained to haul gold ore from a mine under a waterfall that irrigates the idyllic valley. Kelly somehow forced the bear to lead her to the mine. Turns out wolves were not part of this idyll, because a pack attacked the muzzled and, therefore, defenseless bear. No problem: Mark Trail came upon the scene just in time sics his St. Bernard, Andy, and an as-yet-unseen dog, Princess, who together chased off the howling pack. Of course.

That was climax of this nothing story, it develops, because afterward Mother McQueen, serving a fine feast of peace-loving animals, confessed to all that the gold mine is just a played-out hole yielding only enough gold for her poor departed husband to have minted only a couple of bird bands. For some reason or another. Ho hum.

In the end, Mark Trail, who makes his living digging up stories that he can write for an outdoor magazine — and who defied arrest to be allowed into this strange valley — decided after nearly five months of lethargy and nothingness that not only won't he write a story about the discovery, but he will forbid Kelly Welly from publishing any photos, lest any other nosies ever want to explore this mysterious valley. In today's strip,  Mark is at his editor's office, heading off Kelly's attempts to file a story, with photos that'll ruin everything.

In the Mark Trail world, the editor will congratulate Mark for wasting all his time and producing nothing. Mark might even get paid hush money, but it will be called something else. Kelly will be fired, or sent to the secretarial pool, where in this world still exists a vast grid of typewriter-topped desks. 

(It later turns out that Mark stole the memory card from Kelly Welly's camera, even though she was doing her job, gathering information for a story, for which she would be paid, and doing nothing illegal or untoward. But Mark's theft is somehow OK and virtuous, because he's already off on the next unadventure.)

I predict I will mourn the cumulative seven minutes and 14 seconds I have wasted following this strip do nothing for nearly five months, and will vow never to read it again. And will break that vow.

(Find fun Mark Trail commentary here.)

Bittersweet

The inscription for this holiday card inspired its illustration.

My daughter wrote this haiku when she was 10 (she's 19 now):

Icy orange fruit,
American bittersweet
blossoms in the cold.

"I'd like to turn this into a Christmas card?" I said, stunned.

"Why?" Maura asked, underwhelmed.

Why? It's exquisite. Unadorned but so evocative, a moment of fire-bright warmth in the bleak mid-winter, blessed by a precise touch of detail — American bittersweet, a variety of fruity climbing plant. A graceful nod to nature.

A simple gift by which I wish you peace this holiday.

Drawing lessons

We are, none of us, old. Not nearly as old as our parents when they were this old.

Parents shouldn't have to write their children's obituaries. — John Bingle

Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. — Jonathan Larson

Take care of yourself. Take … care … of yourself. People are counting on you.

Think how you've made someone else's life better. Appreciate that.

Greet people with a firm handshake — accept a firm handshake in return — and look them in the eye. — Richard Taniguchi

Grieve loss, of course. Of course. Plumb the fathoms of unfathomable sorrow — tethered, God help us, by someone who can draw you back up — for the loss of a child. I couldn't or wouldn't be so easily rescued at the loss of my own children; I can only imagine, but choose not to.

Grieve for young children who lose their parents, and lose the worlds built for them, and instructions for worlds yet unbuilt.

John and Greg visit a sick friend.

Soften your hearts and let the tears come for those who have come upon death, or whose loved ones have known horrible death. Comfort them as you will. Help them ease the image from their eyes, help them shake the real but unreasonable guilt that they could have averted death, as my mom found my dad, and as my sister found our mom, circumstance sparing me.

Grieve, of course. Then, laugh.

Laughter bubbled out of the chapel at the Starbuck-Lind mortuary in my hometown, the laughter of the heavy hearted, saying goodbye to our friend Greg Cox last weekend. I'm afraid I may have laughed too soon and loudly, intruding on Greg's family's need for space and peace and dignity, and I feel bad for that. But I couldn't help it, just as I couldn't help laughing after losing my parents. As vast and dark as their absence, their presence outshines.

People packed the chapel and the wings, people whom Greg touched, through many years (though we mourn it was not more). People came to honor him and his family, of course, but also to share what Greg brought to each of us. Many, many more, it was clear, were thinking of Greg from afar. We were there because of him; we were together again because of him; in ways many and various, we were going about our lives because of something Greg might have done, said, inspired.

Ageless Mr. Taniguchi, our biology teacher, shook our hands the way he had taught us, with knuckle-knocking firmness, and celebrated Greg and us. Greg's death shook him deeply, it was clear, but pride in Greg and the students he taught so long ago restored him, and laughter bubbled out with ours.

An inauspicious start: Greg's second from right in the middle row, I'm third
from right in the back row. The gentleman holding the sign, Bill Heath, spoke
heartfelt memories at Greg's memorial. Bill is a dentist in Vandenberg Village.

Some of us from elementary school through high school — some of us who had lost touch — were much like players in a stage production, having performed our act without knowing how the play ends. So when classmates and longtime friends from Stanford shared their memories, we learned the rest of the story.

Greg's role was consistent: Polite, gracious, with a gremlin's sense of disarming, sometimes disquieting, humor. Smart, yes, but hardworking, and somehow able to break off great chunks of achievement. Greg made me better by being able to hang around him, riding his coattails. Mr. Taniguchi reminded me math and science were not my strengths, but I tilted at windmills just the same. I give Greg credit for making me run to catch up.

His green Mercury Cougar with the velveteen upholstered seats and the opera windows in the back, we learn, conveyed him from our lives to the next.

Stanford friends reminded us of Greg's keen attention to others in conversation, and his ability to draw you out with thoughtful questions. Stanford friends also told what we couldn't know: His ease with talking and playing with their children, the same keen attention to what they had to say. 

At the reception, our friend John Bingle had the brave idea to seek more stories from the Stanford crowd, and I joined to listen. After, friends from long ago, friends brought in by the memory of Greg, spent the evening celebrating who we have become.

My sister, John and I spent the remainder of the weekend as tourists in our hometown, walking the beach at Surf, talking loudly over the unrelenting waves, then strolling La Purísima's mission grounds and up to the cross on the hill. The valley lay clear and crisp and gray-green on a mid-December morning.

Of my last six trips home, three have been to say final goodbyes, and at least one to help in the aftermath of a goodbye. Lompoc's grip on me is dwindling to gossamer, stretching thin.

Dawdling home, I dipped myself in the chill waters of Avila Beach, joining a group that swims every Sunday morning. We broke through the waves, then swam a mile arc out past the Avila Beach pier before trying our luck escaping heavy breakers to flop back onto shore. I had proven an amateur.

It was salve for a weekend strange and wonderful.

Put an X in the box for Cox

He was good at everything he did. Correction, he excelled.

He never lost an election, from junior high to high school, even winning office as chief justice of the supreme court at Boys State, in a short week winning the hearts and minds of some of the best and brightest among high school Californians. I imagined, right about now, he would be a U.S. Senator. He might even have employed the same mnemonic slogan he used every single time he ran, trumping complex and conniving political strategies: Put an X in the box for Cox.

My friend, Greg Cox, passed away Dec. 5. A life lived fully, and ended too early, is encapsulated here.

Regret sucks wind out of my chest. Greg and I hadn't spoken for more than 20 years. The last we met and talked was in Solvang, near our hometown of Lompoc. He joined my wife and me for Long Island iced teas — we felt so grown up — and I don't remember what we talked about. Life story stuff, probably. It was the first and only time he had met Nancy.

Greg had just finished law school, another in an amazing beaded string on his academic legacy: 4.0 grade point average (we came in advance of Advanced Placement courses) and valedictorian at Cabrillo High School, where he was also student body president; 4.0 GPA as a Stanford University undergraduate, earning degrees in political science and economics; 4.0 GPA, I'm told, at Stanford law school. And what I didn't know — among the many things I didn't know — an MBA from Stanford Business School.

Everyone who knew him would say of him, "It figures." He was our equivalent of a golden boy, the best at almost everything he did, almost entirely by his own hard work, but also by benefit of what Seneca said: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

President Greg with me as
everyone's favorite genocidal
mascot, Juan R. Cabrillo …

"Golden Boy" diminishes him. Though intelligent and gifted, he took almost nothing for granted, and harnessed his gifts with hard work. Many, many school mornings I found him already sitting at the trigonometry or physics teacher's desk, his textbook and homework laid out, going over in detail the concepts he didn't understand, until understanding ensued. It was a lesson I took with me, though I rarely applied it myself, misguidedly relying on my wits in hopes of understanding what I still don't understand.

I repeated Greg's example for my own children, with spotty success. Our teachers probably remember Greg most for his early-morning doggedness.

Besides excelling in school — and still being blamed for skewing the curve — he played varsity basketball and golf, lettering most of his high school career. In our junior year, with the addition of a talented kid who transferred from an overseas Air Force base, Greg played on one of the state championship basketball teams.

Greg just made it look easy.

He was so smart. In our introductory addresses in seventh-grade speech class, when everyone else said he or she lived at such-and-such an address, Greg said he "resided" at his "domicile." None of us knew "resided" or "domicile" or how to use them. He was an only child, his dad a judge, his mom kind and gracious; I imagine he got a lot of attention, but he also rose to high expectations. I remember even in elementary school he had a four-drawer file cabinet in his bedroom, where he kept his schoolwork organized.

Part of Greg Cox' high school legacy, courtesy of a Flickr
photographer. Trees obscure the whole phrase, "Cabrillo
Spirit Conquers All." Greg pushed for this as student body
president. I remember lengthy, sometimes bitter debates
about the wording — Cabrillo's motto is "Our Spirit
Conquers All," after all — and about whether to pay for
such a monument at all.

Wit lightning quick, he could also plant a barb deep, and mock without mercy, and box you in during an argument, smiling just before you realize you were doomed to lose. I imagine some classmates still remember with reddened faces some fierce debates during student body government meetings.

He was a Boy Scout, and had we another opportunity — one in which I likely did not badmouth Boy Scouts — I might have joined the Scouts and fulfilled my passion for backpacking way back then, rather than waiting more than 30 years when my son wanted to be a Boy Scout.

Greg as ASB president, leading
the sometimes sharp debate
over that same monument.
This and above, from
Tierra Royal, Cabrillo
High School's yearbook.

Where Greg went after Stanford, I wasn't sure, until his obituary filled in some gaps. South Dakota for a while, I heard. South Dakota? Something about venture capitalism. He was a principal for a Pacific Northwest investment firm, when he died, near Seattle. His obituary also says he worked for one of the Silicon Valley's premier law firms, in Palo Alto, before that. These are just some of a long list of achievements.

My memory of him, I'm sad to say, is stunted, locked somewhere in the late 20th Century.

In high school it was the three of us — Greg, John Bingle and me. Mr. Johnson, one of our math teachers, called us The Triumvirate; I'm not entirely sure it was a compliment.

When we had time and moments to break free from the various and sundry vagaries of high school life — girlfriends (John), jobs (Greg), term papers (all of us) — we went into default mode: Driving downtown, usually in Greg's green Mercury Cougar, just driving around town and talking, talking, talking, about things far away.

Almost always, we'd end up at Winchell's Donuts near the crosstown railroad tracks on H Street and East Laurel, each of us with a bag of doughnut holes and chocolate milk, talking more under the blanching fluorescent light until we went home.

Annoyingly taciturn now — jabbering instead with my fingers — I wonder how we could have talked so much.

Once in my senior year, I came home late (still before midnight), and my mom went into a fit and started clapping me hard on the shoulders. All the time she was punctuating her anger with her open hand, I found it funny that the worst we were doing, the worst we had ever done, was waste Greg Cox' gas and scarf doughnut holes and chocolate milk.

The stuff of legend, that was us.

On one final drive around town, our conversation comprised what I imagine so many longtime friends talk about on their last meeting: That this was not the end but the beginning, that we would always stay close, that whatever mysteries awaited us, whatever adventures, whatever families and jobs, we would enfold them into our friendship. Our future selves would radiate from this center, this foundation we had built. We wrote the same to each other in our yearbooks.

It was, in retrospect, a jinx. Greg went famously to Stanford, John to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology ("What?" we ragged him. "Where's that? An all-male university? What?"), and I stayed nearby, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. John and Greg went on to amazing careers that early outpaced my capacity to imagine that such careers were possible.

But of course we were not the center of our forthcoming mysteries and adventures and lives. The center dissolved immediately, and off we went, rarely to reconnect.

(Now I remember that this was part of our conversation over drinks in Solvang! Greg mocked our conversation in his car that August night after our senior year; even though he was part of the treacly heart-felt conversation, his recollection almost made it sound like he was outside the car looking in, scoffing. But that was Greg as I knew him then, and I'm sure I had my snarky moments too; I also know I've changed in many ways, good and bad, over the last 20-plus years; I miss the opportunity to discover how we've changed.)

I have talked with John more often — unfortunately not much more often — the last time forgoing my high school reunion to attend John's family's memorial for his mom the summer before last.

John said later he talked with Greg during that memorial weekend. We should get together and celebrate our 50th birthdays together, Greg told John. It's been way too long.

Regret wracks me. I'm the absolute worst at doing something about catching up, looking back, revisiting, even though those impulses nag me on occasion. Facebook, thank goodness, enables effortless connections at those moments. I wonder how and when I would have learned of this bad news without it. 

How appropriate this week that I remembered our last adventure. The subject was hypothermia, because I was talking with a swimming friend who I join twice weekly on cold-water swims.

Somehow Greg, John and I talked our parents into letting us go on a week-long fishing trip in the eastern Sierra, to streams Greg fished with his dad since he was little. Somehow, I talked my parents into letting me take our truck with the camper shell where we'd bunk. Somehow, I talked myself into fishing.

For the early part of the week, we stood in jeans, waist deep in wildly rushing icy June streams, pulling out trout almost as soon as we had dropped our hooks. I know enough from having been a Scout leader that we were doing a really stupid thing.

Greg and John stayed in until sundown some days, long after I had gotten out to read or watch the landscape change. They gutted fish well into dark, stopping only when one of them realized aloud that they could easily have cut into their frozen hands and not known it with all the fish blood spilling over the rocks. It was one of several ways in which we could have gotten hurt or died on that trip, of self-inflicted knife wounds or hypothermia or car wreck or pneumonia.

Small wonder I would not have let my own kids take such a trip. I'm glad they never asked.

Before going home, we headed south out of the Sierra to Magic Mountain, talking about everything and nothing the entire way. On the homeward leg, we tired of one another for reasons that befall most people trying to have the time of their lives in close quarters, and spent long final stretches of the journey in crushing silence. Home again, we were fatigued but at peace. We were ready for wherever we would go. We were ready to move on.

That's what I choose to live on in my memory. I pray for Greg and his mom and dad.