Bless the beasts

Sarah Green loves pelicans!

I love pelicans!

But wait! (I protested in the guarded confines of my head) I don't know how the hell I can fit a pelican into the shirt design for Sarah's charity swim, the Humboldt Bay Critter Crawl.

(Thanks, Dixon Lanier Merritt — and sorry for thinking you were Ogden Nash.)

After all, the swim in far northern California benefits the North Coast Marine Mammal Center — seals and such. When asked if I could create the design, I pictured a seal in acrobatic swirl, enwreathing the swim's name in the bubbles of its wake. Or harbor seals and sea lions forming the words, or hidden in the words. Something like that.

I am thinking about expanding the concept to a larger population of ocean *critters* - water inhabitants, pelicans (a personal favorite) and other sea birds

Said Sarah,

. . .  swimmers swimming among them, Humboldt Bay, maybe The Fisherman statue from Woodley Island.

Having swum the inaugural event last summer, I knew the statue — knew it not only for its rough-hewn figurative style, but as a beacon ushering me to the finish line. It's a memorial by Eureka sculptor Dick Crane to Eureka's fishermen lost at sea; I already thought of including it in the shirt design.

But a pelican … !

They're lovely. When I see them, I feel I know the ocean is wild and thriving, and that they guard the water somehow, scooping in tight formation through the wave troughs. Ungainly and clownish on land (curse our anthropomorphic tendencies!), pelicans rule the sea air.

Now the challenge was to give bird and beast equal billing, using two colors (the screenprint ink and the shirt color). I tried and tried and tried, and sketched and sketched.

And sketched, trying to fit them into a seamless whole.

The filigree of pelican wing had to fit into the warp and woof of wave and fin — I just didn't see how.

I took a different tack as a result, trying a second solution, thinking I'd see the first solution out of the corner of my eye in an unguarded moment.

For the completely second solution, I decided the common element in this swim was in the eye of the beholder — swimmer human, swimmer pinniped and avian fisher extraordinaire.

I would focus on the eyes, and began sketching that idea.

The image taken together would be like a doorway, the eyes being windows of various and sundry souls, and at the top would be the landscape, the sweep of the north Humboldt Bay with The Fisherman in the foreground and the lush forest of Arcata Bay in the background.

It would be a kind of map for the 4.5-mile swim from the mouth of the bay into the marina at Woodley Island, done on a generous tide. It is a grand event, and I recommend it. You want a warm crowd applauding your finish, appreciative of your physical and fundraising effort (and relieved they don't have to swim the cold water)? This is the event.

Despite throwing energy into the other concept — or maybe because of it — the solution for the other still eluded. I batted the two ideas back and forth.

Maybe the pelican's wingtips could diverge into the rough diamond patterns of choppy water, and within the positive and negative spaces the words and a seal would emerge.

Hmmm.

I returned to the second idea, which I could see more clearly. I just had to make others see more clearly that these are the eyes of a pelican, a human and a seal.

It was getting close … I felt it was time to start messaging it on the computer at this point.

Back to the drawing board on the first idea.

I was getting nowhere fast.

The solution came, fittingly, on a long swim. It's counterintuitive, but my habit of counting strokes actually frees some part of my brain to see ideas in the jade depths of my beloved Lake Natoma.

Voices of reason sometimes also bubble up from the dark water. One voice told me, "Stop being so literal." I had kept the bird in the air and the seal in the water, neither to meet. What I really needed to do is fit the shape of a swimming seal into the curve of the pelican's wing, leveraging the yin and yang of positive and negative shapes.

Swim done, I was back on the computer, moving around sketch fragments until the seal's body formed the void of pelican flight, and everything else took shape, literally. Wingtips repeated and echoed in the shapes of liquid and the embrace of kelp, holding everything together with nothingness.


A towering stormcloud became at once the world in which the two could exist, and the swimmer's environment, sea and sky.

While I was at it, I finished out the second idea too, just in case.

The next challenge was creating a related image for the swim cap, perhaps by isolating an element of the art, because the T-shirt art would not reduce well.

I tried and tried and tried.

Again.

Nothing jelled. Until, without my looking the solution jelled on its own:

Stop being so literal, the voice repeated.

•••

In other news:

The Boy Scouts of America, pending ratification by its national board, has agreed to allow gay adult Scout leaders. About time!

New President Robert Gates called on Scouts to change its policy, after it had agreed to allow gay Scouts in the organization.

"We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be," said Gates, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. secretary of defense, in calling for a change.

Not exactly a warm welcome. More like a "(sigh) … if we must," but whatever. At least it recognizes this isn't 1955 anymore.

I'm curious how my old Troop would treat this. It's chartered to a Catholic church, and under the decision, if ratified, each chartering organization would be able to decide whether to allow gay adult leader for its Scouting units.

Religious organizations account for some 70 percent of Scouting's chartering organizations.

Our charter organization had an arm's length relationship when I was involved, probably still does, providing rooms for meeting and a shed space for equipment.

Except for one former pastor who wanted to know why he didn't recognize all the Scouts and why they all didn't attend Mass (uh, because they're not all Catholic? And I'm pretty sure some are agnostic?), the parish didn't pay a lot of attention to the Troop. We took part in Scout Sunday, which amounted to carrying the colors to the altar at the start of Mass, and feeding cookies to parishioners and showing them how to pitch a tent after Mass; and we gathered food for the food locker once a year. Other than that, we were invisible.

I'm going to guess someone with pull will pay attention and my old Troop won't be one of those including gay leaders.

It's always 1955 somewhere.

Mad River

Dory screams at me lately, louder and louder: Just keep swimming.

Not figuratively, as in, It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn! Don't give up!!

Literally:

Just keep swimming, or you'll lose your momentum and will. Keep swimming or your calves will seize into painfully useless meatballs. Keep swimming or you'll get left behind. Farther behind, anyway.

Lock into the groove, rely on muscle memory, check arm and hand movement once in a while. Roll hips, not too much. Relax. Count strokes. Don't look back, don't look around, don't even look ahead if you can help it. Whatever's coming up behind you probably won't hit you, probably won't hurt you, anyway.

Don't stop for food or drink. You don't really need it.

Just keep swimming.

Good ol' Disney®™-fied fish.

With Dory's clarion call I could enter the strange waters of Humboldt Bay Sunday and join the inaugural Humboldt Bay Critter Crawl.

Sarah and Bill dreamed it up. I first met Sarah virtually, another facebook™® swim friend who shared my passion for the open water and could answer my questions about whether people can swim in Humboldt Bay (yes!) and what the water's like (cold!). I met her and Bill in person at the 24-hour swim relay in Aquatic Park in February.

When I heard about their proposed never-before swim, I had to do everything I could to join in. Nancy and I made it a weekend and toted the kayak. There we reacquainted with some other facebook swim friends, Cathy and Lisa and Rob and Allison, and met new swimmers.

Billed as a 4.5 mile swim on a strong flood tide, the Critter Crawl began at the entrance to Humboldt Bay on a spit of beach, and ran along the shoreline edge of the city of Eureka into the marina at Woodley Island.

The swim came at a good time. A trio of diehards (I'm the reluctant one) has been doubling, tripling, and once a week quadrupling the distance of our daily swims at Lake Natoma. I'd moved on from stopping multiple times, drinking at eating each stop, and plodding from one end of the lake to the other in more than three hours once a year — to eschewing fuel and reaching the end of the lake in about two hours and 20 minutes once a week.

Just keep swimming.

I missed the cold, too, which Humboldt Bay offers. Our usually cold lake near Sacramento is in the low-60s, and Humboldt Bay still lay in the mid-50s, I was told. The day was gray and purple and cool: My kind of summer.

My game plan: Do what Dory says.

"How fast is the tide?" I asked Bob, a kindly volunteer related by marriage to this whole endeavor, a fundraiser for the North Coast Marine Mammal Center. Bob is a lifelong resident of these shores, and a long-time fisherman.

Bob smiled. "Take a look," he said.

On cue, a fishing boat headed into the open ocean had stopped and set itself adrift right off our starting point. The boat began twirling at a fast clip back toward the marina.

It'll be a big flood tide, Bob said, filling the bay eight feet. It'll ebb just a little and flood heavily some more. Bob checks the tide charts when it's important to him, and today was important to him.

After a fireboat saluted the first small group of short-distance swimmers with a fountain from its nozzles, it was our turn. Into the mad river, filling the bay. One copse and then another of cypress trees whizzed by, then this pulp mill and that wood mill.

Just keep swimming. The water was cool and welcome at the start, not cool enough to stop me short, and gradually warmed as we neared the marina. I just keep going. Poor Mary who agreed to kayak alongside me must have been a bit out of sorts when I told her I didn't have any food or drink she had to keep for me. I watched her with every breath, enjoying the day on the bay.

Nancy, who thought she might have to paddle around the marina on her own while the swimmers made their way up the bay, instead got to be part of the flotilla in case extra help was wanted. She had practiced heaving the kayak up on our roof and lashing it down, just in case she was by herself.

Commercial fishing boats chugging out to sea tossed us about. I worried about Nancy out in the waves for the first time, but she said it was fun to bob along.

I sighted on a boat way up ahead, hoping it was part of our swim. I wouldn't know one landmark from another, so I just followed the crowd. I suppose I should have minded where the water was flowing, but I figured if the leaders weren't being led astray, I'd be all right.

The bubbles of my wake were squarish somehow, and silvery, and flowed ahead of me. Nearer the city, I could pick up the sharp sweet smell of creosote, coating the pilings.

All I really remember from Sarah's instructions were to look for a green-and-white research ship and the statue of a fisherman. That's where we'd stop.

Just keep swimming.

Well before I expected it, the ship and statue appeared. We were done. A crowd, including caretakers from the marine mammal rescue center who had driven an hour-and-a-half from Crescent City, cheered us on from the opposite landing as we reached the edge of a dock. The hardest part of the entire swim was trying to heave myself up a small ladder onto a deck. Photographic evidence of this struggle did not flatter me.

Harbor seals, we were told, followed us into the marina.

Stroke count — how I measure time and distance — told me this was equivalent to a three-mile swim. We were moving fast. I finished in hour and 15 minutes; my typical 4.5-mile swim at Natoma is another hour longer.

We bounced around the marina parking lot, talking and laughing in the weightless joint relief of having completed the endeavor, to have been part of something new, something done well, something we want to do again next summer.

•••

Mad River, the town (as far as most travelers know) is a bend in Highway 36, consisting of a bar/grocery bookended by a hamburger stand operating out of a travel trailer at the west end, and a taqueria working out of a trailer at the east end. The trailers don't appear to be going anywhere. Each one is under a roof. A trailer court hunkers in the dark shade in back.

Forensic research (meaning I clicked through Google™® maps) shows the burger bar was there first, and a sign suggested the taqueria had been there for almost two years when we drove in Saturday.

It was well past time for lunch on our way to Eureka. We had feared the windy highway would not yield any place to eat, when up popped this daydream.

For no other reason than we were in that kind of mood, we opted for tacos. We had parked at the other end, though, before we even knew what was what and who as who, and walked across town, 150 feet. Though the servers were kind and chatty, the taqueria's shaded picnic tables stank of garbage or a dead animal nearby, so back across town we walked, to an empty shaded table a good shout away from the burger bar. Twosomes and foursomes sat indolently at a few other tables in the hot afternoon, room for everyone.

It wasn't until Nancy went to throw away our lunch trash that the daydream ended.

A door slammed open on the burger bar trailer, a figure hidden by the shade.

"You need to throw that trash in the taco trailer's cans. You didn't get that from here," the voice shouted. "And for future reference, these tables are for the Burger Bar. I don't want you buying your stuff over there and eating it on this side."

"Don't worry, ain't gonna be no future!"

"'For future reference!' That's the funniest thing you've probably ever said."

"Who are you, the Chamber of Commerce?"

"Who are you, the director of first impressions?"

"Sorry to impose on your overflow crowd!"

"Don't you believe in the co-mingling of trash?"

And other assorted Walter Mitty witticisms we told each other later in the car, following the rest of 36 to the coast.

What we did in real life was stare for a brief moment, and move on. Nancy said aloud, "She probably wouldn't want me using her Porta-Potty®©™, then."

To which a teenaged girl sitting nearby said, "No, she'd probably take your head off for that."

We decided in our sweet-lemon state that we had done exactly what we should have, let the shrill anonymous woman launch her dud of derision, never to give her satisfaction. Kind of like the woman long ago who simply waved each time I flipped her off (yes, I did!) for cutting me off. I got nothing from the transaction, except the lingering chagrin.

We decided the cool coastal breezes would wash us clean.

•••

It's been so long since we last stopped through Eureka, I had forgotten how prevalent homeless people are. I can't pretend to know why a somewhat isolated city in the far north of California would attract homeless, so cool and wet so much of the time, but there you go.

On a country FM station broadcasting San Francisco Giants games (one up on Sacramento, Eureka!) and their mad river of loss, a sort of commercial played. Though it sounded like a political ad, it carried no attribution, no candidate, no interest group. The woman in the commercial called for the "need" to distinguish between the just-plain homeless and homeless vagrants, and urged vagrant crime to stop, though it didn't say how.

I imagined a processing center where officials would assign the homeless one color armband and homeless vagrants another. Now, where have I heard that before?

After the swim, Bill pointed across the harbor to the Eureka shoreline, describing historic buildings and redevelopment that's been going on for some time, with more to come.

Like everything else, he said, it needs a river of money, an economy to move again with new energy.

•••

We stayed at a KOA®™for the swim, not wanting another hotel expense but not wanting to fight for a state park campsite on short notice. Easily 40 years have passed since I last stayed at a KOA. My parents seemed to prefer them on summer vacations, the motel for trailer folk — always a site, always on your route, easy to reach.

I loved them as a kid. A general store (not that I remember buying anything at it), pool tables or ping pong in the next room (not that I remember playing, unless my dad felt sorry for his shy son), a playground.

We always had a trailer when I was a kid. Then as now, I realized, the world favors trailer folk. Trailer folk slid into their spacious slots, arranged at precise slants in the middle of the camp, each with precise slants of green lawn precisely beneath where their canopies unfurl. We watched couples walk their dogs in the trailer area, laughing and gesturing as if they'd stepped out of one of those "let's go RV'ing" ads.

No such equivalent for tent campers, who got the perimeter against the fenceline, spaces not much longer than a car nor much deeper, each site separated by a curling half-sheet of plastic landscape lattice nailed to fenceposts, a square picnic table, a concrete block sometimes recognizable as a firepit.

We began to wonder what we'd done to tick off KOA®™.

Kids didn't bother us, even the mad river of kids that ran around the park into the night as bats began to roam the tree canopies. Kids reminded us of our own (although we'd have hauled them back to our site long before nightfall, and not let them run around by themselves); kids reminded me of the labor camps in "The Grapes of Wrath," an oddly comforting thought.

Ah well, it was a place to stay, and we only needed the tent space for the night. We had gone to dinner at Samoa Cookhouse with Lisa and Cathy. The restaurant out on the spit across from Eureka is supposed to be an old lumberjack's cookhouse, and customers eat the same meal together at long tables topped with red checked oilskin tablecloths.

I tossed and turned, dreaming when I could of the next day's event.

Just keep swimming.