Traffic control

Please pass through the ravine in an orderly manner. No need to rush. 

Water enough for all.

Thank you!

Parallels

They're not what they seem, these giant plants that have sprouted under water, creatures from the green lagoon, growing fast to mammoth proportions on whatever the earth gives them.

Each morning now I must swim over them — sometimes through them — because they ring the shoal around the boat launch at the upper end of my beloved Lake Natoma.

They have made of themselves a vegetative atoll, their many, many bunchy fronds glowing and waving beneath me, wreathing my arms with theirs as I climb and chop over one bush, then dart between two more, huffing and puffing and writhing to find deeper barren water.

It takes a minute to swim through their gauntlet. Their bulk darkens the dark waters. When the water suddenly turns to night, I know a bush hulks ahead, and to zig or zag around it if I can. I don't relax and ease into a rhythm until I'm almost to the other side of the narrow lake.

It makes no sense to me that the bushes flourish around the boat launch, where human traffic is heaviest — not just me, of course, but putt-putt fishing boats and recreational and racing kayaks and canoes and rowing shells and big slobbering dogs and little slobbering children.

But if ducks and geese won't scurry under all that traffic, neither would these plants, I suppose. Fowl are pooping their seeds where they hang out, I suppose, and the plants get a boost from the poop and the sun seeping through the warming water.

A few years ago we swimmers simply dubbed them "big scary plants," a seasonal rite of passage. They all but disappear in winter. In this unusually warm, dry summer, they have grown boldly, the tips of some bushes rising through the water's surface.

A swimmer on my favorite facebook®™© suggested "triffids," after venomous and mobile plants from a John Wyndham science fiction novel and subsequent movie adaptations.

But I know their real name now, and I feel different.

One morning last week I grabbed a rising stem and pulled. It snapped so delicately that it practically jumped into my hand. I was going to photograph and use the Internet to identify it.

It wasn't what I expected. Out of the water it was a limp reddish tube on which hung dozens of thin dark green tubules. They clung weak and thin to the reddish stem by the tension of the water, as if desperate for protection.

In the water the little tubules spread full and dense, seeming to lift and float the stems in bright green glowing clouds, their edges indeterminate but their bodies thick and foreboding.

Milfoil, it's called. I know only because I'd heard the name months before and dismissed it. I was sure it was hydrilla or hydrangea, the carcasses of which I had seen in spring, ringing beaches.

I Googled®™ and voila! Milfoil. Eurasian milfoil, probably, an invasive species.

They exist because of water, full and robust, their tiny fronds billowing and spreading, because of the water. They are not meant for land; they are limp and almost invisible on land.

Kind of like myself.

In the water, I am always present; I must be. The water envelops me, requiring my attention, needing me to be mindful of temperature and density and current, of the streaks of cold which my feet occasionally touch. I cannot take it for granted. I float and glow in the water. I'm sure other swimmers share this feeling.

On land sometimes I feel unsteady and less, somehow. Not always, just sometimes. Not present, not needing to. Distracted. Unmindful.

I know these plants now. They are not scary.

I will miss them come winter.

Benumbed

First, thank you: When I reached out last week in this blog, seeking advice on helping a Ghanaian swimmer help others learn to swim, I imagined I was casting a message in a virtual bottle, letting come what may. But it reached you directly and you reached back quickly, with heartfelt help and mindful advice.

Many of you pointed me to the same person, co-founder Dan Graham of Nile Swimmers, a United Kingdom charity based in Sudan. Dan gave me a frank and thorough background on the scope of lifesaving efforts in Africa, successful but woefully underfunded against pandemic drowning. He advised me of the challenges and pitfalls of providing help remotely. Dan, in turn, pointed me to three organizations already doing similar work in Ghana, with whom my Ghanaian acquaintance might harness his efforts.

I'm hoping the next steps bring a good result soon …

It is no longer cold in my beloved Lake Natoma. At nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the water is far warmer than I can remember over the four years I've swum here.

The current is strong, though. Water officials said they would slow releases from Folsom Lake into Lake Natoma in this drought, but it doesn't feel like they have. I have learned to swim against the current by hugging the north edge of the rocky ravine, a weather eye out for the canyon edges, which jut out over my head at times.

I'm finding eddies, some strong enough to swirl around and push me forward, then fighting against the rush of water as I round a rocky point, until the water relaxes and lets me into the next eddy. It's sneaking to the edge of Folsom Prison by the long route, but I'll take it. I have no choice.

Once up to the prison chain, I plow sideways into the middle of the channel, and feel my body fly back down the ravine where moments ago I had been climbing half-foot by half-foot.

I've been taking this for granted, I realize. The numbness I feel in in my hands in the winter water has this summer reached my head and heart.

Each morning this week, I have been swimming past a body, somewhere below in the green water.

A 22-year old man drowned in this water last Thursday. He and some friends tried either to swim across the lake or into the middle, and got tired. Kayakers rescued two, one swam back to safety on his own. The 22-year-old man disappeared. Recovery crews have yet to find him.

On my way up through the current toward the prison, I pass the rocky island near where rescuers last saw him.

He is one of six people in the last three weeks to have drowned in the rivers and lakes around Sacramento.

The other five drowned along the lower American River, or at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers, where the current can sweep unsuspecting swimmers over unseen drop-offs below the surface and pull them under.

The Sacramento has long been a river of industry, its bottom crowded with concrete slabs and poles and cables and downed trees and junked cars — there to catch a struggling swimmer.

The Sacramento Fire Department reports that an average of eight people drown in Sacramento's rivers each year – four times the national average. This year the terrible season started early, with a drowning in late and warm March at the rivers' confluence. The number of drownings has already exceeded the average.

Drowning, widespread far away, is also prevalent here, where we would expect the resources to prevent it.

I had been numb to it all, until that man drowned near where I swim. Now I mark his passing, looking shoreward to see if anyone has come to mourn him, looking to see if recovery teams have resumed their search that early in the morning.

Now I wonder how I could help stop the drownings. I have been blessed to be able to swim, blessed to have had help since childhood to overcome my fears and respect the water; blessed to have practiced open water swimming, first as a Scout leader, then with new friends passionate about the sport, who would not let me give up because of new old-guy fears.

I have been blessed to have time to swim my lake, to learn its ways, to learn to relax and be patience in current and high chop.

But I have lost touch. In the television news stories, I have heard experienced swimmers describe Lake Natoma as "extremely cold," and I have forgotten that for many people who rarely or never go into the lake, it can feel cold even in high summer.

I had forgotten that not long ago, helping Scouts learn canoe rescue techniques in Lake Natoma, the cold (64 degrees F) shocked me head to toe, arrested my breathing, chased away rational thought, began to induce panic.

Though I'm as snarky as the next skins swimmer, I'm not militant: If a wetsuit is what it takes for someone to swim the open water, I bid welcome.

I had forgotten, too, how frightening moving water can be, how futile it made me feel.

The city and county are taking new water safety steps after this horrible string of drownings, including new signs posted near the most dangerous landmarks along the American and Sacramento rivers, and rangers talking with beachgoers about the perils of swimming.

It already provides life vests on a rack at swimming holes along the two rivers, including the dangerous confluence. Many people, unfortunately, ignore the offer.

I'd like to do more, and as usual with most of my public whinings, I don't know what. I'm not trained to teach others to swim, and I'm not even sure encouraging more open water swimmers is even the answer. Though I do encourage anyone halfway interested to give it a try, as safely as possible along the shallow beach at the lower end of my beloved lake.

I would not swim where most have drowned, where the currents and undertows are swift even at low levels. Most of the victims weren't even swimming, but wading until they got too far out to come back. Only in a few instances have drownings resulted from hubris, swimming beyond ability and knowledge.

Knowing is key — knowing how to swim, knowing how to relax in the water, knowing where the life vests are, knowing where the water is dangerous. The education is often in English and many who drown here don't speak English.

I can do something. The numbness needs to go away.

Thumb drive

"You just have to be 10 percent smarter than the machine," says Will, a friend and fellow former Scout leader.

He has said this many times.

Or maybe I have just heard it many times.

Maybe Will has intuited the futility of this particular man against the machines.

Machines are winning.

The latest machine might deliver me the death blow.

I got a smart phone. Yeah, a dumb guy got a smart phone.

Playing hard-to-get with technology, I'm typically the last on my block or my continent to embrace these Tools of Amazing Convenience,™® Doing Things I Never Thought Possible or Even Necessary In Any Measurable Way!©®

I derided such devices as Whiz Bangs. "Get out your Whiz Bang," I'd say to my son. "Tell me where China Beach is from here."

A Whiz Bang of my own finally seemed necessary. At least that's what we're telling ourselves. I need it to conduct business remotely, since I'll be going to a job job but keeping my old job. The family, each of whom has embraced smart phones with something approaching ecstacy (meaning they might actually have affixed the free Apple®™ logo sticker on something others might see), has felt sorry for me.

They have all been helpful. Maura handled the basics, setting up the phone, taking me through "on" and "off" and "volume" and "lock" and "charger," and how none of this is possible without opposable thumbs.

Nancy has shown me some features while driving, but we shouldn't have been doing that so I won't mention it here.

Liam has been trying to solve remotely why my emails won't send from the phone, and how I can schedule my blog to post regularly and link it to a facebook®™ status update.

Which is the only reason I really need a smart phone.

I gave up my flip phone and accomplished all that seemed useful with it. Over the last four years I had moved through the Five Stages of Mobile Phone:

Indifference: I know I have a phone. I don't know where it is. I don't want to look for it. It's always bleating to be recharged. How do I make it stop bleating?

Empathy: My loved ones would like me to find my phone. They think it's a fine idea that I keep track of the phone so they can communicate with me.

Dawn of Man: I answer phone calls ("Are you there?! I can't hear you very well." "Well, neither can I!" "What?!") and learn to text, beginning with several months of the repeated opus, "k." My loved ones learn to frame statements and questions that can be answered with "k."

Renaissance Man: I can type "ok."

Acceptance: I text like a mad fool. My thumb can leap tall buildings.

I had come to love the cumbersome way to text with a flip phone, in which I have to press a keypad button a certain number of times to produce a certain letter, number or punctuation mark.

I got quite good at it, and the more I did it, the more it appealed to my vestigial childhood wonder about cyphers and codes and spies and secrets. They intermix with the wonder of magic and sleight of hand, and American Top 40®™ and animation and paleontology.

I have daydreamed in the last few weeks about a secret code based on my flip phone — a symbol for the position of the keypad button, say, and another symbol for the number of times to press the button,  equals a letter number of punctuation. Probably no punctuation; or maybe sometimes, to throw off the enemy.

How robust would such a code be? Probably not very. I wonder if anyone has made such a code.

I'm right back in third grade, writing notes in lemon juice to send to my childhood friend Lance, who would have to carefully pass the paper over a light bulb to burn the juice traces into visibility. (Owing to the shrinking supply of incandescent bulbs, lemon juice may come back in vogue as a spy medium.)

We each had plastic cards from Pop Tarts™® boxes, the cards incised with symbols. Trace the symbols in certain orders on paper to create messages, the meaning of the symbols known only to Lance and me. And anyone who ate Pop Tarts™.

Typing on the new phone is not code-like. It's foreign and unwieldy, my thumb pressing around every onscreen letter but the one I want. I am saved, grudgingly, by the predictive spelling feature which saves a lot of pressing and guessing.

But I press and slide and tap and double-tap, and pitch and spread my fingers and watch the images slide and bounce like cartoon characters at my sorcerer's gestures, and wonder at this technology, new to me, common to you.

Here's the thing, though: The phone is big. Bigger than my wallet. A phone is my watch, real watches falling off my wrist too frequently when the sweat of my arms saws through leather wristbands.

The flip phone fit in the palm of my hand, and I could hide it without too much trouble when leading a tour of the Old Sacramento Underground. I could direct visitors one way, turn the other and palm my phone out of my costume apron: OK, I'm right on time.

The new phone feels like I'm pulling a surfboard out of my pocket, and looks just as subtle. Tour visitors are going to wonder what the dude in 19th century duds is doing with this otherworldly device spilling out of his hands. (He is just trying to learn the time; look over there, please.)

I have no particular need for the phone 99 percent of the time. I take it out with me to lunch, checking facebook®™ (you can fall far behind if you're not vigilant, which you know). I have even taken photos with the phone. I have even found where the photos are that I have taken.

Yesterday I pushed myself to the technological zenith: Before finishing a three-mile swim, I climbed out onto the far shore of Lake Natoma, took a photo, called up the Internet, checked the water temperature, posted my swim on facebook®™ to other swimmers, and attached the photo — all before I had even finished the swim — and then got back in the water to reach the dock and my car.

In the old days I went home, post about the swim — no photo — sometimes hours after the fact.

No more. A new era has dawned.

The phone sits at my elbow as I type, a black obelisk as imposing and mysterious as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It holds unimaginable power, untold wealth of capabilities and conveniences.

I sense its urge of obligation, like The Ring to Bilbo. I won't see the masses, together but alone, gazing down into their machines anymore … because I'll become one of them.

Ummm.

Maybe tomorrow. Although: What time is it?

Kiss the buoys and make me cry

Clong! sang the buoy.

It's big as a washing machine, round and spiky and metal as Sputnik, a bobbing yellow enamel-coated and tattooed orb, glinting in the sun.

It's not supposed to sing or make noise, though. It's not that kind of buoy.

It was made to monitor time and tide, discreetly despite its sunny hue.

But it had never met my two front teeth before.

More on that later.

The buoy would get no attention at all if not for regular visits from the Kelp Krawlers. They're open-water swimmers who use the buoy to mark routes through the marine sanctuary off Pacific Grove in Monterey Bay.

My wish to swim with the Kelp Krawlers is almost as old as my wish to swim open water. While dreaming of an Alcatraz crossing four years ago, I began to dream of joining the Kelp Krawlers in the gorgeous and foreboding Monterey Bay, a place I have visited vicariously through writer John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts and painter Bruce Ariss.

But finding a way to be in Pacific Grove at 11:15 on a Sunday, when the main group meets, has proven harder than I thought.

It happened for the first time last weekend, and only then because Nancy and I had dropped her mom off to visit friends farther south, and were making our way home to Sacramento. Still, we weren't certain we could stick around. Daylight Saving made it possible, though, the time change robbing us of an hour but shoving us that much closer to the swim start time.

Heaven ain't Iowa. It's Pacific Grove. Though largely unattainable, like heaven, Pacific Grove at least has generous visiting privileges. Dozens of available parking spaces line the rocky storybook coastline on Ocean View Boulevard. Take your pick, especially at 9 a.m. on a Sunday.

Which we did. We were very early. I was eager.

Finding a space close by Lovers Point (fun fact: It was once called Lovers of Jesus Point as a church retreat venue), we passed the hours walking along the trail that overlooks the rocky coast, its massive adobe-colored boulders softened and lacerated by time and wave, and dotted here and there with resting harbor seals.

Pacific Grove is hyper-real, hyper-California, the Eyvind Earle postcard you'd send to your snowbound relatives to make them hate you. You half-expect a truck commercial to break out at any minute; to turn a street corner and suddenly find yourself in another section of Disneyland®™.

You can walk right along the shoreline through carpets of delicate ice plant, amid towering succulents with red and blue rockets of flowers, all the way north into Monterey or south around the point to the state Asilomar retreat if you want, right in front of grand sweeping houses, right before the great sweep of the dark blue bay.

I always thought that if we ever won the utterly remote chance to live in Pacific Grove, we'd never own a TV because we'd spend morning and evening down by the ocean, always finding something better to watch.

It's always a treat to visit, and next I was going to swim it.

The Kelp Krawlers are a big bunch, 30 or 40 of them gathering above Lovers Point Beach, and that isn't even the largest gathering, I'm told. It's lucky if two other people join me to swim my beloved Lake Natoma.

A guy named Chris was shepherding the Krawlers, gathering them up in the parking lot. All but four were wearing wetsuits. One who was not, besides me, is John Ratto, whom I've met through my favorite facebook®™ page, "Did You Swim Today?"

John lives in Pacific Grove. He said he owns a TV. His loss.

The beach at Lovers Point is a smaller replica of the cove far south in La Jolla, where I got to swim last April. Each features a terraced stone-and-concrete amphitheater that drops from a lovely park to the water and opens northwest to the curve of land in the distance. Lovers Point Beach faces the redwood-covered hills that rise more than 20 miles away, above Santa Cruz at the north end of the  bay.

In each place, the bright sand beach and topaz shallows form the amphitheater stage, inviting you in.

At an unseen signal, all the swimmers began making their way down to the stage, past beachcombers beginning to stake out their morning.

Most of the Krawlers were heading north to the round yellow buoy, about a mile round trip. I opted for the smaller group swimming a triangle of about a mile and a half around two buoys.

"I usually take off first because these guys will eventually pass me up," John said, and dove into water that looked too shallow. But I followed, and soon flew over undersea gardens that waved languidly in the blue sand. The gardens fell away and the water darkened to jade. Waves started to lift and drop me, a reminder I was far from my placid home lake, as I kept watch on John. He hugged the point a bit closer than he had recommended, but I kept a wider berth just in case.

Giant kelp snaked up from the bottom of the little cove here and there, and sometimes I had to climb over their heavy thick fronds. The kelp pushed back so hard that it seemed like a giant spring, holding up the water surface.

Another look up and I suddenly saw the flashing black arms. Sure enough, swimmers who started a few moments later have sped past. I began to follow them — when I could see them. The ocean constantly opened and shut the world from me.

I counted strokes, as usual, but I wasn't sure what for. I didn't really know where I was going or when I'd get there.

It's the wildest water I've ever swum, just a bit wilder than off Laguna Beach where I got to swim last year. I looked down into the deep green water and considered the wildness that might be swimming below in this sanctuary. But I never saw anything.

I was the last in the group to arrive at the first buoy, a tall yellow cylinder.

"Every new swimmer kisses the buoy," one swimmer explained. So I leaned in and deftly left a kiss. The buoy felt light, like plastic, and warm from the early sun.

I asked John how these conditions compare to most swims. About the usual, he said.

Next stop, said Chris, we'll sight on Cabrillo Point to the north, where the Hopkins Marine Station sits. The next buoy will be just to the left of the point. Somewhere. I followed the flashing arms.

Chris, I soon realized, was swimming behind the group, making sure all made it and were going in the right direction.

"You're keeping a good line," he said as I stopped with him one time. The waves seemed to get larger and jumbled. The world appeared and disappeared; I tried to practice sighting when I felt my body lift.

I counted strokes again, for no good reason, just out of habit.

In one rising wave I finally caught sight of the round yellow buoy, and a few dark heads bobbing around it.

"In answer to your question," said John, "this is not how the water usually is. The swells are getting bigger."

"OK, kiss the buoy," a swimmer said. This buoy was not light and warm and plastic. I grabbed onto the grass-covered steel frame around its girth and leaned in for the kiss. In the swells the buoy pitched forward.

Clong!

"Ooh, I think I chipped my tooth,"  I said, even before my tongue found the grit where the back of my tooth had been, the one the dentist had fixed already.

I'm a terrible buoy kisser. My swim friend Lisa Amorao has managed to leave perfect lipstick marks on this very same buoy. I've seen the pictures.

No pain, no blood, though. I judged it a worthwhile token of the journey I had waited so long to make. My tongue remained occupied as I sighted on the base of the amphitheater of Lovers Point Beach for home.

New swims always carry trepidation — How far to the next point? Will I tire out before I reach it? Should I keep calm or start flailing harder? Where is everybody? Will current take me where I shouldn't be? What's down below?

My worries eased and dissipated with each stroke toward the beach. John was just ahead of me so I followed him in.

Chris' worries eased too, I'm sure. After all, he was just taking my word for it that I knew how to swim open water.

Into the clear blue water of the beach I planted feet again in the sand, always the best part of a swim: The finish. Swimmers did what swimmers do, stand on the shore looking out onto the water, not so wild looking from this vantage, and share their adventure of having crossed it.

The water was 57 Fahrenheit, said John, warmer than usual for this time of year — warmer than Natoma — and not as clear as some days.

"It's Zen swimming," answered Chris, when I asked him how they find their way off around the cove. After a while, he said, you just know where the next buoy is, and you get a feel for distance and direction.

The only remedy, I decided, was to figure out how to join the Kelp Krawlers more often.

Gym membership renewed, year 5

New pass — cheaper than last year's! — amid the detritus
of an inveterate doodler.

Another year!

One year more, for swimming my beloved Lake Natoma whenever I feel like (within reason and daylight … ), whenever I can, any day of the year.

Christmas! New Years! Sadie Hawkins Day! That's right, I said Sadie Hawkins Day!! Damn the limits!

Well, except March 31, 2016, when this contract expires.

But that's not gonna happen. I'll be in line that day buying the 2017 pass, probably after a swim. Bet on it!

Not that there is ever any line to buy the pass. I'm just melodramatizing my zeal.

This pass is so much more than a convenience and amazing bargain. It's a symbol, a trophy I award myself.

It means I plan to embrace the water at Natoma for as long as I can, one year at a time. This marks the beginning of my fifth year.

Since buying last year's pass, I have migrated farther up the lake to its northernmost point, where the water is coldest, and have nearly tripled the difference of an average daily swim. During the year our swim buddy ranks have thinned, from as many as five in spring, to one other swim buddy now. Life happens when you're making other plans, right?

Seems silly to design group t-shirts now.

I have swum the lake's length 10 times at least, and swum a double length once.

The pass marks my passion to do more — more lengths as a matter of course, a few more double lengths. Maybe permission to dream of officially epic swims, and let my body and mind toughen over time for that possibility, in the cold green water of the lake.

Distances and dreams aren't as important as to me as perseverance, and the realization I have swum at least five days a week for seven straight years, the first three in a pool at 4:30 a.m.

It's something grand for me that I'm glad to do, and hope fervently to keep doing.

I bought this year's pass at the ranger kiosk at the lower lake, Nimbus Flat. I usually buy it at the labyrinthine central offices of the California Department of Parks and Recreation in downtown Sacramento. I always forget in which of the nondescript towers the little windowless park pass office is, and I have to sign in at the front desk, and wear a little badge. So much Big Brother bother.

By buying it instead from the parks attendant at the kiosk, out in the fresh open air, I came away with additional swag I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

I got:

Last year's pass became quite
the conversation piece:
"Hey," says the state park attendant,
"Why is 'January' crossed out and
replaced with 'February?'"
"The guy at the parks office made
a mistake," I explain.
"Why didn't he just issue a new pass?"
"Hey, what am I, Scotland Yard?
How would I know?"
No, I didn't say that. I say,
"I don't know."
(Pause for scrutiny.)
"Well, all right, then."
(Attendant waves me through.)
Repeat nine or 10 times.

• A receipt! 
• A recap of state parks rules. Nothing prohibits swimming, I see, though I'm forbidden to destroy or disturb natural resources. Destroy? No. But I couldn't say whether natural resources find me disturbing.
• A pamphlet on how to reserve campsites in the California parks system. It's eight pages of very tiny type to explain this succinct concept: Good luck and God be with you. The state could write that on a Post-it®™ note.
• A list of all the places we can and cannot go (mostly Southern California beaches) with the pass. 
• A map of the state parks system, to go with the many other maps we already have. It feels weird that it's a 2013 map, but why spend my tax money if you don't need to?
• A Guide to Eating Fish Caught in Folsom Lake and Lake Natoma. Trout 16 inches or shorter, as well as bluegill and green sunfish, are low in mercury. If you're not a woman 18-45, a woman who is pregnant or breastfeeding, or a child 1 to 17 years old, eat two servings per week if you want. Try the trout, the pamphlet says: it's high in Omega-3s!
  
  But don't eat any kind of bass, chinook salmon, catfish or trout longer than 16 inches. They're high in mercury. That goes for everybody.
  
  These things I did not know. Also, there are no known fish that have just medium levels of mercury. I don't know why. The pamphlet doesn't explain.
• A pamphlet for Folsom Lake State Recreation Area. It's embarrassingly pro-Folsom Lake. Lake Natoma is the poor distant cousin, seen on the map but not heard from very much. Oh well, more for us swimmers.
• A pamphlet for pumping wastewater from your boat, and how to prevent water pollution.

The receipt reveals a markdown in price. Last year's pass was $150, to commemorate the 150th anniversary o the parks system. It seems strange and ballsy to charge more money for such a commemoration, but I'm not in marketing.

I also got a wallet card that would have gotten me into All the Places No One Wants to Visit. It was free. I tried going to one of those places. It was closed. On a Sunday. Sunday feels like the kind of day one of these places would be open so folks could visit. You know, to give it a fighting chance. But I'm not in charge.

At either price, the pass is a bargain. If more people bought them, California's parks wouldn't be in such woeful shape, where gleaming water fountains stand broken and a bare water pipe sticks up out of the ground nearby instead, with a Cold War-era bubbler screwed to the top.

If you go to a California park or historic site even once a week, you should buy one and save yourself serious money. Do it for my sake.

I'm going swimming.

Seymour Butts

If you think the features on your iPhone™®© and Lady Gaga©®™ change at a lightning blur, clearly you have never owned a Butt Buoy®™.

This is my third such inflatable orange creamsicle-colored swim-safety device, and it's remarkably different from the second, which had changed from the first. As with computer software, consumers pay for corrections to product design flaws.

But as the kids used to say, allegedly, it's all good.

Your standard Butt Buoy©™, the facts will bear out, lasts a year and a half. Though to be honest, Butt Buoy™® No. 2 needed babying and $4.75 worth of vinyl patching to keep it floating at the year-and-a-half mark. Barely.

A Butt Buoy™© is a flotation device that open-water swimmers can tow as they work out. Not only does it help boaters see swimmers better and maybe not run over them, it includes a dry bladder for storing valuables during a swim. I didn't deem the dry bladder useful at all, until the day after someone broke into our cars while we swam at our beloved Lake Natoma.

Officially, the Butt Buoy™© goes by more genteel descriptions, such as "tow floats" or "swimming safety devices." Mine, for example, is officially known as the International Swimming Hall of Fame SaferSwimmer™ Float.

I am helping change that. With the fervor I should be spending on adult literacy or world hunger, I am convincing fellow swimmers to call these things "butt buoys.®™" A triathlete who used to swim with us offhandedly coined the off-putting name, noting how the orange blobs drooped over one's butt, like a saggy DayGlo™ diaper, as we waddled to the water, and floated above our butts as we swam. Offended at first, I soon embraced the name — give me a better descriptor! — and promulgated it to the swimming masses.

It has worked. Some other swimmers on other continents, with whom I correspond on the facebook™® "Did You Swim Today?" page call them "butt buoys©™."

(Yes, by Googling®™ "butt buoy™" — if you haven't already — you can link to a company that has trademarked the name for a line of boat marker buoys. They are literally representations of a presumably white, presumably woman's thong bikini-clad butt. Just her butt. You may choose from a variety of colors and fabric patterns — Leopard print! Checkered! — for the bikini panties.

(I'm still trying to figure out what the buoys represent. A woman frozen in mid-jackknife dive, perhaps? Someone drowning? If so, why? My first thought, though, is that this is what the bloodless, disembodied pelvic girdles will look like, bobbing in the water, when Disney®™ eventually remakes "Jaws" as a computer-animated musical. "Here's to swimmin' with bow-legged wimmen …"

(But I digress.)

No. 2 was a Butt Buoy®™ design laboratory regression, I must say. It had brittle seams, which split shortly after I bought it (though by folding down the top of the dry bladder and clipping it closed, water managed to stay out for a year and three months). From buoy no. 1 to buoy no. 2, its makers replaced the sturdy handle that tethers the waist belt with a strap welded in place with rubber grommets. Gone are the words "SWIM 4 HEALTH" and "SWIM SAFELY" in bold black letters across the top.

My new one has a small warning instead, "NOT A LIFESAVING DEVICE," and "FOR USE ONLY BY A COMPETENT SWIMMER."

The International Swimming Hall of Fame never asked me for proof.

Hoping for a sturdier version, I came upon the Hall of Fame's TPU model, which stands for thermoplastic polyurethane and sounds ominous.

A long time back, I asked the International Swimming Hall of Fame to make Butt Buoys™© brighter, maybe neon yellow instead. I may even have suggested they call their products Butt Buoys®™ instead and watch sales soar.

No answer.

Then my SaferSwimmer™ Medium TBU arrived and — so orange! I'll need my mirror tinted goggles at all times, lest my corneas peel out of my head. Do they make welder's swim goggles? Rower would see me easily if they didn't have to avert their eyes from the brilliance.

All the seams are internal, so maybe they aren't subject to cracking and tearing.

Product review: I like it. I'm anxious to see if it's hardier than the last two.

My mentioning the new Butt Buoy™® on facebook™® launched an unexpected discussion, more than the usual "likes" and two-word encouragements. One British swimmer I talk with frequently, for example, worried that such buoys would embolden people to swim in conditions for which they are unprepared.

I get her point, and have begun to understand that swimming is serious business among the general population of the United Kingdom, where many schools make swimming part of students' curriculum.

But Butt Buoys®™ and their ilk don't show up on the average consumer's radar. I was swimming open water for a year before I ever heard of one, and few swimmers I know want them because, well, they look stupid.

I'm keeping mine. One week of swimming, so far so good.

Here are a bunch of Butt Buoys®™ in action, at a lake in Florida I'd like to swim someday. The doctor here invites swimmers from around the world every day to jump in from his backyard. You have to watch it: Doc Lucky Meisenheimer is a trip.

Nowhere to go

I don't know, it sort of felt like this again last year …

May we make this year better.

…

…

…

…

…

…

Oh look, it's already started. From one of many New Year's Day swims taking place around the world — including our own at Lake Natoma — I got to design the cap for one of them, in Walter Dods' community out in New Mexico:

Swimming, we swimmers have resolved, is salve. Maybe not a cure, but a medicine, stout to reset and steel you for the trials ahead. Which is why, even though Colin Hay sang in "Beautiful World:"

All around is anger automatic guns
It's death in large numbers, no respect for women or our little ones
I tried talking to Jesus but He just put me on hold
Said He'd been swamped by calls this week
And He could not shake His cold

And still this emptiness persists
Perhaps this is as good as it gets

Hay proclaimed the liberty of swimming in the sea. And it is as good as it gets.

May we make this year better.

Having a fit

My swimming life will now flash before your eyes:

• Age seven or eight — Fell into my aunt's pool, finding the edge only with a lot of death-panic flailing. My younger cousin, thinking she was being treated to a planned comedy rather than real tragedy, laughed.
• Age eight — Finally put my face in water, on purpose, at my older cousins' encouragement one summer at their neighborhood pool in northeastern Washington. Discovered a brave new world.
• Age nine — Took swim lessons at the high school. Liked it, except for the 200-yard test swim, which I never completed. The regret of never having become a Shark, and settling for Sea Lion or whatever the penultimate swim lesson designation is called, is a burden I carry still.
• Age 10 — Bested my older cousins in one thing only: Being able to keep my clenched fist in a bucket of ice water for far longer than they could. They are amazed, or adept at ladling out compliments on their visiting twerp. The moment prefigured events far away in time and distance.
• Teenage — Swam about once a year, in pools.
• High school —Tried out for the water polo team. Owing to embarrassing inability and unwillingness to wear a Speedo®™, I lasted one day.
• Young adulthood — Continued to swim once a year, or less, into adulthood, but only if I really had to. The public and I couldn't abide my going shirtless.
• Fatherhood — Participated in the daily Polar Bear Swim at son's Boy Scout summer camp, mostly trying to be a role model in getting up very early, getting organized, and braving cold water before the rest of camp arose. Realized I absolutely loved it, and swam the 50 yards as slowly as I could, savoring the cold while all around me boys yelped in agony.
• Further fatherhood —Crawled onto shore of a tiny lake somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley, absolutely sure my heart was going to explode and I would die in front of other adult leaders after swimming a 50-yard test for a Boy Scout canoe training campout. After my heart didn't, in fact, explode, I decided I must take steps to prevent nearly dying in this manner ever again.
• Fatherhood still — Swam the mile at next summer's Boy Scout camp. It felt like 100 miles. But I did it.
• Older fatherhood — Certified as a lifeguard at the next summer's Boy Scout camp, just in case our Troop ever wanted to go swimming or canoeing, which it mostly didn't.
• More fatherhood — Swam a mile at the next summer's Boy Scout camp. And the next.
• Older adulthood — Decided I like this swimming business, as the only thing I can do regularly in hopes of getting in shape. Start in a pool, a mile a morning.
• Nearly five years ago — Tried the open water of Lake Natoma on a cold February morning.

The rest being history.

Scouting, you can see, played a big part in my evolution as a swimmer. Despite its flaws, one of them fundamental, Scouting is an extremely important laboratory for growth, not only for boys but for the adults who volunteer to guide them. Without Scouting, I would not be in my beloved Natoma almost every day.

The Mile Swim, BSA®™, though, makes me laugh.

Among the Big Deals for the average Scout — and the average adult leading the average Scout — the Mile Swim, BSA©®, has to rank high. Most adults, I'm guessing, would balk at the idea of swimming a mile, and involuntarily shiver at the thought of swimming a cold lake.

Yet when a Scout or adult leader completes a mile under official supervised conditions, he or she receives a wallet card announcing:

You have proved yourself to be a strong swimmer and are commended for this fine accomplishment. It means that you are making yourself prepared for a possible emergency in the water and are working toward physical fitness. The emblem shows that you have reached a worthwhile goal. Don't stop here. Continue to improve your stamina.

Please remember to never swim alone.

Excuse me?! "Working toward physical fitness?" I read the back of the card for the first time after my third Mile Swim, BSA ®™and immediately wanted to throw the writer of these two paragraphs into the nearest lake and tell him/her to work toward physical fitness.

I can't climb rock faces, but I doubt a rock-climbing Scout could swim a mile. Give swimmers some credit, BSA!

The front of the card puzzles me too. It verifies that I swam under safe conditions and qualified for the Mile Swim, BSA.

Qualified? I swam it, damn it!

The first mile was at Camp Winton along the Lower Bear River Reservoir, as close to natural as a human-made lake could come, blue and sparkling as sapphire, high in a granite Sierra cradle. I didn't wear goggles, couldn't see the far shore except as a shimmering gray-green mass above a shimmering blue mass, could barely see my canoe support, the life-vested Scouts leaning over the thwarts and constantly pointing out my course.

One Scout finished in 19 minutes. I didn't know anything about swimming a mile, but I knew that was fast, especially since it took me three times as long.

We got hot chocolate on shore and first dibs for breakfast in the dining hall — the Nobel Prizes of swimming, as far as I was concerned.

My second mile was at Camp Whitsett in the southern Sierra Nevada, where the camp dammed up a creek in the summer to create a lake. It was narrow and grassy and we had to swim back and forth between pylons to get our mile in. At the end, the swim director signed our yellow cards and literally ran off to do something else, camps being chronically understaffed. We were left alone to return to our campsites, no fanfare, no reward, except internal.

My third mile was at Camp Royaneh in the redwood ridges north of San Francisco. It used to dam up a creek, too, until environmental regulations prohibited it. The swim was in a pool of the oddest design, about 1 1/2 feet at the shallow end (despite all kinds of space in which to build a pool!) and finished in skin-scraping stucco. I lost a few knuckles earning that card, and really really missed the Lower Bear River Reservoir.

It took a long time, many stops and starts in my Lifetime Fitness Plan®™, but I have my own reservoir now, more of a serpentine in color and shape, and I took the card's words to heart. "Don't stop here," it admonished, and I didn't.

Though I often swim alone. Don't tell the BSA.

Yet so far away

Yesterday — somehow, some way — I swam two lengths of my beloved Lake Natoma.

It is one giant leap for me, one small splash for swimmingkind.

And all so ludicrous not too long ago.

Not too long ago — really, just three months back — I would amaze myself with the occasional 2.4-mile swim to a little island called Texas Hill near the middle of the lake. A mammoth swim.

Each time, I would crawl out of the water like I was reenacting the evolution of land animals.

Once a year, on Independence Day, I'd swim the length of the lake, impossible without a support boat and three stops to eat and drink. I was jelly at the end.

Now, every seven to 10 days a small group of us, sometimes just two, swim the length of the lake, a bit more than 4 1/2 miles. No support boat, no fuel except what we ingest before jumping in.

Swim buddy Sarah, gifted with the superpower of suggestion, compelled David — our other conspirator — and me to swim longer more regularly. It was the right time; we had exhausted the shoulda couldas, worn ourselves out with a couple of years of talking about it. Time to act.

Now two miles seems short, and we curse our conflicting schedules for it.

Sarah's been bugging us for a while to swim two lengths. We joked and made up names for the out-of-reach route instead, as we had begun to name our other routes.

A month back, to prime the pump for the double, we swam the traditional length — boat dock at lower Natoma to dock at upper Natoma — then added a round trip up the narrow rocky canyon to the boundary of Folsom Prison, for a total distance of 7 1/2 miles.

Common sense follows that we'd build up stamina for the double. A couple of more times of the length plus the prison boundary, for example. Then downstream and back up to Willow Creek, an additional two miles or so, with a lot where we could park and drive back to the starting point; swim that a couple of times. Then the length and up to Texas Hill and back to Willow Creek once or twice.

But we lack common sense.

With half a day off, Sarah and I made plans for Monday's swim. Sarah stashed food under a bench at lower Natoma; I kept mine in the tow float "butt buoy" I tether to myself. We parked our cars at the upper end.

Should we keep one car at the lower lake, just in case? Sarah asked.

No, we decided. We were like Cortés, burning his ships on reaching the New World. Conquer or die.

Or we could get out and walk back along the paved trail, if we really needed.

Hopes nosing out doubts, we plied the route, knowing from previous swims where the reeds and plants had overgrown in the shallow water, ready to trap us if we weren't paying attention. We knew where to look for any rowers; we knew one side of Texas Hill is better than the other for smooth unfettered passage.

We knew the chop was just a bunch of bumpy water. Adjust, roll a little more to breathe, deal with it. We knew the distant landmarks would remain distant for longer than we wished, and to be patient. We kept each other in sight.

At the lower dock we stopped and got out, violating international swimming rules, ate our stash and wondered aloud about walking back. In our hearts, though, we knew we could finish this, even if our shoulders and backs balked. A long moment of stretching and back in we went.

The water felt silky, aches went away, replaced by new aches elsewhere. Upstream was our usual route, and we knew it well, knew not to get too excited at every turn.

Along the way I thought, "This is really something!"

Followed by a new thought: It's really nothing.

It's all relative, of course. On my favorite facebook®™ page, Did You Swim Today?, swimmers around the world celebrate someone's first mile, or first open water swim, or first swim ever.

We also celebrate the gargantuan swims, the famous channel crossings, this time of year happening with stunning frequency. At times last week, it seemed a caravan of swimmers was crossing the English Channel, one right after the other, in the water at the same time along the tide-driven reverse "S" route from England to France.

Our long Natoma swim wasn't even as long as the six-hour qualifying swims English Channel swimmers must endure.

Within the last week, several teams and soloists have crossed the English Channel, including the oldest ever — 73-year-old heart surgeon Otto Thaning of South Africa — and the youngest to have completed what's called the Triple Crown. In addition to the English Channel, 16-year-old Charlotte Samuels of New Jersey has also swum around Manhattan Island and the Catalina Channel off California.

A 70-year-old Australian, Cyril Baldock, swam the Channel last month, holding the title of oldest crosser for only a couple of weeks.

In July, a Massachusetts woman, Elaine Howley, became the first to swim the 34-mile length of Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. A northern California woman, Patti Bauernfeind, last month became only the second to swim the 25 miles across Monterey Bay, followed shortly after by Kimberly Rutherford (see a great video of her Lake Tahoe ice mile with long-distance swimmer Scott Tapley).

In Southern California last week, Peter Hayden became the first swimmer to circumnavigate Anacapa Island in the Channel Islands chain. (Channel swimmer Lynn Kubasek takes you on the journey with her video documentation.) Hayden topped it off by swimming 12 miles into the mainland. Shortly after, Julian Rusinek also swam from Anacapa to the mainland, last year having been the first to swim from San Miguel to Santa Rosa islands.

(Editor's addendum for Sept. 10: Carol Schumacher Hayden swam from Anacapa to the mainland this day. She just happens to be married to Peter Hayden.)

A New Zealand woman named Kimberley Chambers, who lives and works in the Bay Area, last month became only the sixth swimmer to have completed the Ocean's Seven Challenge — The English Channel, Catalina Channel, Cook Strait of New Zealand, Molokai Channel in Hawaii, Tsugaru Channel in Japan, Strait of Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, and the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland.

Just two months after finishing the 12-mile Tsugaru Strait, Kimberley capped her challenge with the North Channel, swimming through clots of poisonous lion's mane jellyfish. The constant stinging and exhausting swim briefly hospitalized her.

Kimberley writes eloquently and personally about her swims; I'm one of many waiting anxiously for her North Channel swim account.

Read also Jason Betley's blog, accounting his English Channel swim to raise money for the hospital that treated his son's brain tumor.

facebook®™ has enabled me to correspond with many of these stars of long-distance swimming.

I'm leaving out so many swims, only because we have so many to keep track of, including valiant but aborted long-distance attempts.

My Natoma swim only deepens my appreciation of theirs, magnifying the greatness of their feats.

Yet …

Now I'm wondering, and asking. Now I'm dreaming. Now a fire has begun burning about what if? All the swims I've swum this point seemed unreachable until I slowly reached them, after all. What could I reach in time? How far can we swim regularly when winter drops the water temperature? What else is possible?

Maybe. Just maybe.

In other news:

Ray Rice won't be play football in two weeks after all.

He may never play again in the NFL, now that video has surfaced showing him knock his fiancée — now his wife — unconscious with a punch that sent her sprawling against the wall of a casino elevator, a punch that appears to have driven her headfirst into a metal railing. The second punch he landed in that elevator.

A video that supposedly no on knew about. The Baltimore Ravens, Rice's employer until yesterday, and the NFL: We're surprised as anyone by this video!

Yeah, right.

Confronted with — or exposed by? — undeniable and appalling proof, the Ravens cut the contract of their star running back. The NFL, rather than suspending Rice for two games, suspended him indefinitely and required any team considering putting Rice on their roster to check with the NFL first.

Would any team consider it? I'm not surprised by much anymore.

The NFL looks extremely pathetic on this, with dim hope of being better without real reform and major changes in the league and the legal system that allowed this crime to go so lightly punished, until the truth emerged.

Rice's wife has criticized the NFL and the news media for her husband's consequences.

Is money the only thing that matters anymore?

Flow and ebb

So now Doug's gone. Maybe just for a year. Coming back briefly in the fall. We'll see.

Lake Natoma got emptier.

We'd been swimming together several times a week for 2 1/2 years. Doug's leaving for his native New England to help with his grandchildren.

"Fast" Karl left earlier this month. Though he had only been swimming with us for seven months, he was dedicated, and his dedication inspired even if his speed deflated.

On his last swam before heading for work somewhere in the Rockies, he laced twice the length of Lake Natoma, about 10 miles. Notre Dame swimmer; whatcha gonna do?

Karl's a mountain man who found California's ways strange. I don't think he's coming back. Except, of course, to swim the length of Tahoe, 21 miles, later this summer.

What did good ol' Heraclitus say? "You could not step twice in the same river."

To which I add, "Not even with the same toes."

Change: The only constant.

Toes come and toes go.

Sarah had already joined our core group of rogues before Doug and Karl took flight. It wasn't until she said it out loud that we finally acted on our shoulda-coulda-wouldas, swimming longer distances regularly. Once a week for the last month, Sarah has swum the length of the lake, and small various and sundry of us have joined in.

The length used to be a daunting once-a-year enterprise, borne out on the Fourth of July. Now it's oh-so-slowly becoming a routine change in routine.

David's the iron man now, literally and figuratively. We've been swimming together longer than I have with Doug; in fact, I think it was a winter morning on upper Natoma when Doug first joined David and me.

David is the exception to every rule: An Iron Man©® triathlete who eschews triathleticism … a wetsuit wearer who defies conventional wisdom and swims just about as fast without one, when we can get him to … the polite smiling contrarian who I guess really meant it when he said he wouldn't pay the measly $10 annual fee to our meetup.com group.

That's how we all met, though, through the Sacramento Swimming Enthusiasts page on the meetup.com site.

But we've become an ad hoc splinter cell, using text messages to gather, rather than the site. We're the few who like upper Natoma chiefly, where the water spilling directly from the bottom of Folsom Lake is always a little colder. It's much less crowded, free of beachgoers. Few rowing crews make it all the way up here, most staying on the 2,000-meter race course at the lower lake.

We're the few who swim Natoma year-round. Most swimmers on the meetup.com site prefer the lower lake during the evenings (too warm, too crowded) or what's left of dwindling Folsom Lake, where gather the three forks of the American River that release into Natoma.

I've met so many meetup people on my scheduled swims, whom I see once or twice more and then never again. They either decide against open water swimming, or figure out the group's not competitive and I certainly am not going to give them much of a race, or join the Folsom/lower Natoma/evening swim crowd.

It got me thinking of those who stuck out the cold water with me in the four years I've swum Natoma:

• Jim, whom I met at one of my first meetup.com swims, a Polar Bear event in mid-February. I forgot my goggles, my wife urged me to ask Jim for an extra pair, and we struck up an immediate friendship. Jim's the one who showed me not to take the open water so seriously, to revel in the realization that few people enjoy this or want to.
  
  When I first hit the winter choppy water of Folsom Lake I wanted to quit for good, and Jim's the one who told me to swim 10 stroke at a time, get my bearings, swim 10 more, and keep going — to let time get me used to the new adventure. I think of his help every time I swim through heavy water with confidence and a semblance of ease.
  
  We swam together most of two years, and many times he brought fast Kathy, a champion open water swimmer, which was a commitment since they had to come from two counties over. I swam in several open-water races with them that first year.
  
  Jim got a different job and different obligations, and Kathy's life changed around. I haven't seen them in a long while, nor have I raced since then.

• Brad, whom I still see, though he's more rogue than us, preferring mostly to swim on his own, and swim great distances. I first saw Brad at one of the Polar Bear swims four years ago. All of us huddled at the shore in our wetsuits, tentative penguins, when suddenly came Brad in just swim briefs and goggles, diving in and swimming away into the foggy chill while we stood and stared.
  
  Until that moment, I thought it may have been illegal to swim without a wetsuit. But I soon resolved to swim that way since I hated wearing my neoprene, and weaned myself out of it, shedding it for five, then 10, then 15 minutes in the cold water after each group swim.
  
  I still swim with Brad on occasion. It feels weird to drive home after my swim knowing he'll still be in for a couple of hours more. He's swum the length of Tahoe, and a mile in freezing water; whatcha gonna do?
• Stacy and I were the first long-term rogues, swimming off the meetup.com grid and venturing northeast to upper Natoma. It was exotic water when we first tried it out. Few boats and of course no swimmers, the only noise coming from the aggressive domestic geese that had been released to the wild to cadge visitors for food.
  
  Every swim was discovery and serendipity as we learned where the water was deep and where shallow. We learned to endure the cold water for longer and longer distances, and swim against current. We established routes under the new bridge, and downstream to Texas Hill, a little island where once Texas miners had come to dry-dig for gold.
  
  We swam many times when Stacy wasn't running or doing cross-fit workouts. We even swam the length of the lake one Fourth of July, me with my inflatable butt buoy and him with a modified boogie board he called his party boat, sailing behind him. It had a flag and a foam noodle arch and a stretch net to hold his food to the board. Even with a long fin below, the party boat capsized in the wind.
  
  Stacy once left for Tennessee to run a 30-mile race with his sister, and never really came back to swimming.
• Ryan made the fastest ever transition from heavily wetsuited swimmer to skin swimmer — 10 minutes. He's a concert organist from Canada who showed up one day in a thick wetsuit with some sort of shirt over it, gloves, booties and what looked like deep-sea diver's cowl.
  
  You don't need all of that, we said. Or, really, any of it.
  
  OK, said Ryan and in one swim he became a skin swimmer. He was just about the most joyful open water enthusiast, but he disappeared after a couple of months.
• Susie, her hair and smile dazzlingly white, also loved to whoop and holler and express on our behalf of the wonder of open water swimming. I think she sticks to the evenings and lower Natoma swims these days.
• Helen, whom I met in the early days. I don't think she swims much anymore, but she probably doesn't have time, seeing how she now runs races of 50 and 100 miles regularly.
• Myron, who was running the meetup.com group and cheerfully organizing Polar Bear swims and other activities, but who moved on to other things.
• Patti, who runs the group now and puts a lot of energy into keeping the group going.
• Special guest stars: Dave came all the way from Cork, Ireland, to swim in Upper Natoma last summer. Suzie, an ultra-marathon swimmer who launched the 24-hour relay swim in San Francisco Bay, last summer brought another marathon swimmer, Roxie, to explore upper Natoma. They laughed as they swim in too-shallow water past the first bridge and had to stand up on the slippery rocks.
  
  Lisa made a great arc through the northwest last week and stopped by my lake on her way home to the Bay Area. Lisa and David and Karl and I swam as part of team at Suzie's 24-hour relay swim in February.
  
  Nejib came from Tunisia swam lower Natoma last year, cold but not cold enough swim for peace in the Bering Strait. It didn't matter: He swim four kilometers in 39-degree water along the International Date Line. for his eventual 4-kilometer swim in the frigid water of the Bering Strait, a swim for peace.
• Kate, completing her residency at a nearby hospital, swam almost every day with us for five weeks. We'd met at the 24-hour relay swim. She pushed our distance a bit to get her ready for a swim across Tahoe later this summer.
  
  Late in our swims, she said she didn't like swimming under the bridges. Lisa said she didn't like the shadow the bridge cast through the green water.
  
  We've come to know the scary plants are just plants, the shallows just riprap, the current just something to relax in and pierce through for half again as many strokes, the chop just a fun reminder of being present in the water.
  
• I'm forgetting or misplacing some names, I know. The various Dans, Steve, Sean, all fast. Haven't seen them in a long time.

We've come to a happy peace about our relative speeds. If anything, I give the other swimmers a harder time for being fast than they do for my sloth. We collect at the shore, no matter our arrival times, and leave to drink coffee at the "adjective" Starbucks™® (so named because we sit outside next to the drive-thru and count how many descriptors drivers use to order their drinks), or good beer, or the occasional meal. Usually a going-away meal.

The only thing I could beat Doug at is cold-water endurance. Fortified with bioprene, I'd keep going while he'd turn back, and if we'd planned it right I'd leave my Thermos® of boiling water in his car so he could fight the intense shivers with a cup of cocoa. After winter swims it takes us a good 40 minutes of jumping up and down in the parking lot and sloshing hot cocoa all over ourselves before we're even ready to drive for hot coffee.

These days, though, with even the coldest water hanging in the low 60s Fahrenheit, Doug would swim well past our turnaround point and double back to meet me when I hit that point. The Thermos™ of hot water is more reflex these days; I pack it but we don't use it.

A go-getter whose actions speak louder than words, Doug has already created a meetup group in his homeland, New England Open Water, and has a swim already planned next weekend in Thoreau's Walden Pond. Twenty "BigWataSwimmas" have already joined.

The core group at upper Natoma has changed and shifted. Though I've been lucky of late to swim with someone else, I'll probably end up swimming by myself again many times. I know I'll swim many, many times with David and Sarah and Patti, and that a new swimmer or two will show and join our group. Most will leave after awhile. A precious few nuts will stick around for long run, and we'll keep on swimming, finding new routes, new swim adventures, different lives to talk about over coffee or beers.

That's the way it's been, the way it will be.

A frayed knot

Trips trip me up anymore. You too?

Mine become essays, with themes and thorny puzzles, questions and frayed answers, and denouement, tidy or no.

I write and rewrite them at 72 mph.

Since most trips lately take us on Interstate 5, the long straight stretches across the Sacramento Valley set the drone for mental proofreading.

Except I don't really know the theme for last weekend's trip. Surrender? Futility, with faint light of redemption?

Lake Shasta is low — summer low. In the state's worst drought ever, the lake has such little water to collect from the Cascades and release into the Sacramento River.

The great rusted belt of earth exposed by the dropping water is lovely and terrible.

A path has been carved into the orange earth under the I-5 bridge so that boaters can descend to the marina and get to their slips. No one seemed to be boating what is left of the turquoise water as we passed.

Oregon's southern rivers — the Klamath, the Rogue, the forks of the Umpqua, the Willamette, the McKenzie — already roll in their summer somnolence, fast but thin, sheening shallow over riprap. Oregon is in drought too, though it's more difficult to see in the evergreen damp along the freeway.

We had taken my mom-in-law back home, after more than three months in Northern California, to visit and have surgery and recuperate. It occurs to me after dropping her off and tending to a little spring cleaning that she will be by herself for the first time in decades. My dad-in-law passed away last year. One of her sons had been living nearby, but he came down with us before Christmas and lives around here now.

She is strong and ready to be back with her forested and terraced community of retirees, which instantly embraced her. A resident busily scrubbing around the trailer waste disposal site recognized us somehow and asked Nancy how her mom is doing. It is community with a capital C.

She has much to do and much she wants to do.

I drove solo on the way up; Nancy rode with her mom in her car. Flipping the radio in a failed search for spring training baseball, I got Oregon State baseball for a brief moment, from a broadcaster who sounded like he was doing a Vin Scully impersonation, right down to the hissing lisp and the skirling Bronx vowels.

That's the thing with radio in southern Oregon: Brief moments. National Public Radio is handed off from tower to relay tower, signal crackling for 20 minutes before fading; if you're lucky, the station will list the other frequencies so you can catch the rest of the story on another station before its last raspy detail.

Christian radio knows no barriers here. Their signals stay strong even in the narrowest gorges. If you don't want one station, another is just a few blips away, just as strong.

Their broadcasters seem to talk a lot about "creation science." I hung with one program, the upshot of which was that the lack of fossil evidence for any transition of one creature into another proves "creation science's" point that creation diversified rapidly in the few thousand years the universe existed. "Creation science," the show host said, is more relevant than ever and needs to be taught in schools.

I processed that. So, because scientists haven't found a complete fossil array of related creatures, and "creation scientists" discount what they have found and the agreed-upon (except for "creation science") methods for how old they may be, then "creation science" wins by default?

A commercial on the station promoted books that parents can share with their children to bolster the creation story, including diagrams showing children how all the animals could fit on Noah's ark.

Why — why are we still talking about this? I sighed. Why is this not settled? Why can't we worry about other things, like how Syria and the Central African Republic are human butcher shops, how Nigeria's people burn at terrorists' torches, how Russia does whatever Russia seems to be doing to the people of Ukraine. Why can't we move on? What century is this?

We lumber in retrograde.

As for redemption … I look for hooks to snag hope. The reservoir near my mom-in-law's place is full, as is my beloved Lake Natoma, full for now. Their high levels are mysteries to me, or maybe I just choose to think that, water suspended in disbelief.

My mom-in-law prays for Nancy, prays for me, prays for all of us, just as her husband did. Prays for all the world's woes, which is sometimes what is left to do.

In the dipping turn of the freeway I find slack, then momentum.

Misadventurous

Complacency kills nerve endings.

I zoom along freeways at 67 mph (don't tell the highway patrol), in tight NASCAR™® formation with everyone else going everywhere, calmly gauging openings in the moving mass. Occasionally I become aware that I'm hurtling in a metal cage, vulnerable to the laws of physics and vector forces that would become tragic at the slightest miscue.

Shod in Crocs©®, I climb to the roof of my house, minding the guy wires that tether the aerial, kneeling awkwardly and upslope while reaching low to scoop the muck out of the gutters. One wrong step …

Many, many times I swim my beloved lake alone — cold water, cold wind, stealthy rowing craft, blinding sun, eerie dark, what have you. It's still a shock when once in a while someone points out, "That doesn't seem very safe."

I know the risks, decide I can work with them, settle into the hum of self-assuredness and deaf to the drone of danger. I am in control, even if I'm really not.

No such thing for me, however, swimming in the ocean.

All I can control in the ocean is my mind, to impel my body to enter, and to go through the motions. The ocean sings of a living planet, moving, heaving, immense, breathing, unsettled. Unknown. Hungry, maybe. Maybe angry.

I must surrender.

The part that impels outlasts the part that withdraws, and I head into the waves, as I did this weekend.

I met Marta Gaughen, a fellow facebook®™-er for a tour outside the breakers at Doran Beach. I had been there a couple of months before, my brother-in-law walking the beach alongside while I tried out the water, and demanded to know on facebook's "Did you swim today?" page why no one seemed to swim this quiet beach. Marta posted that she swims the beach frequently, and after a time we finally arranged to travel from our far-flung towns to dive in together. Nancy, my sister- and brother-in-law and niece and mom-in-law came along, with our little old dog in tow.

Doran Beach rings Bodega Bay, a shallow cove a patient couple of hours' drive northwest of San Francisco. Think of Bodega Bay as the unhealed scar of the San Andreas Fault, the edge of the continent, which infamously readjusted in 1906 to level Santa Rosa and San Francisco.

The shape of the bay follows a straight and true line southeast forming Tomales Bay, the trough of the fault, plain as day.

No one swims, several people told me, because great white sharks cruise the waters. Marta says sharks pup in the waters outside Bodega Bay in their season, and sharks are all around us. Whatcha gonna do except manage the risks?

I'm slowly, slowly learning the bay's ways. A beach like this in Southern California, it seems, would teem with swimmers and boogie boarders on the gentle waves.

Their absence here at Doran Beach alarms me. But not enough to stay out.

Following Marta's lead, I dive into the waves, and dive again, finally beyond the breakers, and swim parallel to shore, north to the spit of land that forms the jetty for the fishing boats of Bodega Harbor.

The water is 55 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than in my Lake Natoma these days, and clear to a couple of feet past my down-stroking arm. It is olive green and shapeless beyond that, revealing nothing.

Soft and slightly salty, the water lifts and drops me gently. I count strokes, sighting on some distant building, wondering about where the current is taking me, wondering all I don't know about the water I'm swimming. In the lake, I am moving, the water holding still. But in the ocean, the water moves me, moves around me, despite me. I'm moving, but ultimately the ocean lets me move.

As the smell of fish intensifies toward the jetty, Marta suggests heading back and past our starting point. My body's fine: the water is comfortable and I'm not tired. My brain is the one hiccuping and sputtering; it doesn't want to go back, it wants to get out. My mind decides we have pushed our luck; my mind is quickly laying out the argument that no swimmers were hurt in the undertaking of this endeavor so far — why go father and risk an unhappy outcome with whatever's out there?

Body trumps mind this time and I follow Marta again. She is drawing a bead on a point well wide of the beach where we started, well out into the deeper water. The current, she says, will push us in a curve toward the sand. After a while I trail closer and closer to shore from her angle, and I push out trying to get back out to where she is. With every stroke I think, "OK, I'm OK. OK. I'm OK." My mind is still arguing.

The current has pushed us both back in line with our starting point, and Marta advises swimming straight to the beach and mind the waves.

I have done this enough times now to believe I'm expert, timing the waves to lift me onto the sand. I have managed the risks. I am in control.

Even if I'm really not.

I watch the wave, the one I should have been riding, lift dark and green behind me, then above me. I know enough not to put my back to it.

My mind has made me realize its bulk will fall directly on me, which it did, pounding me to the sand. I force my head straight up in the froth thundering about me, shaking like an astronaut at launch, waiting for the pummeling to subside, then walk up and out of the beach. Safe.

I'll never be comfortable in the ocean.

I can't wait to go again.

Come again another day

Don't be fooled by the ferocious sea: It was rocky, but this is from a low angle on a wave just
about to crest on the beach, between the South End and Dolphin Clubs' docks. I'm about
to hand off the next leg to Lisa Amorao, who shot the day-long adventure with a GoPro™©
camera mounted over her swim cap. The masts of the Balclutha, a 19th-Century
cargo ship, loom in the back.

By noon the day after, the floor finally stopped heaving.

Unseen forces finally stopped pitching me forward whenever I stood still, and stopped nudging me off my gait down the hallway.

Now I miss that gentle vertigo, an unexpected souvenir of what I'd just done: Joined a team that swam 24 hours straight in San Francisco Bay.

See exactly what we did here, a rollicking video by teammate Lisa Amorao.

The 24-hour Swim Relay was Suzie Dods' crazy idea back in November. At least, that's when she unleashed the proposition upon the swimming world. Maybe it brewed in her brain long before.

Looking back, I probably had no business taking part. The 54 swimmers who flocked to Aquatic Park in the Bay last weekend, to the quirky, cozy confines of the South End Rowing Club and Dolphin Club's complex at the edge of the water, are channel swimmers (English, Catalina, you name it) and big-lake crossers. They swim great distances, fast. They direct and organize distance swims of their own. Google their names and their epic exploits top your list of choices — and Suzie is a channel and distance swimmer extraordinaire. She also guided me on my first Bay swim three years ago.

It was an honor to design the cap logo, which I filled with landmarks and the wishful
thought of safely encountering a sea lion. Several asked what the shape on the lower
left is. It depends on your attitude: It's a watch marking time, or a circling drain.

Many of these swimmers who took part dart through the green silty salty waters of the Bay regularly, know the tides, know the dangers.

I swim cold and flat Lake Natoma, have swum its length on three separate summer occasions, and swim Aquatic Park maybe once a year. So end my credentials.

But I brought them, some chutzpah I didn't know I had, and three friends — Lorena, David and Karl — with whom I swim at Lake Natoma, to join the team.

Through a Lake Natoma swimming connection, we gained two San Francisco Bay veterans from the south Bay Area — Lisa and Fred — and during the swim were able to add another veteran, aptly named El Sharko, to the team.

(Two Natoma stalwarts, Doug and Patti, got sick right before and couldn't come. All the more reason to do this again next year.)

The name is everything! Option 2 was
Team Curglaff. Lisa Amorao photo

We became the Fogheads, as new Bay Area friend and teammate Fred dubbed us.

Chutzpah took a hit the night before the swim, when Suzie told the gathered swimmers, "Watch yourself: The first swim will feel great, the second and third will feel fine. It's the fifth, sixth and seventh swim, swimming in the dark, when you will really feel it."

Fifth, sixth and seventh swims? I hadn't really considered them. What had I done? I'm gonna have trouble, and now I've talked several people into getting into trouble. The Bay's 51-degree water wouldn't bother me; we swim in colder water near Sacramento. But swim after swim — seven in all for me over 24 hours, most of them 1.5 miles each — was not something I had necessarily trained for.

I'm used to swimming our Lake Natoma once a day, 1.3 miles or so at a go, dancing in the parking lot to exorcise the shivers, swilling hot cocoa until warm again, and driving home. That being that.

This event was so. Much. More.
 
Too late to doubt. Time to strap up. In all, I swam 10 miles — the Fogheads must have logged in at least 60 miles together. In the end, we smiled; throughout, we smiled. This was a strange and wonderful journey we were taking together, that we were somehow accomplishing. It was hard not to smile.

Each swimmer was to complete at least one 3/4-mile clockwise triangle of Aquatic Park lap at a go — along a buoy line parallel to shore to a floating "wedding cake" buoy with a flag atop and a thermometer dangling by a tether into the water, near the Maritime Museum; then through a collection of moored sailboats out to the end of two jetties marking the bay entrance to the park; then back to the clubhouse past the historic ships Balclutha and Thayer tied up at the Hyde Street Pier.

The next swimmers had to be at least shin deep in the water to high-five their incoming teammates, calling out their numbers, before starting their turns.

I usually swam two laps. We heard of at least one swimmer who swam five laps at a go.

Throughout, miracles happened, big and small:

• It rained.
• and rained.
• and rained.
• It never stopped raining (an unconfirmed source alleges that rain stopped between 5 and 6 a.m. but I'm inclined to doubt, having picked one of those hours to sleep in a corner of one of the South End Club's handball courts.)
• We'll take any credit cast our way for putting a dent in the horrible drought. Bright calm unseasonable skies heralded us — until the night before the swim, when winter began making up for lost time. Wind blew throughout, sometimes hard. Swimming became our salvation, our way out of the misery of standing on South End's pier awaiting our turn or checking in on incoming teammates.
  
  The gray boil of sky matched the green roil of water.

• I met a man named Jim Bock. Met a man, I say, because when last we met, he was a little skinny kid with me in fourth grade during our former lives in the little Air Force/diatomaceous-earth mining city of Lompoc, Calif.
  
  In the event's early planning and flurry of facebook®© and email communications, I came across Jim Bock's deceptively unusual name. One and the same? One and the same! And somehow we are reunited 43 years and six hours away from our hometown by an avocation neither of us had imagined back then.
  
  A nice dinner with him as he met Nancy, our son and his girlfriend, was not enough conversation. I was busy swimming, he busy watching over us as a volunteer guardian and South End denizen, so we'll have to make future excuses to continue the talk. Good thing he swims in such a beautiful pool.

• A sea lion did not eat me. More important, a sea lion did not nibble on my kneecaps, which was the irrational fear I carried into each swim. It didn't help that on my second round trip, mid-afternoon Saturday, I saw a sleek black shape surf the green waves out toward the opening of Aquatic Park, where the water begins to get rough.
  
  The shape was so big, it occupied two waves. Just as quickly, it disappeared.
  
  "Did I see what I thought I saw?" I asked the kayaker/guardian angel posted at the opening.
  
  "Yeah," said the angel, "but I saw it chomping on a fish a while back, so it won't be interested in the swimmers."
  
  Night presented a different story. Just when I had let my mind wander in the dark sensory deprivation of the water, my safe cocoon, I felt a smooth shape slide right into me. After a big swallow of water, I stopped to see — another swimmer! Somehow in all this water, each of us lit up like little Christmas trees with our blinking lights and glow bracelets, we crashed.
  
  'Round midnight, lulled by the relief of reaching the dock — it loomed like a torii gate silhouetted in the clubhouse's orange lights — another shape crashed on my head. An aggressive sea lion declaring territory? No, another swimmer doing the butterfly. We smiled in shared relief.

• Virtual swimmers became real. I have before sung the praises of a facebook™© page called "Did you swim today?" (dyst?) The relay provided opportunity to meet some of the swimmers with whom I have shared daily stories of swims from around the world.
  
  There came peripatetic Londoner Jackie Cobell, a member of swimming royalty, a cheery ambassador of open water swimming, known now as much for the extreme cold-water swims she's made as for holding the record for the longest time taken to cross the English Channel, 28 hours, 44 minutes.
  
  I met Mark Spratt of Indiana, a dedicated distance swimmer and dyst? poster, and Amanda Hunt from Australia by way of Chicago. Globetrotter Bruckner Chase, a long-distance swimmer from New Jersey and American Samoa whose livelihood advocates for ocean health and access to the ocean for all people, was there too.

• No one went hungry. No one had a chance: Food filled a big table in the South End dining room, and food never stopped filling the table. At 4:30 a.m., fresh pepperoni pizza suddenly appeared. Imagine how good pepperoni pizza tastes at that hour after a disorienting swim!
  
  The modest entry fee and the generosity of swimming cooks went far — loaves-and-fishes far. Who could not get fuel was a fool.
  
  I drank cup after paper cup of hot water, until the cup could no longer hold its shape and I'd get another. I was driving off cramps as best I could, and took electrolyte tablets swimmer Bruckner Chase had provided right before each swim.
  
  Lisa Amorao's delicious couscous dish tempted me to skip a rotation and scarf it all instead.
 

• The world in the wee hours became magic.
  
  On my second night swim, around 3:30 a.m., all was dark save for lights along the shore and the gargantuan Ghirardelli chocolates sign (gleaming for whom? I wondered). It was much darker than it had been 'round midnight. The water this time fizzed as I entered, so loudly it hissed through the wax ear plugs I wear to ward off cold and keep from getting dizzy.
  
  As my arms drove the fizzing water below me, bright green balls of light rose from them, up and past me. Another Bay veteran swimmer had told me about the bioluminescence given off by tiny creatures — were they making the fizz? — but I was sure he was mistaking it for bubbles that caught the ambient light of The City. Of course he knew better, and I swam along enjoying the gift of sight and sound and sense. Suddenly I became very calm, and in that calm grateful to God for this opportunity, and deep in thought for my wife and son to be able to see some of the event, and my late mom, whose birthday was Saturday.
  
  Heading for the showers and another twitchy cycle of warming up, I heard Jim Bock on the South End dock, clad in a yellow sou'wester as he checked off the swimmers, singing "Greenland Whale Fisheries" into the sideways rain.

• Fogheads came through. "King" Karl helped South End folks move a sailboat and almost missed one of his rotations. David helped warm up a shivering swimmer in the middle of the night. (Normally in a wetsuit as an Ironman™© triathlete, David went several go-rounds without.) Lorena staffed the kitchen when our team's time came, and summoned the grit to go out each time in the foreign waters, emerging strong each time.
  
  Lisa continues to provide inspiration with her photos and video and cheer, resolving to swim in the dark without an escort, as she had first planned. Her Karl (different from our "King" Karl) kayaked even though he was sick.
  
  Fred and "King" Karl worked the walkie-talkies from midnight to the end so that weary swim teams could know their turns from the comfort of the South End dining room.
  
  Modest Chris "El Sharko" Blakeslee, a South End veteran and heralded as one of the oldest swimmers to cross the English Channel, joined our team midway as his team was dispersed, and at every turn did what he could to make our team go.
  
  I'm overjoyed to have been among them.

Most of the Fogheads: David, Fred, Fast Karl, me after the final lap, Lorena and Lisa. In the hullabaloo,
we lost track of Chris "El Sharko" for the photo. Nancy Turner photo.

Suzie Dods had it pegged: The first swims were a fine and relatively easy. "King" Karl, our youngest and fastest, led off the rounds 9 a.m. Saturday. It was the only lap that felt like a race, all of the nine teams seeming to send off their fastest.

By 11:30 p.m., three or four go-rounds into it and 13 1/2 hours later, the clocks seemed to stop, and missed naps were widely regretted. Nine teams had collapsed to seven, smaller teams dispersed to medium-sized teams.

By 11:30 p.m., my underarms and neck chafing and stinging, I began to think this endeavor folly. Teams fell to sleeping when and where they could — sometimes all but the swimmer in the water was asleep, and the next in line had to be found and roused so the teammate could officially leave the water.

Early-morning swims (the fifth and sixth go-rounds) required extra deep breaths, extra smidgens of motivation. Each round required swimmers to know the tides and how they changed. Failing to adjust meant more work at best or swimming into hulking breakwaters and historic moored ships at worst. Even the buoy line near shore was dodgy in the dark — one swimmer returned with a cut forehead from swimming into a buoy.

When I relayed Suzie Dods' announcement that teams who were tired should just all take a break for one or two swimmers' rotations — "It's not a race, we're not keeping books," she said —  "King" Karl (aka Fast Karl) was incredulous.

"That would be cheating!" he said. "You couldn't say you swam 24 hours straight, then." None of the Fogheads even considered it, I gather.

Right before dawn, the clock sped up. Light shone in the darkness. Strength returned.

Karl, Fred and me, never quite dry. Lisa Amorao photo.

By hook or crook or conspiracy, I had the privilege of swimming the last leg of the last go-round for our team. The big triangle route, closed off in the early hours when visibility and conditions worsened, was reopened with sunup. I tried to make two laps as before, but wasn't fast enough to come in on time. I settled for one lap around and one lap along the buoy line next to shore, as leisurely as possible, before heading back in.

Swimmers who had earlier gathered on the dock to cheer Suzie Dods for her last swim (she came in towing a kayak with her teeth) were back on the dock cheering the last swimmers and our shared accomplishment. A wave lifted us onto the beach for the last time.

Many of us weren't even dry before we were wishing aloud to do this impossible thing again next year.