Being water

Right where a man had drowned 14 hours earlier, David and I guessed at the time.

"8?" I said.

"You think it's that late?" said David. "Quarter to eight, maybe."

I hoped he was right. We were halfway through a five-mile swim, and I had to be back in time for work by late morning.

The time and our tenuous grasp of it worried me, but not the swim. I could make the swim, even as the destination seemed to drift farther and farther away with every stroke.

The drowning, which I read about the morning after our swim, gave me gloomy pause … and made me wonder how I had come to this strange and happy place:

Almost all my experiences in water had been bad.

Before learning to swim, I once fell fully clothed into the pool at my cousin's house. Above the white panic and the chlorine froth and the ka-chucketa whoosh of blood in my ears and my own screams, I could hear my cousin laughing, could see her face red as she convulsed in guffaws.

She had no idea I couldn't swim, having learned how long before me. Of course she thought her older cousin must be able to swim! Of course everyone older than she could swim! She thought I was just putting on a show, so she had no reason to call for help. She meant no harm. The locomotion of thrashing and sheer will to live somehow bobbed me in reach of the edge, where once I vomited water I made her cry with my angry yelling.
  
During swim lessons as a kid, the coach said I was doing well enough that I might even be good at swimming distances. One set of lessons progressed into another, each with bigger challenges and requirements than the one before. At one point in the summer, I was to swim a long distance; I bet it was 200 yards, or eight lengths of the pool. I felt condemned to failure.

My dad told me to pace myself. I learned after his death he was an accomplished open water swimmer. He never told me this, never got in the water and said, "I'll show you how." I learned to swim from the girl teaching at the Cabrillo High School pool.

Such a little piss-ant kid, prone to tantrums and quitting over board games and games of catch, I'm sure I gave my dad plenty of reasons to let someone else suffer the trials of trying to teach me to swim. Tantrums in the water are unsafe.

I don't think I ever swam those 200 yards. I probably quit the lesson before then.

At a lake in Idaho where an uncle had a cabin, I was supposed to learn to water ski. My uncle was a man's man, the prototype of mid-century American men, taciturn, tough. The process of teaching me to water ski was to put me in a life jacket and into the water, put the skis on me, give me the end of the rope and pull me around with the boat, until eventually I was to figure out on my own to put the skis up just so and rise to a standing position.

But I didn't. I hung onto the rope as long as I could, as many times as I could, drinking water like soup, as they say, from a fire hose, before I couldn't take it any more and let go, bobbing in the water, blubbering. My uncle offered tips such as, "Oh, fer cryin' out loud! Just stand up! Just stand up! Is he cryin', now? Hey, quit cryin', ya baby!"

He left his two sons, my older cousins, in charge of the crybaby for the rest of the weekend.

In high school my drivers' ed teacher was also the water polo coach, Bob Boyer, who asked me during class to try out for the team. I can't imagine why.

He described water polo as a cerebral sport; maybe he knew I got good grades. But book smart ain't street smart. Book smart ain't toughness. As I would prove.

Still, Coach Boyer recruited me! How hard could it be?

Really hard, he neglected to say. Just staying alive required constant effort. It was sink, literally, or swim.

I showed up in my gym shorts over a jockstrap. All the water polo players had Speedo®™-style briefs; that alone should have compelled me to call it a day. But I jumped in. A coach showed me the egg-beater kick, a circular outward flailing of legs designed to keep players stable and afloat; that was the extent of player development; the season was already under way and most of the players had been together a couple of years.

I don't even remember Coach Boyer asking me if I could swim.

Immediately after being shown the egg-beater, we were to egg-beater around the perimeter of the pool, our backs against the wall, hands up.

The goalie was the classic Charles Atlas ad, a 97-pound weakling I knew in junior high who had transformed through water polo into the Muscle Beach body, shoulders out to there. He could egg-beater at high speed, lifting his torso from the water past his navel for several seconds. He made the sport look easy. It isn't.

Sputtering and sinking, eyes inflamed by chlorine, psyche rubbed raw by reality, I didn't last one practice.  

As an adult 12 years ago, I crawled onto shore during a swim test at a Boy Scout canoe training campout, and crept behind the group of other adult leaders who'd also finished the test. Dizzy and heaving, I was sure I was going to die, and wanted to do so quietly. I lost one of my new water shoes in the schlumping attempt to reach shore.

After another canoe outing, I dipped into upper Lake Natoma to cool down. Instead the freezing water shot through me and I arose as if electrocuted, splashing to get out as fast as I could, resolving never to do that again. This was late June, the water temperature in the low 60s.

Yet, I swim.

Why? It became the exercise I could stick with. For all that water drama, I still liked the water. Though not the best swimmer, I enjoyed it for its solitude, a sort of Benjamin Braddock kind of solitude.

As a kid I even invented a new swimming stroke, the corkscrew, the body twisting front to back, front crawl to backstroke. I imagined the Olympics would eventually incorporate the corkscrew. It didn't catch on.

Five years ago, I learned a new swimming technique in the pool, one that would get me from Alcatraz to the mainland with vigor. Gradually I left the pool completely for the open water. It wasn't easy — the first chop I encountered immobilized me with the same childhood feelings of collapse and panic. But friends bade me go on. Now I swim year 'round without a wetsuit, gathering distance. A pittance compared to many swimmers I encounter, but a lot for me.

It's hard to picture the panic and disorientation the drowning man felt the day before our swim. His name and age are known. Beyond that, he has become law enforcement's cautionary tale about respecting the cold water and one's swimming ability.

The water feels warm to us, about 55 degrees. David downed a sport gel and I ate a slimy cranberry-orange bar with a couple of gulps of coconut water, and we headed back into green water. Texas Hill, the little island, was next. Then the marker buoy. Around the bend, then a diagonal across the dark wide stretch back to the boat dock. David zigzagged far ahead of me.

I could make this swim.

(Rest in peace, Bob Boyer.)

Chill!

Circumstances notwithstanding, 'tain't all that bad …

Getting it out of my system, Case No. 1

You have been warned.

File this under the law of unintended consequences.

I see this little monument every day, while driving to wherever. It sits in front of a house near the corner of a busy street. It's a lovely house, I'm sure. But I wouldn't know, because the only thing I see — the only thing anybody really sees — is this curmudgeonly tribute.

Your guess is as good as mine, which is probably this: The man of the house (why oh why would I think a man is behind this?) found dog poop on his lawn once, twice, maybe three times.

Maybe he berated a dog owner he caught letting his/her dog do his/her business there the second time, and the dog owner delivered the dog a third time out of revenge.

More likely an untethered dog pooped there once, decided it was a safe place for pooping, bothering neither man nor beast, and did so again.

The bothered man posted this sign as passive-aggressive protest, thereby stamping out a pooping pandemic. Maybe he made the sign, working from a template he got online. It's an accurate silhouette in thin plywood, capturing a pooch in the pose of necessary evil, its hind legs well clear of its butt, tail stiffly cantilevered, to enable a clean evacuation.

Dogs don't like this reality any more than we do. My dog gives me that look right before, that sad "Avert your eyes, I beg you, for this thing I must do." Without being taught, dogs instinctively perform this move in every effort to avoid their own waste.

The sign, painted a pale shade of poop, has topped this little knoll at least 10 years, the lawn around it always carefully shorn … except the tall stalks of grass here suggest even the homeowner tires of it. Details have been added, just in case; the dog is happy. "NO!" is carefully stenciled. (The other side has a faded admonition, meaning maybe the neighbors down the street are off the hook for this violation.) Weather and water has dogeared its edges.

It is a monument to the exact act the home dweller detests — a dog at its most awkward, frozen in squat.
 
The years have managed to subsume this image in dark memory, until I drove by another home in town with its own similar sign. The questions arose anew:

• Is this for dogs to read?
• Does it denounce pooping as a function? Dogs of the world, lock up your bowels?
• Is it a joke? If so, it's funny, especially since the home dweller doesn't let on.
• Is it a grave marker, for a dog buried in that knoll, the last dog that pooped there? A burial mound, a devotion to the god of dogs at their most vulnerable? Is it holy ground?
• Does it deter? Apparently so, since the lawn is always immaculate. Of course, I never see anybody walking, let alone walking dogs, or even being out of their homes on that street. Maybe dogs and their owners live in fear there, holding it in.

But the most intriguing question:

• Why?

Really, how big a deal is it to pick up dog poop, even if the lawn became a dump site, which it didn't? At first I used to recoil at the coil of dog poop our dog produced, preferring she do so in secret. But as soon as she was ready to go for walks, I realized that's the main point of her twice-daily constitutional.

I've got the poop pickup down to one smooth motion.

Sure, it's a grievance to pick up someone else's dog's poop, but as long as you're out there, carefully trimming the turf at the base of the statue erected to anti-defecation, how long can it take?

It reminds me of another sign a few years back in a nearby neighborhood, this one packing-taped sturdily to a sidewalk. Long ago the homeowner had built the short walk on the property, creating a little section on the street corner for ornamental plants.

The sign warned, in all caps, "THIS IS NOT A SIDEWALK!"

The sign maker had given Magritte one more twist. It is in fact a sidewalk, which is hard to dispute. The warning meant, more likely, "Private property. Do not enter," which is reasonable, though I can't imagine the harm from walking on a concrete sidewalk, since hardly anyone around that neighborhood goes outside either. The sidewalk is safe from trammel.

That sign, and this, are the same: Futile. Funny, but futile.

Michael Ramirez also go boom!

Every so often an editorial cartoon educates and enlightens me, which happened with Michael Ramirez' 'toon this week, above.

Though I had no idea the topic, the visual metaphor is lightning quick despite its devastating weight.

(By the way, it's so hard to keep track of what's going in the world, and it gets worse every day even as information builds to a torrent, isn't it? I blame myself almost entirely, succumbing to the beguiling filters and baffles of irrelevant TV and celebrity news, ignoring 10 world events for the sensationalism of one. What news I manage to pay attention dismays and disorients me.)

I had to find out what the hell Ramirez was talking about — to the Internet, Batman!

Gosnell is Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia doctor on trial facing charges of killing babies born alive, and of killing a woman by a drug overdose during an abortion. The jury is deliberating after six weeks of testimony.

Prosecutors say Gosnell delivered babies and then snipped their spinal cords because he didn't know how to perform late-term abortions, while Gosnell's attorney says the doctor performed abortions while the fetuses were in the womb. Gosnell's attorney said the woman died instead from unforeseen circumstances.

A two-time Pulitzer winner, Ramirez 'toons for Investors Business Daily; such is the state of our traditional newspapers that a top award winning cartoonist would now work in the narrow margins of specialty journalism, seen online more than in print.

Ramirez runs far to the right of my opinions, but he wins me by his mastery of art; I look at his stuff even though I know eight times out of 10 it's gonna be about anything-Obama-does-is-bad-because-he's-not-the-second-coming-of-George-W.-Bush.

Few are better than Ramirez at taking advantage of better printing and digital dissemination. The painting effects he applies to his black line art amplify rather than muddy the image, are inextricably woven into the picture. Note that he has even painted the shadow of the barbed wire on the children's faces.

This one surprised me; this one lured me in the way I'd find it impossible to avert my eyes from a car wreck, wondering frantically what happened, what is what.

Right away I saw the visual metaphor for the sign above the gates at Auschwitz, the one promising prisoners Arbeit Macht Frei — work will make you free.

Then I saw the doors to the ovens, the analogy that the babies Gosnell allegedly killed were disposed of dispassionately as so many Jews and other threats to the Nazi state. Then I saw the children; then the shapes (window hatches?) within the ovens, together with the openings forming haunted eyes; I'm guessing it's intentional, maybe even a spectral caricature of the bespectacled Dr. Gosnell.

This cartoon will receive letters of damnation and praise and threats and the usual calls for Ramirez' firing, as happened when last week The Sacramento Bee's Jack Ohman blamed Texas' lax regulation on the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion. Or maybe not; maybe his readership is largely limited to the choir.

Here Ramirez unleashes all the power of his pen, skewering me in the gut. His 'toon is a too-sharp mirror, making me reflect and question myself.

I believe in a woman's right to choose. I also believe in the power of education to make the best of that choice. I hear some of you: How could I have lived this long so naive, eyes half-closed to realities?

If Ramirez' statement railed against this trial alone, it would be an outrageous stretch, equating the Nazi mass extermination with, if the jury convicts, a callous if not miscast and misguided doctor. Given Ramirez' long documentation, though, I'd say he is condemning all abortion, at least late-term abortions.

Still, it's outrageous and raw, and Ramirez did his job expertly. He got my attention. He taught me something. The image lodges uncomfortably in my conscience.

Jack Ohman go boom!*

Jack Ohman is good. Like the world needs my opinion.

Even after the Internet made viewing the world's editorial cartoons a mere matter of mouse clicks, I liked to pick up the Portland Oregonian anytime I was in the vicinity, mostly to see Ohman's latest cartoon.

(Cartoons are best read in your lap or at the breakfast table, your nose to the ink, examining the work.)

He has a distinct painterly style and a fierce voice. He knows precisely the power of the editorial cartoon; he knows not to waste his space and your time with the visual equivalent of a Jimmy Fallon topical toss-off.

Ohman joined my neighborhood newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, this year, after his best friend, cartoonist Rex Babin passed away. Ohman said he made the leap to help raise Babin's young son.

Babin had a spare, reductive style, as if he was carving away his cartoons from blocks of wood or linoleum. His voice as well was understated and circumspect, with occasional pointed jabs.

Ohman has brought a wealth of explosive devices to the job.

Last week he lit up the sky with the cartoon above.

In the wake of the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, so horrible and vast and somehow swallowed up in the sensational Boston Marathon bombings, Ohman blamed the explosion on Texas' lax industrial regulations, touted as a benefit to California businesses looking for cheaper operating locales.

Oh, man!

The 'toon went viral, major newspapers reporting that Texas Gov. Rick Perry got mad. Perry told The Bee:

“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans.
 
“Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas, an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”

Other letter writers said they failed to see the humor in Ohman's insensitivity.

Damn right it's insensitive — but not for its own sake. Ohman's job is not comic relief; it's sardonic dyspepsia. Ohman upholds editorial cartoons on the same serious level as editorials and columns, and uses the directness with which the written word can't compete.

The Bee stands by Ohman, who defended his work in a newspaper blog:

… what normal person doesn't mourn those poor people fighting the fire and living by the plant? I certainly do. What makes me angry, and, yes, I am driven by anger, is that it could have been prevented. I guess I could have done a toned-down version of the cartoon; I am not sure what that would have been, but I think many readers' objections just stemmed from the fact that I used the explosion as a metaphor, period. The wound is fresh, the hurt still stings.

Texas hadn't inspected that plant since 2006, Ohman pointed out.

To be fair, having to explain oneself in a blog defeats the purpose of a cartoon, but it's helpful in its expansion. Good cartoonists such as Ohman count on informed readers to know the issues, and then stomp around in the playgrounds of their minds, splashing ink.

A toned-down cartoon wouldn't have been worth publishing, much less drawing.

Ohman also gets a Sunday comic-sized space to satirize California politics, particularly the musings and meanderings of Gov. Jerry Brown and his corgi, Sutter, who comments on the lunacy a la Pat Oliphant's Punk. Ohman has an interloper's view of California, without any cows to hold sacred.

Here's a recent one, with entertaining riffs on art history:

His stuff is well worth visiting.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/ohman/#storylink=cpy

*to borrow from the colorful patois of kids (or at least TV commercials) these days …

Beer bash

May (or may not) be for a primer on how not to make beer (or beer bottles). Or not.

Cheers!

Cesar Chavez: A remembrance

Cesar Chavez fasted this year for 36 days. Vice President Dolores Huerta was beaten by
San Francisco police during a protest of President George H. W. Bush.

(United Farm Workers union founder and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez died 20 years ago today. This is an essay I wrote after his death for the California Farm Bureau's newspaper where I worked; I'm still a bit surprised the Farm Bureau published it.

(All it takes is a sore back after just 10 minutes of edging the front lawn to begin to imagine the sunup-to-sundown toil and courage and pain of the farmworkers he fought for):

Cesar Chavez was a fiction when I was growing up. He was as distant and mythical as any of the dusty heroes who peopled the John Steinbeck novels I loved.

He was a symbol, a poor man daring to stand up for the workers from which he sprang, to speak for them, and I liked the symbol.

Out of school and looking for a job, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, a place as mythical as Cesar Chavez had been in my youth.

In this place, both became real for me. Cesar Chavez was a shorter man than I expected, the thick black hair I saw in old photographs having turned a thatch of gray, the lines on his face having deepened. The San Joaquin Valley, a vast smoky place scored with a gigantic grid of perpendicular roads, took its shape from farmers and a history unknown to me as the child of an itinerant Air Force Mechanic.

Something else became real for me at that place and time: The hatred farmers held for Cesar Chavez.

He was the devil. He was "that goddamned Cesar Chavez." People mispronounced his name Chu-VEZ. One former assemblyman who battled Chavez used to spell his first name C-E-A-S-E-R in press releases.

I heard he was the man who stirred up trouble for farmers by causing unrest among farm workers. I heard he intimidated farmers into signing labor contracts with his union, threatening violence and using it. I heard he threatened to destroy the industry with wild claims that farming poisoned workers and consumers.

I heard all of these and then I met the man. In his death I'm left with a cloudy soup of feelings.

He was rallying workers at a large farming operation in the south San Joaquin Valley when I first saw him. Some workers were trying to win United Farm Workers Union representation and Chavez had come to spur the effort toward an election.

A knot of maybe 200 people, waving red banners bearing the Aztecan eagle symbol for the union, filled a small community hall to hear him. They didn't represent all the workers at this operation, but their shouts of fierce passion made them seem more numerous.

Chavez spook briefly to the crowd in Spanish, raised its spirits, and departed. The election took more than a year to decide. The union lost.

Chavez came again to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the union's radio station in Woodlake. When he arrived at a nearby fairground for the day-long party, people quickly surrounded him, stretching their hands to him. He clasped the outstretched hands and embraced the small children who pressed close to him, and the crowds fell in behind him like a boat's wake as he walked about the fairgrounds that day.

I waited until late in the afternoon for an interview, when finally his bodyguards — including some off-duty city police — ushered me into a makeshift courtyard.

Chavez sat across from me in a folding chair, his sat eyes nearly hidden behind folds of skin, and challenged every one of my questions. With a wave of his hands, a firm shake of his head, the smile of a prosecuting attorney discovering an opening, he turned each question into a clumsy attack on his union and his causes.

He made each question an opportunity to attack farmers and the pesticides they used. Cesar Chavez put the blame for cancer in young children on all farmers.

In the course of a few brief moments, the man I once thought was a myth made me his real enemy.

Chavez dismissed me, the bodyguards closed ranks, and the union leader returned to the throngs of people who thanked him for dinner and a party.

After I came to work at Ag Alert, Cesar Chavez made a stop at California State University, Sacramento, to build support for a boycott against table grapes. He still regarded virtually every question from the press as a thick-headed accusation of his cause. But he had won over another fiercely passionate knot of people at the univerity, and leaders of major cities, including San Francisco, pledged to support the boycott.

Farm Bureau and other major agricultural organizations retaliated by boycotting San Franci
sco.

Over the years, I have read death notices for the union. Some former UFW officials left because they said Chavez refused to delegate authority, made no plans to pass his power on, and wouldn't consider changing the union's strategies to match the times.

Chavez and the union denounced the state Agricultural Labor Relations Bord he helped create, saying former Gov. George Deukmejian turned it into an advocate for farmers rather than farm workers.

Membership plummeted, labor contracts dissolved, the union built luxury homes with non-union labor as investments and it lost millions of dollars in court damages from labor strikes it waged.

Chavez' 36-day hunger strike in 1988 to advance the grape boycott failed to ignite the emotional fire of the hunger strikes that launched his union in the 1960s.

Most recently, UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta, Chavez' sister-in-law who founded the union with him and marched beside him for more than three decades, left the organization (editor's note: Huerta had taken a leave of absence to focus on women's rights).

He was an icon for another age, a folk hero, a malcontent. He led with, as someone said, quiet charisma, but he distrusted criticism. Perhaps the United Farm Wrokers union has die
d with him.

But for me, Cesar Chavez stopped being a myth and became human.

It is as John Steinbeck wrote of Cannery Row: "Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'Whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole, he might have said: 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."