Wow.
One of these days, I have to figure out how to take pictures of the moon, because nothing I own can do it justice, but outside is the biggest, shiniest, turning the surrounding clouds into silver shapes like rabbits and pirate ship-iest full moon I've seen in a long time.
It explains everything.
Father taught us to swim early- even before he taught us to read. So I learned to swim before I learned to read. The reason for mastering swimming, Father said, was because of his distaste for drowned children. "I never knew a drowned child that was worth much," he said. "Horrid, bloated things, fish-belly white, which, I suppose, is natural enough, since fish, like drowned children, spend a lot of time underwater."See? Hilarious and a very good point.Father's distaste for dead moppets was not shared by Huckleberry's friend Jim: "I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em"- one of the sweetest and most mysterious statements in English literature.
Father had another simple straightforward statement about the ocean, the only valid one I have ever heard. "The ocean," he said, "doesn't care."
This is all you know about the ocean, and all you need to know. Over the seventy-odd years of my life I have seen the wisdom of this statement many times. I have seen powerful swimmers washed ashore dead in an apparently pacific ocean; I have seen infants carried out to sea by a frothing riptide only to be cast back by a succeeding breaker. I have seen a whale crushed by its own weight on a receding tide, and I have seen a strange and wonderful white mare ride a breaker from straight out to sea- we watched her from among other whitecaps on a wind-tossed autumn day, a mile or so offshore, until she breasted the last wave and galloped off down the beach. I knew then and I know now that she came from Tahiti; I've seen her in Gauguin's paintings.
"The sea," Father repeated, "doesn't care, but you do. Heed well." Father often talked like one of the wolves in The Jungle Book: "Heed well, Louis Pasteur: 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' A cat," he went on, "can adjudge the speed of everything of possible danger to him except an automobile; that's why cats get shot down so often by cars- their mind are not prepared. If you want to be smarter than a cat- which is unlikely- prepare your mind and your body for any contingency you can anticipate. It's the lazy person's way- and I do hope you are wise enough to be lazy- so learning to swim is not a sport. Being faster than someone else in the water is silly and ridiculous: a six-year-old child can trot faster than the best swimmer in the world can swim. The only thing you need to know about swimming is how to breathe when you're in the water; if you can breathe, you can swim, and the important thing about swimming is to get where you want or need to go. It may be six feet if you fall into a swimming pool (most children who drown in swimming pools do so within six feet of the deck edge). It may be a mile or so if your boat founders. But one thing is certain: water is an alien element- you can't breathe underwater. It's that simple. So, if you want to spare my feelings, learn to swim.
"Swimming," my father went on to say, "is a form of transportation. Like walking, it can be done for pleasure. But when you stop walking, you don't ordinarily sink, so never confuse the two."
