I am
defined by water. I can’t imagine life without it. I
come from water and return to it whenever I can, daily, seasonally, yearly,
constantly. I was born on an Island,
surrounded by water. A Long Island near
The City. My grandfather and father were
in Public Water Works on The Island. My
first job was painting fire hydrants for my dad for the Public Water
Works. My favorite job was being a
lifeguard. My first sport was
swimming. My first friend was a high diver,
wild, reckless and fun. My first love
was a swimmer, warm, smooth and wet. My first broken arm required 9 casts since
I kept jumping in the water with it on, lucky my uncle was my orthopedic. My first major in college was Fluid
Mechanics. My first occupation was
hydrology and hydraulics - surface water - repairing dams and rivers in the
desert, a place defined by the lack of water.
My time is spent skiing in deep powder snow and swimming on the coast
where the water is clean, blue and clear.
Water encompasses and embodies me.
It is who I am. We are all
something.
My first recollection was of my dad
taking me out in the ocean, on his shoulders, at the beach and then launching
me on a wave to ride towards the shore.
I must have been 6 or 7 and fearless.
The feeling of the ocean pitching me forward quickly, all the way to the
beach was profound. It felt alive, powerful and a little menacing. Dad showed me how to catch waves myself,
looking for sets of size and shape and catching an early one before there was
too much water on the beach. It opened a
new independent world to me, similar to learning to cross the street or tie my
own shoes. With his supervision, I moved
out into deeper water to catch better waves, without losing my toehold of the
ocean floor that kept me from washing out to sea with the mysterious Under
Toad. Emboldened, I dropped into a big
one but I was late and inside and It flipped me up the curl and crashed me down
to the floor and sat on my chest for what felt like eternity. Sputtering to the surface eventually and
crying for my mother, I raced to the shore but found my dad there laughing and
smiling incongruously. WTF, I said with
my limited lexicon as he shook a mound of sand out of my little red surf
shorts. He asked me how I liked the
‘washing machine’ and I knew instantly what he meant. He said next time drop my head and hands and
go out the back door. I asked him if
there was anything else I needed to know, and he just said yes. I wasn’t sure what that meant but would
figure it out after a PBJ sandwich, a Coke and the half-hour mandatory rest
that seemed to be the law of the beach.
Conversely, I was swimming with my
step-daughter in big surf one day and she got caught in a riptide. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, and I didn’t
want her to be alone, so I followed her out.
She was besides herself due to the lack of control and distance building
from the shore. I calmed her down as we
tread-water and asked her inclusively what she thought we should do. She wanted to swim to an adjacent jetty and
climb out. We looked at the jetty and
saw big waves cashing violently on it, so that was out of the question. I told her it was a rip current that would
eventually dissipate and let us go in deeper water, but we had to be patient
and couldn’t fight it.
The lifeguards looked oblivious to us
so I told her to swim parallel to the beach with me until we could find an
inbound current. We did this for a while
with me asking her periodically if she was all right, and she would say yes,
until she didn’t and said she was struggling and going down in the turbulent
waves. I told her swimming is 90%
relaxing and calm breathing and I had her float on her back with her hands on
my shoulders while I swam slowly. She
laid her head back and breathed rhythmically, trying to relax and recover. Finally, we felt a current flowing towards
the beach, and we turned and rode the waves in.
As we walked from the water a lifeguard ran over and asked if we were
ok. I said YES and she simultaneously said NO but we walked back to our blanket
for some tuna sandwiches, a beer and the mandatory half hour nap. After a while I asked her if she wanted to
get back on the horse and go for a swim.
She said NO, never again.
After surviving freshman year of high
school, I reported to our summer Swim Club on the Great South Bay for our first
practice in our new, fast, floaty, saltwater pool built between the
docks-of-the-bay, the Corinthian styled Clubhouse, the spacious lawn and the
foreboding canal full of hackle heads and blow fish, eels and rays, horse-crabs
and barnacle bills. No one ever wanted
to go in the canal full of brackish, back-water, seaweed and slime. One day I was walking with my sister along
the boardwalk along the canal with a quarter my mom gave us for French
fries. It was a big day for we usually
got a dime for a frozen Milkey Way bar so we were in fat-city. I jokingly showed her how a ‘millionaire
feeds the ducks’ with a fake throw of the quarter into the air but I mistakenly
let it go and it sailed into the canal.
We were horrified and she told me to go get it. I said, “not for a million bucks”, that being
our theme. She said, “I might”. I few years later I threw her up high in the
air and into that canal out of spite, arrogance or jealousy and I can see here
her flying, kicking her legs and saying how she hated me, before she hit the
water.
But the canal was diabolically worse
for sailors who had to tack their boats into the ubiquitous afternoon south
winds to get out to the bay. Being only
100 feet wide, and less with boats tied up on each side, so the tacking was
quick and furious. If you did not keep up, you would go backwards or flip and
turtle your mask in the smelly, toxic, anerobic mud in the bottom, with the
entire club watching, laughing, commenting and yelling advice. It was the ultimate ignominy, in the ugliest
of places.
After swimming practice one day, I
walked past the women’s locker room off the canal and out swung my old fiend Gina
Sweeny in a bright yellow, homemade, polka-dot bikini. I didn’t recognize her out of her one-piece
racing suit, and she swung her hips that could sink ships, like most young
women know how to do, instinctually[1]. I had been in a carpool with Gina for years
and knew she was crazy and funny, the best swimmer in the Club and exactly 10
months younger than me, when that was import in swimming and life[2]. This emergent woman Regina, way up firm and
high, was all new to me and I was coming of age where I could appreciate it.
She was an athletic Goldie Hawn with a butterfly upper body and strong legs. Va-va -va voom. Wasting no time, for if you snooze you lose,
I asked her to go for a swim, and we spent the rest of the day playing water
ballet and swimming through each other’s legs blowing bubbles and laughing
innocently. We would spend the next four
years growing up together swimming and sailing and going back behind the boats
to smooch and smoke cigarettes.
Gina loved Cat Stephens, Winnie the
Pooh and me, not necessarily in that order.
We all love something. I unfortunately grew up and moved on to less
aqueous women named Mary Anne, Mary Beth, Mary, Beth and Mary Ellen, away from
Gina to landlocked Indiana and worse yet, Utah. Mary Anne was a tall drink of water, drank ‘Beevos’,
a ton of fun and way over my head. Mary
Beth had deep blue eyes and wavy blond hair, was savvy and smart and taught me
a lot, but eventually got hip to my tricks.
Mary was voted ‘best butt on campus’ two years running and we could talk
all night long but ultimately she was too attractive for me. Beth was the Deans Daughter and Editor or our
Stems and Seeds engineering newsletter but too shy for me. Mary Ellen was a good friend who I still text
all the time and visit yearly. Gina became
a champion swimmer, a great beauty and a wonderful person. It just wasn’t
our time or place. It is as important when, where and how you
fall in love as it is to whom.
I also had a great aquatic friend,
appropriately named Willie Hooper, who was a great swimmer and diver, football,
basketball and baseball player. Not
William or Bill or Will but Willie. With
rugged Brad Pitt good looks, a baseball build, blonde hair and blue eyes, he
personified and espoused cool and was funny as snot. We would bounce on the high diving boards in
our Bonner Bob, Banana Hammock Speedos, all day long, doing clown dives and
serious dives, but not knowing the difference between the two. We had a sense of where we were in the air
and were comfortable there. One day we
decided to skip swimming practice and smoke cigarettes surreptitiously in the
white rocking chairs on the screen porch of the Clubhouse, incognito. It was a blast watching the others work hard
until big coach Reese snuck up behind us and banged our heads together and made
us swim a double practice that day.
When Willie wore a Dungaree Jacket
with his Varsity Letter-A, from Amityville High School on it, my dad asked him
what the A was for, meaning what sport.
Willie looked down at the letter, perplexed for the moment, and then
smiled and said, ‘A is for Outstanding’.
Not the sharpest tool in the shed but he was an Outstanding guy with a
big heart. Despite him smoking 2 packs a day at age 12, my only goal was to
beat him in the breast-stroke and in our last race we tied for third. When we both sauntered up to the podium the
coach was confused about what to do with the one ribbon. Willie took it and ripped it in half and gave
me the top part with a grin. He lost the Club Swimmer of the Year that summer
by one half a point, but he didn’t care because Gina won it instead and we both
loved Gina. She accepted the trophy that
winter in a homemade yellow polka-dot dress with Willie, in a sporty white
turtleneck, at her side. ‘I don’t
recognize you with your clothes on,’ we liked to say in the winter.
One day I came home from a two-week
wrestling camp and found him in the Junior Clubhouse smooching Gina. We shared girlfriends in those days,
including Joan Zahusky who was quiet and had three huge brothers or Bobbie
Waltz with long blonde hair and the biggest boat in the club – The
Aquastar. There was Nancy McCurdy who
had deep blue eyes and scored 100 on her Algebra Regents in 8th
grade, Merle Cromerty who could play bridge and lived in the Amityville Horror
house and Dianne Englert who was a sassy double D by 13. We had quite a harem back then because of
Willies athletic good looks and my quick wit.
I asked Willie what was going on and he said he was making-out with my
girlfriend. I said OK, but did they want
to go swimming and play water-ballet when they were done. We all got up and swam for the rest of the
day and summer like nothing had ever happened.
Years later the three of us were
drinking by candlelight at the Club on the night of the NYC blackout. We got kicked out when we mixed up the
letters on the sign for the dinner specials to spell something more obscene
than clam chowder. We went home to Willie’s
house in the dark, across from the Amityville Horror house with a full-sized
baseball field in the front yard, so Willie could show us his new
motorcycle. We all hopped on it to make
believe we were riding. Of course, we
lost our balance and fell to the floor of the garage, becoming harmlessly
pinned under the bike and laughing hysterically. Willie’s dad came out to ask what we thought
we were doing and Willie chortled that we were just going for a ride. We were locked in the garage for the rest of
the night, but we didn’t really mind.
Willie was haunted by fire and smoke and burned out young at 42, from
lung cancer. We all have something.
We had a bevy of friends back then,
older and younger, we hung out with; mellow surfer dude Jack Ireland[3],
sailor boy Hugh Rawlins[4],
the bespeckled professor Frank Parlini[5],
my brother Maude[6], tall
water-skier triathlete Jacky Mehan[7],
wrestler Ricky Liquire[8],
suntan sun glasses Tom Fleming[9]
, sleepy Stewart Weber[10],
bumptious Pat McCormick[11]
and his brothers Chris and Brian.[12] I learned to play football with these guys,
bare-foot and bare-chested on the lawn near the pool. The Lifeguards would try to chase us away
because we were ‘wearing it out’, but we wondered aloud what they were saving
it for. The gals came out to sunbathe
and feign ignoring us. There was
blocking and tackling, run plays and reverses, but mostly it was passing. They taught me to square-out and square-in,
button hook, stop and go, post, pylon, pirouette, Statue of Liberty and razzle
dazzle but my favorite route was to just go long. My dad said I was a gum-shoe with small hands
who was smart and knew the game and should play quarterback, but I could catch
anything so I just wanted to play wide receiver.
We would alternate calling plays and playing QB and three completions would get you a first down, but we were never that patient. Willie was QB and asked what I wanted to do. I said, ‘Go Long’. He said, ‘Real Long’ with a wink. I was double teamed by the older McCormick brothers, so I gave a few jukes at the line and headed down field, fast, far, furious. We were neck and neck, stumbling on each other when Willie launched the ball as far as he could throw. At full speed we were running out of grass before the boardwalk and the spooky canal. I didn’t care. There comes a time for every boy to define himself, as a man with the older kids and to himself, and this was mine.
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When we hit the board-walk the
McCormick brothers stopped instantly, out of discretion and sanity, and I kept
going, launching my 80-pound frame off the edge out into the air, hovering ten
feet above the dirty water. With nothing
else to watch for anymore, I now located Willie’s pass, caught it and tucked it
away for the crash into the canal. I
came up with the ball in one hand and the entire crew, even the girls, yelling
down at me in wonder, astonishment and disgust.
I had to swim several hundred yards in the slime, but I didn’t care. I
became a legend that day and I swam with pride on my back, with the ball on my
chest, squirting chocolate fountains in the air from my mouth that would make
the Bellagio jealous. My brazen
disregard to the dangers of flight and the deplorables in the canal came to
define me as reckless. As reckless as
water.
We are all defined by something, but
we are all also defined by water. It is
what we are, 70% at birth. It is also
what defines 70% our beautiful little blue dot to the rest of the universe,
this planet dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, ice and
clouds, but mostly by water. Be what you
are. Be where you are. Be who you are. Flow like water.
[1]
Like they know how to hold a baby on their hips
[2] Swimmers
are not like racehorses; not all are born on Jan 1.
[3]
California and Hawaii eventually
[4]
Bad bike crash with brain damage
[5]
Designed jets for Boeing but died of tongue cancer
[6]
Colonel in the Pentagon
[7]
State Champ – taught me to drink - we rode bikes 160 miles in one day
[8]
State Champ – taught me to wrestle and sing American pie
[9]
Male Model - NYC
[10]
High Diver -Delaware
[11]
Sing-Sing prison in Ossining NY
[12] Played
lacrosse for Cornell and the Navel Academy
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