I was doing a practice lesson as part of this WSI class I don’t want to take but that’s a long story. The task was to teach the three kicks for treading water, and as I and my faux-students treaded away, I started telling a story that was so buried in my memory I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once since it happened. But unbidden, it surfaced and demanded to be told:
A bunch of us were at my friends’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, and we were behaving like typical teenagers, which is to say, like idiots. We’d taken their boat out into the “big lake,” i.e., far from the channels of the Les Cheneaux Islands, well into Lake Huron, where the rollers are. We were doing something they called submarining, i.e. putting a bunch of people on the bow and gradually increasing the speed until the bow started going down, sending up an amusing spray and…I’m not sure how it was supposed to end, because we hit one of those rollers funny and a guy on the bow slipped off into the water.
This is northern Lake Huron, and as I recall it was June, late in the day, almost twilight. Lake Huron never really gets warm, and in June it is still quite cold. The kid was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and probably shoes of some sort. Did I mention we were all drinking? We were all drinking.
The guys who were leading this excursion, to their everlasting credit, did exactly what you should do in that situation. Neil immediately fixed on the guy in the water, pointing to his position. Paul scrambled for the swim ladder in the storage space. And Mark, at the wheel, put us in an immediate turn and roared back to the guy, expertly steering close without running him over, then decelerating, and we floated right up to him. Swim ladder was hooked on the side, and many arms reached down to help him climb back into the boat.
His first words, through his chattering teeth: “I’m sorry I dropped the schnapps.” Ha ha! Such a card! We’re having an adventure! We bundled him in what blankets were aboard, put him in the warmest spot (directly behind the front bench) and headed for home.
“And now we’ve been treading for about as long as that guy had to tread, in all his clothes, in very cold water,” I told my faux-students. “And that is why learning to tread water can save your life.” And honestly, it wasn’t until Wednesday evening, 50 years after the fact, that I realized how close we’d come to a fatal drowning incident, i.e., extremely. He could have easily gone straight to the bottom. I think your memory keeps that stuff buried for a good reason.
The three kicks for treading are scissors, breaststroke and rotary, i.e. eggbeater. Rotary is best. Also: Don’t do stupid boat tricks ever, but especially not there, especially not when the sun is going down. On the other hand, that kind of stupid fucking-around in boats often produces people who know how to drive boats. (Neil, Mark and Paul had done their share of stupid boat tricks before this.) My riding instructor grew up playing a game she and her siblings called Knock ‘Em Off, in which one person climbed on their horse, bareback and with no bridle, and the others tried to do anything short of touching the horse to get the mounted one to fall off. Flap a shirt in its face, run around yelling and waving arms, whatever. And that’s how my teacher learned to stick tight as a tick when a horse was misbehaving. I’m not sure that these stories have a point, but if they do, it’s that if you behave like this, don’t tell your mother.
You guys were discussing this piece in the comments, but if you don’t read the comments, Monica Hesse wrote an excellent column about the Diddy/Sean Combs trial, and here’s a gift link to read it.
Before I leave, three photos of our back yard.
March 26:
April 18:
This morning:
Happy weekend, all. Enjoy spring.
tajalli said on May 16, 2025 at 3:02 pm
My older brother liked to play Let’s Capsize the Sailboat, wildly swinging the beam into a broad reach nearly beaning me at the till in the process, and then righting the boat to give it another go. And other equally harebrained endeavors. It’s a miracle I’m alive to tell the tale.
Perennials from bulb/tubers or an annual introduction from the garden supplier you visited recently, Nancy? Either way, truly terrific.
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David C said on May 16, 2025 at 3:13 pm
My brush with death came on my grandfather’s tractor. It snowed a wet, slushy snow and I was plowing. I did my parent’s house and was headed down the street to my grandparents. I hit the brakes and the tractor went sideways. It almost hit a ridge on the edge of their driveway and if it had, it probably would have flipped and I’d be a gonner. I dumped the clutch and it pulled into the drive way before it hit. Maybe it’s getting older, but I think of that a lot more often than I used to.
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Suzanne said on May 16, 2025 at 3:58 pm
My cousins, siblings, and I used to pile in the bed of my grandfather’s pick-up truck and careen down the gravel road on which he lived. I can’t remember who was driving but it was not even remotely safe.
We also spent time in the summer at my aunt and uncle’s lake cottage, swimming out to their raft which was quite far from shore and the water there was very deep. We would jump or dive off the raft into the water, often landing on top of someone already in the water while the adults paid scant attention to us from the shore where they were imbibing in adult beverages. I am not even sure how many of the adults could swim but my parents couldn’t. I wasn’t much of a swimmer either. Had one of us gone underwater and not surfaced, the day would have quickly turned to tragedy.
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nancy said on May 16, 2025 at 4:03 pm
Perennials, all subject to annual adjustments.
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Peter said on May 16, 2025 at 5:17 pm
My former barber grew up in a nearby Chicago suburb which had a small scale amusement park.
She told me that the place would host children’s birthday parties, and they would drive a flatbed truck through the neighborhood to pick up the guests and birthday kid, put them on bales of hay, and then drive down Skokie Boulevard (US 41!) a four lane road, with the kids sitting on bales of hay, on the back of a flatbed truck, with no guardrails.
You might think she was exaggerating, but I did go to that place a few times when I was a tyke and I remember seeing a flatbed truck with a bunch of kids on it pull into the parking lot.
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Julie Robinson said on May 16, 2025 at 5:43 pm
Dad’s family experienced farm accidents in two generations; one fatal and one at the cost of Dad’s arm. One of his younger brothers drowned in a fishing accident on a whitewater rapids river in Canada. He and his buddies liked to party, a LOT, and by party I mean drink, and as he didn’t know how to swim, he never stood a chance.
I used to drive way too fast out on country roads but childbirth cured me of that. Otherwise, I’ve always been careful and cautious.
All of which is to say that I’m not happy that my daughter will be in DC on June 14 and intends to be part of a protest against Dear Leader’s Grand March. She was staying for a few extra days after a conference and didn’t even put it together until just a few minutes ago, when I looked at the calendar. Her eyes lit up at the opportunities! If you see a woman with curly hair in a clerical collar getting arrested that day, it just may be her.
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Sherri said on May 16, 2025 at 6:26 pm
Two things I have yet to see in any of the articles about the latest book about how Biden’s decline was hidden from the public is 1) any sense of responsibility from the pundits that maybe they should have caught this or 2) any comparison to the current occupant of the office, who constantly demonstrates cognitive deficits. Like when he keeps talking about the word “groceries” as if it’s some weird, unusual word. Hard to pass that off as some eleventy-dimensional chess move like his supporters try to do with the whole 51st state thing.
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Deborah said on May 16, 2025 at 8:09 pm
Wow Nancy, your backyard looks terrific, I’m kinda jealous. I’m going back to Santa Fe leaving Sunday, for 3 weeks just to get the gardening squared away. It looks a lot better than it did when we first had a presence there but it still has a ways to go.
The only crazy thing I participated in as a teenager was sailboating on Biscayne Bay with others who didn’t know much more than I did, which was nothing. Nobody was drinking that I know of anyway but there were often shark fins in view, or maybe they were dolphins, we sure didn’t have a clue.
To Trump “groceries” is probably an odd word, I doubt that he has ever set foot in a grocery store in his entire life. Same with anyone else in his family.
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Mark P said on May 16, 2025 at 8:48 pm
Trump invented a new word the other day when he was lying about lowering drug prices — equalize, or equalization. He is so proudly stupid and ignorant. It’s hard to believe he has been our president for it seems like forever.
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