TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

I wear seasonal clothes, eat seasonal foods and like to write about seasonal topics. During the past few weeks, I’ve written about summer experiences. This week, I’ll continue to celebrate this season of daylight and warmth.

Though some days are warmer than we like.

I’ve done much outdoor work in the summer, including as a food and flower grower, garbageman, roofer, landscaper and camp counselor/swim teacher. I’ve also often played sports outdoors. Being out in so much sun has beaten up my skin. Mistakes were made.

So were memories.

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I still love immersing in either fresh or salt water. Depending on their ages, human bodies are between 60-75% water. It’s unsurprising that people are drawn to it.

I learned to swim in a river a block from my childhood home. As was that river, much freshwater is surrounded by trees. Some such settings have rocks from which you can dive or jump. Some are streams you can sit in. Some you go to with friends. Some you go to with your girlfriend. Immersing in these places is a slice of paradise.

I’ve stepped into liquid in such places as Bear Creek Lake in Southern Indiana, with its rope swing. Copake Falls on the New York/Massachusetts border are beautiful and user-friendly. Ithaca, NY has several nice spots for swimming, diving and jumping off cliffs of various heights. I’ve swum in a farm pond and an abandoned strip coal mine in Central Pennsylvania as well as in the broad Hudson River near Beacon, NY. I’ve slid down and leaped and dived from rocks in Western North Carolina and outside Chattanooga and into Northern California’s Rainbow Pool, just outside of Yosemite. I’ve submerged in the Delaware River and in New York State’s Catskills and Adirondacks, as well as in Washington State’s ice-cold Cascade lakes. I’ve bathed beneath waterfalls in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in Puerto Rico, on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and the Pacific Coasts of Choco, Colombia and Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Among other places. If you tell me about a good swimming hole, maybe we can meet there.

When I see other people in these off-the-books swim settings, they’re smiling, shouting and laughing. The setting induces that reaction. For example, Richmond, Virginia’s James River has several places where one can slide, seated, dozens of yards, riding the current atop and between rocks.

One August 2012 day, a burly, forty-something guy rolled up alongside the James on his Harley.He stepped down the small riverbank and began snorkeling in shallow water. I asked him what he was looking for. He said he often found rings that had slipped from the wet, shrunken fingers of those whose hands scraped the rocks as the water swept them, blissfully distracted, through these gaps.

This treasure hunter told me that he struggled in school because he had a learning disability. He dropped out as soon as he could and started a window-washing business. His work paid all his bills and enabled him to buy a house and his Hog. He said his flexible work schedule allowed him to drop into the river often during the summer. I was impressed that despite adversity he had built a life he loved.

He said that, based on engraved initials and embossed dates and schools on the rings, he had located some of these rings’ owners and returned their rings to them. He told me that he found and saved so many unmarked wedding bands that he eventually filled a bread bag with them. When the price of gold crested, he sold the bag for $43,000 in pre-Scamdemic dollars.

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I like the way natural water looks, feels, sounds, tastes and smells. Some people consider lake or river water spooky and yicky because you can’t see through it and it often has a rocky, slimy or weedy bottom. I’ve put my feet into plenty of river and lake bottom muck and vegetation. Nothing bad ever happened. Some also fear that a fish will bite them. They’ve taken too seriously Jaws and documentaries about Amazonian piranhas. Lake fish, which are mostly sunnies, can’t even break the skin. In El Salvador, dozens of small fish harmlessly nibbled on our feet for a half hour as we sat on rocks in a hillside stream.

Besides swimming in rivers and lakes, I’ve also often swum in the ocean, typically at the Jersey Shore. I like to swim during the twilight hours after the lifeguards have left, and sometimes in the dark. One evening 35 years ago, near sunset, I got pulled out by a rip tide. Based on that experience—five others drowned nearby on that same day—I can understand how some who get caught in such a current drown, as Malcolm Jamal Warner just did. Ocean swimmers should have decent skills, remain calm, avoid taking a big gulp, resolve to stay afloat when swimming parallel to shore doesn’t immediately yield progress and reassure themselves that salt water exerts extra buoyant force.

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At some lakes, rivers and streams, immersion is allowed. But other places have “No Swimming” signs. Police or ranger efforts to prevent plunges into these places vary, depending on the location and the day.

My wife, Ellen, is a rule follower. In contrast, I think some rules should be broken. Not in a way that endangers or annoys others. And not for its own sake. Instead, just to do something that you enjoy. Swimming during hot weather, for example.

Inverting Adam and Eve, I’ve often talked Ellen into entering forbidden water. I convinced her that we wouldn’t get caught. And that if we did, we wouldn’t get arrested. And that we wouldn’t get fined. And that if we did, paying the fine would be worth the fun we would have had.

As were those who said “two weeks to stop the spread” and “vaccines are safe and effective,” I was making all this up. It was Salesmanship 101: you convince other people to go along and leave them to deal with any unfavorable consequences.

While this is plainly unethical, much of the world operates in this way, including in much higher-stakes matters than the misdemeanor I proposed. Back in the day, many human lives were created via such short-sighted persuasion. It’s part of my heritage.

Ellen hates the heat. When it was above 95 degrees, she was more amenable to suggestion. She put on a bathing suit under summer clothes, grabbed a towel and came along with me, never agreeing aloud that we should do this. Accomplices often exhibit silent, tentative affirmation.

I told her that if something went wrong, she could blame me. Ellen is nicer than I am. I could imagine a municipal court judge fining and scolding me and letting her go. When we want to, we can imagine many implausible things. During Coronamania, many adults imagined that healthy people would die from a respiratory virus. It was as if they thought there was a monster under their bed.

After my sales pitch, I drove Ellen 20 miles to the vicinity of swimming spots I knew near the edge of the New York City Metro area. During droughts, officials locked the gates to the gravel parking lots in these water-containing, semi-wild areas. We parked a half-mile away and walked to the gate, wiggled past it and, in order to avoid being seen, ran down and/or up paths where, once around a bend and behind trees and boulders, we became invisible to the police or rangers.

Having sneaked in, we soaked for hours, some afternoons in a lake and others in a river with water in the mid-70s. On one of these occasions, as we sat in the river wedged between boulders, we saw a boy and a girl in their late teens also defying the park closure. Each gripped a towel as they sprinted across a bridge 75 yards away, toward the lake atop a long hill that Ellen and I went to on days when the park was open. Their mischief was a beautiful sight. In the same way that one roots for a movie hero to avoid capture, we silently rooted, from our river niche hideaway, for the sprinting teens to evade detection, as we had. As in REM’s Nightswimming, the fear of getting caught was part of the fun for them and us.

Because I had been there many times, I knew there was an un-treed area up ahead of the scofflaws and that a ranger might have been waiting there to nab them. That’s why we opted for the river that day, instead of the lake, which I calculated was A Bridge Too Far.

Nowadays, security cameras would capture all of our furtive movings about.

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Some days we brought along my parents’ golden retriever. He swam well and followed me into the water after I dove off a ten-foot boulder and into the lake, in which swimming was prohibited, even when the park was open. As many times as I dove in and swam out and back again, he leaped in and chased me. Because he tried to climb on me in the water, when he got near, I soon learned to dive below the surface and swim underwater, beneath him and back toward the lake’s edge. When I surfaced, I saw the confused, paddling dog wondering where I had gone. I called for him and he turned around and chased me. By then, I had a big enough lead that I could get back to the lakeshore, unscathed by his paws. When he got near the shore, I again dove off the rock and over his head and swam back out toward the lake’s center as he resumed his chase. Rinse. Repeat. Multiple times. He went home tired but happy.

So did we. After each of these long water sessions, Ellen and I remained cool for hours. On hot days, we still talk about how we used to chillax in water surrounded by trees and the delightfully refreshed aftermath. Since we’ve moved away from North Jersey, we go the Shore instead. It’s good. But I miss the woodsy water.

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Over 4,000 Americans, i.e., 1.3 out of every 100,000, drown each year. On three sad occasions, I’ve seen a deceased young person pulled from the water. All perished in places with still, shallow, lifeguarded water. The first victim was an urban seven-year-old, knocked unconscious when he hit his head on a metal handrail sloping into the water at the park where I worked. The second was a cognitively challenged 13-year-old, briefly left unwatched. The third, in his early twenties, had been drinking. None of them were seen in time because crowds obscured them.

In many aspects of life, risk is unevenly distributed. As in the above examples, personal characteristics make some activities riskier for some people than for others. Nonetheless, as during Coronamania, officials decree and apply one-size-fits-all rules.

Governments shouldn’t close either lakes or societies pretending to protect people who can protect themselves. I’m safer swimming illegally than I am sharing New Jersey roads with reckless, texting, drunk and increasingly high drivers. Two summers ago, I was sideswiped by one such motorist going 65 mph, as I was coincidentally heading for a twilight dip at the Jersey Shore. I’m also safer swimming unsupervised than I would have been if I had taken the mandated Covid shots. Governments forbade the former and required the latter. It makes you wonder about their motives.

One could say that governments assess risk poorly. But their mistakes often seem intentional. Ostensible safety regulations can have hidden agendas. This was certainly true during Coronamania, when governments opportunistically invoked safety concerns to justify a nonsensical, universal, unprecedented package of restrictions, wealth transfers and a fraud-facilitating liberalization of voting procedures. Many naive, fearful, opportunistic people bought in, even though The Virus posed an extremely low threat to the remotely healthy. And neither the lockdowns, masks and tests (the “NPIs”) nor shots safeguarded the public.

Aside from failing to deliver benefits, the Covid interventions imposed very high, predictable costs that most failed to foresee or consider.

By acting as if they were trying to protect us, the viral-overreacting government deprived hundreds of millions of much fun. Fun is essential. It builds mental and physical health. No one should be made to feel guilty for wanting to have some fun. No one killed any grandma/pa while doing so.

Beyond allowing people to enjoy the present, doing fun stuff creates valuable memories, as my above-summarized aquatic experiences show. Looking back at good times can offset inevitable, subsequent disappointments.

“Yeah, this (current situation) sucks. But remember that time when…”

Sharing fun activities with others also builds lasting bonds between those who did those things together. For me, immersing in natural water alongside others has helped to build relationships that provide benefits that far exceed swimming’s microscopic risks. Given fun’s high emotional worth, a society-wide, Coronamanic War on Fun presented, as is too often said these days, “an existential crisis.” In contrast to other invocations of this trite phrase, this label clearly applies to the Covid overreaction and the fun stolen during that period.

Intensifying human isolation during lockdowns and school closures caused widespread harm to the people these measures were said to protect. Yes, those who didn’t fear The Virus and refused to stay home or mask were still able to do some of the things they always did. But with so many buildings and other spaces locked, people couldn’t interact with others in the settings that normally brought them together.

Coronamania’s disruption of human interaction and false messaging about the shots created lasting ill-will between those who bought the Scam and demanded that others inject unnecessary and harmful substances versus those who rejected these lies, oppressive measures and shots. If government and media had allowed anti-lockdown and shot narratives to be heard and had encouraged discussion, instead or preventing it and allowed everyone to manage his/her own viral risk, the continued good health of those who rejected the NPIs and shot would have become more obvious. With minds opened, the NPIs and shots would have been exposed as phony and individual, social and economic outcomes would have been far better. Instead, because the Covophobes never heard why some opposed the NPIs and shots, they felt free to angrily and sanctimoniously dismiss others’ opposition.

The Scamdemic’s effects persist in various forms. The dysfunctional isolation of work-from-home arrangements initiated during Coronamania remains common. The economic interventions, also said to advance public safety, have caused much deeper, and longer-lasting, harm than they could ever have prevented. Via inflation, most have lost 20% of their savings. Similarly, phony concerns that so-called “misinformation”—which was actually all true—would threaten public safety have been used as a pretext to build and perpetuate a surveillance/censorship complex.

To offset boredom, depression and anxiety worsened by over-regulation and government and media fear mongering, legions of Americans were encouraged and subsidized to use psych meds and various forms of THC. Over the long term, these substances worsen the physical and mental health of those who rely on them.

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As has been true throughout nearly all of human history, during Coronamania, people should have the freedom to assess their own risks and accept the consequences for their actions. They shouldn’t blame, or sue others for, injuries incurred while taking risks. Neither governments nor courts exist to protect people from themselves.

In the name of safety, officials herd the public into chlorinated, monitored swimming pools. Swimming in unshaded, chemically-treated water contained within rectangles of aqua-painted concrete supervised by boys and girls blowing whistles is better than nothing. But it isn’t as evocative, beautiful or memorable as is dunking in a river or lake. And although one might cool off by sitting in front of an air conditioner, using water to cool off feels primally satisfying. It’s what our ancestors did.

Dysfunctional safetyism is also seen in countless regulations that serve principally as barriers to entry to various businesses or markets, as with farmers who want to sell raw milk, and in stringent building codes that inflate the already high cost of housing. Exalting safety presents its own dangers.

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I know my capabilities better, and care more about my survival, than do politicians and public health bureaucrats. If I were to make errors in judgment and die or become injured from doing something illegal, such as swimming in uncontrolled settings or declining “life-saving vaccines,” I, not the government, would pay the price for having done so. Given my personal stake, I’m motivated to see things clearly. Simultaneously, I understand my, and others,’ need to have some fun. I give due weight to that need whenever I decide how to spend my time.

Neither competent swimmers drowning nor viral deaths among the healthy during Coronamania were serious possibilities. Despite my ostensibly—but not remotely—risky swim excursions and vaxx refusal, I’m unsurprisingly still alive and fully functional. Beyond the happiness I experienced during afternoons, evenings and nights in unsupervised water, I have great memories of such water time, often shared with others.

Despite all of the fear mongering, and my Covid non-compliance, this wildly overhyped virus never killed me or anyone I knew. Though the shots seem to have already taken down a few. It turns out that my judgment was better than that of the public health “experts” and NPI-supporting politicians, as well as their often-vitriolic acolytes.