Some Dogs Don’t Swim

The last time I was back there was a chain across the walkway of the dam over the Lemonweir River in the little town I spent my first eighteen years in. That would have been along about the summer of 1988 if I recall. Twenty years since I’d stood there in that high school gym and was told that the life I’d always known was over and good luck in the future.

That day in ’88 I stood there in front of a chain across the walkway of that dam that once was the pathway to a day of yelling, hollering, splashing, daring and in later years girls in two piece bathing suits. On the far side of that dam was the old swimming hole, the place where who knows how many generations of local kids had gone to learn to swim. That place where someone, I was never really sure who, once the ice had cleared would drag that old diving platform out into the middle of the river and anchor it there for the summer.

There were two ways of measuring who you were at that swimming hole and one of them was to be big enough and good enough to swim out to that raft. The other was to jump off the diving board just beside the spillway.

I’d never wondered about that dam, it had always been there and the why of it for me was obvious, so that on those hot and sticky days of summer I could go swimming all day long. There likely had to be another reason for it being there but in my case over the years it would serve a threefold purpose and that was more than enough work for any one dam as far as I was concerned. One of those purposes was to take away a fear.

The diving board attached to the side of the dam was long gone the day I stood on the other side of the river and looked across to that old memory. I’m sure someone had decided that there was something in the river and so for the safety of all swimming was no longer allowed. Kids would no longer get the chance to run out into that little shallow part, feel the sediment ooze up between their toes and always make sure they stayed away from the bloodsuckers waiting for them in the cattails. That was of course unless someone dared you to walk over there. No more would a kid stand there in water just over their mouth and nose, bouncing up and down while the river waters ran by them, one minute warm and the next mysteriously cool. Whoever makes those decisions had decided that what that town needed was chemically treated and government approved swimming pool and so no longer did that river and that old dam get to teach the little ones how to swim, the older ones how to not be afraid and the oldest to sit there on the grass listening to the shouts of joy and excitement of kids being kids.

But kids will be kids and back in the days when there was no chain across that dam, when the diving board was still securely attached to that wall, when the raft still floated in the middle of the river there came a moment when two boys, a dog, that diving board and the river would meet, or so the story goes.

Sometimes the best intentions of young boys go terribly askew mostly because they just don’t know any better. I don’t doubt they thought they were doing nothing wrong and everything right the day they walked their English bulldog down to the dam to see if he could swim. If you’ve ever seen an English bulldog you’ll know that they have rather stout bodies and not a whole lot for legs. Though I’ve never followed up on it I’m told that some of the breed does swim but others simply can’t.

They led their friend and companion out to the end of that diving board rising some eight or more feet over the river and not more than thirty feet from the closest spillway. I’m sure they were certain that everything would be fine when they picked him up and released him to gravity and his fate. I suspect they ran down to the edge of the water anticipating their trusting friends’ swift emergence from below the water and they would yell and holler for him to swim back to them.

Like I’ve already said, I’m told some English bulldogs can swim and others don't.

I miss you Nat King Cole

Trying to figure out why is probably impossible but I just heard Nat King Cole singing "Unforgettable" in my head. I haven't thought of Mr. Cole in a long time but right there, in the dark, as I'm heading to the bathroom, I hear his unforgettable voice singing to me. It made me happy and sad all at once because that's when the floodgates of memory suddenly kicked in. And so there I was, in the bathroom in the middle of the night with a montage of sounds and sights charging one after another toward the front of my mind, each yearning, no demanding, my private attention.

"Unforgettable" by Nat King Cole may have been the very first song that triggered something akin to passion inside me.

Mr. Dalke ran the shoe shop and in the summer the radio in his workshop could be heard a half a block away. I use to love to go into his shop and look at all his tools and the machinery for polishing and shining shoes of all shapes and sizes. It didn't hurt that he sold minnows for fishing either along with red wigglers and night-crawlers. Those were the sorts of things an eight year old boy could literally get his hands into.

But it was the music that day coming from his shop as I was walking across the dusty, empty except for the propane tanks, lot. And to recall it today I was walking toward the music and nothing else. That voice and those instruments that suddenly filled my head with something new, exciting and for an eight year old boy life changing were sounds that got me to feel something I wouldn't understand for years to come.

Today it seems we're constantly being assaulted with sounds and images but in those days, in that little Wisconsin town, sounds consisted pretty much of semi-trucks shifting gears through town, the occasional distant sound of the train whistle as it approached another crossing and in the summer robins singing. Mr. Dalke's radio always broke that rhythm but not with loud and raucous "look at me!" lyrics and sounds; rather something that was far less intrusive and much more an addition to the world around me rather than a subtraction. There was no yelling and screaming, cussing and cursing, not from Mr. Dalke's radio at least.

So, as I sit here tonight I remember a world and a time that maybe all these years later I'm finally realizing was a world that wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but was a world where an eight year old boy could feel something inside coming to life while trucks shifted gears out on US 12 & 16, when the wind was just right the "thump, thump" of a farmers' tractor out plowing fields, where robins searched for worms on greener than green lawns and Mr. Nat King Cole sang "Unforgettable."

Yes, I miss you Nat King Cole.