Diving Lessons

Abstract

Five bodies crammed in a dull red ’67 Volkswagen Beetle hurtling through the darkness of Grand Traverse County, Michigan. At least one of the bodies is wet from skinny dipping in Spider Lake (mine); others are dampened by late summer humidity and/or nervous sweat. Some of the skin in the car is more tacky than wet, chilled by shock, disappointment, anger, or the diuretic of too much alcohol. No one is speaking. The attempt to tune in WCCW on the AM radio with the broken knob has failed. But it's just as well. With the windows in the un-air-conditioned car rolled down, even rock & roll would be difficult to hear above the whine of tires, the whoosh of night washing around the sail-shaped window vents, the static of crickets and frogs.I am driving, though it's not my car, and in spite of the general acknowledgment among the other passengers that I have just been injured. Maybe seriously. My forehead is bleeding; the left pocket of my short-sleeved madras shirt contains the fragments of more than one of my teeth—those that were not spewed into Spider Lake during the short, violent rant of curses that I'd performed. I am driving not only because I am now the most sober person in the car, but because I am the only one who can drive a stick.We are headed to someone's aunt's house. Once there, I'll drink another Southern Comfort and Squirt while someone's aunt, a school nurse, will clean out the lake-bottom grit from the most obvious of my wounds—a one-inch scrape on my forehead, at the hairline—and where I'll assure everyone that I'm really all right, except for the cracked teeth. No big deal. At least one of the shattered incisors had been an oft-filled baby tooth anyway, as it was a genetic trait of my father's side of the family to not develop certain permanent teeth, among them incisors and the far back molars called “wisdom teeth.”Days later, I would question whether my lack of wisdom teeth had in fact precipitated that night's stupidity.Sobbing. For my stupidity. For my punishment. For my reckless, mistaken love. For my selfish and hurtful arrogance. For my drunkenness itself. For my uncertainty in “forcing the overwhelming question.” [“Do I dare?” And, “Do I dare?”]1 For my [prescient] sober embarrassment. For my parents’ embarrassment (—I, the “golden boy” of their six children, according to my sister Margaret). For the lessons I had taught but apparently not learned myself, even as I was just then embarking on what would become a teaching career. For my inability to impede the sobbing. For coveting the wife of my best friend. For my jealousy and anger. And—just possibly—for my pain, as the alcohol was wearing off.But not, sad to say, for the awareness of my brush with death. That would come later.More than two hours in Dr. Shipley's dental chair as he extracted shards of teeth from my gums. Shipley's office was attached to his home on Peninsula Drive, in Traverse City, a half mile or so from Traverse City Central High School, from which I had graduated five years before. (Someone's niece—at whose house I'd apparently spent the night—had driven me to Dr. Shipley's, once I got my sobbing under control.) While I had not visited the dental office with any regularity since going off to college, Dr. Shipley had been our family dentist for so long that he was willing to see me as an emergency case despite it being Labor Day Weekend. After excavating the ruins of a set of teeth he had spent years maintaining, Dr. Shipley filed down the rough spots on the teeth that still might be saved—temporarily, at least.I would return in two weeks for him to begin reconstruction. (And continue appointments biweekly for the next few months, then monthly for over a year . . . )When he'd finished fixing what he could, I was so groggy and numb that I was unable, without help, to lift my head from the dental chair. I assumed it was due to the immoderate amount of Novocain that had been necessary. But Dr. Shipley thought otherwise. He suggested that a trip to the ER at Munson Hospital was in order.“Cervical spine (C-spine) injuries,” reports Dr. Igor Boyarsky, in an online article on C2 Fractures,2 “are the most feared of all spinal injuries because of the potential for significant deleterious sequelae. Correlation is noted between the level of injury and morbidity/mortality (i.e., the higher the level of the C-spine injury, the higher the morbidity and mortality).”For many years after my skinny-dipping farce, in the rare, intimate moments when I overcame my humiliation and confessionally exposed my drunken folly, I claimed the break was at C2, for that's what I seemed to remember being told. Then, in my early sixties, when I underwent an MRI for symptoms that my physician thought might be related to past injuries, the nuclear med technician could see no evidence of damage at C2 but thought that C5 showed scarring. My request for records from Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, to verify the exact location of the fracture, proved fruitless. Because I had not been formally “admitted” to the hospital—the injury was treated in the emergency room and then I was referred to Dr. Clark, an orthopedic surgeon—no patient intake forms, no x-rays, had been retained. Instead, the only copies of records that were located by the staff at Munson Medical Center (and forwarded to me) documented the treatment of my multiple-fractured left shoulder, which had been the result of another impetuous, youthful stunt, for which I was hospitalized during the final three days of Advent in 1963 [and another story entirely].Much of the current information about cervical fractures is now found at sports medicine websites, for the simple reason that such fractures are most often caused by a forceful impact, or traumatic blow to the head, and that “impact sports, or participating in sports that have a risk of falling or ‘snapping’ the neck (skiing, diving, football, cycling) are all linked to neck fractures.”3 Consequently, the C-spine industry has expanded exponentially over the past three decades as sports participation has burgeoned at every level (individual, community, school, professional, and semiprofessional). The treatment for a broken neck, however, has not radically changed since 1973, and “depends upon which cervical vertebrae was damaged and the extent of the fracture. A minor (compression) fracture is often treated with a cervical collar or brace worn for six to eight weeks . . . ”I wore my brace for the better part of three months, almost to Thanksgiving. Still, the treatment suggests my broken neck was not too serious, more likely C5 than C2.I would claim, in my occasional recounting of the incident, that the depth of the water I dove headfirst into was “six inches.” Witnesses would argue eight or ten. No one ever suggested that it was deeper than a foot. I can recall wading back to shore after the accident—cursing and screaming, and fishing pieces of teeth from my mouth—with the surface of the water barely reaching my shins. Days later, physical evidence suggested that the water was shallow indeed. While most of the initial triage had been directed to my bleeding skull and mouth, I later discovered abrasions on my knees, shins, and the tops of my feet as well.My roommate John, a biology major, would occasionally store his homework in the apartment fridge our senior year of college. Consisting of a cat carcass—or, at times, a dog shark—the relevant parts of a dissected and plastic-bagged body were labeled with small, crimped, color-coded slips scripted in difficult handwriting: lungs, kidneys, heart, muscles, arteries, nerves. Other than the six-packs of beer we would run “over the hill” to get for the weekend (Boyle County, Kentucky, being dry), John's cadavers were often our only cold storage.What the separate parts were called was easy. Even I, an English major, outperformed the average score on the mock GREs in biology (John and I exchanging our tests for the fun of it; he outscored me in literature). But ask how it all functioned together, and more often than not some visiting fraternal wit would retell the old joke about dismantling an engine to see how it worked and after reassembling it having parts left over that didn't seem to fit.“What have we got to lose?” I would tease. “When you're done studying, let's put the cat back together, hit it with jumper cables, and return it to the alley, to live with the other strays.”I have provided a similar response—facetious and deceptive—whenever I'm asked why I dove into the shallows of Spider Lake in the first place. The fact is, I knew better. I had taught swimming for years by then—diving do's and don'ts—and had included on the written portion of the test I gave to my Junior Lifesaving class what I thought was an obvious question: “True or False: You should never dive into unfamiliar water.”But logical explanation, it seems (or even a philosophical explanation, for that matter), has yet to account for youthful abandonment—our risk-ripe adolescence stretching into our twenties like an elastic launcher of a balsa airplane. Especially in the America where I grew up—Midwestern, middle class, mid twentieth century—and where the prosperity of postwar economics, combined with parental leniency, tended to delay one's maturity. (Some called it privilege; others called it spoiled.)“Boys will be boys,” it's often said, assigning a gender-specific excuse to youthful transgressions. Others (my mother included) have been known to apply the seemingly forgivable catch-all of boys will be bored. Still others argue it may be genetic, a mutation of male DNA.In other words, there may not be a single explanation.I was not a typical high school student—if “typical” is defined by the teenage characters portrayed in popular novels, films, and locker-room apocrypha of the 1960s—at least in terms of the consumption of alcohol. I did not break into my father's liquor cabinet and steal off with my buddies to some ramshackle fort to get stink-faced. Nor did I ply the “loosest,” most well-hung girl of my 10th-grade class with vodka filched from the bottle stored in the out-of-reach cupboard above the refrigerator—and then re-line with tap water, so no one would know—in order to impress her (i.e., to cop a feel). Throughout high school, I felt a certain moral superiority to such immaturity. I did not need to drink to get a buzz on (I argued); my life already presented me with enough hormonal ups and downs that no other stimulants were necessary. In other words, I was pretty much a dweeb. Even throughout the better part of my college years I did not drink—let alone do other drugs, which were coming into popularity (and readily available) about that time.As for other vices: I had “tried” cigarette smoking as a sophomore in high school, just as I had, about the same time, tried out for the tennis team. In fact, it may have been the influence of other members of the tennis team that mitigated the smoking, as I was not any good at tennis and, by way of prior embarrassment and humiliation, not particularly fond of competitive sports in general (not to mention bending to the authority of peer pressure). I soon quit both. Tennis took practice, I discovered. And after an exceptionally vomitive poker party (involving cigars), and a certain incident with an orange-hot, free-ranging cigarette among the upholstery of a Ford Mustang traveling about eighty miles an hour along M-22, I became prudish about smoking. Even (some might say) preachy. With minor exceptions, I became a goody two-shoes to the extreme. Consequently, I couldn't imagine I'd be drinking alcohol until I was able to do so legally.I started in Europe. I was twenty, a junior in college, and spent the winter term of 1971 in Paris, studying French language at the Alliance Française and, at the American Centre, studio art—sculpture, to be exact, working with a Romanian artist who had been a disciple of Brancusi. Paris being what it is, and artists (and students) what they are, and the cost of beer or wine more affordable than bottled water, and the “drinking age” in France somewhat amorphous—I began drinking alcohol in earnest.Once back in the States—either in Michigan (my parents’ residence) or in Kentucky (where I attended college)—I was close enough to the legal age (twenty-one in both states at the time) that I often wasn't ID'd, not to mention that everyone I knew (my roommate John, in particular) was already old enough to buy. Consequently, my twenty-first birthday, in November of 1971, was anticlimatic—just another day of the week.But then—and this is where I could easily place blame if I were inclined to—on New Year's Day of 1972, the legal drinking age nationwide was reduced to eighteen (in conjunction with the reduction of voting age). Suddenly, the world as I was beginning to know it—bars and parties and attention being paid—was rich with three years worth of (legally) inebriated women testing their sexual freedoms and maturity.I suppose one could argue that my burgeoning and extravagant enthusiasm for alcohol at the time may in some ways have been a subconscious attempt to catch up on what I felt I had missed during the temperance of my high school years. Or maybe it was a sign of the liberating times—the political backwash of the Women's Lib, Civil Rights, Free Love, and Student Power movements of the late 1960s. Or perhaps it truly was genetic and I was just a late bloomer.My Grandmother Urquhart's cottage was reputed to be one of the earliest summer residences on the south shore of Big Platte Lake in Benzie County, Michigan. The cottage was located on Bixler Road, adjacent to the Bixlers’ own place. Mr. Bixler was a kind, friendly, unpretentious overseer of sorts, given to hailing summer mornings by the ringing of a farm bell at exactly 8 a.m. In addition to his cottage, and perhaps a few rentals along the shore, Mr. Bixler owned several acres of property on the non-lakefront side of the road, including a large field of randomly spaced evergreen shrubs, which he took pains to keep mowed and trimmed, though the parcel seems to have served no other purpose than as a playground for vacationing children. The field was a perfect arena for hide-and-seek, our nightly entertainment during the weeks my cousins and I spent together at my grandmother's.Lake access for the renters at Johnson's Resort bordered the other side of Grandmother's cottage. The small cabins of the resort itself were across the road. In contrast to Mr. Bixler's benevolent amicability, Mr. Johnson was an ogre. More than once when we were playing baseball in the open lot, old man Johnson would step out of the second floor balcony of his house and yell at us—GET OUT OF THERE, YOU ROTTEN KIDS!—which sent us scurrying through the cedars that defined the property line. (Only much later would I come to understand that Mr. Johnson's vehemence was nothing more than gimlet-enhanced teasing.)After my father bought a cottage of our own on Platte Lake, a quarter mile down the shore, I'd stay at my grandmother's only on occasion, as for sleepovers when Mr. Bixler's grandsons were visiting (Brad Bixler being the same age as my cousin Nancy and me). My grandmother, in fact, had begun to spend less time at the cottage, having gotten to the age (and health) where she seldom desired—or was able—to spent the entire summer “Up North,” nor did she have much interest in making the six-hour drive from Detroit by herself; as a result, my Aunt Sue and Uncle Nelson (Sue being my mother's younger sister) began spending more time there. A physical education/health teacher and textbook salesman (respectively), they had liberal summer vacation time. Uncle Nelson, in fact, had taken over the care and maintenance of the cottage and begun to enlarge it, as the two small bedrooms were insufficient space for three teenage daughters, let alone additional cousins. We began to call the cottage “Sue and Nels’.”My cousin Nancy, the youngest daughter, was my age, having been born just three weeks before me. As a result of our age and family proximity, Nancy and I spent pretty much every summer day together—swimming, boating, fishing, riding bikes, lounging on the dock, or, if the weather was rainy, playing board games, Chinese checkers, or cards. But after dark, after hide-and-seek in Bixler's field, we'd generally find our way back to our separate cottages and our own beds. Except for the occasional sleepover.It was during one of those rare cousinly sleepovers at grandmother's cottage that I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sounds of a struggle: grunting and moaning, shushing noises, cabinets bumping, screen doors clacking, curses . . . At first I'd wondered if the monster raccoon we'd seen rifling through the garbage cans the night before had somehow gotten into the kitchen and was frolicking among the leftover snacks and treats we adolescents had disorganized on the countertops. But when I stepped out of the storage-cum-sleeping room to investigate, I found my older cousins standing in the kitchen watching my drunken uncle trying to wrestle my drunken aunt into the house. There seemed to be an argument going on as to how it should be accomplished—one person applying more physical force than the other person thought necessary, and so resistant to the idea, etc.—though I'm not sure that either one of them even knew what the ultimate goal was. It was my first experience with “falling down” drunks. One of my older cousins entreated me—repeatedly—to go back to bed. “It's nothing to worry about,” she said, in what I would later recall as a strangely unaffected voice. So I took her advice.In the morning, nothing about the incident was mentioned.In the instance of driving one's head into the bottom of Spider Lake with such force that one's tongue is permanently “tattooed” and several of one's teeth are fractured like parish headstones subjected to a sledge hammer, the result is a blend of several distinct tastes: the chalky meat of an overbaked largemouth bass that was lured from beneath a swag of lily pads in a slow-moving muck-bottomed pond; the gritty marl that covers every fallen branch, clam shell, or stone in a river-fed lake, like those we'd collected as boys and scraped to reveal the iconography of fossil; the rust of iron, as from seldom-used cottage water pipes or long-exposed ship cables; unoiled oarlocks; the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow”4 of gasoline suspended in the unbailed water of an aluminum fishing boat . . . My mother would have seen it as a familial or social responsibility, given our economic position; my father would have seen it as a marital consequence. As a result, in the late 1950s, my parents often hosted family or neighborhood parties at our rambling lakefront house on Middlebelt Road in Bloomfield Hills. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July, Labor Day. A good number of these gatherings were recorded on sixteen-millimeter film—my father had the latest equipment—and in many instances those films have come to serve in place of my memories of the seven years we lived there (from the time I was one until I was eight).My parents were not drinkers, although they felt compelled by their position as upper middle class to socialize, so my father often had a beer or two as host. He also would allow us kids a small sampling, in the bottom of a five-ounce Dixie Cup (which we would retrieve from the dispenser next to the bathroom sink). As Bloomfield Hills was a suburb of Detroit, he often drank Stroh's—“supporting local,” as we now say. Stroh's had a taste like no other beer (the best selling at that time being Schlitz, Blatz, or Pabst), though to be honest I wouldn't have been able to distinguish differences. To me, Stroh's had the color and carbonation of Vernor's ginger ale—another Detroit product—which I often (play-acting) claimed was beer. But there was an odd, uninhabited-room taste about it as well—not unlike my Grandmother Urquhart's cottage—a musty, old newspaper taste, with a fragrance of insect casings and water from a neglected hand pump. And then an aftertaste: the fishy porch screens of a morning on the lake after a rain.We were living in that house on Pine Lake when my oldest brother, Robert, immediately upon his graduation from Bloomfield Hills High School, enlisted in the Army. Given what I now know about my brother, it's likely that he had begun to drink beer while still in high school. And it's even more likely that it was Stroh's, the brand he was faithful to right up until his death from cancer in 1991, a few months shy of his fifty-second birthday.At the time I entered Centre College as a transfer student in 1969, the phys ed requirement consisted of two units, which could be selected from a variety of courses. I was able to satisfy one of those requirements by teaching a Junior Lifesaving course for the Boyle County American Red Cross, Centre's natatorium being the only indoor pool in the county at that time. It was a win–win situation, as I needed to teach at least one course a year in order to maintain my Water Safety Instructor (WSI) certification, and I had no intention of returning to another summer of lifeguarding and swimming instruction at Elmwood Township beach near Traverse City, which I had done the two summers prior. While I wasn't very keen on teaching in a pool—to someone who grew up on lakes, the deliberate and limited length and width of such a “body” of water was constrictive, less than invigorating, not to mention chemically hard on the eyes and hair—I nonetheless thought it would be an easy way to get phys ed credit without having to participate in any team or group sports (which, as a result of several painful high school shower room experiences, I had aversion to).To satisfy the second requirement, I took a diving class. I was a passable platform diver, having begun as a fearless eight-year-old launching myself headfirst off the upper dock at Beulah Public Beach, and then honing my jackknives and swans from various freighter “pilings,” both active and abandoned, that serve as reminders of the glory days of Great Lakes shipping. Much of my lifeguarding job at Elmwood Township beach, in fact, consisted of deterring risk takers from climbing up and diving off the pilings at the coal docks, which were adjacent to the public swimming area. They were dangerous: weathered telephone-pole-sized posts thrusting up from broken slabs of marine concrete and wound together with disintegrating, tetanus-rich iron cables. Yet no sooner was the beach closed for the day—or whenever “business was slow” (that is, when no one was looking)—we lifeguards were the ones out on the pilings, propelling ourselves toward who-knew-what.Of springboards, I had very little experience. I could cannonball from the one-meter board with the best of them or, with any luck, draw the attention of bikini-clad onlookers with a vast array of “crazy” dives (developed in my youth by meeting any challenge set up by my brothers on those rare summer travels when the family stayed at a motel with a pool and diving board). But springing to do a backward summersault caused me some trouble. And my first attempt at a forward flip off the one-meter board smacked a certain amount of confidence right out of me. As a result, the three-meter springboard was more than I wanted to handle. While eventually I was able to complete the minimal requirements for the course—I could do a passable backward pike, but my forward one-and-a-half was nothing to store on film—I decided to stick with solid surfaces. The edge of a pool, say, or a sturdy dock.More than once during my time at the Boles Natatorium was I encouraged to join the Centre College swim team, and each time I refused (see “aversion to team sports,” above). But I'd often thought that some of the encouragement to join the team stemmed from my notable execution of a racing dive, which was, as they say, awesome.Lines from Adrienne Rich's Poem “Diving into the Wreck”: The words are purposes.The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.5In the air after I'd left the dock but before I'd hit the water. At that moment, I was fearless; I considered myself in peak physical form—unencumbered by (possibly mischosen) fashion, confident (in my diving abilities), knowledgeable (that I would draw attention, make a “splash” [so to speak]), and, by all accounts, attractive to the person I wanted to impress (someone's niece). The future was spread out before me like a sixteenth-century geographer's map of the world. I was single, educated [sic], had money in the bank (from a summer's occupation as a potato chip distributor), and had just finished my first week of teaching as a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University. I drove a sporty Plymouth Barracuda, had recently acquired a very cute puppy (“chick magnet”), and shared an apartment close to campus with a young man who was seldom home. Life, as they say, was good. In that air—the warm, moist, cricket- and frog-sung air in which I was suspended (however briefly)—I had no reason to think that it could get much better. The stars shone numerous and bright; the night was beautiful; I belonged to it.Would that I could have stopped time then! If for no other reason than as a reminder of how indifferent and fragile our lives actually are.“Is it deep enough to dive?”“I don't think so,” said a voice.“Probably a couple feet, at most,” said another voice.“Not a good idea,” said a third.“Not even a racing dive?” I said.6I have in front of me a two-and-a-half-inch square black-and-white photo of my father diving off a raft in Platte Lake. The picture is dated August 1963, and my father is caught mid dive, suspended, which is fairly remarkable given the technology of photography at the time. The photo was taken with a simple Cub Scout camera that had been given to me by my Aunt Mary—my father's only sister—the year before. What possessed me to take the snapshot is the fact that I had never seen my father swim until that day—let alone dive—and I was astonished by it.Years later, when I discovered this photo in a box of childhood mementos I'd left in storage, I rediscovered my astonishment, so much so that I was moved to try and record it in a poem:Wave-laced Platte Lake lacks color,a steelhead gray in black-and-white,while the bold horizon's forest of pineand State Park campfire smoke closesdark and unfocused on the hottest dayof August 1963. The day of my father'slast swim. What compelled him theneven now isn't clear—he refuses to say—a man more known to love the faster watersof a trout-packed stream. And howI happened to have my Cub Scout Kodak handyseems miraculous.Perhaps he only thought to catch—what I on the dock must have thoughtas he splashed half-laughing up at me—the trout-quick silver of a perfect moment.7My father's splashing up at me was captured in another photo, which shows a playful smirk on his face—the closest thing to a smile he was ever willing to share.In that respect, I am said to be like my father.The bottom of Big Platte Lake varies depending upon where along the shore you are. To the east, where the Platte River empties into the lake, the bottom is black-silty and bog-like, what I always think of as “brackish,” though mostly for the sound of the word, as I am aware that the proper definition of brackish denotes “containing salt; briny” and there is nothing salty about Platte Lake. Instead, the bottom along the eastern shore, as I remember it, was mostly what we boys called “mucky”: dark, fine, easily disturbed sediment, “teeming” (as they say) with aquatic life. The small bay where the river enters the lake was a prime location for bass, turtles, and frogs, what with the rich abundance of fallen cedar and pine trees in various stages of rot and molt (detritus of extensive logging), not to mention a Monet-envious engorgement of lily pads. Just east of the mouth, where the North Branch of the Platte River drains from Little Platte Lake (and slows to the point of being called “The Deadstream”—the local road named for it), the current was so reduced as to be easily maneuvered in a fourteen-foot rowboat with a ten-horse outboard. In the bay, the movement of water was negligible. If not for an occasional breeze, one could cast for bass among the lily pads there without need of an anchor.Along the northwestern shore, where the river empties from Platte Lake and commences a jaunty, reckless journey to Lake Michigan, the water flows more rapidly, reducing the bottom to bright, gravelly, mostly golf- and baseball-sized stones, interspersed with an occasional cotter-pin-shearing rock. By the time the river reaches the big lake, it's mostly sand. More the fast, clear habitat of trout and smelt than that of bass or turtle, the river's relentless and heady escape from the deepest part of Big Platte Lake allows very little sediment.The southern shore, where my father bought our cottage, was “rocky,” though three sections of dock would generally get one out into what Mark A. Tonello calls “predominately sand, with large stretches of gravel shoals.”8 Our “beach” was more like gravel shoal: stones of various sizes, commingled with clams and clam shells, snails and snail shells, deadwood and reeds, and other forms of natural debris, generally of a uniform color (grayish/green—the term “uniform” being used ambiguously here), encrusted as it was with what seems to be properly called “marl.”9 As such, being of uncertain footing and slippery, and mined with penknife-sharp fragments of mollusks, the shallows were not swimmer friendly (thus, the dock), though it was, for young boys, a veritable playground, rich with water life and other forms of entertainment. I would spend hours fooling around in the shallows, scooping up crayfish from their hiding places, netting minnows, antagonizing clams.My brothers and I