PORKY: (Uncertain softening) Well—gee—you dirty forlorn old dog—I d-didn …
CHARLIE: (Blinking and sniffing, talking mainly to blade of grass he picks up) All my life I’ve dreamed of the day I could go and live in the country—I’m not strong—I need lotsa fresh air—and milk—and cream. (Tiny cough) And fresh leafy vega-tabbles. (Breaks down and sobs through next sentence) Good clean wholesome farm living. (Cries softly)
PORKY: But I-I—didn’t—f …
CHARLIE: (Turning sadly away again, ignoring Porky) And now … (Big sniff) And now that I’ve got a chance to regain my health, you want to send me back to the city. (Leaps up stiffly, grabs throat, eyes bulging) The city!! I can see it all now—its high towers!! Cold!! Cruel!! Onimous! Closing down on you!! From every side! (Wheels stiffly around, pointing in terror) From every side!! Till you can’t breathe. Closer! Closer! (Grabs throat in own grip) Br-a-a-ck-k (Whisper) You can’t breathe!! All day!! All night! You can’t sleep!! The traffic! (Hesitates—eyes roll—silence) Beep-beep! Honk! Honk! Look out for that truck! Ar-roo-gah!! Look out for that taxi! Honk! Honk! Boing! Honk! Freep! Breep! Ring-g-g! Honk-beep-beep! (Quiet) (Sotto voce) Hark—what’s that? (Eyes roll, grabs heart, and points up) Look! It’s the towers! They’re falling!! (Screams) Ya-a-h! (Falls stiffly to ground, arm still pointing up)
PORKY: (Into scene, hands clasped) Why, you poor unsanitary old underprivileged mongrel, you—I-I didn’t kn-know—you can stay and get all clean-lived like me—you pathetic sallow creature, you.
CHARLIE: (Looks up) I wanta drink of water, and a cookie, and my very own rubber duck … and …
And so on.
As was said, if you have Charlie, you don’t need Daffy Duck. Charlie is an Old Dog of the Sea, and Sinbad was fortunate beyond his wildest dreams to have had that pleasant interlude with that old man, rather than that young old dog.
At any rate, better it should happen to Porky than to me. I met Charlie when I was old enough and experienced enough to handle him. If I had met a sophisticated self-centered slob like Charlie when I was a child, I most certainly would have turned away from dogs, perhaps pursued a life of canary lover at the very least.
Father taught us to swim early—even before he taught us to read. So I learned to swim before I learned to read. The reason for mastering swimming, Father said, was because of his distaste for drowned children. “I never knew a drowned child that was worth much,” he said. “Horrid, bloated things, fish-belly white, which, I suppose, is natural enough, since fish, like drowned children, spend a lot of time underwater.” Father’s distaste for dead moppets was not shared by Huckleberry’s friend Jim: “I alwuz liked dead people, en done all I could for ’em”—one of the sweetest and most mysterious statements in English literature.
Father had another simple straightforward statement about the ocean, the only valid one I have ever heard. “The ocean,” he said, “doesn’t care.”
This is all you know about the ocean, and all you need to know. Over the seventy-odd years of my life I have seen the wisdom of this statement many times. I have seen powerful swimmers washed ashore dead in an apparently pacific ocean; I have seen infants carried out to sea by a frothing riptide only to be cast back by a succeeding breaker. I have seen a whale crushed by its own weight on a receding tide, and I have seen a strange and wonderful white mare ride a breaker from straight out to sea—we watched her from among other whitecaps on a wind-tossed autumn day, a mile or so offshore, until she breasted the last wave and galloped off down the beach. I knew then and I know now that she came from Tahiti; I’ve seen her in Gauguin’s paintings.
“The sea,” Father repeated, “doesn’t care, but you do. Heed well.” Father often talked like one of the wolves in The Jungle Book: “Heed well Louis Pasteur: ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ A cat,” he went on, “can adjudge the speed of everything of possible danger to him except an automobile; that’s why cats get shot down so often by cars—their minds are not prepared. If you want to be smarter than a cat—which is unlikely—prepare your mind and your body for any contingency you can anticipate. It’s the lazy person’s way—and I do hope you are wise enough to be lazy—so learning to swim is not a sport. Being faster than someone else in the water is silly and ridiculous: a six-year-old child can trot faster than the best swimmer in the world can swim. The only thing you need to know about swimming is how to breathe when you’re in the water; if you can breathe, you can swim, and the important thing about swimming is to get where you want or need to go. It may be six feet if you fall into a swimming pool (most children who drown in swimming pools do so within six feet of the deck edge). It may be a mile or so if your boat founders. But one thing is certain: water is an alien element—you can’t breathe underwater. It’s that simple. So, if you want to save my feelings, learn to swim.
“Swimming,” my father went on to say, “is a form of transportation. Like walking, it can be done for pleasure. But when you stop walking, you don’t ordinarily sink, so never confuse the two.”
In 1922 or 1923, Duke Kahanamoku from Hawaii and Haig Priest of Australia had recently landed in Ocean Park with their twelve-foot mahogany surfboards, and surfboarding took root for the first time in America. Body surfing quickly followed, and we all became adept at this wonderful sport. Only strong men could handle the two- and three-hundred-pound boards, so we learned to make our bodies into boards—curling over the wave, not arching against it. To this day, it is a thrill to look down that surging
