Some days start later than others. And they are starting later and later these days. That’s just my own biorhythm, I suppose. That’s something fixable, at least. When I finally made my way after the reading portion of the day, and past the eating lunch phase, and the extra reading phase, I decided to go outside.
It was quite warm indeed, this afternoon.
Like I said, some days start late.
I decided to go for a swim. And this is the story of that swim.
It was a day for a 3,000 yard swim, because I am a lousy swimmer. See, I swim and figure, This takes forever, and so at the end of the effort, I don’t want to just repeat it. It’s that interminable build to the finish of these “longer” distances. I don’t want to spend all of that time — because I’m slow — getting up to the goal, and then achieving the same goal, and all of that time — because I’m slow — doing it again.
So, I figure, I will swim this distance and then, the next time, swim a greater distance, and so on.
This is not counterintuitive, but probably counterproductive. So since I swam 3,000 yards last time, but it had been two weeks since my last swim, I figured I should probably just swim the 3,000 today.
But my body, pretty much my entire body, had a different idea.
It takes me a while to warm up. And that time came and passed me by on this swim. You can tell, because it just feels like the same continual “meh” for 700 yards and then some more of that. At varying times it felt like I was breaking through that, for lack of a better phrase, and then swimming well.
That would last for a few yards at a time.
Then I started making little concessions to the effort. I’ll stop at 1,500. But I kept going. It kept feeling not great. I’ll get out of the pool at 2,000. Somewhere around there, and there’s not a way this really makes sense — because I’m slow — the lengths click off more quickly. It’s a mind thing, I’m sure. A mental thing. Maybe the repetition becomes meditative.
And so when I got to 2,000 yards I said, I’ll stop at 2,500, because the swim still wasn’t a good one. The whole of it required attention. I was willing my arms forward, down and through. It wasn’t an automatic thing, which maybe it should be. When you think of it, if you run, you don’t think “Left-right-left-right; pump the arms, pump the arms.” You just think “Run.” And, if you’re like me, you think, “Stop running!” In this swim I found I had to be conscious of every little thing or it wouldn’t happen.
Which is how you just wind up floating and going nowhere, I guess.
I got to 2,500 and then I thought, 3,000 is just down there, may as well.
So, I did that. At which point I returned to my original point, and the reason I’m not a good swimmer — aside from being slow — is that I don’t want to just repeat what I’ve already done. To my way of thinking, it should all be progressive.
A real swimmer, or a craftsman of any sort, would say something about the process. The perfection, even the improvement, comes from that effort. But, man, all of that up to that point is also a part of the process. And I’m still slow. I always will be slow. But, today, I swam 3,200 yards.
Trees in the backyard. It’s one of those where the photo doesn’t meet the moment.
Nice as this might be, it was more impressive in person.
When I went out to check the mail this evening, I looked up once again. A plane just flew behind this tree, headed to places unknown.
The plane was going to Vermont. I looked it up on an app.
When I looked in another direction, another tree looked like this. I’m not sure where that light comes from, or why it shows up this brightly in the photograph, but the camera sees more than the naked eye.
And underneath those trees I checked the mail. And, because it was finally a temperature that allowed me to linger outside for a few moments, I looked down.
Which is how I came to be pulling up weeds just before midnight.
We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 42nd installment, and the 74th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.
I think this is one of the county’s last war memorial installments. And this one is humbly placed, sitting by the fire station on the edge of town. And it’s a little place.
It all sits in one little fenced off square, which is always well maintained, though I’m not sure how they get the lawnmower through that tiny little gate.
It was a warm summer day when they dedicated this in 1996. The high was 94 degrees, and then a light rain in the afternoon knocked down the temperature. On the day when the people of this town learned of the surrender of Japan, in August 1945, it was cloudy and 80 degrees.
There are 167 names on that marker. In 1940, 1,722 lived in this township.
The war called nine percent of the town.
Private E. Stanley Bakley enlisted with the Marines when he was 17. He shipped out to join the 4th Marine Division. He was killed on Iwo Jima before his 19th birthday.
John P. Cole, if I have the correct one, served in the famed 15th Infantry Regiment. He was 22 years and two weeks old when he died in 1944. The regiment:
On February 15, 1942, the 15th Infantry Regiment was assigned the duty of defending the Washington coastline from Seattle to Canada. In May 1942 orders arrived for the regiment to move to Fort Ord. The soldiers received additional training to become combat ready. In September the regiment was sent to Camp Pickett, Virginia, to await overseas shipment. On October 24, 1942, the 15th departed from Norfolk, Virginia, as part of the 3rd Infantry Division, bound for French Morocco. The regimental combat actions were Fedala, North Africa, with an assault on November 8, 1942; Licata, Sicily, on July 10, 1943; Salerno, Italy, September 18, 1943; Anzio, Italy, landing January 22, 1944; Southern France operations August 15, 1944; entering Germany on March 13, 1945, and arriving in Austria on May 5, 1945. The regiment spent 31 months in combat.
Corporal Jay C. Doblow Jr. was also 22 years old. He has a marker in a cemetery about 15 miles from here and another at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He served in the 9th Combat Cargo Squadron, which was active in India and Burma.
Howard E. Hewitt was commissioned in California as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Force. He was a bombardier in the 365th Bomber Squadron. He was killed in October of 1944 when his B-17 was shot down over Germany, trying to bomb an airfield in a town near the modern Czech border. Only two of the 10 crew members survived. Awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the air medal with three oak leaf clusters, he is at rest in Belgium. The plane had been in the 365th for just two months.
Paul L. Hutchinson was a seaman second class in the naval reserve. He was 21 years old when he died. He’s buried in Panama.
Joseph Kachrosky joined the Army in 1941. He served in anti-aircraft artillery roles, and somehow with the British Army. By 1944 he was a sergeant in the United States Fifth Army. He had fought in Africa, Tunisia, Sicily and Salerno, he went in early at Casablanca. The men in the Fifth had some of the toughest fighting of the war, clawing their way north through Italy. Lieutenant General Mark Clark, who commanded that army, said in March of ’44 that it was “Terrain, weather, carefully prepared defensive positions in the mountains, determined and well-trained enemy troops, grossly inadequate means at our disposal while on the offensive, with approximately equal forces to the defender.” Kahrosky and all of his fellow soldiers felt those things most keenly, most directly. He was killed that same March, in Anzio, one of the 5,000 allied servicemen killed in that six-month campaign.
PFC Carl B. Lloyd was a private in Company C of the 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion. He was 28 or 29 when he was killed. His battalion had seen action in northern France, Ardennes-Alsace, and the Rhineland. He died in February of 1945 while his comrades were fighting their way across the Saar River, a well fortified waterway that was 150 feet wide and 15 feet deep, in Germany. He’s buried, nearby, in Luxembourg.
Finally, Lawrence Tighe was a PFC in the 102nd Medical Battalion of the 27th Infantry Division. They served across the Pacific. His war ended in November of 1943, just 26 years old. He was buried at the National Memorial of the Pacific.
What things did they see and do and endure, what did they miss most of home? What has changed about this place since they were here? What did they think about when they looked up at those same stars on some long ago summer night?
If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.
