CANAL/ DOGS OF EBERLEIN STREET

I was barely 15, but what I saw and did – and the decisions I made -  at the canal that late winter day, and what I saw others do and not do, is still with me more than 50 years later. I’ve told it to students in my martial arts classes, as a way to get them to think – ahead of time – about how important it is to move when it is time to move, when a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

                                             Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town.

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, broken‑down pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the four‑letter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad.

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!"

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold.

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenaline‑jerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An.

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two armlengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people.

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy.

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.          

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well‑directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.

The following story is about the time I felt the deepest fear of my young life. I would remember it in Vietnam. I still remember it.

Dogs of Eberlein Street

     I was sixteen. We lived in the Shasta View Apartments in Klamath Falls, another leftover WWII housing project that we lived in for most of my childhood because they were always the cheapest. The project was on the far side of town from the high school, and since it was winter and I was in basketball or wrestling practice every day after school and missed the bus, I walked home in the dark.

     I'd long since found the shortest way home. By the time I got to Eberlein Street, bordering  the northern edge of the project, I had it made. One night I turned onto Eberlein and was halfway along it, with only two or three blocks to go, when a dog came out and started barking at me. I tried to ignore it. They can smell fear, I'd always been told, so act like you're not afraid.

     But the dog persisted. It wasn't your typical front‑yard mutt sounding the alarm as you passed its territory. The dog seemed really angry, though I hadn't done anything, and hadn't strayed from the sidewalk. I got scared. The dog came in closer, barking and growling with real menace. It went for my ankles. I turned and kicked; it dodged just out of reach. It seemed to become even angrier. Other dogs in the neighborhood started barking. A second dog came out and joined the first. It seemed to have the same peculiar anger, as if the two of them had just discovered a kid who had severely abused them as puppies.

     They teamed up on me, making it difficult to move along the sidewalk. More dogs came. There were five or six. They all behaved the same way. I was terrified. I broke and ran. That infuriated them even more. Oh no you don't, they seemed to say. They worked like a wolf pack, cut me off. They got me in a circle. I broke out and ran. They cut me off again.

     I made it to the street light on the corner across the street from the project. They cornered me there in the cone of light at the base of the pole, barking furiously and growling and taking turns lunging in to nip at me. I was doing a frantic dance to avoid their teeth, trying to kick at them to drive them back, yet reluctant to actually kick one hard for fear they’d just tear me apart.

     I yelled at them, yelled for help. Porchlights were on all along the street, but no one came. I couldn’t believe that the noise the dogs and I were making didn’t bring people pouring out of the houses to help, or at least to see what was going on. But no one noticed. The human world was locked away inside those houses, and I was banished to some bestial zone outside it.

     I finally flailed and yelled and stumbled my way across the street. The dogs peeled off and left once I entered the project. I ran into the apartment. I was shaking. I got out my .22 Ruger single‑action revolver, which Mom had let me buy on my sixteenth birthday, and just held it. I wanted to load it and go kill them. I knew I couldn’t just walk out in a populated neighborhood and start shooting, but every throbbing part of me wanted to. Mom tried to calm me down, and kept an eye on me lest I load the pistol and head for the door.

     That night I went to bed and lay awake, holding the pistol, still shaking at times, looking out the window, looking for the dogs, wishing they would come up to the window, now that I was armed, wishing they would try to attack me again, right through the window, so that I would have no choice but to load and shoot, wishing I could shoot and shoot and kill them all.