I was just a kid. These few moments in a barber shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon - and then in the large irrigation canal which ran past outside - had more to do with the formation of my character than any other hour or so of my entire youth.
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, brokendown 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 fourletter 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 arm--lengths 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.
