WALKING IN POOLS

I wonder if you’re familiar with Joe Dante’s 1978 movie Piranha.  In the opening scene a couple of young hikers are lost, walking at night in the mountains, and they discover a mysterious military test site that isn’t on their map.  So naturally it’s a case of “Let’s go inside and check it out.”  They climb over a fence, look around, and immediately find a swimming pool, “Hey far out. Let’s get wet.  Last one in is a rotten egg.”  Yep, the girl really says that.  They strip off, and in they go.  “Hey that’s not funny,” says the boy. “You bit me.  You actually bit me.”  But no the girl didn’t bite him of course, it was a piranha, and before long both young hikers have been devoured by our fishy friends.

Well, a lesson learned there, I’d say.  Since seeing that movie I’ve never climbed into a mysterious military test site at night, and I’ve certainly never plunged into a pool without first checking for piranhas.  In fact I can’t remember ever finding a swimming pool full of water while out walking, though I have encountered a few empty ones.

 A few years back I came across the one above, in upstate New York, somewhere near Kingston.  In fact the pool isn’t absolutely, completely empty: a certain amount of slimy rainwater had collected in the bottom, but even without a “pool closed” sign, and even without a fear of piranhas I don’t imagine many hikers were stripping off and leaping in.

Desert swimming pools, such as the one below, encountered while I was walking around the Salton Sea, are far more inviting, though completely dry, and quite a few people had obviously been there before me, though to express themselves via graffiti rather than swimming, it seemed.  I expect they did some skateboarding there too.

For one reason or another I’ve been rereading John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer.”  Of course it’s a story about swimming rather than walking, but as the hero, Neddy Merrill, swims his way home via a line of swimming pools, he inevitably does a certain amount of walking, at one point crossing a major highway.  “Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, close to naked, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross … An old man tooling down the highway at fifteen miles an hour let him get to the middle of the road where there was a grass divider.  Here he was exposed to the ridicule of the northbound traffic, but after ten or fifteen minutes he was able to cross.”

I think “The Swimmer” is as perfect as any short story ever gets.  Nothing similar can be said about the movie version starring Burt Lancaster.  One of the worst scenes, not in the original story, but invented for the movie, has Neddy encounter a small boy who’s tending an empty pool. The boy's parents are away and the pool has been drained for his safety: he confesses he’s not much of a swimmer.  The lack of water threatens Neddy’s project but he and the boy mime a swim while walking across the bottom of pool.  It’s the first time the boy has managed to “swim” a length, and initially he’s delighted, but then he has his doubts.  He says, “I suppose it doesn’t count though because there’s no water.”
     “But for us there was,” Neddy insists. “You see, if you make believe hard that something is true, then it is true for you.”

Well, this is rubbish, isn’t it?  A lad who can’t tell the difference between walking and swimming is obviously going to find himself in serious trouble before very long.  “Oh, right, I’ll just swim along Hollywood Boulevard.  It will be true for me.”

But the fact is, there is something strangely enjoyable about walking across the bottom of an empty swimming pool.  I think it’s that sense of walking in a place that’s usually not available to walkers; not walking on water, but walking under water, walking where the water usually makes walking impossible.

As everybody now knows (I mean, it was a plotline on Seinfield for Pete’s sake) Cheever’s sexuality was a troublesome matter both to himself and to the people around him.  He liked men, but it seems he didn’t actively hate women.  His story “Goodbye, My Brother” concerns both the agonies of sticking to convenient illusions, and the equal agonies of truth-telling, and it has a wonderfully ambiguous final paragraph that concerns walking and water and much else besides.  The final words: “The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming -- Diana and Helen -- and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.”

WALKING IN THE FUTURE

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that in a post-apocalyptic future there will be a lot of walking.  Admittedly, there will be a certain amount of driving around in very cool vehicles, but mostly it’ll be striding along, gun in hand, ready to kill or be killed. And it seems that very few of us will be dressed appropriately. 

There will, of course, be a lot of desert in this future.  If you’re going to make a post-apocalyptic movie, the desert is often the location of choice.  It’s pre-ruined in a way that, say, the Palace of Versailles isn’t.  And you’ve got to imagine it’ll be pretty hot in this desert of the future, but that won’t stop a lot of people from wearing a lot of leather.

You might argue that a Terminator can get away with it because he’s a cyborg and doesn’t feel the heat in the same way that real humans feel.

On the other hand, Mad Max is clearly feeling it in this picture, though you have to wonder if simply pulling one arm off your leather suit is really going to be enough to cool you down much.

If you’re Linda Hamilton you’ll wear an elegant little tank top, showing off your gym-toned arms, but this simply creates a different problem: she’s running a terrible risk of sunburn.  And if you reckon that in general women of the future will wear be wearing less than the men, you're probably right.

Milla Jovovich certainly looks well wrapped up in some respects in Resident Evil: Extinction but not so much that she can't show her stocking tops and thighs.

I’m not sure exactly what these boys from Star Trek are wearing in the episode “Desert Crossing.” It's not leather obviously: could it be polyester?   Clearly they’re sweating like SOBs.  Later in the episode they do strip down, though they don’t actually look much less sweaty or any more comfortable as a result.

And do spare a thought for poor Kyle MacLachlan in Dune.  Well yes, there are reasons to feel sorry all for the actors in that movie, but in the picture below it looks as though his sweat problem is so bad that nobody will come anywhere near him.  Wouldn’t he be much happier in a simple safari suit?

Finally (and I know you could go on about this stuff forever) we come to the movie of The Road.  Now that is one bleak future you’ve got yourself there, but it’s not the desert.  Instead, it’s a cold, grey, polluted world where the sun never shines, and walking is a grim and potentially lethal business.  But say what you like, father and son are certainly dressed for it.

WALKING IN RUINS

I’ve been looking at photographs of people walking in ruins.  The one above is one of the most familiar, taken in the London blitz, a morning after shot.  And if you’d asked me a couple of days back I’d have said it was by Cecil Beaton or Bill Brandt.  It turns out I was wrong about that, as you’ll see.

Without really thinking about it too much, I’d never doubted that it was a bit of a set up, though not a particularly reprehensible one, a morale-boosting image to show Londoners that life was still going on normally even after a night of bombings.  For one thing, I didn’t really believe that milkmen were still sticking to their rounds in the middle of the blitz.  Would there even be any doorsteps to leave the milk on?  And when the milkman came back at the end of the week what were the chances of the customers still being there, what possible likelihood that they’d hand over what they owed?

But it turns out the photograph is even more fake than I thought. The photographer was actually Fred Morley, and it’s widely reported that the “milkman” was his assistant dressed up for the part.  But that raises more questions than it answers.  Because obviously he must have borrowed the coat and the crate of milk from somebody, and if not from a milkman, then who?   So does that mean there really were milkmen making deliveries?  And if so, why not use a real milkman in the photograph?  Couldn’t they find one winsome or perky enough?  Or did the real milkmen think this photography lark was an insult?  But if so, they wouldn’t have lent their jacket and milk would they?  Or were there no real milkmen involved at all, and did the photographer bring the jacket and milk with him as a props?  I should really like to know. 

It’s generally assumed that the firemen working in the background are the genuine article, and I imagine they were extremely pissed off that this photographer and his assistant were free to ponce about taking pictures, while they had real work to do.

When I was growing up in Sheffield in the 1950s and 60s, memories of Sheffield’s own blitz were still fresh in the minds of my parents’ generation. It had been short-lived and limited by London standards – just two raids in December 1940 - but bad enough; almost 700 dead, another 1500 injured, tens of thousands left homeless.

There was a story told in our family that my father, then in his teens, had walked to work the morning after the bombings, stepping over debris and, according to my mother, also over dead bodies.  My father never mentioned it at all, which I’ve always thought gives the story more rather than less credibility. 

There are a lot of extant pictures of the Sheffield blitz, though there seem to be no Sheffield war photographers known by name, no Brandt or Beaton, not even a Fred Morley.  The vast majority of the photographs, like the one below, are simply credited to “Sheffield Newspapers.”

This is the best known, and probably the best, photograph from the Sheffield blitz.  It shows the High Street on fire, a couple of abandoned trams silhouetted against the conflagration.  Other photographs exist of the scene, taken that night and the next morning, but none look as good as this. 

And I've been thinking that for a photograph of ruins to look really good it's a big help to have a figure there somewhere, preferably someone walking, and now I find myself wondering about that solitary figure on the right of the Sheffield blitz picture.  What’s he doing there?  He looks so untroubled.   Where could he possibly be walking to so casually in the middle of an air raid?  And I wonder if he was placed there by the photographer for the sake of the shot.  I wonder if he was the photographer's assistant.

        

In a post-war article titled “Pictures by Night” Bill Brandt wrote, “In 1939, at the beginning of the war, I was back in London photographing the blackout. The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since. It was fascinating to walk through the deserted streets and photograph houses which I knew well, and which no longer looked three-dimensional, but flat like painted stage scenery ...”   I suppose it would have been too dark to show a walking figure.

WALKING WITH WELLS

You’ll find H.G. Wells quoted all over the internet, both on actual quotation websites, and on those dubious “advice to entry-level writers” sites as having said or written, “I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.” 

It comes from An Experiment in Autobiography though none of the online sources I’ve seen acknowledges this, and he’s saying it in order to bad-mouth the prose style of Joseph Conrad, whom he finds a bit fancy and literary.  The quotation in full is  “I write as I walk because I want to get somewhere and I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”

To which the obvious response is surely: well that all depends, doesn’t it? Sure, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but if the two points are, say, either side of a river, it might be wise to walk along the riverbank to a bridge rather than just plunging straight through the water.  There’s also the matter that one doesn’t need to be some fancypants flaneur to believe that walking isn’t always about getting somewhere quickly and efficiently.  A walk without an obvious goal is sometimes much more enjoyable that going in a straight line from one place to another. 

I’m not even all that persuaded by “straightness” as an absolute virtue in writing, but obviously if you’re going to write about time travel, improbable experiments in vivisection, and a war of the worlds, then a good plain prose style helps a lot with credibility and suspension of disbelief.

In fact there’s some evidence that Wells didn’t always walk quite as purposefully as he claims.  In the last decade of the nineteenth century he was living in Woking, Surrey with his second wife.  His mornings were spent walking, or sometimes cycling, in the nearby countryside: in the afternoons he wrote.  Legend has it that he was walking with his brother on one of these mornings, and they imagined how it would be if Martians suddenly landed on this rural English scene and set about destroying it.  Thus was born The War of The Worlds, a fine book of walking and ruin.

One of the oddest details in the books tells us that the narrator was “much occupied in learning to ride the bicycle” as well as being “busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilization progressed.”  Well yes, that sounds a full life, doesn’t it, but he still finds time to go walking with his wife  “One night  … I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her.”  No word on whether she thanked him for this.

Anyway, soon enough the Martians arrive, in cylinders, and it takes a while before anything emerges, but then, “And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather.”  Fortunately a member of the English working class is nearby to offer the description, "Boilers on stilts, I tell you, striding along like men."

Well, you probably already know that things don’t go terribly well for mankind.  The Martians take over.  Finding himself stranded in the colonized Martian zone, our unnamed hero spends a lot of time dodging the tripods, holing up in a ruined house, doing an occasional bit of swimming, and a lot of walking through a devastated and depopulated London and its suburbs.  “Scrambling over a ruined wall, (I) went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew--it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops.”  That strikes me as pretty good, and not entirely unfancy or unliterary.

The novel contains a lot of great adventure story stuff and Wells is obviously really on to something with the “aliens in the neighborhood” idea.  It’s all very well for spacemen to battle monsters on distant planets but there’s something far more urgent (and fun) in imagining aliens attacking the local supermarket.  And who hasn’t fantasized about walking through a familiar but ruined world in which you’re the only survivor?

Still, it all turns out all right thanks to our friends the bacteria, the Martians die, civilization returns, and one of the last images in the books has our hero standing on Primrose Hill, where he’s able “to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still.”  Being able to walk freely about the city is an emblem both of freedom and order.

Visitors to modern day Woking city center can do something just a little similar, and walk around a 23 foot high sculpture by Michael Condron of one of the Martian tripods.  Gotta say I’m just a little disappointed that it doesn’t have feet.

It’s always hard to imagine how exactly a tripod walks – does it move just one leg at a time, which seems rather slow and laborious, or does it move one leg and use that as a pivot as it brings the other two forward, which seems like it would cause a lot of instability. 

http://drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw/ 

Above is a link to a wonderful website, from which I’ve borrowed some of the images in this post, that shows multiple covers for different editions of The War of the World, and it’s interesting how few of the illustrators address the question of how the tripods walk.  Quite a few of those tripods on the covers would be hard pressed to get around at all, while some of them seem to be floating rather than walking.  And a certain of the illustrators have evidently not read the book at all. 

Above is one of my favorites, a 1916 Heinemann edition (it comes courtesy of Andrew Cox) which is true to the spirit of the book, but also seems to be anticipating steampunk.  To me, it also looks like it might have been an inspiration for Guy Maunsell, the designer of the Maunsell Sea Forts, a World War Two defense system in the Thames estuary, and briefly home to a pirate radio station.

I find it very easy to imagine those sea forts uprooting themselves from the seabed and walking into London to destroy humanity.  I do realize that they’re quadrupeds rather than tripods, but surely that would make the walking and the destruction very much easier.


And finally an image that gives me so much pleasure.  If the Martians had really attacked, and if Sherlock Holmes had been a real person, then he'd certainly have been around for it.  And if you're going to show Britain in ruins, why not show Britain's most famous ruin, Stonehenge?

LAUGHING TACKLE

Like many people, I try to model myself on Demi Moore, and if nitrous oxide is good enough to make her forget her worries, then it’s good enough for me.  My particular worry was that I was going to the dentist to have some awkward fillings replaced and since my man is of the new, caring breed of dentist, he suggested some nitrous would help me float away as he was doing all kinds of horrible things to my lower right molars.

The nitrous helped at least little, enough that afterwards I floated out of there not feeling quite competent to drive home, so I decided I should walk it off, and wander around the neighborhood streets for half an hour or so.

My dentist’s office is on Wilshire Boulevard, and I’d been thinking about Ray Bradbury being picked up and interrogated by the cops for walking on Wilshire, though I can’t say that’s entirely why I decided to walk along 8^th and 9^th Street instead.  And in fact I did see the cops pull somebody over on 8^th Street – but he was in a car, so I guess that doesn’t count.

Anyway, I’m here to tell you that nitrous oxide makes for a very interesting walk.  I felt fine, if a little floaty, but everything around me seemed simultaneously very chaotic and also deeply fascinating; the sky, the palm trees, the building my dentist’s office was in, the cacti in people’s front yards, the parked cars, the gingerbread house roofs. Sometimes I can experience this without nitrous oxide, but I certainly hadn’t been experiencing it that day before I went into the dentist.

And then suddenly around a corner and there at the end of somebody’s driveway a kind of hallucination: mountains, a moat, a fantasy castle.  Hey man, this is good stuff!

And one thing I noticed was that a lot of the streets around my dentist’s office share names with various pop or rock acts - Burnside as in (R.L. - who sings "Walkin' Blues"), Cochran (as in Eddie – singer of “Walk the Dog”), Detroit (as in Marcella of Shakespeare’s Sister – “I walk past posters selling simple sex ooh!” from “Dirty Minds”). There were also a couple of near misses Cloverdale - not a million miles from Coverdale (David of Whitesnake “Walking In The Shadow of the Blues”) and Dunsmuir, (somewhat like John Densmore of the Doors – “And then he walked on down the hall”).

Even at the time it did occur to me that if your knowledge of pop music is wide enough you can probably think of somebody with just about any name, and most of them will have performed a song with walking in the title or the lyric.  Still, at the time, it seemed somehow very significant.

Eventually I felt fit enough to drive.  I finished the walk, went back to the car, got in, started the engine, and what do you think was playing on the radio?  “Careless Whisper” by George Michael.  Yep, the nitrous was good and gone.