December 18, 2023

The vision for Longwood Gardens, a magical place in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, dates to 1700, when a Quaker farmer named George Peirce purchased 402 acres of farmland from William Penn’s colonial government. For more than 200 years his descendants cultivated a rich tract of plants and trees on the land, called Peirce’s Park. By 1906 the space was threatened by a logging business.

Pierre DuPont, the then-36-year-old heir to the DuPont family fortune, stepped in and purchased 202 acres of the park, saving it from the loggers. He laid out plans for what is now Longwood’s Flower Garden Walk.

By 1921 he had completed work on the Conservatory. By 1927 he had built an Italian Water Garden with 600 jets in nine individual displays. Du Pont kept buying land.

Every city has its parks and gardens that give spiritual respite both to locals and visitors. Some are famous as beacons of history and culture: Hyde Park and the Bois de Boulogne, among the great urban greenspaces of Europe; New York’s Central Park, Philadelphia’s Fairmont, Boston’s Garden, Chicago’s Grant Park, others.

Woodlands, whether vast or humble, may soothe the aching of human hearts. We walk through our greenspaces, hoping not only to separate from the raucous pace of the city, but also to find in flowering living things a clue to what is good and hopeful in our world.

In the mid-1930s Du Pont’s garden, roughly between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del., had grown to 926 acres. Today it occupies more than 1,000 acres. Du Pont died in 1954 at 84. By then he had completed plans for the Longwood Foundation, a non-profit that operates the Gardens and its programs offering horticultural education, concerts, and special events.

Building continued. In 1957 Longwood created a new Christmas display in the Exhibition House, filled with red, white, and pink poinsettias, as well as white lilies, hyacinths, and others.

Since 1960 the Christmas display has showcased gorgeous bursts of winter-flowering begonia, lilies, cineraria, kumquats, and lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees.  By 1984 Christmas at Longwood featured more than 80 trees and 60,000 lights.

Longwood takes its name from “Long-wood” a wooded area where escaped slaves could find shelter before the Civil War. The drive to Longwood from any direction is across the rolling meadows of southeast Pennsylvania’s farmland, much of which is still owned by heirs to the area’s railroad, coal, and heavy industry heritage. From the south rural roads curl past massive estate homes through tiny places like Coatesville, Media, and Concordville in that lovely, near-empty country.

Longwood, du Pont’s legacy to the region and the world, is a miracle of botanical artistry, populated by more than 10,000 plant species. The place transports the visitor, young or old, to awed appreciation of nature’s sublime beauty. We visited with son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline, curators of nature at their nearby home, along with thousands of others, on a drizzly December afternoon. The air was cool but bracing.

The vastness of the Longwood space creates the perception of privacy amid forests and meadows deftly touched by soft pastel lighting. We strolled east from the visitor’s center along a lake, past the Rose Arbor Display and Wildlife Tree. At a bend in the path we paused to warm ourselves, with a dozen other snugly dressed folks, at a roaring firepit.

We turned up a steep trail that offered a view, framed by trees, of the broad Longwood Meadow, now lying fallow. We walked through the Pierre du Pont home which, amid the cheerful Christmas brilliance, recreates his work and family living spaces, with graphics posted describing the history of the place. We moved on.

The Conservatory is the heart of Longwood and the centerpiece of Longwood Christmas. The East Conservatory is set off by the rich luminescence of evergreens, reds, and whites, mounted on holly and fir, the walkways lined with 4,600 plant species, many of them exotic and tropical. A pipe organ filled the place with traditional Christmas music.

The crowds pressed in, adults taking photos, children thrilled by the cascading loveliness; all heartened, renewed by the richness of nature surrounding us. At the south end we turned into a hall festooned with orchids in an explosion of nature’s most brilliant colors, a massive orchid centerpiece suspended above.

As darkness fell we continued around a loop of dazzling light past the Tunnel Light Display and spectacular Gardener’s Tree. The glowing trees lined dark meadows and seemed to light our way in gentle blues, whites, and pinks.

The chill had diminished, we found a soothing, mystical serenity in the quiet beauty as we strolled with other visitors, some pushing strollers and wheelchairs. Together we made our way back around the loop, as a joyful sense of the Season spread far from this vast, peaceful, lovely place.      

December 11, 2023

Nurses Becky and Katie were always on duty, smiling, when I showed up. They found me a seat, offered me water. On a couple of occasions, Katie came to the rescue when another nurse, Alex, was not able to insert the IV needle in my arm. Alex poked me a few times, missing the vein at the bend of my elbow. I gritted my teeth. She called Katie, who expertly got the needle in the vein near my wrist. I relaxed as the saline solution flowed.

They tended to other chores while we waited for the pharmacy to mix my drug.

Outside the one-level Prisma Cancer Institute, brutal wars are being fought, Republicans are backing a sex abuser and traitor for president. School boards nationwide are purging libraries of books. Every day more than 300 Americans are shot.

Inside this building and hundreds of others like it nationwide, people are caring for the sick, defending life.

Katie and Becky both talk about staying active, an important part of cancer therapy. Katie runs a few miles every day and said she’s thinking about entering a half-marathon. Becky said she tries to exercise, although family now takes most of her off-duty time. It was small talk, I usually didn’t pursue it. I showed up every three weeks for a couple of hours. They were there four days every week for twelve-hour shifts, caring for cancer patients, their lives’ work.

The treatment center is a large, cheerful space, nicely exposed to daylight by a wall-length picture window that revealed the lush garden and woods on the north side of the building. In the afternoon the place usually is full of patients in Lazy-Z-Boys, hooked to IVs, some asleep, others chatting or looking at their cell phones. On most days a few wives, husbands, or friends sit next to the Laz-Z-Boys, some looking concerned, others resigned to their hour or hours in the place.

The Institute had become almost a second home, after 30 straight days of radiation two years ago and now a year of immunotherapy. The visits became a kind of ritual: the blood draw, touching base with the physician-assistant, the infusion. The phlebotomists are fast and efficient, asking your name and birthdate, then “right arm or left?” The pinprick, filling the vials, then “band-aid or wrap?” sometimes all inside of three minutes.

A computer analyzes the blood and spits out a report. The PA looks it over then calls the patient in for a chat, sometimes brief, sometimes longer. The blood data determines whether the patient gets infused that day, any abnormal readings may send him or her home. I always was lucky, although my “creatine,” an enzyme that accumulates in the kidney, was consistently high. The PA reminded me to hydrate. I always said I’d try harder.

After the meeting the patient is back in the waiting area. Almost invariably Becky or Katie would escort me into the big space. Then it was all routine, or almost routine, apart from the needle stick. “Sometimes we’re not on our ‘A game,’ but we usually get it done,” Katie said a couple of times.

The delay then is waiting for the pharmacy to get the OK from the lab to brew my drug, pembrolizumab, trade-named Keytruda, which is easier to pronounce. Because it cost $38,000 per 200 milliliters (before insurance), they mix only single doses. The wait could be ten minutes, or thirty, or more. I sipped water, sometimes closed my eyes. Patients came and went, nurses moved around, attentive, compassionate.

Occasionally someone would have problems, the nurses would call paramedics, who would show up with a stretcher and haul the patient off to the ER. But most of us endured.

Once the drug is ready the infusion is just a matter of connecting the IV to the drip bag and hitting a switch. “Thirty-five or forty minutes,” Katie or Becky would say, then turn to help other folks. Sometimes they’d pull on protective plastic coveralls to disconnect patients receiving certain chemo drugs to avoid contact if the drug leaked or spilled. Oncology nursing can be dangerous.

On most days a chaplain would stop by, a friendly young guy from a local Protestant church. He’d take a seat, introduce himself, ask how I’m doing. We chatted about my situation. He’d jot some notes on a clipboard, and remind me he’s happy to offer spiritual guidance. I’d thank him, he’d move on to the next patient.

Not everyone was being treated for cancer. Once a young woman was seated next to me, getting infused with medication for a blood condition. She noticed my Garmin watch and said she enjoyed trail running. She had run in a mountain-trail event a year ago. Then the condition set in, leaving her in agonizing pain. She said she’d been there for two hours and would be back in a week.

After plugging in my IV Becky would visit a bit. Once she mentioned her sister’s husband, a surgeon, worked at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, which she had visited a few years ago. I told her I used to go up to Walter Reed for meetings of the Navy’s Human Research Protection Program, which I supported at the Office of Naval Research. “It’s been a few years since I went. I’m sure it’s changed a lot,” she said. “Traffic around Bethesda is very tough,” I offered.  

She and Katie exchange this kind of casual talk with their dozens of patients, all day long, all week long. They’re nurses, after all, they’re good at it. They administer life-saving, or at least life-lengthening treatments. But their job also is to convey humanity, in the smallest ways, which for all of us stuck there is, more than anything, what we need.

I was finishing my 12-month sentence, no more visits scheduled. The doc wants to look at radiation therapy. At our last meeting he said, “You’ve had it on the left side but not on the right.” I’m set for a PET scan, he’ll share it with the rad team. Then we’ll see.

When my drug pouch was empty Becky unhooked me. I told her about the plan. “Good luck with that. But even if you’re not back here for treatment, stop in and say hello.” She smiled. I said I would, then said, “Thanks—and Merry Christmas,” and waved on my way out.

December 4, 2023

The Sassafras Trail is a winding path, about two and one-half miles long, through a corner of the local state park. We arrived on an overcast Sunday morning, Noah and I, to get some fresh air and a dose of the woods. He was about to turn 10, and has a lot going on with school and fourth-grade debate team. He doesn’t get to do much hiking.

It was all I could come up with as an outing for the boys. I got them fishing gear last summer, we went once and caught nothing. They weren’t impressed.

I pitched the idea of the hike both to him and the younger grandson, Patrick, who just turned seven. Noah said sure, Patrick wasn’t up for it. It’s a twelve-mile drive, when we arrived at eleven o’clock the parking lot at the trailhead was full, meaning we had to park at an overflow lot about a quarter-mile away and hoof that stretch along the park road.

We took a shortcut down through a leaf-covered ravine, slipping all the way, crossed a creek, and climbed the short rise to the trailhead. It was chilly. I handed Noah his jacket. I wished I had brought one, but usually you can count on warming up as you move. We turned right, or east, onto the trail loop, although the sign points hikers left, or west. We kicked at the leaves.

“What time is it?” Noah asked. I told him, hoping he wasn’t already tired of it. “We have to go two miles. Let’s see how long it takes,” he said earnestly. So maybe he looked at it as a challenge, rather than a boring afternoon with grandpa. I couldn’t tell. “We’ll be done in about an hour,” I said, just guessing.

We moved up the second rise. It was quiet; despite the full lot, we seemed to have the trail to ourselves. Noah was full of pep, striding easily, telling me “part two” of a story he had started a couple of days ago. It was a fantastic, creative yarn mixing bad guys and good guys dueling with lasers, unlocking gates with key cards. Lasers and key cards? I wondered where in heck he picked up this stuff.

Elementary schoolkids today are growing up in a different world than I did, the world of casual technology that we all lean on. Even the first-graders are issued laptops at school that they take home for assignments and then nearly anything else they want to do with them. Ten-year-olds are more comfortable with computers than I am. They play video games, most of them, not cowboys and Indians.

They’re still kids, like all kids before me and since. But they’re busier. Noah played Little League baseball last spring, soccer in the fall, and is signed up for basketball starting in January. Last month he sang in a talent show. Both brothers have been in kids’ golf programs. I asked about debate team. “I’ll tell you when we see grandma, she’d like to hear about it, too,” he said.  

The trail is level for a quarter-mile or so into the forest, curves left then right, rises and falls. Ahead, we could see the rough surface wind up a long hill. The trees had mostly lost their leaves, but were still densely packed. A few weeks ago I had hiked the same way and spotted a mature female white-tailed deer grazing. She heard me and raised her head as I passed.

We moved more slowly, Noah just behind me. He said maybe he’d go to Clemson because it’s a good engineering school and he likes math. Or maybe Penn State, his dad’s school. Or maybe one of the service academies. I hadn’t heard that before. I talked up the Naval Academy, ships, fighter aircraft, world travel. I dropped it before he got bored.

“Maybe you get the math from my dad,” I said. Noah never met his great-grandfather. “It skipped a generation. Your Uncle Michael is good at math, too.”  

We kept walking. I pointed out trail features around us, the steep drop-offs, the hills and ridges, the winding route the path took ahead. “Do you like being out in nature,” I asked. He said, “Sure!”

About midway through the two miles we climbed a long hill, the trail broken up by boulders and tree roots, the going more difficult. The summit was obscured by the trees. We slowed down. I could hear Noah breathing hard behind me. To encourage him I pointed at the next ridge, where the trail levels out and begins to descend. He didn’t say anything but pushed on.

I grew up in a suburb a lot like Noah’s. The land behind our street was a woods-covered buffer between our community and the next one, maybe a half-mile wide and three or four miles long. Over the years before I went to high school my neighborhood friends and I spent many hours in the woods, hiking, exploring, camping, and fishing in a creek that flowed through the area.

Years later my younger brother bought a home on the outskirts of the woods. On one of our rare visits, he led me along an overgrown trail to a dead fallen tree. My name was carved in the trunk. I had no memory of that, so long ago, in a different time and, it seemed, a different world.

The halfway point on the trail loop is also the highest point. We slogged forward. “Just a little farther,” I said more than once. “We’re almost there.” Noah kept moving, still game but a bit winded. “How much more to the top,” he asked again. Finally I said, “okay we’re here, all downhill now.” We could move a bit faster.

My grandfather was a city man who lived all his life in the Bronx, New York. He never took me hiking, and probably had never been hiking himself. Instead, he took me to watch the New York Yankees play in the old Yankee Stadium. That was the era of Mantle, Maris, Berra, Pepitone, Yankees world championships. It was the big city, the Big Apple, the family anchoring place. Those memories are forever.

There’s not as much excitement here in Greenville. No roaring, clattering subways, no Empire State Building or Greenwich Village. No Yankee Stadium. We do have hiking trails.

As we turned on the back of the loop, I reminded myself how time is passing in a bewildering blur. In a few years Noah will face his coming of age. He will find excitement and achievement, and maybe some setbacks and heartache. Like all of us, he’ll engage in life, find his purpose, his meaning, find himself. Maybe in some quiet moment in the middle of all that, he’ll recall our hike on a chilly Sunday afternoon.

We walked a bit faster on the downhill. Closer to the trailhead the route zigzags back and forth through thickets of young tree growth, then turns, and turns again. “How much farther,” Noah called. “Almost there,” I yelled back. He laughed. “You already said that, grandpa.”

November 27, 2023

A free library stands outside the Cancer Institute. It’s just a box of used books mounted on a post, one of those casual collections you see in neighborhoods. Anyone can take a book, the idea is that at some point you leave one. Our daughter Laura went with me to my last appointment. As we left she noticed the library. She opened the plastic door and pulled out Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss: It’s (not “Its”) a book about punctuation.

Read this sentence: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” Then this: “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

And: “Dear Jack, I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy—will you let me be yours? Jill”

Then: “Dear Jack, I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Jill”

Punctuation. For most of mankind and womankind it’s a monumentally tedious subject. Lynne Truss, a longtime critic and columnist for the Times of London, recognized the epidemic of misuse of punctuation in the U.K. and U.S. In 2002 she started a lighthearted BBC radio series called “Cutting a Dash” about punctuation pitfalls. The show led her the next year to write Eats Shoots & Leaves. Sales are around 500,000 copies in the U.K.

Truss’s book traces the history and function of punctuation: apostrophe, comma, period (in the U.K. called “full stop”), comma, semi-colon, colon, dash, ellipse, exclamation point or “mark” (U.K), question mark, italics, hyphen, and quotation marks, single and double.

If you doubt there’s a chapter’s worth to write about each, read her book.   

She writes that some grammarians define punctuation as stitching—the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another describes punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language that tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. So, she asks: what happens when punctuation isn’t used? If punctuation is the stitching of language, without it, “language comes apart and all the buttons fall off.”

In Truss’s elementary school students learned Latin, French, or German grammar but were expected to pick up English grammar by reading, rather than studying it. That led to such puzzles as “its” and “it’s.” What is the apostrophe for?

She writes that “grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature … to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. What an annoying bunch of people.” She says, unhappily, that “my personal hunches about the state of language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the U.K. are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines are truly in the driving seat of our culture.”

The earliest known punctuation, Truss says, is credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 B.C., who created a three-part system of notation to cue actors when to breathe in preparation for long or short lines. A comma then was the signal for the short line. St. Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced punctuation to aid pausing when reading aloud. The word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century.

She zeroes in on everyday apostrophe glitches, not just “its” instead of “it’s,” but “I’ts party time!” She notes an advertisement for decorative services for “wall’s, ceiling’s, and door’s.” In 2001 a popular TV show created a singing group called Hear’Say. The name, she says, marked a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy.

She lays out the rules for apostrophe use, e.g., possessives, plural and singular (the boy’s hat, the children’s playground, the babies’ bibs) and the rest. She notes the 17 (yes, 17) rules on comma use, principally to illuminate the grammar of a sentence and to highlight, as in musical notation, the literary qualities of rhythm, direction, pitch, tone, and flow. Comma use, she says, requires discretion—that is, common sense: For example: “The convict says the judge is mad.” Then: “The convict, says the judge, is mad.”

Truss gives the same treatment to semi-colons and colons. They propel you forward in a sentence. A colon is nearly always preceded by a full sentence: “Man proposes: God disposes.”

As she walks through all this, Truss agonizes over the creeping substitution of electronic communication, emails and texts, for the printed word, with the presumption that computers and cellphones eliminate the need for punctuation in favor of LOL, IMHO, FWIW, etc.

“The printed word is presented in a linear way,” she writes, “with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of words in their order. … The book remains static and fixed, the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. … All these conditions are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way. … Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past.”

She notes that some users think their keyboard punctuation marks are decorations for creating cartoons like <:-), meaning “dunce,” and so on. She’s appalled especially by emoticons (☹😊).

She goes on: “Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived in its present state by a series of accidents … it is a matter of despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between who’s and whose, and whose bloody automatic ‘grammar checkers’ can’t tell the difference either.”

Yet in her last chapter she writes, “while massive change from the printed word to the bloody electronic signal is inevitably upon us, we diehard punctuation-lovers are perhaps not as rigid as we think we are.”

So, she suggests, we should calm down. Truss and her fellow “sticklers” are working hard for us. We’re probably helpless to stop the unsettling, even bizarre evolution of our language and with it, punctuation. But let’s understand where we’re going, not where were going.

November 20, 2023

The Intercoastal Waterway stretches down the East Coast, around Florida, then north along the Gulf. When Kevin settled in Sarasota with his wife, Jean, and picked up kayaks and paddleboards, it was inevitable, a matter of time. That is, that all of us: Amir, Archie, Chris, Kirk, Paul, and I, the old Lake Ridge, Virginia THuGs running group, would meet at Kevin’s place, put boats in the water, and navigate the Waterway.

We arrived from the incomprehensible chaos of the world around us. Florida’s Gulf Coast is, for a brief moment, a kind of dream, a respite. And it was Veterans Day, a day of dignity, our special day.

Kayaks and paddleboards are graceful craft. Obviously they’re not “boats,” just as a Navy ship isn’t a “vessel.”  With the right paddling technique they move through the water gracefully. The kayak has more mass, but is easier to handle in choppy water or wind than the paddleboard. The paddleboarder can stand or kneel. In the standing position, it seems, paddleboarders can put more of their back and leg strength into their strokes.

The plan was to transit a couple of miles, according to Kevin, to a bar/restaurant on a spit of land called Casey Key, where we could get drinks and catch our breath. Amir, Archie, and I were new to this, we went with the kayaks, leaving the paddleboards to the others. Kevin has the experience, eight trips on the course between Siesta Key and Casey Key. 

Our little flotilla set off, maybe a little nervously, Archie and me in the lead for a quarter-mile. At the first turn we went left, Kevin yelled go right. We struggled with our paddles to pivot, blinking against the bright sun and rich blue Florida sky; the others turned in the right direction.

It was exhilarating to try out our never-before-used kayaking skills. Kayaking is very different from rowing or canoeing. You’re stroking alternately left and right with the long two-bladed paddle, trying to keep the strokes even. Since I’m left-handed I could put more energy into the left. That meant compensating with more shallow right-arm strokes, banging my paddle on the side of the kayak with nearly every stroke.

The paddleboard team stood erect on their boards and cut through the water, making a turn around a tangle of mangrove bushes. We got past the mangroves and sailed into open water, a stretch of the Waterway that resembles a huge lake. Kevin pointed south at the horizon, which appeared as a dark pencil line. We dug in and paddled.

Amir, with his big shoulders, moved ahead of us. Chris got the hang of paddleboarding early and cruised in the lead, a dot in the distance. Paul, in a bright orange shirt, was in the middle of the pack. Kevin stayed a few hundred yards ahead of Archie and me. Kirk was off my starboard. I bore down, trying to establish a rhythm.

We slogged into the middle of the wide, lake-like stretch, the horizon looking no closer. Chris had disappeared into the faint haze ahead, with Kevin not far behind. I pulled closer to Paul. The sun blazed down.

I tried to stay on a straight course but drifted east toward the channel markers. Within a few hundred yards into the lake the first boat purred past us. I waved, a woman in a bathing suit waved back. Then the swells of the boat’s wake rocked the kayak, throwing me out of my paddling rhythm.

I kept stroking, watching the others ride the wake. Another boat appeared from the opposite direction, moving faster. The swells were heavy, I bobbed up and down, clenching my teeth. Another boat cruised by, I tried to steer into the wake, but it rocked me higher. A guy aboard yelled, “You’re in the middle of the channel, get over to the side, you’re going to get run over!”

I tacked west, but it didn’t help much. By now our order had shifted, I was closer to Paul and Amir, Kevin and Chris were farther ahead, Kirk was a couple of hundred yards west, Archie was behind me. The horizon seemed closer. After passing the next channel marker Kevin signaled a pause to regroup. I laid my paddle across the bow, my shoulders throbbing.

Kevin pointed at the shoreline. “Turn right just past the bridge,” he called. We pushed on towards the bridge and landfall. We moved closer to a grove of mangroves near the bridge, past “Danger” signs warning boaters away from rocks. Then we saw our destination, a short beach, a gang of sun-drenched folks lounging under a thatch canopy at a bar, a rock band playing.

We hauled our craft halfway out of the water, caught our breath and got drinks. The lead singer yelled “Happy Veterans Day!” The crowd cheered. “Who’s a vet?” he asked. We raised our hands above our sore shoulders. “Alright!” he shouted, and pounded his guitar. The band launched into a Beach Boys tune. I think it was the Beach Boys.

We talked a bit and looked around. The crowd were mostly in swimsuits and Hawaiian shirts, enjoying the Florida sun. It was an older bunch, fifties, I guessed. I laughed: I should talk about older? They were having fun. We took some photos, stretched our legs, then turned back to our beached kayaks and paddleboards. It was time.

We climbed aboard and headed to the Waterway convoy style, under the bridge and into the wide stretch. We pounded away, Paul and Chris in front, the rest of us more or less abreast. My left wrist ached and I stroked harder with the right. The shoreline crawled by. The northern end, our target, again seemed miles away. We bent our backs harder, the channel markers loomed ahead then fell behind. The surface seemed calmer, the boats had disappeared.

Eventually Kevin yelled, “Head for the condos!” We could see the roof of a condo building beyond the treeline. We tacked left then crossed the lake. I moved closer to Paul, he surged ahead. Kevin held back, surveying the team. We sailed past the last of the mangroves then into the quiet channel. I paddled harder, making less progress.

With the ramp in sight I lay the paddle down and glided, catching my breath. My shoulders felt numb. We pulled the boats from the water, hosed them down, and hoisted them into the pickup. We climbed into the van and the pickup and slumped in our seats. I tried to raise my arms and groaned. Kevin started the van, Chris drove the pickup. As we headed for Kevin’s place I closed my eyes. The THuG navy had come ashore.