153. Crazy

Crazy 

 

I think it is now—will be tomorrow, on January 1, 2022—15 years for the Wallowa Lake Plunge on New Year’s Day. There were five of us that first year, and one, Beth Gibans, passed away this year. Informally—and it’s always been informal—we are calling it the Beth Gibans Memorial Plunge. The plungers now number 70 or 80, and Beth has been with us every year that I can remember, even as she battled a ferocious cancer. 

 

Many call us crazy. They say they won’t jump into that lake in the middle of July! But if we are crazy, what is the world!

 

Denver and Boulder, in snow country Colorado, are burning; hundred-mile per hour winds and no snow on the ground took Denver suburbs from no fire at 10 AM to 500 houses burned and mass evacuations at 6 PM yesterday.

 

Meanwhile, it is snowing and freezing in Seattle and Portland.

 

What will the next crazy chapter in the “housing crisis” be? Extraordinary price increases in some areas, including Wallowa County, with more and more people sleeping on streets, in tents, cars and homeless shelters in cities and suburbs across the land. Million dollar houses next to tents. Crazy?

 

We have homelessness, Covid, inflation, dislocation of workers, and supply chain disruptions—and the stock market indexes hiccup their ways to new records, resting briefly for market pros to take profits, then marching upward again. Is that crazy? 

 

ESPN paid $470 million for the college football bowl games. Hawaii dropped out of its own bowl game, and UCLA dropped out of the Holiday Bowl—three others have been canceled due to Covid. If college sports—and pro for that matter—aren’t crazy right now, what is? 

 

Still in sports, a lawyer who worked hard against performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and cycling in the 1980s argues today for bringing Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The game was full of cheaters, so he argues the best of them deserve to be in the Hall.

 

At 10 AM tomorrow morning I will dive into Wallowa Lake and come up ready to begin another crazy year! I hope—but doubt—things get a little bit saner. 

 

I think of that old movie, “Mondo Cane,” a kaleidoscopic chronicle of humankind’s strange habits. I remember the German matron force-grinding food into the goose to make the best liver pate, and the cargo cult waiting in Australia for the next airplane to drop its goodies from the sky. People were just as crazy in 1962. 

 

Happy New Year!