A river ran through it

No one says, “I just love to go to the dentist.”

The dental experience is usually uncomfortable and sometimes painful, not to mention always expensive.

Add in the would-be conversationalist working on your teeth, the one who asks questions while both her hands, a mirror, a siphon, and a whirring tool are all in your gaping mouth.

A new dentist tried that on a first visit once.

She inquired as I squirmed, jaws pried apart, etherized like Prufrock in the bright glare on the leatherette examination chair, “Where did you grow up?”

And she expected an answer?

But I bravely soldiered on, “In _ex…as. La…re_o.”

I clarified the best I could, but still unintelligibly, limited as I was to vowels and a couple of back-of-the-mouth consonants, “on _e… or…_er wi_ _ex…ico,” because in the days before the notoriety of the TV series Bordertown, you had to explain Laredo to foreigners, who thought it was something in a cowboy song.

This geographically if not linguistically savvy dentist, however, knew something about Laredo.

“Grew up drinking that Rio Grand (with the one syllable, to rhyme with “old cow hand”) water?”

“Uh-huh, …, yeh.”

“Good water. All those minerals. Good enamel. No cavities,” she responded in sentence fragments.

Drinking water from the Rio Grande is apparently well-known in the dental community for its beneficial effect on growing children’s teeth.

And whether it was thanks to the minerals in the Rio Grande water I grew up drinking or the DNA from my father who had a similar dental history, I’ve never had a cavity.

The 1950s controversy over adding fluoride to municipal water system had passed Laredo by blissfully undisturbed. Years later when I saw Dr. Strangelove in a college film society screening one night, the rant by the Sterling Hayden character, Base Commander Jack D. Ripper, about commies and fluids made no sense to me.

“It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.”

Everyone else was laughing, while I was wondering what the joke was.

After the movie, a classmate who grew up more deeply immersed in the mainstream of American culture than I had in Laredo sketched out the movie’s satire of the water fluoridation controversy.

Conspiracy theories, quack science, and paranoia didn’t appear only recently with arguments about climate change or anti-vaxxing. They’ve been around for a long time, and do-gooder 50s idea of putting fluoride in cities’ drinking water to prevent children’s tooth decay had once been a hot-button issue that divided the country along approximately the same passionate fault lines that separate Americans today.

Along with its dissolved gift of tooth-hardening minerals, the sanitized Rio Grande water I drank as a child gave me large daily doses of chlorine. Like everyone else, I was as used to it as sunshine and the greeting ¿Qué pasó?

Adèle, on the other hand, grew up drinking melted snow water from the glaciers of Mount Rainier. Being used to drinking the natural equivalent of distilled water, she always smelled and tasted the tell-tale scent and flavor of chlorine in Laredo water.

Once on a visit to my parents, my father potted up a little cactus from the patio garden for us to take home. Before sending it off, he was watering it from a white plastic Clorox bottle he used to ladle rainwater out of a barrel.

Adèle marveled aloud at how you could smell the chlorine in Laredo water from ten feet away.

Dad laughed at the olfactory hypersensitivity in his young daughter-in-law.

“Aw, I can’t smell anything. It’s rainwater,” he said, taking a big sniff from the open bottle in a gesture intended to prove the point.

But the undeniable smell of chlorine bleach provoked a startled grimace.

“Hey! This is Clorox!” he exclaimed.

He’d grabbed the bottle of Clorox bleach my mom was using in the laundry, not the recycled one for watering plants, and before he realized his mistake, Dad had bleached the poor little cactus into a chemical swoon from which it never recovered.

With Laredo water, sometimes you couldn’t be sure whether it was disinfected water or liquid bleach. Lucky my father hadn’t taken a swig of Clorox out to the mistaken bottle to prove a point!

The Big Flood of ‘54 wiped out the old water treatment system on the river in northwest Laredo. The Rio Grande water that rose over its banks and into downtown Laredo, took out the old International Bridge, and inundated most of Nuevo Laredo crested in the second floor of the water plant’s main building, destroying all its electrical systems and chemical purifier equipment. By the time the floodwater receded, the 30” main intake line from the river was gone, the road was washed out, and the emergency repair crews couldn’t even get out to the water plant. There was no longer a water treatment plant, and Laredo had no municipal supply of clean drinking water.

While the city repaired the flood damage around town, the million-and-a-half gallons of clean water that the waterworks had the foresight to store in elevated water tanks were rationed out first. After that ran out, in the middle of Canícula heat, we were left to drink the treated water the trucks hauled in from Lake Casa Blanca. People who lived on ranches were lucky: their wells were still full of potable water.

My mom had had enough of the twice-daily water boiling, so she took leave of my dad and me on the bus to Port Arthur to wait out the cleanup in civilization at her parents’ house. The water pumped out of swampy Lake Sabine at grandmother’s house tasted like salt, but it wasn’t rationed, and it didn’t make you sick. During our two-week stay, I couldn’t tell the difference between a disaster evacuation and a fun visit with my grandparents. There were fresh biscuits baked every morning and cookies every afternoon. My namesake grandfather Dandaddy brought home 24-count boxes of Milky Way and Three Musketeers bars from his grocery warehouse.

Mother and I went back to Laredo as soon as the all-clear notice was broadcast, and I was banished from the cookie and candy Eden of Port Arthur.

One thing was the same in Port Arthur and postdiluvian Laredo. Every night trucks rolled through the neighborhoods spraying DDT to control mosquitoes and malaria. Who knows what terrible long-term health consequences that early double exposure to Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane gave me? At least I’ve always had it to fall back on as an excuse.

From the perspective of a four-and-a-half-year-old boy, the only problem with contaminated water after the flood was the CDC’s mandatory typhoid immunization for everyone along the border. Within weeks, 62,000 of the 80,000 residents up and down the Texas side of the Rio Grande and another 60,000 south of the Río Bravo got typhoid shots.

Having been out of town for two weeks did not qualify me for an exemption, so my mom hauled me into Dr. Malakoff’s office across the street from the Escuela Amarilla for mine. I’d had shots before, and there was no mystery about what was about to happen. The imminence of pain was all I could think of as we sat waiting in the examination room.

The day nurses started to wear pajamas –sorry, I mean ‘scrubs’—to work was still twenty years ahead in a distant future when other novelties like disco, platform shoes, and mullet haircuts would have their brief vogue. Dr. Malakoff’s wonderful, but (as the children’s shot-giver) terrifying nurse Elizabeth “Rocky” Rauch was dressed in a real nurse’s uniform, all white from the folds of the cap down to her shoes. Her no-BS, bite-the-bullet style she’d perfected during the war in battlefield hospital tents made cringing seem (if I had known a word to name the concept) churlish.

Rocky methodically pulled a syringe out of the steaming clavicle, attached the dreaded needle, and calmly proceeded to fill the instrument of torture with liquid from the rubber-topped vaccine bottle she held upside-down in her hand. Then I had to watch the little drip-drip out of the inverted needle’s end she squeezed out to make sure there were no bubbles of air.

It would have been easier to submit to the inevitable, had Rocky performed the shot’s preliminaries quickly, but her by-the-book preparations were all in slow-motion, leaving than enough time to anticipate the agony of puncture, the pressure of the fluid being injected, and the offending needle being yanked from my throbbing arm.

Enough time to panic and ask myself, “Why are you sitting still for this?”

And to think, “Run!”

Without the courage to flee or to avert my gaze, I watched it all happen in nightmare time and sat still for Rocky’s shot. Unsurprisingly, it hurt just as much as I’d imagined it would.

Over time I outgrew the fight-or-flight reflex provoked by being in the same room as Rocky and learned to appreciate, even enjoy, her professional calm. Five or six years later, Rocky pulled a two-inch long splinter of wood that I’d got impaled next to my kneecap while crawling around in a stack of 2 x 4’s at Herring-Price Lumber with Chester Long, and I felt more relief than pain.

But the day after the dreaded immunization, to add insult to injury, my immune system reacted to the typhoid vaccine. My poor shoulder swelled up and turned blotchy yellow, green, coral and crimson. Just the touch of the fabric of my shirt on the lump was painful, and I staggered around the house with the short sleeve rolled up above it.

Lucky I wasn’t in school yet because my classmate Larry McNary would (I guarantee!) not have missed the chance to slug that tender spot. The Three Stooges may be the greatest idiot physical comedians of film history, but (the appropriately named) Larry and I pinched, tripped, slapped, and punched each other at the same frenetic pace as Moe, Curly, and The Real Larry. With stooges, three isn’t a magic number. Two will do, and together, Larry and I sufficed.

Chlorine wasn’t the only distinctive thing about Laredo water sixty-five years ago.

Who among us didn’t experience the ugly surprise of dissolved phthalates in our mouths in the solar-heated water coming out of a new green vinyl garden hose? You were dying of thirst playing out there at 4 o’clock in the 105° summer sun. You grabbed the water hose coiled in the grass like a man overboard grasping at life ring, turned it on, and took a big gulp. The scalding water was awful. Not only was it way too hot, but the water had a strong flavor like nothing you’d ever tasted before. Never that is, until the next time, when you had your first explosive, nose-burning, unforewarned mouthful of wasabi.

In those thrilling days of yesteryear, we watched The Lone Ranger on Channel 8, and no one ever breathed a word about the health benefits of staying hydrated. Unadmonished and all on our own, we drank quarts of water out of garden hoses every day by sheer survival instinct as we played outside in our neighborhood gangs.

One summer though Johnny Snyder forgot to drink from the hose he was using to water the new lawns of his dad’s spec houses in the development called Calton Gardens way out in what was still the monte, and he ended up in the hospital with a heat stroke. Of course, he’d also forgotten to wear his Yankees’ baseball cap, and not even his sun-bleached platinum blond hair, which had earned him the nickname Espejo, reflected enough solar heat to keep him from collapsing unconscious in the dirt.

Water hoses were for us way more than just watering gardens and avoiding dehydration in the sun.

We enjoyed running through the cooling spray of sprinklers when all the other pastimes were just too hot.

There was the peculiar smell of wet dirt when you sprinkled the unpaved street in front of your house to keep the dust down.

No subsequent prank has ever given me anything close to the bent-over-double, laughing-‘til-it-hurt satisfaction of sneaking over to the spigot when Beto Piña was enjoying a long drink, suddenly turning the water from barely on to full blast, and watching him choke on a surprise firehose of water into his nose and eyes. The fun continued as he chased me around the yard squirting a stream of water out the same hose at me.

That long-range squirting capability got me in trouble at least twice during my first year of school.

The first time was on the first day of kindergarten at the original United Day School on Clark Street. It was September 7, 1954, the day after my fifth birthday, not that long after The Big Flood. My mother had been reluctant to let me start school a little on the young side, but even her long-suffering mother’s patience had run out, and she handed me over to the discipline of an older and wiser Mrs. Hemenway.

Like many mothers on first days of school, mine was sniffling teary-eyed farewells to the novice ‘big boy’ being pushed out of the nest – or, more accurately: out of the car. Mom was at the wheel of our new but used, putty-colored 1951 four-door Chevrolet Styleline, and she was grasping at my left elbow to pull me back for one last good-bye kiss. I might as well have rubbed that arm with bacon grease. She couldn’t hang on to hold me back.

United Day may or may not have been ready for me, but I was ready for it. I ran through the gate without looking back.

I’m not sure what I expected of school, but I’d figured out that it would be a lot more fun than any of the wholesome activities my mom would have had in mind. Besides, unlike at my single-child home, school offered a playground full of boys my own age for a change.

How was I to know that the playground boys would include Freddy Dickey? As Monte Python put it, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

And it was on the United Day School playground that I had my first run-in with The Authorities.

After the morning bell rang, we stumbled through the as yet unmemorized and still un-mangled (by fourth grade, “one nation under God invisible…”) Pledge of Allegiance, followed by the first of thirteen years worth of morning roll calls, and we were marched out to the east third of United Day’s dirt playground for a Recitation of Recess Rules.

It was a list of Thou Shalt Not’s, mostly tediously trivialities like not crossing the imaginary line separating the kindergarten and first-grade sector of the playground from the area reserved for the second, third, and fourth grades. The rules were so arbitrary, it was impossible to concentrate on them.

One rule, however, grabbed my attention the way my mom had tried and failed to hold on to my escaping arm half an hour earlier.

That rule was the absolute, never-ever prohibition against making the playground water fountain squirt higher than the four inches required for sipping a mouthful. Mrs. Hemenway got gasps of shock and awe and admiration from us boys when she stooped over and made the water fountain shoot a majestic six-foot-high arc of water that splashed down twelve feet away.

It was a terrible mistake to show us what that fountain could do. Even an amateur reverse psychologist can tell you that to demonstrate forbidden pleasures is entirely counterproductive. Mrs. Hemenway should have required us to squirt the fountain across the playground. If she had, no one would ever have done it.

Looking back, having bungled my share of plumbing projects, I understand now that the plumbers had failed to install the right size pressure reducer on the line, and had inadvertently created an artistic feature that could be admired both for its beauty or the math of its equation x² = -4a y.

Or, if you were like me, neither a connoisseur of water sculpture nor an initiate in the cult lore of parabolic equations, you could admire the arcing jet of water for the way it might be weaponized for drenching victims at a distance. If merely squirting the water a little too high for drinking was a misdemeanor, I saw in an instant how to use it to commit a felony.

At recess, the kindergarten class headed out for our fifteen minutes of anarchy in the September morning sun.

I made straight for the water fountain and scanned the dirt for the muddy spots where the water had hit when Mrs. Hemenway had so foolishly demonstrated the fountain’s squirt feature.

I waited, hand on knob, for someone, preferably a girl, to run through the target zone.

A girl ran right over the mark.

“Fire!” and I turned the knob.

Too late.

I had the X- and Y- coordinates right but had neglected to factor in the time it took for the water to arc to the target. By the time the water hit, the unsuspecting girl had escaped to safety, dry.

Recalibrating my strike, I was visualizing how far away the next moving target would have to be for her to run into the falling water.

But before another innocent victim could blunder into range, the experienced surveillance of Mrs. Hemenway had identified my plot, and she ran down to grab me just as I was about to turn the knob again on the water fountain weapon.

I missed the rest of morning recess that day sitting on a chair indoors, with most of a quarter of an hour to mull over the consequences of kindergarten crime and punishment, although I spent most of it working out the more interesting calculus of water arcs.

The other water-squirting trouble happened at about the same time. My next-door-neighbor and friend Jimmy Fisher came down with a severe viral infection, and his pneumonia had to be treated at Mercy Hospital. When he was finally well enough to come home to Garfield Street, Jimmy arrived one afternoon with his parents in the family sedan.

Unfortunately for Jimmy and me, I’d just been sent out to the front yard by my mom to water a newly planted tree, and, as Jimmy weakly hobbled out of the car, there I was, standing with a running water hose in my hand, a crime waiting to happen.

In a single instant, I shouted, “Hey, Jimmy!” and soaked him with a well-aimed shot from the hose. Jimmy’s mom tried frantically to shield him from a potentially life-threatening chill. That motiveless crime earned me five whooshing lashes to the backside from a 24-inch twig my dad had snipped off the backyard orange tree.

Sometimes friendship and welcome home sentiments don’t find the best way to express themselves.

Everyone has heard the old academic legend about the Eskimos and their 20, no, 50! no, 100! words for snow. (Do Not Repeat This: it’s bogus. Fake Facts.)

Given the scarcity of water at the northeast edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in Laredo, no wonder we made do with just four words: water, agua, river, and río, and two of them were synonyms. Of course, we’d heard the useless expressions rain and llover, snow and nevar. But during our Laredo childhood far south of Eskimo lands, the word snow only existed as the first half of the compound, snow cone, a seldom used English translation of raspa. Words like snow, fog, mist, blizzard, icicle, cross-country skis, drizzle, sleet, de-icing, snowplow, ice, and rain were all foreign language vocabulary. They referred to realities as far from our lived experience as kayak, bookstore, sushi, honest politician, penguin, cloudy day, paved street, ice skates, or shepherd.

Maybe that’s why we remember childhood stories involving water so clearly: they were stories about rare moments.

Like the time we saw red velvet Santa Claus bugs after a rain.

Or maybe we remember them because Laredo and Nuevo Laredo shared a river whose muddy trickle we crossed so many times growing up, trips instantly and vividly conjured up in our memories by the expressions “across” and “al otro lado.”

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, “you can’t step into the same river twice.” He should have added, “…except in memory.”

But now you’re wondering, “Whoever stepped in the Rio Grande anyway?”