The reporting of oddball incidents of random violence at remote recreational hot spots sometimes feeds my own general wariness when it comes to strangers’ potential propensities to do terrible things, leaving me feeling unnecessarily insecure. But I don’t think that means I’m completely wacko all of the time.
Take our recent trip to the local swimming hole. It’s a federal place, national forest or something, but in the middle of nowhere and out of reach of cell service and everything else. The water is cold and refreshing, and deep enough that I wasn’t too worried that the apparently local young man in orange shorts who was climbing the cliff and then up a tree on the cliff and then jumping off would hit bottom (his head on the cliffs, well…).
“It was four feet deeper earlier this month,” he told me as he climbed and as I kept N from sliding down the shifty gravel into the depths. His feet smacked the water.
M and I took turns taking leisurely swims for the length of the hole, and then we found a shady spot along a calm inlet and ate our pasta salad picnic.
Soon I noticed that Mr. Orange Shorts and his buddies, plus two other guys who’d been hanging out, weren’t swimming any more, but were back at the parking area with a bunch of other guys who’d showed up in their pickup trucks. One truck had driven by the hole, paused while the driver stared down on the scene, and sped in reverse back to the others, where he sat with the others, taking long glances toward the swimming hole–not at us, but at the mixed-race group that had shown up soon after we’d gotten there and were lounging, laughing, and swimming.
I was feeling nervous, and wondered if we should call law enforcement to disburse the racial hatred I sensed in the white locals’ clustered, unswimming stares. It made me a bit tense and eager to leave, and as we walked to the car past the trash cans, Mr. Orange Shorts, who was throwing away a beer case, said to me, “I’m scared.”
Scared of what? I thought (rather cluelessly). Too much cliff diving? Out loud I gave a polite chuckle.
He continued, “Did you see that woman?”
Oh. There had in fact been a black woman swimming in the water.
I didn’t say anything more, and breathed a sigh of relief we’d made it to the main road. It was soberingly astonishing, the local festering of racial hatred.
Side note: I was again taken aback when, several weeks later, I heard in an interview on Fresh Air about the ongoing existence of slavery, in the U.S. tomato industry.
