I’m not really sure whose idea it was but I remember thinking that it was the wine bar owner, incongruous as that might be, who made the suggestion. Incongruous as she is a non-swimmer.
The idea arose as not well thought out ideas sometimes do when eating and drinking. That night instead of drinking the cheap Australian Viognier that is normally the sole drink available at the bar we were drinking awamori which someone had just brought back from Okinawa. The attraction was not just awamori itself but the several varieties that the person had brought back. We tried every one of them and profusely thanked the Ryukyu civilisation as we did so.
As we relaxed on the sofas, drank the awamori and ate the very Q baguettes which are standard fare at the bar the conversation drifted from the philosophical to the mundane and back. Adding to the ambience there was as usual country and western music playing unobtrusively in the background.
If the culture - in this case of Ryukyu - still exists, does the civilisation too?
Where in Kaohsiung can you buy Piave cheese?
What’s the easiest way to get to Secret Beach?
Is soapie a homonym?
Late in the evening someone said apropos of nothing, frogs of course swim. Thus ensued a meandering discussion about frogs.
Do all frogs swim?
Could a frog have created the world?
Did you know my neighbour has a pet frog?
Is frog-keeping a form of agriculture?
The different treatment of frogs in oriental and western literature.
At one point someone said, if all frogs can swim there must be some in the swimming pool. Possibly thinking :
All frogs swim in water
The pool has water
Therefore frogs swim in the pool
While some discussed the logic, others of a more practical bent suggested an empirical investigation was needed. The pool is, after all, someone said, just a short walk away through the night market so we could easily investigate now.
It’s too dark
The moon’s full and there are street lights
We wouldn’t be able to get in
The students climb the wall
We won’t be able to see the frogs
Take some netting from the flower beds and we’ll net the pool
I’ve no bathers
Nor do I but in the semi-dark that’s no problem
And so the conversation went until in a short time instead of discussing the a priori likelihood/fact of there being frogs in the pool, we were discussing the elements of an empirical investigation to see if there were frogs in the pool.
Who will stand on who at the wall?
How will we get the last person into the pool?
Will there be guards?
How cold is the water?
In hindsight, a few other questions should have been asked, the most obvious one being, how do you catch frogs? However they weren’t asked.
Night swimming, I remember my mother saying, is very dangerous. Always light a fire on the beach, she said. Recalling that warning then brought to mind a Chinese saying - 水深火热 shuǐ shēn huǒ rè which translates as deep water and scorching fire or abyss of suffering. I thought to myself, I hope not!
And so, filled with the nonchalance that too much awamori, french baguettes and meandering conversation provides and ignoring my nagging doubt that this was a good idea, we all set off for the pool taking as we went some netting from the flower beds and the mango tree in the wine bar’s yard [it being almost mango season].
Somehow, without too much noise and having managed to evade the few people still exercising in the school grounds we got to the wall. The first - and really the only - major obstacle to putting our hastily conceived plan into effect.
The initial idea was that the smaller people would climb on the backs of the taller people and somehow, having found the top of the wall, haul themselves in. Though this seemed reasonable it didn’t work. Small people aren’t necessarily light and tall people aren’t necessarily strong. So the idea when implemented resulted in our human pyramid collapsing and with people falling on top of each other.
After a few more collapses and at the point where some people were on the verge of admitting defeat the wine bar owner pulled out her tablet and said, wikiHow. It’s here in 7 steps.
And sure enough, there it was
Stretch yourself and loosen up
Find a short wall to practice on
Grab the top of the wall.
Place your feet on the wall
Push and pull yourself upward
Go over the wall
Circle your back leg forwards
She said that she thought we only needed to concern ourselves with Step 3 through to Step 6. She explained:
We’ve been drinking enough that we’re all pretty loose (Step 1), this is the only wall so it’s the shortest and tonight is practice night [as well as performance night] (Step 2) and once we’re over the wall we’re over the wall so we don’t really need to circle our back leg forwards (Step 7).
And in keeping with the spirit of the evening gratuitously told us that the opposite of practice were concepts like neglect, abstain, shun and reject.
She left that non-sequitor hang and continued, so, lets, as the wikiHow says, grab the top of the wall, place our feet on the wall, push and pull ourselves upward and go over the wall.
There was a noise as though someone was struggling to articulate that perhaps it was easier read than done but a nearby squirrel - unusually for Taiwanese squirrels - at that point let out a sort of squirrel squeak and the person who was on the verge of grasping the hole in the wikiHow/wine bar owner’s logic doubtfully acquiesced to the plan.
As it was written in the wikiHow thus we climbed over the wall of the swimming pool and onto the top of the tiered seating. From there we scanned the pool and it’s surrounds for guards and anything else that might be an impediment to our proposed empirical investigation.
No one seemed to realise that if at that point we had seen a frog it the pool, we’d need no further investigation. We all seemed more intent on the process of the investigation rather than it’s purpose.
Still, not having seen any impediments someone said:
We’re all over the wall
The wall is high
Therefore we’re all high.
That may or may not have been true but its relevance was difficult to grasp so we instead started to discuss where the frogs might be in the pool and how to see them [though we used the plural in this case “them” meant “at least one”], or catch them [at least one] and what we would need in order to show proof to anybody else that there were frogs [at least one] in the pool.
It doesn’t really matter where the frogs are, someone said, we can just drag the netting from one end to the other. We’re bound to catch them. So that’s what we did. We decided to start at the far end of the pool and drag the net to the other end. The wine bar owner said she’d play a little music to guide us back and from out of the tablet started to drift the sounds of Johnny Cash singing Let the train whistle blow.
We groped our way down to the other end of the pool, half of us on one side and half of us on the other, threw the net in and commenced slowly dragging it back toward the sounds of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, singing Good old mountain dew which as we progressed down the pool changed to Johnny Cash singing Five feet high and rising.
Failure. There was not one frog in our net.
Perhaps fuelled by that excess of awamori, instead of spending time lamenting the complete absence of frogs, without discussion one of the group undressed and slid into the pool saying - just as Johnny Cash started singing I walk the line - I’m going to do a line search like the police do.
Night swimming is very dangerous I remembered again as I too undressed and slid into the pool wondering if the absence of the fire was going to be a problem. But ever resourceful, the wine bar owner at that moment lit a small fire in a bin and started to burn paper money just as she would when performing the 拜拜 bàibà ritual on the first or fifteenth of the month or at Ghost Month.
It wasn’t Ghost Month. If it had been the wine bar owner probably would have been very insistent - despite the awamori - that we not go near large bodies of water and we no doubt would have acquiesced and not gone to the pool.
It was dark in the water looking away from the fire and though I could hear others I couldn’t actually see them. Something that looked like one of them, when I got closer to it, turned out to be one of the bonsai plants at the pools’s edge.
When you are low in the water the small waves on the surface appear larger than when you are a distance away from them. In the darkness, the small waves all looked like small dark objects. No doubt some of them were frogs I thought. Just have to catch them.
I decided to swim back to the fire to discuss the logistics of the line search. I was met with the wine bar owner whispering, Go get a frog. Thinking that she might add something helpful such as that she had seen/heard a frog and could point me in the right direction, I waited. But she said nothing more and continued performing her bàibài.
Yes, she really was performing bàibài I realised and wondered if she was asking for help to find the frogs or perhaps seeking protection from danger. I mentally checked again. No, it wasn’t Ghost Month so even if we were in danger, I thought, at least we’re unlikely to be in danger of being drowned by ghosts.
Gradually a few of the other swimmers came over and she repeated the same imperative, Go get a frog. They too waited hoping for some further direction. Which meant, of course, we swimmers, though we were in the pool, were all hanging off the side waiting and no actual line search - or indeed any search - was happening.
Since I’d not caught any frogs I decided that I might have success by approaching from under the water rather than on its surface where we had spent most if not all of our time. That being the case I decided to swim as far as I could about a metre under the water to find a frog.
In the meantime the wine bar owner read her tablet. Another wikiHow but this one on how to catch a frog. Clearly a question that should have been asked much earlier in the night.
There were three methods - building a trap, using a net or using your hands. The trap method involved buckets and board which we didn’t have and we had already tried netting though without the handle that wikiHow recommended.
When I returned from my under-surface swim she suggested the use-your-hands method which she added had the attraction that of the four steps we’d already completed or were well advanced with two of them. Only Steps 3 and 4 remained - Once you find one sneak up behind it and Catch the frog.
Locate a body of water.
Search for frogs.
Once you find one sneak up behind it.
Catch the frog.
As I left on my next reconnoitre she called out in a sort of stage whisper. Step 3, Sneak up behind it.
On what must have been my fourth or fifth under-water swim I decided I’d keep under the water for maybe half the length of the pool. Though I couldn’t see the other side, I knew the length and breadth of the pool from having been swimming here many times. I also knew that the wall we came over was at the end of the pool. So swimming away from the wine bar owner I’d be swimming the length of the pool rather than across the pool.
I hadn’t thought that the wine bar owner would not be at the end of the pool but I later found out that she had moved to a side of the pool. As I made one last big effort to swim as far as I could underwater I felt a huge bang on my noise. I’d swum across the pool - the short distance - and hit the side of the pool.
I returned to the surface which was much further up than I had thought - so I’d swum down as well as across - with blood starting to stream from my nose.
This coincided with the arrival of the police. We could not hear sirens, but through the acrylic siding we could see the red and blue flashing lights approach and we saw them stop outside.
On seeing my nose and the police the wine bar owner and the others decided we’d better leave. We didn’t want blood in the pool or on the ground and more than that did not want to have to explain our reasons for being in the pool to the police.
To the sounds of 25 minutes to go [the wine bar owner had not been able to turn off her tablet] we all quickly scrambled - all of us except the wine bar owner naked - with our clothes in our hands - over the wall. We who had needed wikiHow to tell us how to get into the pool now, with an ability that seemed innate, managed to get out in much less than the 25 minutes Johnny Cash’s song had allowed and without any assistance.
Somebody started to discuss the speed of decision-making under extreme pressure compared with the meaning of the proverb nature is the mother of invention. Were the concepts actually the same or if different which one best described our new-found ability to scale walls without thinking and without clothes?
However we naked ones [which was of course all of us except the wine bar owner], resisting a compelling urge to ponder the matter, scattered. Some going in one direction, some in another but all to a place well away from the pool. The wine bar owner remained so that she would appear to be one of the people still exercising in the school grounds
From amongst the trees at the other end of the school grounds, I could hear Folsom prison blues playing. I dressed and then slowly walked back - a little bedraggled - to the wine bar where the wine bar owner brewed some of that black Turkish-style coffee and served it in the ceramic mugs as the others one-by-one returned.
She described how the police had talked with her. They said they’d seen a fire in the pool and asked if she knew who might have lit it but she feigned ignorance and said she didn’t know but said I guess things happen that way which the police were a little baffled by but didn’t ask her any more questions.
Discussing the event over coffee we agreed we’d not been able to solve the frogs-in-pool question empirically. No doubt there were frogs in the pool as was obvious from a priori logic but we’d not found them only because nobody had been able to sneak up behind a frog as the wikiHow had instructed.
I thanked the wine bar owner for lighting the fire. I told her that without that the saying, 水深火热 shuǐ shēn huǒ rè - deep water and scorching fire or abyss of suffering might have become true for us.
She said, I know and looked toward the wall where she had hung Tracey Moffatt’s Adventure Series 9, 2004.
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