Swimming and reading

My swimming companions

Since getting home from my kayaking expedition at the beginning of the month I've been swimming at the Reservoir, almost daily. I swim with a woman who seems to be an amazing source of local gossip. Some of it good, some of it not, some about people I know and some about people I don't. I occasionally have gossip tidbits to exchange, but not very much really. The main benefit of all this gossip is to keep me swimming; I can do 4 laps while listening and at best 2 laps while not. So, there's that. 

She has a neighbour who sometimes shows up to do serious swimming (the crawl, with flippers, goggles and ear plugs), it turns out he is also a serious kayaker. So I mentioned to my swimming companion that I am always looking for fellow kayakers and she said she'd pass that along, which she did. So we shall see. I've pretty much decided that I don't want to combine kayaking and camping any more, at least not the way we have been doing. Maybe a single base camp for a 4-day trip, but not changing campsites every day or even every other day. So what I want is people I can do day trips with, sans camping.

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Today is a wet stormy day and after today the temperature will take a downturn, so I may not be swimming anymore unless we get a mini heat wave in October. Not likely. Today I am doing more or less nothing. This past week, besides swimming I also did some rather strenuous yard work so doing nothing is my idea of a rest. I watched the storm outside the window, I read, and got caught up on bills.

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I just finished reading an interesting book which I can recommend: The Premonition, by Michael Lewis. I'd never heard of Lewis before, and on the back cover of the book is a review comment: "I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it." I absolutely agree, it was an enthralling read and I learned a few things, albeit rather depressing things. But no matter, he writes in a very upbeat style leaving one with hope and a little faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings. The book is a pandemic story, specifically about Covid19, but it starts in the early 2000s, under the G.W. Bush presidency. I learned that Bush did one good thing during his presidency, he read John Barry's book about the 1918 Flu Pandemic and it scared him into creating a committee to come up with a pandemic plan for the USA. The membership in this committee was brilliant, they did their homework and they came up with an official pandemic plan that—had it ever been implemented—would have changed the course of the American experience of the 2020 Covid Pandemic. Sigh…

Lewis focuses his book on a half dozen individuals, some of whom were original members of that committee, and some of whom were latecomers to the party. All of them brilliant in their own ways, all of them heroes who went above and beyond in their attempts to stem the carnage of the pandemic in the USA. The book reads like a thriller, you get inside the lives and heads of Lewis's subjects, and in the process you learn a thing or two about how bureaucracy works. That latter bit leaves me a little depressed, but it's good to know that heroes exist.

Lewis says an interesting thing about government in general. He says that the federal government—and I think this applies to any federal government—is a manager of a portfolio of existential risks, whether natural disasters, financial panics, military, energy or food security, and so forth. It is the job of government to be ready for any of these risks and to jump into action when they happen. To that end they maintain a stable of experts, a host of disaster plans, and a cohort of people ready to act according to plan when disaster occurs. But that's expensive, and it means a whole lot of people being held at the ready for such a disaster to materialize, and people who are against the idea of Big Government just want to eliminate all that. It makes the cvil service look wasteful. A couple of things that happened when Covid exploded in the US were that the plan was forgotten or ignored and it turned out the supplies necessary for addressing a pandemic weren't there, they'd long since expired and not been replaced.

We hear a lot about how Trump sabotaged the Covid response but Lewis does not dwell on that. He talks about a whole lot of other failures that contributed, and how his little team of heroes tried to mitigate them. These heroes did not have job titles reflecting their importance, they were what one person referred to as "L6": so far down the hierarchy of authority that they should have been inconsequential, but they weren't. They really took the ball and ran with it, regardless of the consequences to their careers. Few of us get that opportunity, but these people did and their stories are inspiring.