Chance to Reflect on Life’s Madness Serves to Magnify It

A vacation was just the tonic I needed. Leaving California for 10 days helped clear my mind and allow time to reflect on this column. I concluded that maybe I’ve been too hard on myself recently, that maybe the column isn’t as bad as I think and that maybe I am connecting with the public. Reassured and revitalized, I was eager to catch up on the mail that came while I was gone.

“Dear Mr. Parsons,

. . . You write some of the dumbest stuff I have ever read.”

I see.

In answer to your question, yes, it’s good to be back.

. . . It was sometime in the late afternoon last Thursday, while reclining on a lounge chair on the patio outside my hosts’ home in the Lake of the Ozarks and watching a big blue heron swoop down near the waterline at Wilson Bend and then squawk to announce its arrival on shore, that the thought occurred, I need to take more vacations.

I was visiting my sister in St. Louis, and from there it had taken us 3 1/2 hours to reach her friends’ home out on the lake in central Missouri. Our hosts, Jerry and Joleen Meyer, have dubbed their hideaway Chalet Point, and to get there you jump the beaten path and keep an eye peeled for twin landmarks: the shoes-on-the-fence and the cups-on-the-tree.

By the time you arrive, with the last few miles on a bumpy gravel road and then down a steep incline, your car may take a beating but not your senses. My sister, who has a much keener eye for such things, noted the wildflowers along the drive--the black-eyed Susans and the Queen Anne’s lace--and the groves of oak, elm and hickory. She pointed out the Missouri bottomlands and the stretches of interstate highway that were under water last year from the historic Flood of ’93. As tranquil as the countryside was this year, it must have been equally nightmarish last summer.

Having grown up in the Midwest, I may be most nostalgic for the silence of the open country. There are just too many of us here in California to guarantee silence and because the Southern California building industry has linked growth with prosperity, things will just get noisier. And because I’ve chosen to hang around the news business, there always will be background noise in my head from the constant clamor of the world’s craziness.

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GRAND RIDGE, Fla. (Reuter)--A 26-year-old man used a circular saw to slice off his penis and testicles during a bout of depression, police said Wednesday.

That electronic message, sent by a friend while I was gone, greeted me on my return to work. On most days it might have made me laugh, because I’ve become one sick puppy after years in this business. On the first day back from vacation, however, the message was more of a plaintive reminder that nothing has changed.

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We decided to eat dinner out on the lake that first night. Joleen sells property in the area and got hung up all afternoon on a sale, so she didn’t have time to display her highly touted cooking prowess. She brought home some chicken, whipped up a bean salad and we loaded it, some corn on the cob and a bottle of wine onto their 20-foot-plus pontoon and cut loose from the dock while it was still light.

The lake is huge, with an incredible 1,300 miles of forested shoreline. To my surprise, it is man-made and was finished in the early 1930s by damming the Osage River. Jerry said the project took three years. He wondered aloud how long it would take to do the job in today’s bureaucracy. We settled on about 10 years.

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The lake glistened under the slowly setting sun and we immersed ourselves in the reverie. My sister told us that whenever she sees a shimmering lake anymore, she thinks kindly of her first husband, who loved the water and died 5 1/2 years ago of a brain tumor. She and their daughter scattered his ashes on a lake and just as they were doing so, she recalled, the sun broke through and the water seemed to glow.

We continued down the lake, occasionally ducking around a bend to see some lakeside houses and speculate on whether any would someday become my sister’s retreat from the city. About an hour before sundown, we cut the engine and dropped anchor in a secluded cove and broke out the food. As if in church, we talked more softly than we normally would. We saw snakes slithering through the water, creating their momentary ripples. At one point, my sister shushed me and we listened in the dead calm to a choir of whippoorwills in the nearby trees.

“If you’re real quiet, you’ll hear sounds out here you’ve never heard before,” Jerry said.

We toasted friendship and our good fortune and headed back to Chalet Point before darkness fell over the lake.

For at least that moment, for at least that day . . . I had no job, no worries and no connection to a world going mad.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.