Will float for food

Perhaps it was not meant to be. Maybe it’s better this way. Still, the disappointment stings.

To get here has required logistical contortions. A long drive to Lake Arrowhead. Stealthy unloading of bikes in the parking lot. Miles of pedaling past “road closed” signs, through a ghost town of chimneys and fire-stripped cars, along a helmet-clattering dirt road.

Hide the bikes. Hike a stretch of Pacific Crest Trail. Scramble down a hillside that insists your descent is too slow.

The air’s hot, and anticipation is high, primed in part by seductive memories. Now this, a sight as cruel and inexorable as the years that have filled in behind those memories.

Fire has burned the hills. Dirt has come down. The swimming hole is gone.

The man who led you here, the man you’re beginning to see as a long-lost alter ego, stands on what would have been the surface of a pool so deep it could catch dives from the towering rocks that frame it.

He points at the wet sand beneath his sports sandals. “I’ll bet the bottom is 20 feet down.”

He should know. He’s Pancho Doll.

Time to backtrack.

The poolman cometh

Let’s say you’re someone who spends too much time in an office, in a city, sometimes in a suit. Let’s say that one fine summer day you’re sitting in an ergonomically correct chair staring at the air vents in an acoustically correct ceiling, and a colleague mentions that he’s just heard from a guy who has spent the last eight years hiking up rivers and down streams and writing guides to America’s best swimming holes.

What if that offhanded comment released an unseemly flood of reverie, right there in the corporate work environment?

Oh, come on, you know what.

And so it is that you’re ankle deep in that cool Deep Creek water, standing on what was once a classic swimming hole known as “Peace,” a San Bernardino National Forest spot that your new idol’s California guidebook calls “the sort of place that, on a spring day, you’d expect to find Huck and Tom skipping school.”

Canyon wrens trill their 13-note song. Sunlight kneads your bare shoulders. A hot breeze huffs up canyon, whispering: So you ditched work for a day, is that such a sin?

You plop down in the sand, in the shade of a cliff. But there’s no escaping the fact that the thing you came for is not here, that the fried mountainsides gave way to winter rains, sloughing tons of silt into the deep granite holes. Worse, you know that most of the other great pools from San Diego to Santa Ynez have also been scorched and silted or depleted by drought.

And so your inner office self speaks up. Repress this longing, it says.

Back at the Lake Arrowhead parking lot, Pancho Doll pops a side window of his 1995 Toyota Tacoma pickup and begins stowing his tools into gear nets slung from the camper shell ceiling: a Camelbak stuffed with PowerBars and emergency gear, a fanny pack neatly accessorized with a knife and carabiners, the GPS that has gotten him lost in watersheds from Maine to Alabama to California.

Slamming the tailgate, he pulls cold Gatorade from an ice chest and tosses his hat on the Bokhara prayer rug he’s stretched between two crowbar-resistant steel bins. This is where he sleeps most spring and summer nights, usually in roadside turnouts or in the parking lots of Super 8 motels, whose clerks, he says, usually can’t be bothered to run him off.

The truck’s front seat is jammed with maps, a box of files, a cellphone and the laptop he uses to self-publish his books -- three so far, with one on the swimming holes of the South coming out next year and updates in the works at all times. He calls this hubcap-free vehicle the “research vessel,” and the 250,000 miles he’s put on it show.

Back in Los Angeles, thoughts about such a truck are almost as disruptive as visions of paradisiacal pools and questions about what possesses a grown man to crisscross the country in search of swimming holes.

You wish you could be Pancho Doll.

Chasing water

When the suspected mirage you’re approaching reveals itself as an oak- and sycamore-shaded oasis, you feel the need to tell yourself that the western slope of the Sierra Nevada isn’t really that far from the urban hub of responsible productivity. For reassurance, though, you approach Travis Calloway as he sits on a boulder drinking a Budweiser.

Calloway is a big man with a shaved head and a lot of tattoos -- most notably a woman’s face on his shoulder and a dragon that swirls up his right arm, entwining the words “in memory of Samuel.”

Every year, the Calloway clan joins six other Palmdale families for a weeklong camp-out at Lake Success, outside Porterville. And one morning each year, 50 or so men, women and children make a ritual drive up Highway 190 to a series of sprawling swimming holes at a place called Coffee Camp.

Upstream, a group of college students from Fresno leap from rocks into another deep pool. Today, this lower hole belongs to the Success crew. All three of Calloway’s sons are in the water, and that’s Calloway’s 5-year-old godson, Xavier, climbing granite boulders with determination, looking like a plump baby turtle in the red and blue wetsuit pulled over a life vest.

Calloway watches the boy play caboose as a train of whooping, giggling kids skitters down a water slide into a churning pool. The kids come up shrieking.

The children wait all year for this day, and so does Calloway, has since he was a kid, he says. “Dad, he’s the one who always took us camping,” he adds almost reverentially. He lifts his arm. His father’s name was Samuel.

Decked out in full explorer gear, Pancho Doll smiles but keeps his distance, watching the cannonballing, log-rolling, beach-ball-slapping rumpus like a food connoisseur surveying the scene at Chuck E. Cheese.

Killjoy shocked

There are people who spend lifetimes within stone-skipping distance of glorious rivers and remain ignorant of their pleasures. Pancho Doll has little use for them. They do him no good.

Standing by the jerky rack in a western Sierra country store-turned-minimart, he cajoles the gray-bearded counterman about favorite holes along the river across the road. On the porch of a mountain lodge, his grilling about a local stream sets two young seasonal employees into giggle fits.

Pancho Doll is 41 years old, and this is his job.

In the introduction to his first book, “Day Trips With a Splash: The Swimming Holes of California,” he writes about growing up on a farm in Missouri: “Whether ... diving off logs or doing spectacular parabolic exits from a rope swing, wet was the only way to stay during humid Midwestern summers.”

Such joys, of course, are meant to be outgrown, and they eventually were. He studied politics and journalism at the University of Missouri and started reporting for newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Then the corporation downsized, and Pancho Doll’s responsibilities vanished. To help him adjust, a friend dragged him to California’s Yuba River.

“It was full of hippies, naked people,” Pancho Doll says without a trace of opprobrium.

Hoping to find other swimming holes in which to recuperate, he went to buy a guidebook.

“I was shocked,” he says, “to find that there wasn’t one.”

A new career had arrived.

These days, Pancho Doll has the routine down. Before he arrives at a river, he pulls out maps and books and researches local geology, looking for clues -- any formation that constricts the water -- that will lead to great holes. At the scene, he buttonholes locals, most of whom would rather give up their ATM password than the directions to the pools into which they fling themselves from rocky overhangs or branches.

Pancho Doll has tricks, though. Sometimes, for instance, he’ll swoop in on the youngest employee in a small-town sporting-goods store, figuring he’ll want to show off what he knows.

“I like to jawbone,” he says.

Two years ago, someone stole his car radio. He never replaced it. So he has a lot of time to hear himself think. “It seems like I’m doing my own radio show, being narrowcast to an audience of one.”

His asphalt-polished riffs focus at times on the loneliness of the road, on some women’s peculiar reluctance to love a man who lives in a truck and bathes intermittently.

This disclosure should temper your envy. Instead it plunges you into deeper rumination.

Gravity’s rainbow

Many bends up Highway 190 and the Tule River’s middle fork, there’s a turnout and an unmarked trail. Other turnout trails, including one with concrete stairs and aluminum guardrails, lead to beautiful pools accentuated with heaps of garbage and rocks decorated with spray paint.

But this poison-oak-lined trail is precipitous and crumbly and when you find yourself on a granite ledge, staring at a waterfall’s misty rainbow, there’s no one else around.

“Sometimes I miss the wonder of people experiencing this for the first time,” Pancho Doll says. “I can actually be a killjoy about swimming holes when I’m with friends. I try to keep my mouth shut.”

If he’s talking, you can’t hear him. The allure of swimming holes pours back into your body.

Why are these pools so tempting?

Because a slanting ledge 30 feet above a blue-green pool reduces the mind to simple binary impulses: Yes or no? Smart or dumb? Cowardice or courage?

Because the confrontation can last 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and each moment seems essential.

Because the false starts -- one ... two ... three ... no -- force you to wrestle with the truth that you are timid and silly.

Because the psych-up cycle issues a succinct reminder: Breathe in, breathe out.

Because there’s no way of knowing what makes those leg muscles stop quaking and actually fire.

Because when feet pierce water and you crash through a sensory threshold, you’re submerged, disoriented, shedding heat and tension, and then you surface, transformed.

Just because

“Central California is the sine qua non of swimming-hole country,” Pancho Doll says. “We’re dead in the center of it now.”

OK. It’s true. You’ve been drawn farther into the mountains. You are now in the midst of pine and redwoods, Teva sandals filling with pungent duff.

Signs warn that this creek is dangerous -- that people fall in and drown. Indeed, the moment you leap in, you drift down the granite canyon -- scrambling, swimming, diving, drowning in explanations for why you are here:

Because every bend, every new horizon line reveals an array of formations as innocently erotic as the rounded boulder topped with naked young women you happened upon when you discovered your first remote swimming hole as a boy.

Because swimming-hole water has substance: Pine needles tippy-tap your thighs, and tiny fish nip the hair on your legs.

Because the scent of sage, buckwheat, rotting bay leaves and sun-baked moss gently roils your sinuses.

Because when you open your eyes underwater, sunbeams slice through variegated green, igniting mica washed down from granite peaks.

Because when you slip yourself into a pothole carved by a waterfall, a frantic trout leaps onto your lap.

Because canyons muffle all distractions, creating pockets of quietude amid the unceasing crescendo of moving water.

Because a bug prancing on water evokes a line from Yeats: “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream, her mind moves upon silence.”

Because slick granite is more indifferent to skin and bone than any sidewalk.

Because right now, in some city, some lawyer is telling some politician that some bureaucracy cannot afford the liability of letting people throw themselves into some river or stream.

Because it’s childish and reckless to slide off the lip of a waterfall that’s taller than you are, but you do it anyway, over and over.

Pancho Doll does too.

These are the moments that got him started, he says. Such surroundings reveal “the beauty of a place renewing itself -- it’s never the same.”

Now he’s off on one of his patented spiels: “Swimming holes are one of the best ways to get in touch with wild nature,” he says. “When you’re hiking, there’s an inch of rubber between you and the trail. When you jump into a pool, your whole body’s in touch with the wild. It’s sensual.”

This message resonates, and soon after his book on California appeared, desk-bound reporters began circling like zombies to a living soul.

In his first big media mention, Esquire referred to him as a “cult figure,” a leap of status that amuses Pancho Doll when he thinks of his humble off-season life in the outskirts of St. Louis: “I do, you know, spend months living with my mother in an unfashionable suburb.”

But what’s most impressive about Pancho Doll’s career is not that NPR, ABC, National Geographic Adventurer and others find it so fascinating, but that he takes it so seriously.

There you are, sprawled blissfully on the granite. Your skin tingles as heat throbs from rock into your kidney, heart and liver.

Where’s that bug going, you wonder, unwilling to so much as flinch an eyeball to see for yourself.

And there Pancho Doll is, feeding details into a digital recorder, cameras dangling, carabiners clanking, itching to move on.

Today he’s been leaping and sliding. Ask him if he swims in many of his discoveries, and he confesses: “Sadly, no. I’m usually chasing sunlight, trying to get pictures. If I move quickly, I can score two to three publishable places in a day.”

With that comes a revelation. Pancho Doll is driven. To him, this glorious canyon is just this: an office.

At least that’s what you tell yourself the next day as you sit at a desk in downtown Los Angeles, staring into a computer screen.