Chlorine: Nice to meet you, hope you guessed my name. But what's puzzling you, is the nature of my game.

Chlorine, our friend, and constant companion, floating in, and around our bodies.

I am allergic to two things: wool, and chlorine. I can take wool in small doses. I like sheep. They're nice. I will pet sheep. Chlorine is like poison to me.

When I was six years old I took swimming lessons. The lessons were held in an outdoor pool in November. No, maybe not November, but it seemed like it. The water temperature was about sixty  degrees. For a kid with 1% body fat, as I had, jumping into that cold of water was suicide. The first thing most of the kids did when they jumped in the pool was to urinate. It was a natural reaction to drowning, our minds thought that if we lightened our payloads we would float. Some did, but I was a better sinker than a floater. The swim instructor's name was Miss Hersog. She was  a tall fat thirty-something year old woman who looked like a Martian in her pink rubber swim cap. Our lessons began at eight in the morning, and involved holding our breath underwater, back and forth, for forty minutes. When you go under water that many times, the thought was that eventually you would relax and become accustomed to drowning and drinking mouthfuls of urine laced water. The chlorine was doing strange things to all of us, but it was peeling off layers of my skin. I looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon after each swimming lesson. Miss Hersog sighed as I dragged my skinny white body out of the pool after my chemical dip. She would say, "Go take a shower," with her steel blue eyes. The only thing she ever said to me was, "No, you may not come up, yet!" I heard this through the water, and it sounded like German. She had her hand on top of my head, holding me under with her fat German hand. I don't remember her speaking to me when I was above water in the three week lesson. She loved to blow her whistle. When she blew her whistle, all the kids stopped talking and turned to listen to her booming voice. I often stayed under the water because I had become accustomed to drowning. There I was, lying on my back in the deep end, my cheeks puffed out with air, my lungs burning with the need to breathe. I was intrigued by watching the bubbles escape my mouth; they warbled back and forth as they rose. My myopic challenged, burning red eyes, watched the kids thrashing around above me. I learned it is possible to stay underwater for over six minutes if you relax and don't care about your dying brain cells. I wore a glow in the dark watch that was waterproof to fifteen feet. I checked it often to see what time I had left before I drowned. When the time was up, I would push off the bottom with my legs, and pop out of the water like a cork. One time I did a triple axle and stuck the landing on my towel, which was spread out just for that purpose. After three weeks my hair was a shade of green, and whatever tan I'd had had been sterilized and floated like pond scum on the pool's surface.

My parents did not know they were killing me. When the lessons ended, they were disappointed I had not learned to swim. I had, however, learned to drown really well. I was relieved; I had escaped Auschwitz. I had a 50% content of chlorine in my body; there was no room for bacteria. If I ate yogurt the chlorine killed it in seconds. I swore I would never swim in a public pool again. I did learn to swim, though it took five years. I learned in the creek on my parent's property, where bacteria were everywhere. It turned out that all that underwater drowning training had made me a very good diver. I would dive to the bottoms of rocky pools to clear the boulders out so I would have to tread water. Crawdads scurried from under the boulders. I wore a mask and I felt at home in the non-chlorinated water. I grew gills when adolescence arrived and no one noticed.

I first discovered swimming in the ocean when I lived in Texas. I was a late bloomer; I did not realize that most people in the world had swum in the ocean. I didn't try it until I was nineteen years old. Later, in college, I roomed with a guy named Marshall, who told me stories of his brother and he riding their bicycles off the pier in Newport Beach, California. The bikes had ropes on them and the ropes were tied to the brother's ankles. This was not that unusual. Boys in California were much better swimmers than boys raised in Oregon. They also had better tans, and a zest for life. In California, they baptize people in the ocean. People who live in Oregon never try this because the window for sunny beach weather is limited to just a few days. The water temperature reaches forty-five degrees on those days and people in Oregon go crazy over the balmy seas.

In California, they also baptize people in swimming pools. The Jacuzzi is a place the Holy Spirit likes to hang out I suppose. In many coastal California towns people have swimming pools in their back yards. It saves on cutting the grass that you cannot water. The pools were usually not very creatively designed. A few in Malibu were shaped like guitars, but most pools built in the 1960s were rectangular. Pools built in the 1970s have curves, and pools built recently look like lagoons on tropical islands. But Southern Californians have almost no water for swimming pools, so mostly they have a lot of big holes in back yards.  I attended a number of baptisms that were held at swimming pools. I was baptized in a church on Turnpike Avenue in Santa Barabara. I wore a wet suit. The baptismal basin had more chlorine than a load of laundry swishing around in a celebrity's washing machine in Bel Air. I never got in the pools. I knew it would kill me. As an adult I have managed to evade most of the chlorine in the world. I have installed filters on my shower sprays and sink faucets, and I filter my water. Had I known, in 1980, that a bottle of water would sell for $2.00 a bottle, I would have figured out a way to make some money on it. Ah, but that time is passed. Other chlorine haters thought up that idea. Chlorine has been added to municipal water supplies since 1908, though its use was not nationwide. Today, over 1.5 billion people do not have access to good clean water, which is to say, not laced with our friend, Mr. Chlorine.  As a bacteria killer, chlorine reigns supreme. As a gas there is nothing so beautiful to behold as a cloud of chlorine drifting over a battlefield killing people. Like that song, "Killing Me Softly." Let's take a stroll down Chlorine Boulevard to learn more about this wonderful chemical and its blessings, shall we? The chemical element chlorine is a corrosive, poisonous, greenish-yellow gas that has a suffocating odor and is 2 1/2 times heavier than air. Chlorine belongs to the group of elements called halogens. The halogens combine with metals to form compounds called halides. Chlorine is manufactured commercially by running an electric current through salt water. This process produces free chlorine, hydrogen, and sodium hydroxide. Chlorine is changed to its liquid form by compressing the gas, the resulting liquid is then shipped to children's wading pools throughout the free world. Liquid chlorine is mixed into drinking water and swimming pools to destroy bacteria. It also kills the children in the pools and the human beings, and the animals that drink it. Ah well. So it goes.

Chlorine is a natural born killer, and not just of little kids and adults in swimming pools.  This was first proved in World War I, on April 22, 1915, at the start of the Second Battle of Ypres. The Ypres Salient, held by the British, Canadians and French, ran for about 10 miles, and skirted German occupied territory for five miles.  A combination of French and Algerian troops held the line to the left, and British and Canadians held the line to the right. Nobody really wanted to fight, but their leaders told them to, and they had bought into the idea that war is a romantic and patriotic thing to do with your day. During that morning, the Germans bombarded the allied lines around Ypres, but after a while they ran out of shells, so they sent some schmuck into town to get a a hundred kegs or so of beer. Towards evening, at around 5 pm, the bombardment began again. The Germans were drunk and getting drunker. They couldn't tell which side of the Howitzer they were to load. The French and Algerian troops only wanted to write long love letters to their sweethearts in beautiful but archaic cursive writing, play love songs on their accordions, harmonica, and fiddles. Suddenly one of them noticed a curious yellow-green cloud drifting slowly towards their line. Trees were wilting in its path. The French believed the cloud was a way for the German infantry to advance, so they waited. The effects of the chlorine gas were severe, not to mention a rather mean and vindictive way to win a war. It took the French years to get over it. They made impressionistic paintings about it. They were resentful because cheating with poisonous gas lacked decorum and good taste. War was a romantic thing back then. It still is, but most don't believe that now. This is perhaps due to the many young men who came back from wars without lungs or limbs. Within seconds after inhaling the chlorine gas, the allies' respiratory organs shut down. The men writhed in agony because it is hard to be a killing machine when you cannot breathe. The panic-stricken air hungry allied troops ran, leaving their damaged lungs sitting on the ground, gasping of air. The lungs couldn’t even sing a decent French love song, so they just lay there trying to breathe on their own. One lung was heard to say, “J'ai un mauvais jour aujourd'hui.” (I’m having a bad day today). The German high command were astounded that the gas had worked so well. They stood with their beer steins and sausages in hand, and watched the allies run. Then they put on lederhosen and did traditional dances, and before they knew it a couple of hundred blond haired wenches with their hair in braids showed up, and after that the German troops didn’t feel like waging a decent or indecent war, with or without poisonous chlorine gas. So the allies eventually came back, picked up their ruined lungs and bludgeoned the Germans with good stiff baguettes, and that was the end of that. The bruised and bloodied Germans ran with their wenches back to the fatherland. One remarked, Chlorine: Gottgeschenk zur Menschlichkeit! (God's gift to humanity!) They had opened up a four mile wide gap in the allies' defenses, but they just ran out of chutzpah. Chutzpah would also run out of Germany when Hitler showed up twenty years later. Their hesitation to seize the advantage cost the Germans what could have been a decisive victory. Ah well.

The world has fallen in love with bottled water and filters that remove chlorine and other harmful things from water. Ah, but hold on to your hats, we now have a new culprit. Bisphenol A is leaching from plastics, and if you've been in any grocery in North America you know that there are literally tons of plastic surrounding all the food and drink you are consuming. Recently I heard on the news that Bisphenol A is leaching into canned soups. It is even worse for living things than chlorine. We can thank our friends at Monsanto for both of these chemical wonders. They also made Napalm. God bless them - they sure know how to win a war that cannot be won! Amen. Napalm is even better at ruining lungs than chlorine. They also gave us DDT. Thank you, Monsanto!


I may not be a rocket scientist, but it seems clear to me that my only hope is to begin plans to live on a piece of land away from metropolitan water supplies, plastics, chemicals, and war mongers. I will not wait for the missiles to bomb us back to the Stone Age. I have no choice, I will have to become an organic hippie dude. It will be my own personal anti-industrial revolution.

Goodbye, Mr. Chlorine, I simply can't take you anymore. Can't live with you, and can't live without you. But as Rosanna-Danna used to say, "It's always something."