Society
When a man's genitals are bitten off by a pit bull, can anything be retrieved that's worth sewing back on?
Published 11 September 2000
Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker that the moment he heard that Speed was about a bus with a bomb on board which would go off if it dropped below 50 miles an hour, he gave an anticipatory grin. Some ideas are like that. I felt the same when I heard the idea behind Roger Deakin's book, Waterlog: a swimmer's journey through Britain.
Actually, as is pointed out almost guiltily, both on the back of the paperback edition (published by Vintage this year) and on page one, the idea comes from John Cheever's great short story, "The Swimmer", in which a man decides to swim all the way home from a party in a series of swimming pools, a journey that gradually turns into a surreal parable. (The story was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster, which was in turn "adapted"for a Levi commercial.)
In fact, perhaps as a perverse joke (although he doesn't refer to it), Deakin swims in every body of water one can think of apart from a private swimming pool: the moat in his own garden, canals, harbours, lakes, marshland, wells, and numerous rivers and streams. Cheever's "The Swimmer", like most of his stories, was a tragedy, but Waterlog is an almost alarmingly happy book. Deakin believes almost every story you have ever heard about why water is good for you: Homo sapiens was originally a semi-aquatic species; springs and rivers follow secret energies; bathing in cold water lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while raising libido. And have you ever seen an unhappy dolphin?
The last example was my own suggestion, but you get the idea. However, the passage in the book that struck me most forcibly concerned the experience of a plumber called Stephen Rees.
He was swimming in a millpond in the River Cherwell, a few miles north of Oxford, in August 1996, when he felt a "bash" on his right arm. Looking down, he saw a pike holding his arm, then quickly swimming away. "I had one large rip in my arm and a lot of puncture holes." He later decided that the pike must have been trapped in the pond, eaten all the fish there and finally, feeling hungry, attacked the first thing it saw.
I spend a fair amount of time each summer swimming across a Swedish lake. It's about half a mile long, and there are times when I'm entirely alone. This year, the water was icy, and I was able to test Deakin's theory about cold-water bathing. He said that it releases endorphins, which cause feelings of exhilaration. I just got cold; and when I got out of the water, I became colder and colder until I had spent half an hour in front of a fire.
While swimming, I have frequently felt queasy by thinking about what's underneath. I'm not sure that I would dignify it with the word "phobia", but I hate brushing against anything under the water, such as weeds or a rock. As for being bitten by something from below, a shark wouldn't be necessary to dispose of me. Just a nibble from a minnow and I'd die of a heart attack. But, I hear you asking, what harm could a pike do you? Here is a story I read in the Guardian on the day I got back from Sweden. It is, incidentally, a refutation of the journalistic maxim that "Dog bites man" is not news, whereas "Man bites dog" is news. I reproduce it in full:
A 26-year-old man was recovering from surgery in hospital after his genitals were bitten off by a friend's dog. The unnamed man was attacked in Parkfield, Wolverhampton. It is understood the dog, an American pit bull terrier cross, will be destroyed.
And I expect that the man is pretty devastated, too. This is a story that you either wish you hadn't read at all, or wish you knew a bit more of. Especially if you're a man. Bitten off? What did the surgery consist of? Curious that it should happen in Wolverhampton, which sounds like a description in Cockney rhyming slang of what had occurred. (I'm sure there's a line in an Alan Bennett play in which a woman says: "I come from Hampton Wick and I'm no stranger to innuendo.")
I imagine that there would be some difficulty in retrieving anything worth sewing back on from a raging pit bull terrier. But think how much harder it would be to retrieve anything from a pike, diving back into the depths of the lake with its prize. Maybe I'll be doing backstroke next summer.
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