A Man, No Plan, and a Canal
He lives in Southern California without traffic or stress and usually without shoes, the lucky cuss.
"Go play," his lovely Spanish-born wife, Maruxa, tells him every day, and he does. Like a kid.
Norman Cargill, creeping up on 80, has lived a fairy tale since 1970, an ancient yesteryear when a high school auto mechanics teacher married to a college professor could afford waterfront property. His back yard in the Naples section of Long Beach has a boat ramp on a sweet little canal that spits him past palms and bougainvillea and onto Alamitos Bay.
He watches friends retire, as he did roughly 20 years ago, and they can't wait to take out their equity and move to saner, more restful environs.
Not Cargill.
"He's kind of an original in an area taken over by multimillion-dollar houses and yuppie couples," his neighbor, Lesley Hawks, e-mailed me. "He runs over to share his discoveries regularly. A cactus plant that flowers only once every two years, a rare butterfly, a caterpillar he rescues from tree-trimming activities."
But it was the part about the birds that interested me most. Hawks said that when Cargill paddles out to the bay to go windsurfing, a daily excursion as predictable as the morning fog and dating back more than 20 years, he often returns with a passenger.
A sea gull he calls Pablo.
"I can't promise the birds will come," Cargill told me as he lugged his windsurf board under a Chinese elm and out to the launch. With a stranger on board, he said, his feathered friends might be spooked. I was willing to take that chance.
Cargill wore blue cotton shorts, a red fleece vest and a golf hat with back brim folded up. He's a stout chap, with a low center of gravity that serves him well on the floating dock and aboard the 40-year-old, 11-foot sailboat he's converted into a rowboat. Cargill attached the board to the stern, lowered himself onto a faded lawn chair and paddled away as he does seven days a week -- unless it rains.
Even as I propped my feet up and felt my blood pressure drop, I had never been so envious. We lolled under bridges in a Venetian dream, the marine light soft and lazy. "This is the life I should be living," I said, and the comment drew a knowing smile, with Cargill warning me not to let the secret out.
A few hundred yards of slow paddling and we came to the mouth of the canal, with warm salt air blowing in across Alamitos Bay like a tonic.
