Swimming With An Axe  I'm at Mud Lake near the boat landing with my housemate Stephen Ramos. It's a hot sunny summer day. We walk into the water to swim. We're both wearing life jackets, to float around. I carry a light brown wooden handled axe, to hit things on the surface of the water. We start to swim. I hear that Duke and Kentucky are in overtime for their basketball game. We're swimming near the south end of the lake with three other people. I probe the water in front of me with the axe so I don't swim into a brush pile or into the mucky bottom. Many people are swimming at the lake. A male and a female police officer arrive. They ask us suspiciously what we're doing. I think they've been tipped off that we're doing something wrong. I try to conceal the axe. We're in shallow water near my carp fishing hole. The axe is on the floor of the lake, about 12-18 inches deep. I try to nonchalantly stir up the lake bottom so sediment settles over the axe. The female officer asks me if that is a paddle, pointing behind me. I turn and see the axe handle sticking out of the water a few inches. I try to cover it up, saying that it's just a little paddle that I use, and hope that she won't look at it. She moves towards it. I see the handle is white plastic, and is actually not a handle, but is the leg of a white plastic chair, the kind we have at the Whitman house. I quickly tell the officer that this is actually a chair that I have with me so when I get up into shallow water I can sit in the chair. We both see it's a chair. She doesn't ask me why I said it's a paddle. She thought the white plastic was part of a cooler, and that I had been drinking. She asks me, "Have you been drinking?" I reply honestly, smiling, "No, not today." The older male officer says Army is losing. He means losing in college sports. I ask him the score. He said they lost 315 to 17! I know that Duke and Kentucky are in double or triple overtime in college basketball.