Everywhere I go I see people declaring that spring is here. I have very little more to contribute to the subject, except to say that I agree and have noticed it as well. This has been the warmest winter I can recall in central California. Of course, when we did receive a series of arctic blasts in January, I was in Hawaii watching the rain. All through the month of February it was beach weather around here, then March cooled down some, and now April, spring, and a few rain showers come lightly dancing through, causing a lot of hidden bulbs to suddenly rise from their tombs.

I went east over the weekend. I crossed a couple of mountain ranges to get to San Luis Reservoir, where I have been going windsurfing for perhaps twenty years. The reservoir is one of the windiest bodies of water anywhere to be found. The people I met when I first began windsurfing still go there, after all these years. Saturday I attended the semi-annual safety patrol meeting. Volunteer windsurfers have organized and trained to help keep this reservoir from being less than a death trap when the season of high wind begins. Most of the drownings at the reservoir have occurred because of people not knowing what to do in strong wind, so the patrol is a set of eyes for the state of California to watch, advise, and report when people are not careful in hazardous conditions.

So far this year on the island of Kauai, where I wintered, there have been eleven drownings. Even strong, ocean-savvy people are getting sucked into offshore currents that drag them out to sea. One lady visiting the island from New York insisted that she could swim across a river that was flash flooding, despite the warnings of others, and was very quickly swept away, as a crowd stood and watched. Yosemite Valley this past summer also went through a rash of people slipping off the tops of waterfalls.

It's okay to love adventure, but why not make room to also treasure life. Surfers think themselves invincible in large surf because they see photos in magazines or videos that show others gracefully riding over-sized waves. As I get older I move slower and my response time to anything moving at me has been dulled by years of living.

In the word "careful" I see embedded the word "care". The Old English meaning of care is: "sorrow, anxiety, grief," also "burdens of mind; serious mental attention". I'm not sure where or how, but for many the understanding of the word seems to have become lost in our culture. Perhaps in earlier times when people lived closer to nature, there was a greater need to be always watchful. In this modern day, people work indoors in safe office buildings and shop for food in grocery stores where there is no threat to life. In their spare time when they want to get out in nature, some of that natural instinct to hold serious mental attention is forgotten.