Last year on Memorial Day, my son and I discovered a giant vernal pool teaming with tadpoles at Riverside Park, so we thought we’d go back today in hopes of finding more. While we didn’t find any frogs or tadpoles, there was plenty for us to talk about. Among other things, we saw a family stranded on a dead tree in the middle of the river, about 100 rotting carp scattered across the park, and a half dozen or so kids climbing on a play structure that was still partially roped-off with caution tape. [The play structure had been roped-off in response to the fact that an easily transmittable infectious disease has already claimed the lives of 5,240 Michiganders. Apparently, however, the families of these kids didn’t see any reason to comply with the guidance of public health officials.] It was a surreal scene. Dozens of public safety officers coordinating a rescue, parents watching as their kids essentially play a kind of “pay it forward” version of Russian roulette, and the smell of bloated fish rotting in the heat wafting through the air. But it was nice to be out of the house, and away from the computer, where I’d been reading about Donald Trump’s well-deserved golfing vacation. [Presiding over an economy in collapse, and the death of nearly 100,000 constituents isn’t exactly easy, you know.]

If you’ll recall, Donald Trump often criticized Barack Obama for playing golf when he was in the White House. In fact, Trump promised on the campaign trial in 2016 not to do the same thing if elected. “Because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf,” he said. Well, at this point in the Obama administration, Barack Obama had played 98 rounds of golf, and, according to CNN, over that same amount of time, “Donald Trump has now spent all or part of 248 days at a golf course.” The Biden campaign, to their credit, just released an add about Trump golfing while the COVID-19 death count fast approaches 100,000 in the United States. Trump responded by saying that it was worse when Obama did it, and that, when he does it, it’s for “exercise”. [Obama, I guess, golfed for other, more nefarious, reasons.]

Donald Trump, for what it’s worth, also criticized Joe Biden’s handling of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak during the Obama administration. Alluding to the approximately 12,000 Americans who died in 2014, he called the White Houses’s response to that outbreak a “total disaster,” apparently unaware that 12,000 is a much, much smaller number than 100,000.

If 12,000 deaths was a “total disaster”, what’s 100,000 deaths? https://t.co/mq5lf8A9dV

— Mark Maynard (@MarkAMaynard) May 26, 2020

So, yeah… Donald Trump, from a golf course, criticized Barack Obama’s golfing, when, in fact, Obama golfed significantly less. And he then attacked Biden’s response to H1N1, on the eve of our crossing the 100,000-dead mark, completely ignoring the fact that nearly ten times as many have already died from the pandemic he’s been presiding over… a disease, by the way, that he once said would “disappear” as if by a “miracle”. [He also seemed to accuse former Republican member of Congress Chuck Scarborough of murder, but we’ll have to leave that for another time.]

Three months ago, on February 26, Donald Trump said, “The 15 (cases in the United States), within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.” And, as of today, we have 99,742 dead in the United States. And we still don’t have a comprehensive, federal plan as to how to address the spread. In fact, based on the photos I’ve seen this weekend, it looks as though we’ve collectively decided to just sacrifice our elderly and infirm, and get back to business as usual, no matter what the cost. And, yes, I hold the President responsible for this. It would be one thing if he just failed to offer leadership from he golf course, but he’s been actively fighting on behalf of the virus, by insisting that states be “liberated” and businesses be reopened against the advice of public health officials.

So, back to the park…. Thankfully, I didn’t witness any tense confrontations with the police over the use of the playground equipment, like we saw a little while ago in Idaho, where an anti-lockdown activist was arrested for removing caution tape and encouraging her kids to climb on playground equipment, but it was still disturbing to walk by and see the torn caution tape fluttering in the breeze as kids played, apparently with the consent of their nearby guardians. Given that there were several dozen officers in the park, tending to the family whose inner tubes had gotten hung-up beneath the Cross Street bridge, you would have thought that one of them might have said something, but I guess they weren’t looking to spend their Memorial Day as a viral video clip on social media. [The people stuck under the bridge were rescued by police officers in a motor boat that was brought in on a trailer. By the time they were gotten out of the river, my guess is that there were close to 20 fire trucks, ambulances and police cars on the scene. And, for what it’s worth, I’d say that fewer than 10% of those on the public safety officers on the scene were wearing masks.]

Well, it took about a week, but I think all of the carp that left the Huron River when Riverside Park flooded, are now dead. You can just see a few in the foreground of this last photo, but there were about a hundred others floating around the pond. [You can kind of make some of them out if you look hard at the above photo. You can see the sun reflecting off of their bloated, floating bodies.] Yesterday afternoon, there was just one dead fish. So all of these must have died in pretty quick succession. I was surprised to find this many dead today. Arlo and I watched a fly fisherman catch one yesterday, and my impression, after talking with him a bit, was that these lagoons had pretty much been fished out. We didn’t see any sign of fish jumping, and he’d told us that he and others had already pulled a lot out, returning them to the river. And I don’t know how successful they were, but these fisherman were preceded by an army of young people with nets, who were out on Saturday, trying their best to save as many as they could. [At one point, Arlo and I counted 8 people with nets in the same small pond.] I guess, though, these 100 or so had evaded capture… Again, I think there’s probably an analogy to be made here between the carp that left the river and the folks who encouraged their kids to all go down the same slide, but I’ll leave that to you.

One last thing… Alro and I, later in the day, enjoyed a double feature of The Music Man and Indestructible Man, talking about what a mash-up of the two (The Indestructible Music Man) might look like. Professor Harold “The Butcher” Hill, we reckoned, would have come to River City seek out the men that had sent him to the death house, sell them musical instruments, and then break their spines in half, all while singing and dancing. [If we could have stayed up later, I would have added either The Omega Man or The Man Who Came to Dinner.]