You can’t understand John Yettaw unless you swim a mile in a Burmese lake in handmade flippers

In the latest government bailout, spiritual-questing endurance swimmer John Yettaw has been released from a Burmese prison where he was serving a seven-year sentence of hard labor for visiting a house-imprisoned political activist. (The Newsweek screen shot above shows Yettaw’s arrest.)

Yettaw has a wife, three exes and a platoon of kids. His current boo, Betty, lives in Falcon, Missouri, a small town best known for being the home of the 53-year-old vision-having endurance swimmer.

With all of the story’s strange details, it’s easy to make fun of Yettaw — the Falcon Freestyler, the Breast-stroker of Burma.

But look past the visions and the plastic-bottle swimmies. Look beyond the question of “what the fuck he was doing there, anyway?” And try to ignore the fact that Yettaw’s swim may have made Burmese opposition leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi‘s house arrest a life sentence. If you can, it’s possible to see that something amazing happened here: A Midwestern landlubber actually swam a whole mile.

Welcome home, Yettaw.