New Year’s Eve

Today is New Year’s Eve. It’s already next year in some places, like Aussie-land and Kiwi-land. But it’s still 2010 in my little part of the world. Which can mean only one thing: tomorrow is New Year’s Day.

Tradition dictates that the holiday season from Thanksgiving to the New Year is a time of over-indulgence. We eat too much; we drink too much. This year, I certainly have done my part to uphold that tradition. In fact, I got a head start on over-indulging on a trip to Florida in October. On the road, as we all know, dietary restrictions go out the window.

The good thing about New Year’s Eve is we’re still in the window of over-indulgence. We’re still, just barely, between Thanksgiving and the New Year. We can over-consume without a guilty conscience. Heck, over-consumption is expected. I’m not sure if the official holiday window for over-indulgence closes tonight or tomorrow night, but for me it will be tonight. If New Year’s resolutions are to mean anything at all, I can’t start breaking them on the first day of the New Year.

So “eat, drink, and be merry” is my motto for the day, for tomorrow is the New Year. Tomorrow I’ll be different; I’ll be better. Tomorrow I’ll hew to my diet; I’ll eat less, I’ll eat better, I’ll drink less, I’ll get exercise. I’ll meditate twice a day and strive to be a better person. I’ll read more books and watch less TV. I’ll be greener, I’ll hug a tree. Tomorrow is the day I get to say “I haven’t had one drink or eaten one bite of high-fat, high-carb food all year!”, and it will be true.

Well, it will be true for a little while.

Left-Handed Stuff

I’m watching TV and a woman on the show says that she cuts her hands in the kitchen because she’s left-handed and all of her knives are right-handed.

My reaction: “Say what?”

I go to my kitchen and examine my knives. All my knife handles are perfectly symmetrical. The left and right sides are identical. Obviously, my knives are ambidextrous. Until that moment, I never knew that kitchen implements had handedness, but it explains a lot.

My right-handed self often eats while in my recliner in front of the TV. I keep dropping crumbs of food onto my shirt. I had thought it was me being clumsy, but now I’m fairly sure it’s because I’m using a left-handed fork. Likewise, I suspect I have some left-handed spoons.

Expanding my thinking on this subject, I’m pretty sure I’m using a left-handed belt to hold up my right-handed pants. The buckle is at the end where the holes should be, and the holes are at the end where the buckle should be. That explains why I put on my belt starting in the left loop and going counter-clockwise instead of the standard way of starting in the right loop and going clockwise. I’m pretty sure that my way of dressing would be correct if I were living south of the equator. So maybe I’m putting my belt on correctly after all, and the real problem is that I’m living on the wrong side of the equator.

Rats. I think I have to move to Ecuador.

The Royals

The news media are all agog over the Prince William and Kate Middleton engagement, as if it is the most important thing on the minds of all Americans. But who cares, really? I’ve never had one person express to me an interest in the British royal family. I’ve never sat at a bar and had a bar patron say to me, “How about that royal family!” But the cable news won’t let go of it.

The news was on today and the announcer said breathlessly that William and Kate plan to live “normal” lives without servants. What?! No servants? Is that possible? Then they revealed that Prince Charles (William’s father) has 149 servants, including maids, butlers, chauffeurs, and chefs. He has a valet to put butter on his toast. I’m not making this up. He has a valet to put toothpaste on his toothbrush. (“I wanted to brush my teeth but my valet had the day off.”)

This just begs for some kind of comedy skit: “Jeeves, come quickly, I need to pee.” I mean, if there’s a guy or gal whose job is to put toothpaste on your toothbrush, where does it end? “Don’t just stand there, Jeeves, zip up my fly.”

Poor Jeeves. I’d hate to be him.

Afternoon Thoughts

The temperature had warmed to 45° F by this afternoon, so I decided to walk around the ‘hood. A lot of snow still covers the ground and makes the wind cold, and there are icy patches on the sidewalk and streets. I couldn’t walk far without encountering an icy patch and then I had to tread carefully. Where the street or sidewalk is in the sun, the pavement is clear. Where the pavement is shaded by trees or houses, there is ice. I ran into one of my neighbors – Judy is her name. She lives around the corner with a woman named Chris and Chris's son. I've talked with Judy several times, including once when I ran into her at Walmart, and she always seems like a nice, genuine person. Chris's father recently passed away and her mother was spending Christmas with them. Judy had just washed off the front porch and steps because she had salted them after the Christmas day snow. She wanted to wash the salt off before it caused a stain. After rinsing the porch with a hose, she was using a broom to sweep water off the porch and steps. We talked for a while and then I proceeded home.

I was just looking through my dusty archive at some of my early writings – I thought I might find something interesting to post. But even when I wrote those pages I knew they were lame. After the passage of time, they are even lamer. My prose is like beer, not wine. Wine may age well; beer does not. I have a few poems that I could publish without being embarrassed, but a blog isn’t the proper forum for them.

My dad served in the Army during World War 2, and I have a lot of letters he sent to my mother during that time. In fact, I have all the letters he sent. Mom saved every letter, I’ve no doubt. I have read only a few. “I’m sorry I haven’t written in the last two weeks, but I participated in an invasion, and now I’m living in a coconut grove on a coconut plantation.” You get the idea. I don’t know what to do with these letters. Reading them feels voyeuristic, yet no one alive today would mind. It’s almost like archeology: artifacts from the past. Maybe I’ll keep ‘em until I pass on, then they’ll be someone else’s stack of mail.

I also have beaucoup photographs. I could scan in a few that have a story … if my scanner worked. I’ll put “buy a scanner” on my to-do list. I inherited quite a few old black-and-white photos of people I don’t know. Seems a shame to throw them away. I know someone somewhere is working on a genealogy and would love to have a photo of this or that person, and I have the photo they want. But I don’t know who they are and they don’t know me. I guess the old photos will end up in the trash can. It won’t be long before someone will find photos of me, and they’ll think, “Who is this guy?” And there will be no one alive who knows or cares who the guy in the photo is or what he did while he was on Earth.

A Winter Night

I’ve always loved reading and writing. As a child in school, I filled spiral notebooks with stories and poems and scenes from my imagination. What follows is one of those scenes, an exercise in imagination, an exercise in translating imagination into prose, to create a picture, to make it real. No doubt it’s the snow on the ground now that inspires me to dig it out and share it. Some of the language is a little dated but I’m not changing a word. It is was it is: a scene my mind conjured up long ago, typed on an ancient Woodstock typewriter and stuffed into a dusty box of papers and folders and spiral notebooks, to drift down the years to the present day.

---

Outside the lodge a cloud of tiny, feathery snowflakes settles slowly over the countryside. Even though night has fallen, the white landscape reflects enough light to enable one to see clearly. A mile to the west a ragged line of evergreens, now colored a spectral white, stretches from the northwest to the south and back toward the northeast in a great curve. On the eastern edge of this curve stands the lodge, nestled beneath tall evergreens at the foot of a long, bare hill. Gusts of wind drive a white plume from the crest of the hill and pile a deep drift against one end of the lodge.

The lodge, a squat, one-story cabin, is constructed of rough-hewn logs and sealed with pitch. So perfectly does it blend with the surrounding hinterlands that it appears to have grown there with the very trees. A curtain is drawn back from one window, permitting a shaft of light to penetrate the darkness without. Snowflakes falling past this window sparkle brightly, but elsewhere are invisible, so that it seemingly snows only in one small spot outside the window.

Though the land outside may be cold and dark, inside the lodge there is warmth and light, and with the sound of laughter and conversation mingles the smell of pine logs and coffee. At one end of a long, high-ceilinged room stands a large fireplace, obviously used for cooking as well as heating. In this a blazing fire crackles and roars as the flames are sucked up the chimney; periodically, a noise resounds like a rifle discharge, accompanied by a burst of sparks which vanishes upward. Waves of heat radiate outward, pushing the cold air into the far corners of the room.

Ranged about the fire in a semi-circle are several couples, their animated faces awash with a wavering orange glow. An air of mirth hovers about them as their discourse carries them far into the night. Finally they are overcome – drugged into sleep – by the warmth of the fire, and one by one each retires to a room in a colder section of the lodge. As the fire dies low the shadows, once content with playing over the far end of the room, creep closer to the hearth. Then, with a final flicker, the light fails, and darkness encompasses the room.

Addendum to Wasted Day

I wanted to add this to today’s blog post. As I said I would do in my previous post, I made my world-famous stir fry tonight.

I start by heating soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce in a wok, then I add sliced yellow squash and white onion, and strips of green and red bell pepper. I spice it up with red pepper flakes and add pre-cooked chicken strips or beef strips. (When I use beef strips I sometimes add stir-fry sauce.) Tonight I made chicken stir-fry. My recipe makes enough for two meals, which for me means dinner tonight and dinner tomorrow night.

When this is cooked up and dished out, a little puddle of brown liquid remains in the bottom of the wok. This liquid is soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce mixed with juice from the veggies. It picks up flavor from the onion and peppers and has red pepper flakes in it.

Tonight, after I ate my serving of stir-fry, I took some baby spinach from the fridge, heated up the wok with it’s puddle of stir-fry liquid, and wilted the spinach leaves in the wok, making sure to coat them with the stir-fry liquid.

This was the best tasting spinach ever! This recipe is definitely on my have-it-again list.

Wasted Day

Oh, it’s been a wasted day. What did I accomplish? Nothing. Almost nothing. I did write a couple of pages which I might, or might not, publish to my blog. I have written many pages that I later decided weren’t up to my normal sub-par standard of writing and so at some point I just deleted them. Maybe I’ll delete the ones I wrote today.

I got up at 7 AM or so. I got on the ‘puter and IM’ed with my main peep CyberDave in Roanoke. Then ate breakfast. Surfed the web some more. Took a nap on the sofa. Ate lunch: a couple of mini-pizza sandwiches. (To make a pizza sandwich just take two pizzas and press them together face-to-face and heat ‘em to melt the cheese. Of course, if you use regular size pizzas you’ll have one flippin’ huge sandwich, so I make my pizzas on sandwich thins then moosh them together and nuke ‘em for a half minute.)

I watched some TV and did some reflecting and spent a lot of time writing the new blog pages that you aren’t reading right now. There’s still a lot of snow on the ground from the dome failure the city experienced on Christmas Day. “What’s a dome failure?” you ask.

It’s a long story. A few years ago I couldn’t pay my property taxes, so I went to city hall and told them, “I’m a pretty fair engineer, instead of giving you money can I make something for the city?” I offered several items I thought they might like to have: a food-replicator for the meals-on-wheels vans; a warp-drive in case the city ever built its own spaceport; a force-field generator that could create an invisible dome over the city to keep out bad weather. They liked that last one, so I built it. The city installed it deep below the municipal building in an old atomic weapon shelter behind thick blast doors. It’s been working great ever since. Initially we had an issue with birds; they kept flying into the dome and knocking themselves out, but fine-tuning the force-field resolved that issue. And as for the tornadoes that hit the city – that was a whole other issue; I asked the city to pay for an anti-tornado plug-in and they refused, so I didn’t build it. Other than that the dome has been glitch-free. But it went off-line on Christmas Day (I’m guessing City Maintenance forgot to install a fresh battery) and as a result the city got a lot of snow dumped on it. I refuse to accept responsibility. The warranty on that dome generator has expired.

Think I’ll go cook some stir-fry. Wonder what’s on toob tonight?

The Day After

Yesterday (Christmas) snow began falling in my city about 2 PM. At 6:30 PM I fired up the kerosene stove. Of course I have central heat, but when I look outside and see snow on the ground and more falling, I like to have a hot spot to bask in. I like to feel those infrared photons striking my epidermis.

Tradition tells us this is the time of year to eat too much and drink too much. Never let it be said I didn’t do my part to uphold tradition. After eating and drinking too much yesterday, I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up at 6 AM. The kerosene stove was still burning.

Finally at 11 AM, the little window in the fuel tank showed no fuel so I took the tank to the garage to refill it from a 5 gallon tank of K1. The snow on the ground was 7 inches deep. I know that because the snow was one inch below the bottom step outside my back door, and the bottom step is an 8 inch cement block.

Snow is still falling. It may fall all day. My 4WD Jeep is in the garage if I should need to get out. I might don my coat and boots and go for a walk later. Right now, the heat from the kerosene stove feels good.

Merry Christmas

Once again, Christmas is upon us. When I was a boy I eagerly anticipated the approach of Christmas. By Christmas eve all the presents were under the tree. On Christmas morning, my brother or I would be appointed to distribute the gifts, and what had taken so long to carefully wrap would be ripped open all too quickly.

One of the first gifts I remember getting was a bicycle. I don’t recall my age but I was very young … maybe 6, maybe 8. My dad took me to an empty racetrack where I could learn to ride it. I recall the ground was sandy and it was difficult to pedal the bike on it.

Another memorable gift was a microscope set. I used it so much that my parents ended up giving me three of them – each more advanced than the previous. I spent many hours peering into invisible worlds such as you find in a drop of pond water.

Of course I grew up, and then I found myself in the position of racking my brain to figure out meaningful gifts for family members, and trying to wrap them nicely and still having them look like I wrapped them using my feet. But having family together at Christmas was nice; there were good times.

But now, Christmas is just another day of the week. I look out the window and see a cold and gray day. Nothing is special, nothing is different from any other day. And that is okay. Growing older is a process of giving up things. The last thing you give up is life itself, but before that happens you get lots of practice at giving up things. As Ecclesiastes says: “To everything there is a season … A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away…”

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Taste o’ Pizza

This Christmas Eve is sunny and clear. It’s also cold, 21° F. Looking outside now, it’s hard to believe that we may get snow tomorrow, tomorrow night, and the next day, but that’s the forecast: cloudy with a chance.

My taste buds clamor for a taste of pizza today, yet I don’t want to buy a high-calorie pizza pie. Can I get a taste of pizza without buying or making the standard high-calorie pie? Yes: a pizza sandwich. But first I must go to the grocery.

At 11 AM the grocery store parking lot is crazy crowded. It is customary in these parts for everyone to wait until the day before the store will be closed before going to buy a month’s worth of supplies. I do my part to uphold this tradition. I duck in and pick up the few items I need for my pizza sandwich.

I buy:

• Sandwich thins – small, round, 100 calories. You’ve seen ‘em.
• Pizza sauce – I get the squeeze bottle.
• Sliced provolone.
• Sliced mozzarella.
• Sliced pepperoni.

Some assembly required:

Separate the halves of a sandwich thin and toast them a little. Don’t toast them crisp, just dry them out a little. Put the sandwich halves on a plate and add pizza sauce, provolone, mozzarella, and pepperoni. If you like them, sprinkle on red pepper flakes (I don’t consider a pizza complete without red pepper flakes) or add onion rings. Then top with the other half of the bread. Put the sandwich into a microwave oven and heat it about 20 seconds to melt the cheese. Tasty!

Solstice Eclipse

Today, in the dark hours of early morning, the winter solstice occurred. It marked the moment the sun reached its most southern declination in Earth’s sky. The winter solstice occurs on the shortest day and longest night of the year. It marks the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere and first day of summer in the south.

Also today, we inhabitants of Earth were treated to a total lunar eclipse. I went outside at 3 AM to view it. The moon was about 45 degrees above the western horizon. It glowed a dim, reddish color, like a giant, round luminary bag with a candle inside. I tried to take a picture of it, but it was too dim for my camera. The temperature outside was 20-something degrees so after a couple of minutes I retreated back into the warmth of my abode.

A Mr. William Castleman of Gainesville, Florida, captured the 4 hour lunar eclipse and compressed it to a 2 minute video. And bonus: he added a soundtrack. This is modern times; we can’t have an eclipse without a soundtrack! (I think my entire life would have been much better with the right soundtrack.) And I like his choice of music: Claude Debussy, Nocturnes: Sirènes. Suitably celestial, nearly numinous.

Christmas is four days away. The weather prognosticators are predicting a 40% chance of snow on Christmas Day. We’ll see.

Right now, I’m going to drive to Wally World (Walmart) to buy food. See you later.

(Time passes.)

Wow. What a crowd. The store was packed. Stay away from Wally World unless you like rubbing elbows with strangers, breathing other people’s exhaled air, and driving in heavy traffic. But I guess that goes for most any place this time of year. Malls, restaurants, grocery stores … it’s all crazy.

Strange Dreams

I woke up at 4 this morning. I got up at 5:50 and turned the thermostat up to 68° and went back to bed. I fell asleep and had a dream.

I dreamed I was with my dad and my cousin Ron. Now, my dad died in 1994, my mother died in 2003, and my cousin Ron died in October of this year, yet they live on in my dreams. When I see them in my dreams, it never seems odd or strange that they’re there. My dreaming self is not aware that in the waking world, those people have passed on. In my dreaming world, they’re still alive and well.

In this morning’s dream, I owned a 1960 Buick Electra. In the real world, this was a car that my dad had owned. In my dream, we were on a mountain road – my dad had been driving “my” car – I was not in the car, I was outside standing on the road – and he got out of the car and walked toward me to say something, and the car started rolling down the road and then went off the road and crashed through bushes and brush and disappeared. In the real world, this had actually happened. My dad had driven to Blacksburg, in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and while there he drove into a gas station and got distracted by an electrical problem in the car and he didn’t put the transmission into Park. He went into the station and one of the men inside asked my dad, “Is that your car?”. Dad turned around in time to see his Buick Electra roll across all the lanes of busy U.S. 460 and disappear over the side of the road and down the mountain. It didn’t go far before it hit a fence and stopped. Police had to block highway 460 so a tow truck could winch the 4500 pound vehicle up the mountain and onto the highway again. The Buick was built like a tank; it suffered no damage and my dad drove it back home that same day.

In another part of the same dream, I was riding a motorcycle. I got off the Interstate somewhere in North Carolina and rode into a gas station and up to the pumps. Shortly afterward, cousin Ron came up to the pumps and offered to pay for the gas. That was very much like Ron. He was very careful with money, but would pay for the meal you had with him or pay for gas when he was riding with you.

My dad, in my dreams, is also very much like he was in life. When he was alive, he was very critical. When I was growing up, and even when I was an adult, he found something wrong with just about everything I did. He always found something to criticize. In my dreams, he’s the same way. He’s been dead for 16 years yet he still manages to get into my head and criticize me. I can’t catch a break from this guy! But, though they’re gone, I don’t mind dreaming about these people. In my dreams they’re alive and well and we’re hanging out and doing ordinary stuff. Some part of me cherishes the good times we had together and wants those times to continue. In my dreams, those times together do continue. My brain takes bits and pieces of memories and combines them to make new, and sometimes strange, dream experiences. The dream may be strange, but seeing my family again, never is.

Pals – an old family photo. Ron and I are in the center; he has his arm over my shoulder. My brother Ken is also in the photo; he looks to be about 2 years old, making me 7 and Ron 9.

Oopsie

This is the famous 1895 train wreck at Gare Montparnasse in Paris, France. The only fatality was a woman on the sidewalk below who was hit by falling masonry. How unlucky do you have to be to get killed by a train coming through the 2nd floor of a building?! The locomotive’s engineer was fined 50 francs for going too fast. Waaay too fast. The fine could have been larger but he did get into the station on time.

(Image: Wikipedia Commons featured picture)

The train wreck below is actually the front entrance to the Mundo A Vapor (Steam World) theme park in Canela, Brazil. Those Brazilians … they’re such kidders.

(Image: Arqueos Weiss, cc-2.0)

A Thousand Summers

I’m not being creative tonight. I’m transcribing. I wrote this as a diary entry 5 years ago. It’s been waiting 5 years to be published.

Feb. 8, 2005

It’s February 8th in Virginia. What some would call the dead of winter. I just got back from my after-lunch walk. The temperature is 61º and it’s going to hit 70º today. That’s winter weather in Virginia. Freeze your ass one day, wear short sleeves the next day.

On days like this I enjoy walking the macadam paths of a nearby park. The warm sun, the warm air, remind me of a day in late spring, a harbinger of summer. I’ve seen many summers. So many. A thousand. Ok, you may think I’m crazy at this point, or at the least, that I’m not good at math. In fact, I am quite good at math. But I’ve seen a thousand summers. And I feel it through and through these days, down deep in my bones. I feel the approach of a thousand summers on planet Earth.

“You have been around through hundreds and hundreds of embodiments on this earth. You're not a first generation human being. You've had some female lifetimes and a lot of male embodiments, but I'm really surprised you're in a male embodiment in this lifetime, because you're still working on the feminine side of your own nature. You've been very skeptical in many of your lifetimes, and this one. You know a lot of things, but it is learning the feeling, the essence of it, to become one with it, is the next part of the journey.”

Walking, for me, is like meditation.  (I don’t mean the kind of meditation the swami teaches, and yes, I paid my money and I learned it and practiced it diligently, morning and evening, so I can say: yes, I’ve meditated, I do know what that – the swami’s brand of meditation – is all about.)

I walked for 30 minutes. Two and a half feet per stride, two strides per second. Multiply that by 60 seconds and again by 30 minutes. That’s nine thousand feet.  One point seven miles.  A person can think a lot of thoughts in one point seven miles. On a warm, sunny day in the dead of winter, after a thousand summers lived, one can think a lot of thoughts.

Me and My Shadow

When I was a child and snow lingered on the ground longer than one would expect, my mother would say it was “waiting for more snow.” My small city received light snow Sunday night, and on Monday morning the ground was white. But it was one of those very light snows that should have disappeared the next day and it didn’t. It lingered, and it still lingered on Thursday morning, and sure enough it was waiting for more snow – and here it is. Snow falls as I type this blog post. The kerosene fire is toasty and lunch is over. What did I eat on this snowy day, you ask … salad greens (romaine and spring mix) topped with “Firehouse” chili sprinkled with red pepper flakes and grated jalapeño cheese, and some buttermilk ranch dressing to top it off. Was it good, you ask. Oh yeah!

For today I’m reaching back decades to a diary entry I wrote about me and my dog Shadow on a snowy day in a long ago winter.

Excerpt from a diary…

It’s sometime after midday and it’s snowing like it plans to snow forever. I’m standing in the backyard facing west, facing the back of the house. I’m looking across the back yard, which is white now, and the house, white roof, and beyond; the street, more white – white flakes falling, millions and billions and billions of billions – and that’s only a single second’s worth. Mind boggling. And I’m standing there still, in my parka with the hood up so I’m looking out through this – hole, it’s like a porthole, and I’m inside looking out at the world. The flakes are hitting my hood just an insulated inch from my ears. The world is quiet, not much sound, except the snowflakes hitting the hood of my coat, and it sounds like – tat, tat tat tat, tat tat ... these tiny hard frozen things hitting the hood of my coat. Shadow is running around, and rooting around (how come her nose doesn’t get frostbite?) and rolling over in the snow. My hands are cold and hurting inside my gloves, my feet are cold and hurting, the rest of me is warm. I’m trying to – this is hard to describe – experience the pain. Feel it thoroughly; know it. And I can close my eyes – tat tat tat, no other sound, very quiet. Shadow and the snow are the only moving objects in my universe. Of course there’s me. I move, or rather I can if I want to. So maybe there are three moving things in the universe – Shadow, the snow, and me. I’m not sure about me. And as I stand there, what occurs to me is this: snow is no big deal, but snowing is terrific. You have to experience it, not just watch it. Bundle up, go out into a blizzard, and just stand still and listen to the silence of the world. It takes a while. Eventually you hear it.

Tales from the Marina

The marina where Dad kept both the African Queen and his next, unnamed boat, which we called, simply, the Trojan, was run like a comedy of errors. I could tell you many stories about that place.

The man who operated it always carried a pistol in a holster on his belt. I guess he was afraid one of his customers would try to kill him one day. His fear was probably justified.

One day I pulled up to the gas pump in the 28 foot Trojan. The gas pump guy passed me the pump handle and I began fueling the boat. Now, the hose on the gas pump was not one continuous hose. It was two hoses joined by a coupling. Suddenly the two hoses came apart. The coupling had broken. Gas was gushing into the bilge at a rate, it seemed to me, of several gallons per second.

One might assume that gas pumps would be designed with a back-pressure sensor, so that if the hose broke the pump would shut off. But one would be wrong.

“Uh, hey, HEY, *HEY*...” the power of speech momentarily left me as I saw this incredibly dangerous situation unfolding. The gas pump guy finally saw what had happened and shut off the pump.

I switched on the bilge fans and pulled open the engine hatches. I was going nowhere in the next few hours.

# # #

Late one night, Dad and I went to the marina. We planned a trip down river the next morning and we had some work to do on the boat. We were working on it late at night, using a flashlight, when a man on the boat next to ours came over and asked us if we were taking flash pictures.

Uh, no. No flash pictures. Just doing a little work here. See... here’s our flashlight. The man grunts and returns to his boat. Dad and I think this is pretty weird, but we continue working on the boat. Ten minutes later the guy comes back. Now he wants to buy the pictures he thinks we’re taking.

Look guy... flashlight, see?... no camera, no pictures, just a flashlight... We finally convince him and he returns to his boat. Dad and I figure he’s got somebody’s wife on his boat and he thinks we’re taking pictures as evidence. We put away the flashlight and put away the tools. No point in getting shot by somebody who won’t even remember it in the morning.

# # #

It’s late at night and Dad and I are getting the boat ready to go down river in the morning when I notice a noise that sounds like a motor running far away, and I also become aware that I’ve been hearing it for a long time. “What’s that noise?” I say to Dad. He doesn’t know, but he becomes curious, too. We walk up the pier, up to the parking lot. The noise is louder. We continue walking until we reach the end of the parking lot. Here is the source of the noise. A drunk is passed out in a car with the engine running. His foot has the gas pedal pressed to the floor, and the engine is running wide open. A radiator hose has burst and engine coolant is all over the ground. The entire exhaust system is so hot it’s glowing red. Literally, the ground beneath his car is lit up red from the exhaust pipes. The car is locked, so we knock on his side window and he manages to rouse himself awake. We motion for him to cut off the engine, and somehow he figures out what we want, and he kills the engine. Then he passes out again.

We think, wow! Good thing we were here. We return to the boat. A few minutes later, I am incredulous to hear his car start up and see it leave the marina.

The next day I was told that his coolant-less car was able to go about a mile before its over-heated engine seized up. When the car’s engine died, the car was only a few yards away from entering a busy highway.

The Trojan

My dad’s second boat was a 28 foot Trojan cabin cruiser with an inboard 292 Ford Interceptor engine. It was a wooden boat. It was undoubtedly nice in its day, but that day was past. Still, it wasn’t in bad shape. It just needed fixing up and it was affordable, so he bought it.

The boat was docked near Mathews, Virginia, and we had to bring it across Mobjack Bay and down the southern part of the Chesapeake Bay and up the James and Appomattox Rivers to the marina at Petersburg. Moving the boat would be a two day outing. The first day we would drive to Mathews and bring the boat across the Bay and up the James River to Gray’s Creek. There is a marina at Gray’s Creek where we would spend the night. The next day we would continue up the James to the Appomattox River, and then up the Appomattox to the small boat harbor at Petersburg.

One sunny Saturday we drove down to West Point – “we” being my dad, my brother Ken and his wife Shirley, and myself.

We left the marina near Mathews and headed out across Mobjack Bay. The trip started out smoothly. It was going to be about a four hour trip to the mouth of the James River. The sun was shining, the water was calm, and it looked like we would have a nice trip. It didn’t stay nice for long.

Soon we entered the Chesapeake Bay. It’s really just an extension of the Atlantic. If the ocean is calm, the Bay is calm. If the winds are blowing out in the Atlantic and kicking up waves, the Bay is going to be rough water.The swells started getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. Soon the swells were about 8 feet high. They were rolling right under us. I was piloting the boat. Every time a swell rolled past it would lift the boat up. As the crest passed under us the boat would balance on the wave-top with its prop and rudder out of the water. So every time a swell passed I had to chop the throttle to keep from over-revving the engine. The boat would just sort of twist and turn as it sat suspended at the top of the swell, and there was nothing I could do to keep the boat pointed in the right direction. It would balance on the crest of the swell and slowly rotate. Then the swell would pass us and the boat would just drop like a rock into the trough. It hit the trough so hard that paint flaked off the cabin ceiling. I would give the engine almost full throttle and turn the wheel to keep the boat on course. Within seconds the next swell would hit and we would be lifted up, the prop and rudder would come out of the water again, and I would chop the throttle again. The bow would swing lazily to a new heading and then we were falling into the trough and I would shove the throttle forward and bring the wheel over and we would climb the swell then we would be on the crest and I would chop the throttle again...

This continued for four hours. It wasn’t gentle. The boat was moving too violently for me to remain seated, so I stood in front of the seat and simply braced myself between the seat and the wheel. It was fortunate I wasn’t sitting in that seat. At one point my brother grabbed the pilot’s seat to steady himself and the boat moved so violently that he ripped the seat loose from the boat. It was about then that my father and sister-in-law began pumping up the inflatable life raft. My brother had a marine navigation chart and was trying to figure where we were. Buoys were few and far between. I tried to keep the boat going in a more or less straight line while fighting the swells. The bilge pump was now running constantly as the pounding on the hull was causing us to take on water. No one said what everyone knew: that if the boat’s engine faltered or if the bilge pump quit running, the boat would sink.

But the engine never faltered, the pump never quit running, and finally we came within sight of land, and the swells abated somewhat. We entered the mouth of the James River and the water became as smooth as glass.

We found the marina at Gray’s Creek and spent the night there. The next morning we gassed up the boat and resumed our trip up the river. Within minutes the engine cut off. I pulled up the hatch cover and scrutinized the engine. The battery wire had broken off at the ignition coil. If that had happened while we were crossing the Bay, our trip would have had a very different outcome.

We were lucky. Or maybe, that day, we had a little help.

The African Queen

My dad’s first boat was a “deadrise”, the kind of traditional workboat used by watermen on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a 23 foot wooden boat. The original inboard engine had been removed and a 4 cylinder Homelite outboard had been installed. The boat was old and beat up and clunky. Most of all, it was slow. My brother and I called the boat the “African Queen”, a reference to Humphrey Bogart’s clunky boat in the movie The African Queen.

One morning my dad, my brother Ken, and I left on an overnight trip down the river. We were headed to a place called Scotland Wharf. It would be a 2 day round trip. Around lunchtime on the first day, the engine died. We checked the fuel gauge; it was on “E”. We weren’t worried; we had two fuel tanks and the other tank was full of gasoline. We broke out some snacks and had lunch.

Why did we think this trip was going to be smooth? Nothing we did ever went smoothly.

After lunch we tried to start the engine. We connected the second fuel tank to the outboard and we cranked the engine. And we cranked some more. We waited in case the engine was flooded, and we cranked again. We cranked until the battery was dead.

Fortunately we had another battery! The engine had a bad charging system and wouldn’t charge the battery. So as we cruised down the river we were continually depleting the battery. During the day this wasn’t so bad, but at night we had to turn on the navigation lights, and battery life became an issue. So we carried 2 batteries.

We connected our backup battery. With a fresh battery the engine still wouldn’t start.

“Wait a second” I said. “Let’s pull the cover off the engine. I want to look at the distributor.” I had become suspicious that the points had closed up. If they had, there would be no high voltage for a spark.

With the distributor cap removed, I watched the distributor points while my dad cranked the engine. I was incredulous when the distributor rotor didn’t spin. The only possibility I could think of was a broken distributor shaft.

“Big trouble,” I thought. But we had tools with us, so we pulled the distributor out of the engine. The distributor shaft was really two shafts connected by a nylon coupling no bigger than a postage stamp, and that coupling had sheared.

We were drifting with no engine power. The depth gauge read 90 feet. And we were in the shipping channel. It was at this point that I looked behind us and saw a large freighter coming around a bend in the river and bearing down on us. The freighter was too big and too close to stop, and it couldn’t go around us in the narrow channel.

We had no paddles or oars, but we grabbed a couple of loose boards that happened to be lying in the bilge and we paddled furiously toward shore. Our efforts and the current brought us close to shore where some men were working on a house. Seeing our predicament, they threw us a line and hauled us into shore.

The men tried their best to help us. One even loaned us his car so we could look for a replacement part, but we had no luck finding anything useful. So one of the workmen took his power saw and cut off the end of a wrench so that we could make a replacement coupling. We took the little piece of steel back to the boat and, using a small file, we began to work on it, shaping it to replace the nylon coupling. It took hours of filing on that piece of hardened tool steel to make it fit.

There were other stories on that trip. The James gets fairly wide close to the bay. Nightfall found us chugging along in our small boat, running the engine and navigation lights from a single well-used battery, staring at the large ships around us, reading a navigation chart by a dim light bulb and trying to figure out answers to “where are we?” and “where are we going?” and “how do we get there?”. We made it to Scotland Wharf, but while we were getting gas the tide went out, and suddenly the African Queen was aground in the shallow water.

Eventually my dad sold the boat. I was at the marina the day the new owner had the boat pulled out of the water so that its hull could be scraped and painted. The marina guys got the boat onto a trailer, which they pulled up the boat ramp with a tractor. But the trailer wasn’t hitched properly to the tractor. When the tractor got to the top of the boat ramp, the hitch parted and the trailer, with boat, went flying down the ramp to the water. Boat and trailer crashed through part of a dock and a handrail. Suddenly the boat was drifting out with the tide with no one aboard. The marina guys retrieved the boat, but after the impact with the dock, the hull was never again watertight and the bilge had to be pumped constantly to prevent it from sinking.

Which, eventually, it did.

Biker Chick

I don’t remember her name, but in my mind she will always be “biker chick”.

I first saw her one night standing with her thumb out on a corner of a busy intersection in San Francisco, and I stopped and offered her a ride. She was in her early twenties, attractive, with blond hair, wearing jeans, work boots, and a denim jacket over a halter top. She sat behind me in my camper van on a little sofa. She was quiet. I stopped at a convenience store and bought a box of donuts. As I pointed my van back onto California route 1, I removed a donut for myself and passed the box to her. A few minutes later I looked behind me and saw her lying down, asleep. The donut box was empty. She must have been hungry and exhausted.

I was hoping to make it to Big Sur that night, but I was tired, too. The highway was dark, and I found a place where I could pull off the road. I quickly fell asleep.

The next day my hitch-hiking passenger was more talkative. She was a “biker chick”, the girlfriend of a biker. She had a four year old daughter in Florida that she missed and she was on her way there to see her. We talked all the way to Los Angeles.

It was late afternoon when we got to L.A., and I pulled my van off the road and into a parking area next to a public beach. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, and while I stood on the beach and pondered my next step, my passenger got out of the van, walked to the edge of the highway, and stuck out her thumb. Two minutes later she had found a ride and was gone.

Florida was three thousand miles away, and I felt some regret that I let her slip away so quickly. I wasn’t responsible for her but, even so, I felt I should have taken her at least part way home. I’ll never know what happened to her, but I’ve always hoped she made it home safely, back to her little girl.

 

Bixby Creek Bridge, about 14 miles north of Big Sur

Hot and Spicy

In another place and time, I often stopped at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant on the way home from work. The restaurant served hot pepper sauce with their spicy dishes. The sauce contained ground peppers in oil and was very spicy hot. (I don’t know what kinds of peppers were in it. They appeared to be toasted dark brown then ground and combined with the oil.)

The first time I tasted the pepper sauce, it felt like an atomic fireball went off in my mouth. I could tolerate only a small amount of it. But after a few years of eating it weekly, it became quite tame. I got it with every meal and spooned it onto everything. The restaurant owner knew I liked it and she began adding it to everything I ordered. Even fried rice had hot pepper sauce in it. That didn’t stop me from spooning even more on. I loved its flavor as well as its hotness.

I also loved Mexican food. A local Mexican family owned and operated several restaurants called El Rodeo. Sometimes I would stop in and have dinner at one of their restaurants. Upon sitting down, the first thing that happened was a waiter would bring a basket of corn chips and a bowl of red, tomato-based salsa and place them in the center of the table. That was an appetizer while the food order was being prepared. The salsa was supposed to be hot and spicy, but because of my Chinese pepper addiction, it tasted fairly bland to me.

One night I was in El Rodeo with a friend who was, like me, a hot pepper sauce addict. We both lamented the lack of hotness in the salsa. On an impulse I asked our waitress if she had anything hotter. She said, “No.”

So I said, “Come on now, you’re a Mexican family, you eat here in the restaurant and this is the hottest salsa you have? I don’t believe it.”

She admitted, “We do have something hotter. But it’s too hot for you.”

Too hot? Bring it!

She brought me a bowl of green salsa. Green, like a jalapeño! It even looked hot. I dipped a chip in it, and with just a slight amount of trepidation, I popped it into my mouth. Hmmm … not bad. It was definitely hotter than the regular, red salsa. My friend and I continued our conversation as we dipped chip after chip into the hot, green salsa.

Eventually hot peppers became something that a meal seemed incomplete without. It’s surprising that a person can adapt to, and even savor, something that at first is so painful. The brain learns to re-interpret that fiery sensation on the tongue as something that is as essential as table salt and black pepper.

On the other hand, if humans lacked that ability to adapt, this would be an awfully painful world. I wonder how many painful things I’ve adapted to … adapted so well that I’ve become comfortable living with them.

HIgh and Mighty Factoid

I thought this was a stunning bit of irony.

In 1954 a movie was released called The High and the Mighty. It was a good movie with a memorable score that won an Oscar. The movie was about a passenger plane, a Douglas DC-4, that was carrying passengers on a flight from Honolulu to San Francisco when it experienced an engine fire. The crew thought they would have to ditch the plane into the Pacific Ocean, but with great skill and much luck they were able to land the plane in San Francisco with less than 30 gallons of fuel remaining. In the exterior and daylight flying sequences of the film, the plane used was a DC-4 passenger plane owned by carrier Transocean Airlines. The plane was named The Argentine Queen and had been the personal aircraft of Juan Perón, three-time President of Argentina. Transocean Airlines director of flight operations Bill Keating did the stunt flying for the movie.

A decade later, in 1964, the very same airplane used in filming the movie – The Argentine Queen – was carrying passengers on an overnight flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles when 8 hours into the 11 hour and 40 minute flight, the pilot radioed that the plane had an engine fire and might have to ditch. The pilot reported his position as 700 miles west of San Francisco. Unlike the fictional flight, on this flight luck ran out for The Argentine Queen. The U.S. Coast Guard searched for 5 days, but the plane and its passengers were never found.

Grace Potter

I wanted to post a video of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, but while searching Youtube I found this video from 2007: some great musicians playing Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer. This is an awesome performance! Musicians include Grace Potter, vocals and keyboard; Joe Satriani, guitar; Willy Waldman, trumpet. (And if you like food, be sure not to skip the video at the bottom of this post.)

Cooking with Grace Potter!

How many recording artists record cooking videos? (For HD click the link and select 720p and full-screen.)

Part1:
Grace Potter makes an Apple, Pepper Jelly, Cheddar Grilled Cheese Sandwich. It really does look good … though I’m not sure about adding white truffle oil. Isn’t a grilled cheese supposed to be a cheap sandwich?

Part 2:
Grace makes a Hot Habanero Mexican Delight. It looks scary hot!

Montana

It was night and I was about 500 miles from Montana when I picked up a hitchhiker. I drove on toward Montana and we talked. He was from Montana and that’s where he was headed. He was going home and I could get him part way there. There were thunderstorms ahead of us; I could see heat lightning on the sky but it was far away. I had already driven many hours and soon realized I was too tired and sleepy to drive; I needed a break. He offered to take over driving. By then, we had talked enough that I had a good idea of what kind of person he was. I pulled the van to the side of the road, and I moved to the sofa behind the driver’s seat, and my hitchhiker acquaintance took over driving. For a while, I lay on the sofa and looked through the windshield, watching the heat lightning play across the dark sky ahead of us. The next thing I knew, I was waking up. It was morning and we were in Montana. I dropped off my hitchhiker, now hundreds of miles closer to his destination, and I drove onward.

On that trip west, I drove to many places in Montana. The hottest was Helena. The van had no air conditioner and the August sun through the van’s windows was merciless. The most beautiful place was Glacier Park in northwest Montana near the Canadian border. It was picturesque with lots to see and do. And if a roadside attraction called the Montana Vortex near Columbia Falls wasn’t the weirdest place, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

My trip was east to west so eventually I had to drive over the Rocky Mountains. There are interstate highways, like I-90, that cross the Rockies, but I didn’t take an interstate highway. I took a small highway over the Rockies. It was scenic but steep and laden with switchbacks. I was amazed to see people pedaling bicycles in the opposite direction. Think of the strength and stamina it requires to pedal a bicycle over a mountain range.

At the top of the pass through the Rockies I pulled my van off the road. Beside the road was a vast and level mountain meadow. There were no trees here; I was probably above the tree line. However, there were beautiful flowers in this meadow: small, delicate, violet flowers, probably native to high mountain meadows. There were small yellow flowers that resembled black-eyed susan. My dog Shadow ran and romped, and I trudged a long way across the meadow until my van was a dot in the distance.

Eventually I resumed my journey. I was descending now. As night fell I entered Red Lodge, the first town I had seen in quite a while. I didn’t linger there. I put gas in the van and a bite of food in my stomach. Then I eased the van back onto the highway and sped down the road. I was putting Red Lodge behind me, putting the Rockies behind me, putting Montana behind me.

I was headed toward Wyoming. I wanted to see Yellowstone Park. I wanted to see some of its treasures: geysers like Old Faithful, hot springs like the Paint Pots, and who knows, maybe I would cross paths with a bison. I didn’t mind putting Montana behind me; it’s a magnificent place to visit, but it isn’t home. Besides, there were yet many wonders to see and people to meet. Life awaited me just up the road.

Glacier Park

One day I saw a photograph in a magazine. The photo showed a beautiful mountain lake surrounded by tall evergreens. Behind the lake was a snow-covered mountain.  The caption said the picture was taken in Glacier National Park in Montana. It was one of the most beautiful nature pictures I had seen. I wanted to see that lake for myself. So I drove to Montana.

I found that lake and stood just where the photographer stood when he took the photo in the magazine. I looked across the lake and beyond it to the evergreen forest surrounding it. I looked at the snow-covered mountain in the distance. And when I looked down into the lake water, as clear as the water that comes from your kitchen faucet, I saw something completely unexpected: the bottom of the lake was covered with small multi-colored pebbles like the stones people buy to put in their home aquariums.

How perfect can it get?

Looking back, it was probably a little impulsive to drive to Montana just to visit Glacier Park and see a beautiful mountain lake, but I’m glad I did. When it was first mapped and photographed in the 19th century, there were 150 glaciers in the park. Because of a continued pattern of warm weather, only 37 glaciers remain, and only 25 of those are “active” glaciers larger than 25 acres. All the remaining glaciers are expected to disappear by 2030 and possibly by 2020. Then, the only glacier in Glacier Park will be its name.

January in December

It’s January in December in central Virginia. Mornings in the 20s, daytime highs in the 30s, nighttime lows in the teens. We’ve already had a sprinkling of snow. It’s time to fire up the kerosene stove.

Of course, my house does have central heat. But I like to turn the thermostat down somewhat and have a nice, comfortable hot spot in one room to keep me warm. The kerosene stove emits a soft, rosy glow that not only keeps me warm but is also soothing, like a fireplace. An electric space heater puts out heat, too, but compared to a kerosene stove, an electric heater is soulless. There is something different about heating with a kerosene stove. It burns fuel, it converts that fuel to heat and light right in front of you, just as a fireplace does. You can see combustion at work; it has a soul of fire. And if you maintain the wick and adjust the flame properly, there is no odor. At least, not until you turn it off. Then, it’s best to put it outside for a few minutes.

The kerosene stove’s chimney glows rosy red with heat. A curved reflector behind the chimney stretches its reflection like a carnival fun-house mirror.

 

When I was a youngster delivering the morning newspaper, I often stopped by my grandmother’s house for breakfast after I finished my deliveries and was on my way home. She knew just what I wanted for breakfast on a winter’s morning; she always cooked a stack of pancakes for me. And when I say “stack”, I mean it; she always cooked 12 to 14 pancakes for my breakfast. (I was thin then and never gained weight from eating all those pancakes.) She seemed to enjoy my morning visits, and she seemed to enjoy cooking those pancakes for me almost as much as I enjoyed eating them. My grandmother’s little bungalow was heated by a floor furnace, and while she busied herself in the kitchen I would pull my chair right up to the edge of the furnace and let the hot air blow over me. I found it so soothing and relaxing it was almost addictive. And though it was hard for me to stand up and leave that soothing flow of warm air, a plate of warm pancakes with butter and maple syrup made the separation easier to bear.

I haven’t eaten a pancake in years. I still love them, I just don’t dare eat them; I think I’ve gained a pound or two just by writing about them. But, thankfully, a warm stove is still calorie-free.

Linville Gorge

There wouldn’t be enough hours in the day to comment on all the stupid things I see on the TV. For instance, on the news today was a story about a woman who was lost in the woods and survived several days by drinking creek water. The news announcer made an expression of disgust when he said “creek water.”

My immediate thought was, “Ooh, how horrible – creek water! (Sarcasm). It was probably more pure than the stuff that comes out of our kitchen faucets.”

My next thought was, “Isn’t creek water what humans drank for hundreds of thousands of years until we invented municipal water systems and chlorination? Isn’t creek water basically what many third-world humans still drink?”

My final thought on the subject wasn’t in words; it was a memory. There’s a place in western North Carolina called Linville Gorge. It’s also called “The Grand Canyon of North Carolina.” It’s a beautiful place. Like the Grand Canyon, Linville Gorge is deeper than it appears from the top. In the picture below, that little “trickle” of water you see at the bottom of the gorge is actually the Linville River.

One summer day I hiked to the bottom of the gorge with my brother Ken and his wife, and the three of us hiked along the river until nightfall. (At one point we passed a group of friends, male and female, swimming in the river and having a good time.) We spent the night camped by the river. The next morning Ken and I continued down the gorge while Ken’s wife retraced her steps to where we entered – a gentler hike to the rim than where Ken and I were headed. Soon my supply of drinking water was gone and I was thirsty. I didn’t want to drink the river water; I was reasonably sure that would be a bad idea. I trudged onward until I came upon a large rock outcrop jutting from the sloped land beside the river. From the top of the rock a trickle of water fell to the earth below. It was clear and I knew it would be pure. It wasn’t coming through towns and cities upstream as was the river water. It was coming from the earth itself, as pure as spring water. I held out my water bottle and filled it – and I can honestly say it was the best tasting water I ever drank. My energy was renewed – a good thing, because I spent most of the day hiking uphill to get out of the gorge. I recall a most welcome sight that day: treetops a hundred feet above us lit by sunlight. The sun, low in the afternoon sky, illuminated those treetops because they were above the the rim of the gorge. We were near the top of the gorge. I survived drinking the water trickling off that rock outcrop. It didn’t kill me; it didn’t make me sick. It was refreshing and tasty and it renewed me.

More than half of Americans drink bottled water in preference to municipal water. And, of course, it hasn’t been that long ago that everyone drank well water or spring water.

I’m not suggesting you should drink creek water. There are no guarantees … it is possible the water could be contaminated. Don’t drink it if you have an alternative. Disinfect it with iodine if you can. But if there is no alternative, use common sense. If you’re in a remote area away from factories and farms and people, the water is probably fine. There’s no need to avoid it like it’s radioactive. And there’s no need to make a face when you utter the words “creek water.”

Albuquerque

One summer day I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico – in “Old Town” – and I asked someone to recommend a good restaurant to me. Their reply: “Have you been to the top of Mount Sandia?”

I had not. Turns out there was a very nice restaurant at the peak of Mount Sandia. However, the only way to get to the restaurant was by aerial tramway, a metal and glass box suspended on cables hundreds of feet above the ground.

The ride to the peak of Mount Sandia was interesting and the view was outstanding. One of the passengers on the tram explained that all the restaurant’s supplies also came up by tram and that the restaurant’s water did double duty, serving first as ballast in the bottom of the tram. I don’t know the truth of that, but it’s what the guy said.

I left Albuquerque and thought no more about that tram for years, until one day I turned on the TV news and there it was. It had been a windy day around Albuquerque, and the wind had buffeted the Mount Sandia tram causing the cable to become jammed. The result was that the tram was stuck and so were the people in it. After hours of hanging a hundred feet in the air, the passengers eventually got to the ground ... by being lowered, one by one, on a rope!

I thought back to my own trip on that aerial tram, and what I remember is ... the tram operator made us wait a long time before allowing us onto the tram because, as he told us, “The winds are too gusty.”

I want to say to that unknown tram operator, “Thanks so much for making us wait.” I much prefer the “stepping out onto a platform” method of debarking to the “coming down on a rope” method.

Denver

Once, I sat on a mountaintop just west of the city of Denver, Colorado. I had endured several long days of driving, and it was nice to sit in the grass on a quiet, sunny afternoon and look out over the city. My dog, Shadow, romped through a tree-filled meadow that looked more like a park than a wild mountain meadow. As the sun set behind me, I sat in grass and looked out across the High Plains a mile below me. I watched the shadows of the Rockies creep eastward until they covered the city. I sat there as dusk settled on the desert and the lights of the city came on. I sat there while darkness descended on the mountains and the desert below, and I watched as tens of thousands of stars that made up the constellation of Denver sparkled into luminosity like some great heavenly galaxy somehow brought to Earth. The sight was truly mesmerizing.

Far away, tiny points of light in the sky above Denver moved ever so slowly toward the ground, ever so slowly blending with and becoming lost in that maze of lights that was Denver. I knew what those tiny points of light really were. They were the landing lights on jet aircraft delivering planeloads of passengers into the Denver airport (Stapleton, now gone). I, in fact, had flown into that airport, had seen it from the perspective of a passenger riding one of those points of light. Now I was seeing it again from this most extraordinary vantage point.

I can never think of Denver without remembering how beautiful, how awesome, the city looked from that mountaintop, sparkling like a million jewels in the darkness of a warm summer night.

Some Early Jobs

My first paying job, one of the hardest with the lowest pay for the hours I worked, was delivering the morning newspaper. I worked three to four hours every morning, then on Thursday and Friday afternoons I worked 4 to 5 hours each day collecting payments. On Saturday morning I retraced my route another 4 hours to collect from customers who were not at home on my earlier visits. All this work earned me about $7 a week, a pitifully small amount of money. But when you’re 13 and 14 years old, your choice of jobs is limited. I delivered the morning paper for two years.

The only job I was fired from was drugstore delivery driver. I was 16. To this day I remember the delivery car, a rear-wheel drive Renault Dauphine with a badly worn clutch. With my foot off the gas pedal I could let out the clutch quickly without stalling the engine – that’s how much the clutch slipped. One dark night I was driving on a narrow country road when I realized I needed to be going in the opposite direction. While attempting to turn the car around I got a rear wheel off the pavement and there wasn’t enough clutch left to pull the car back onto the road. I left the car in gear with the engine running and got out to look at the rear wheels. I figured one wheel would be spinning and maybe I could do something to increase the traction. But, although the car was in gear and running, neither rear wheel was turning. The clutch had finally given out. Because I was driving the Renault when the clutch failed, it was deemed to be my fault, so I was let go.

The shortest job I’ve ever had was selling encyclopedias door to door when I was 17. (This was back when a set of encyclopedias consisted of twenty slick, beautifully made books.) I was terrible at it. After a week I quit and immediately started my second hardest job.

My second hardest job was as a “yard man” at a chemical factory. It was a summer job (I was still 17), and I got all the crappy tasks. I wasn’t union so any task too hard or too dirty or that required lifting something too heavy for the union employees became my job. Tasks such as: loading steel drums onto (and off) a flatbed truck, transferring drums from truck to warehouse and vice versa, stacking drums in the warehouse – all done “by hand”, no forklift or machinery involved – mowing acres of grass with a regular lawn mower (not a riding mower), cutting tall weeds along a railroad track with a swing blade. All the work was done under a hot summer sun or in a hot warehouse or railroad car. Did I mention scrubbing chemical tankers inside and out?

My next summer job was as technician at a company called Fairchild-Hiller in Bladensburg, Maryland. I lived in College Park, Maryland, in a fraternity house without electricity. Every day I showered in cold water, and when the sun went down it was literally “lights out.”

Later that summer, I was transferred to a plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I lived in a boarding house and rented a room on the top floor. The house had no air conditioning and the top floor baked under a metal roof during the day; at night the room was sweltering hot. I tried to sleep by lying on top of the sheet wearing only shorts, but I would just lie there awake and perspire. I had a roommate: another boarder. Every room had two boarders. All the rooms on the floor had access to a single bathroom on the floor. The meals were truly outstanding: southern farm-fresh country cooking prepared by the elderly woman who owned the house and her helper. She not only fed the boarders, she sold meal tickets and anyone could eat there. At dinner I often found myself seated with strangers who didn’t live at the house but who ate there. There were usually two or three kinds of meat to choose from, such as fried chicken and country ham, and several vegetables, and then several desserts to choose from. To participate in all this bounty, you only had to purchase a meal ticket for 95 cents. Because I rented a room there, my three meals a day were included in the $15 per week I paid for room and board. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but even then it was a bargain!

My next summer job was at a company in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Automated Specialties. I was an e-tech (electronics technician). I lived 12 miles away in a cottage at a small summer resort at Lake Albemarle. It was in horse country and there were miles of meadows, pastureland, and white fences. There was just one thing that made that summer job memorable. At the lake resort there was a pretty female lifeguard about a year younger than I. Her name was Dolores. With short blonde hair, blue eyes, a pretty face, and a swimmer’s body, she was a knockout. We dated that summer. I don’t have a photo of her – all I have is a sketch I drew one day in that long-ago summer. I was no artist and it’s fair to say she was a lot prettier than a sketch can show.

I’m Back!

I drove to DC early Thursday. That was unfortunate, because I wasn’t trying to drive to DC. I was aiming for the city of Reston in northern Virginia. I had planned to take I-95 to the Occoquan exit then 123N to 7100N to 606 into Reston. That bypasses some of the heaviest holiday traffic near DC. But oh no, I had to get into the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes north of Fredericksburg (at the urging of electric highway signs that proclaimed the HOV lanes were open, AND at the prompting of my GPS – it certainly wasn’t my idea!). And who knew that when you commit to the HOV lanes, you can’t get out?!

The HOV lanes are between the north and southbound lanes of I-95. As I soon discovered, there are no exits from the HOV lanes. There was the small consolation of being in less traffic, but I had no choice but to drive past my exit and into the denser regions of the DC area, where construction (for the Metro) seems to be going on everywhere, and where the highway twists and turns as though you’re driving on a single strand of spaghetti amidst a plate of spaghetti, with highways crossing above and highways crossing below – sometimes at the same time. The road jiggled left and right amongst orange and white construction barrels while signs beside the jersey walls warned ominously, “Stay In Your Lane”. At one point the GPS said “Exit right ahead,” and so I did exactly that – I took the next exit on the right. As soon as I exited I knew I had made a mistake. Taking this exit is NOT what the GPS had meant – it was simply giving me a heads up to get into the right lane. But the GPS knew I had exited too soon and began giving me a series of instructions to get me back on the interstate and headed in the right direction. I had no idea where I was, but the GPS did, and it got me back on the highway and on to my destination.

I visited Ron (my first cousin once removed) and his mother Betty and son Nick. As it happens, Betty is an excellent cook. For one thing, she enjoys cooking, and when you enjoy doing something it helps make you good at it. Plus, she’s attended cooking schools and cooking classes and watched hundreds of cooking shows and learned by doing. So the food was delicious, and of course I, having virtually no will power, pigged out and now I’m afraid to step onto the bathroom scale. I’m afraid I’ll break the little thing.

We had soups and salads and turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, and ham and green beans with slivered almonds, and mashed potatoes and crescent rolls and pies and cake and other sweet things. Leftovers involved turkey-rice-carrot soup, turkey with brown gravy, fried potato cakes, biscuits made with wheat beer, and other goodies. And all the time there was the ever-present temptation of potato chips, pita chips, pastries, and other high-calorie carbs all calling out, “Eat me.” The morning of the day I left to drive home, Betty cooked French toast made with panatonni bread and drizzled with real maple syrup. Plus, oven-baked bacon.

 

Betty made this pie; it’s the one thing I didn’t taste. I think it was a cranberry pie. Betty said it tasted like cherry pie.

 

Betty’s grandson Nicholas made this pumpkin pie. For a topping, Betty made whipped cream with a little vanilla added. Outstanding!

 

The traffic driving back was much worse than the traffic driving up to DC. Bumper to bumper, high speed, slowing to 20 mph, then speeding up, then slowing to zero, creeping stop-and-go for a few miles, speeding up, slowing to 40 mph, speeding up, slowing to 10 mph, speeding up again … you get the picture. Not fun! But here I am, blogging again.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! But heck, even if you’re alone – nothing wrong with that!  Kick back with nachos and beer and watch TV. Find a restaurant that’s open and that has a bar, and have a beer (or iced tea, or coffee) and chat with other people who are at the bar by themselves – chat with the bartender if she’s not busy.

And give thanks for something good in your life.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s. Among several spacecraft he helped design was Voyager 1, which completed its primary mission in 1990. One of the last instructions sent to the spacecraft was for it to take photos of all the planets. This photo of earth from 4 billion miles away has become one of the most popular photographs of our time. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a pixel. (Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.) In a coincidence of geometry and optics, Earth lies in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from pointing the camera so near the sun.

 

Video: (not viewable on most mobile phones)

Excerpt:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
-Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot,” 1994

Tiny Balls o’ Gunk

I am starting one of my annual autumn chores: cleaning the leaves and gunk out of the gutters on the garage. (By “gunk” I mean the black, moist, compost-like residue of rotted leaves and twigs.) I was going to do it tomorrow, but the weather forecast changed and we might get rain this evening, so at 3 PM I have decided to clean the gutters today while the leaves are still dry.

Usually I put a ladder at one end of a gutter, climb the ladder, scoop out leaves and gunk with a garden trowel, hammer any loose gutter nails, climb down, move the ladder a few feet, and repeat … repeat … repeat, until I get to the end of the gutter. Then I move the ladder to the other side of the garage and do the same procedure.

I start to do that today, but after about one minute of work I look at the long stretch of gutter brimming with leaves and I think, “There has to be a better way.” I drive to Home Depot and buy their cheapest leaf blower (about $30). It is rated at 150 mph, which seems strong enough to move a leaf. I drive home, rip open the box, hook up the blower to a long heavy-duty electric cord, climb the ladder, and wow! Why didn’t I do this a long time ago? I still have to climb up and down the ladder numerous times to hammer the gutter nails – they always loosen during the year – but wow, the blower moves a lot of leaves fast, and it moves a lot of the gunk, too. In fact, it showers me with tiny black balls of gunk, all over my shirt, my face, my hair, inside my shirt pocket, over the blower itself. The moist little balls of flying gunk stick to whatever they hit, and they hit everything within ten feet. But it is worth it too see all that crud coming out of the gutters. I still have to use the trowel on the heaviest gunk, but the job goes a lot faster.

Finally the job is finished. I put away the blower, put away the ladder, put away the electric cord, put away the trowel and the hammer, take off the gloves and put them away. Brush off my shirt. Close the garage, go into the house. Then I bathe, for the second time this day.

Roanoke

I used to live in the city of Roanoke, Virginia. It’s located in the mountains of southwest Virginia – in the Roanoke Valley. I was looking through some old photos and I found these photos I took from the balcony of my apartment in Roanoke.

A view of the parking lot. I drove a 4WD Subaru at that time. You can see why I wanted 4WD.

My car is parked at the left end of the row.

 

 

 
There are cars beneath those mounds of snow. You can tell by the side mirrors sticking out of the snow.

Ordinary mounds of snow don’t have side mirrors.

 

 

I have my Subaru cleaned off and ready to go. But I have to wait for the parking lot to be pushed. 4WD is great in snow, but it’s a Subaru, not a snowplow. If I can get to the street, there’ll be no stopping the Subaru.

 

 

This was the view of my neighbor’s balcony. I don’t recall when I took these photos, but probably in ‘93 or ‘96.

The March ‘93 “Superstorm” brought 18 inches of snow to Roanoke. The “Blizzard of ‘96” brought 2 feet of snow on January 6-7, with 22 inches falling in one day, and a total that winter of 56 inches.

Over the 17 years I lived in Roanoke, the city had two “storm of the century” snow events and several more “storm of the decade” snow events.

The only time I had any trouble driving in snow occurred before I bought the Subaru. I had a Honda Civic (FWD), and while driving up a long, curving driveway at a friend’s house, the Civic lost traction and came to a complete stop on the hill. I took my foot off the gas and put on the brakes, hoping to hold the Civic on the hill. But the Civic started sliding backward down the driveway. It picked up speed and as it slid downhill it began to rotate. The Civic rotated 180° until it was pointed in the direction it was sliding. At the bottom of the hill the driveway curved to the left but the Civic was going too fast to follow the curve – it went straight off the driveway and plunged into deep snow, which quickly stopped its forward motion. I exited the Civic and walked up the driveway, almost slipping on snow and ice and injuring my back in the process. After that event, I bought the Subaru, and never had another problem driving in snow. When it comes to 4WD, my theory is: better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

John Muir

I left the house for a neighborhood walk at 3:57 PM, exactly one hour before sunset. High, thin clouds dimmed the sunlight, making it seem later than it was. At 57° it felt a little cool. Most trees still have a lot of their leaves, and yet plenty of leaves litter the yards and lie in mounds in the gutters. I’d guess half the leaves have fallen; the rest will go quickly.

There is something about walking in the autumn air that makes me think of John Muir. Muir was an engineer, a naturalist, a writer, and a botanist. Among his accomplishments, he founded the Sierra Club. When I returned from my walk, I decided to include in today’s post a few quotes from his writings. So here you go – quotes by John Muir:

“Every time I pull up a wildflower, I find it connected to the Universe.”

"Bears are peaceable people and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour." OUR NP, pg. 28

"In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and embarrassed, both of us, but the bear's behavior was better than mine." OUR NP, pg. 174

“I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in 'creation's dawn.' The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.”

“Most people are on the world, not in it, - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.”

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”
- Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42

“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature -- inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”

VirtualWayne’s Quick Muffaletta

Here’s an idea for a quick lunch. Of course, not having any ingredients on hand will make it much less quick.

Start with a loaf of Italian bread. Cut it in half and scoop out some of the doughy bread.

On one half add:

Ham:

Provolone:

Salami:

Mozzarella:

On the other half add:

Sliced salad olives
Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil:

Hot banana pepper rings
Onion rings:

Close the loaf and slice it:

Wrap the leftover portions and put in the fridge or freezer.