On The Beach

Memoir of Old Jack, an Army Mule

Call Me Old Jack,

My daddy was a jackass stallion; Momma was a big roan mare.

I was born on Roan Mountain on Black Tuesday in 1929

I’m an old Jack Mule now, who has been most everywhere.

I was born in North Car’lina.  Had it not been for hard times, some called it the Great Depression, I might have spent a lifetime draggin’ stone boats up them hills.  A sawed off mountain lad the local yokels called Mack thought I was his pet, like that yeller hound dog and the old Dominicker chicken that follered him around those mountains.  I follered him too, because he was needy.  And, to tell the truth, I liked to munch on the parched corn the kid always carried in the pockets of his overalls.

Mack was a lightweight, a scrawny kid.  Even when I was just a colt I’d let him ride on my back; I hardly knew he was there.

Mack’s daddy got hard up for cash and had me trucked to Jonesboro, Tennessee.  I thought that was the last I’d see of Mack, but danged if I wasn’t mistaken.  I was sold at auction to a feller from Memphis who bought mules to resell to the U.S. Army.

I was most full grown when the Quartermaster from Fort Reno won the bidding.  From Memphis a bunch of us sturdy young studs (that’s just a figure of speech, you know we mules are sterile, which means we can’t reproduce—it don’t mean we’re queer) and a few Jennies were loaded on a train and hauled out to Oklahoma.  I fell for the cutest blue-nose Jenny you’ve never saw during that long, smoky train ride.  Prettiest eyes and ass you’ve ever seen, love at first sight so to speak.  But they kept us apart, chained to the stanchions of that cattle car.  Maybelline was my Jenny’s name.  Our romance was brief and unrequited as they say, but I’ll never forget those eyes.

At the Remount Depot, in Fort Reno we had our Army physical exams, got our shots for tetanus and anthrax, and were tattooed in our ears.  Poor Maybelline caught a cold during the train ride and it developed into pneumonia; she dropped dead while we were having our hooves examined, poor thing.  I reckon the Army veterinarian though I was in good shape—better’n most due to the workouts with the stone boats in those mountains of North Carolina; some of those Missouri mules was half starved when they were recruited, or acquired—so they gave me my service number, 08K0 and shipped me down to an artillery regiment at Fort Sill.

I’m sure stranger things have happened, but imagine my surprise when they put on the chow wagon team and assigned a Buck Private by the name of Mack to ride me.

I reckon if you’ve seen those movies about the 20-Mule Teams that lug those wagons filled with Borax out of Death Valley, you probably got the wrong impression.  We weren’t driven like that, with a man sitting in the wagon, steering us with reins and crackin’ a bull whip over our heads like we were dumb oxen.  No it wasn’t that way at all.  Of course we were harnessed, collars and all, but experienced mule such as myself were put at the head of the team, saddled and ridden by our soldier.  In my case it was my old partner, Mack.

Now I don’t know for sure that Mack recognized me right off, the way I knew him by his smell.  But the first time the Private came close with a bag of corn nuts, I snatched ‘em out of his hand.

The dumb kid might have slugged me, but an old Sergeant had his eye on him.  I nudged Mack with my nose in that spot where he was ticklish, and got him laughing.  And then I gave him back his bag of corn nuts and he shared ‘em with me.  He knew from that moment on just who I was.

“Jack!” He hollered like he’d met a long lost friend, “You sonofabitch, I thought it was you.”

Well, to make a long story short, Mack got married to a girl over in Marlow, had some kids and got out of the Army.  And me, well they hauled me to California on the train, put me on a ship and sent me to Honolulu in Hawaii.  I wound up working for those dog face soldiers at Schofield Barracks, packing loads of K-Rations to feed them, when they went on maneuvers in the Kuhuku Forest on the Pali.

Next thing you know those Japanese airplanes came over and bombed our biggest ships in Pearl Harbor and clobbered all of our airplanes at Hickham Field.  That, friends, was a day to remember.  I have to tell you how dumb the Army Officers were; they had men walking guard duty and manning the anti-aircraft guns, but wouldn’t give them any ammo—dumber than horses they were.  And they didn’t get much smarter as time went on ( I heard they’re using horses in Afghanistan’s mountains, which is clearly a job for mules) but I digress.

I got another boat ride to Australia on my way to the China-Burma-India Theater of War.  For you young folks reading this I should explain that a Theater of War ain’t what you may be thinking—we didn’t put on plays.

When we got off the boat in India, we were assigned to the Engineers who were building a road across the Himalaya Mountains into northern Burma and on into southwestern China.  Now that was some damned hard work.  The loads we carried and the muck we had to hike in was hard to believe.  Then there were those jungles and the Japs.  Need I mention the altitude, or the attitude of those draftees marching through that muck?  Just think of the Ledo Road as hell on earth.  Back and forth over those mountains we went, humping loads that would kill a work horse, swimming rivers filled with leeches. It was not only hard work, but deadly boring until someone started shooting.  We reached Myitkyina finally.  That’s where the Ledo  Road joined the old Burma Road. And from there we went on to Kunming, China followed by the trucks. In 1944, I was in a column of experienced mules loaned by the U.S. Army to the Chinese Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Chiang was an arrogant sonofabitch who was pulling a fast one on Uncle Sam, hoarding the loot the U.S. shipped to him over the Ledo-Burma Road and not doing much fighting with the Japanese to speak of, so it should surprise no one that Mao and Chou En-Lai’s Red Army whipped his butt.  That’s when I became a Prisoner of War.

Like all POWs everywhere, I was harnessed to a plow one day and draggin’ a Red Army wagon the next.  Little by little I made my sway from south China to Manchuria.  I even spent a while at Port Arthur working for the Russians, until the war ended—the civil war that is.

As you may recall, the peninsula of Korea was split in two along the 38^th Parallel of Latitude and the Sovs occupied the northern half and the U.S. Army ran the southern half.  That situation began to change even while Mao and Chou were still fighting the old Generalissimo Chiang’s army.  In 1949, Chiang and his Nationalist Army bugged out of China and settled on Formosa, an island once owned by the Japs that’s called Taiwan.  The Red Army won the war and Mao was set up as the leader of The People’s Republic of China.

Meanwhile, one of them Koreans by the name of Kim Il-Sung, who’d been to Moscow and learned Communism, and then fought in the Red Army went home to Pyongyang and took over as head of the government in North Korea, which he called The Peoples’ Republic of North Korea.   So Kim Il-Sung got Chairman Mao to send all of the Koreans who’d fought in China against Generalissimo Chiang back home.  Then Kim got his buddy, Uncle Joe to send him a bunch of tanks and burp guns, fuel and ammo and he built himself one mighty army.

Kim’s troops were mostly experienced soldiers.  Singman Rhee’s army in The Republic of Korea, down south of the 38^th Parallel, on the other hand were mainly peasants in uniforms with little or no training and though they were reinforced with a regiment of U.S. Army troops and Officers, they were nowhere near as good as Kim’s armies.

So, with permission from Uncle Joe Stalin, the acquiescence of Chairman Mao, and the promise of air support from the Soviet Air Forces in Siberia, Kim Il-Sung invaded South Korea on the 25^th of June, 1950.  Let me tell you true, Kim’s troops and tanks went through the South Koreans like shit through a tin horn.  But like most invaders, Kim made a great mistake; he went too far too fast.  By the time his army was down near Pusan, at the Naktong River, he ran out of gas for his tanks, ran out of ammo too.  Well, almost out of ammo, but not quite.  And he went farther than the Soviet Aircraft could fly and fight and still get back to their bases in Siberia and Manchuria.  So Kim’s army was in about the same shape our U.S. Army was that Sunday morning in 1941, when those Jap airplanes hit us on Oahu.

Next thing you know, General MacArthur landed two thirds of a Marine Division and a bunch of soldiers at Inchon and cut off the North Koreans stuck down south.  With the remnants of the R.O.K. Army and the First Marine Brigade and some U.S. Army reinforcements whipping them down on the Naktong, in Mason and so many places, there wasn’t too much left of Kim’s army left to fight.

Well, Kim Il-Sung wasn’t the only one to make mistakes.  Danged if Macarthur didn’t do the same foolish thing of extending himself too far by pushing the fight clean up to the Yalu River—the boundary between Korea and China—with winter coming on.  Some of those old generals were dumb as stones, in spite of all the glory heaped on ‘em.

It was late in November, when the Chinese loaded me up with ammunition and sent me across the river with all those Chinese Volunteers.  It must have been the coldest damned winter on record.  Damned ice was thick enough to hold a tank, but slick!  By then my shoes were worn down so thin they looked like tin foil, no cleats on them at all.  I slid on the ice at every bend in the trail, skint my knees, near broke a leg.  And Christ knows I wasn’t a young Jack by then.  I was Old Jack, and Cold Jack.  By the time the Chinese Volunteers chased the Marines out of the Frozen Chosen Reservoir area down to their ships at Hamhung and the U.S. Army well south of Seoul, I was one Hungry Jack.  What I would have given for a bag of corn nuts that winter.  I must have lost thirty or forty pounds or more.

Then President Truman fired General MacArthur, so I heard, and put another in charge and he counter-attacked and there I was, caught right in the midst of another melee.

Tell you what, by then I’d had ten years of war, damn near continuous war, and I was tired of it.  You can call me a coward if you like.  But I’d had enough, thank you.  I clomped down through the rubble of the Railroad Station in Seoul and hid.  That’s what I did.

After the battle was over, a little Korean boy found me hiding in the dark.  I reckon he must have thought I was a pony—God knows I’d lost a lot of weight.  So the kid, name of Tack Su-Tu, rode me out of the rubble of the Railroad Station and was heading for his daddy’s farm in the Taebak Mountains, when an M.P. stopped us.

The M.P. ran little Tack Su-Tu off and took me prisoner.  Before you know it, I was humping ammo up some mountains higher and steeper than any in North Carolina in a place called The Punch Bowl and a hill called Heartbreak Ridge.  It was nowhere as rough as the Himalayas, but then I wasn’t the youngster I was back then neither.  It was rough, I’ll tell you, and no corn nuts for a reward either.

I was just about worn down to a nubbin when the veterinarian ordered them to give me some R&R and new shoes.  I won’t go into all the trouble I got into during those 10 days of freedom down south.  Well, there was this little roan Mongolian filly, cute as a button, bangs and tail the color of Tennessee clay—ah me.  She couldn’t speak a word of Mule and I hadn’t learned Mongolian, but well, let’s just say we got along and leave it at that.

In 1953, three years and a couple of days from when it started, the Truce was signed in P’anmunjom and I was shipped home on a troop ship, just like one of the boys.

Old Jack was 26 years old by the time the ship docked in Oakland.  Had I been a human being, I would have had a bale of back pay coming to me.  Being an old mule, however, all I got as a reward for all my service was a small bag of corn nuts  when they mustered me out.

When it’s all said and done, I can tell you this: war’s are a bunch of horse shit, and any mule with half a brain would steer clear of armies and wars.  Personally, I’d rather pull a stone boat, or skid logs for a living than go to another war.  Well, they put me out to pasture in a place called Bright Angel to spend the remains of my days toting people down into the Grand Canyon.

If you don’t believe it, you can kiss Old Jack’s tail.

Challenging Carpentry Work

Challenging Carpentry Work
By OldMack © August 24, 2011

When I began working for Granite-Yamanishi, a joint venture general contracting company in San Francisco, they had already completed blasting and excavating the hole in which a waste water treatment plant was to be constructed completely underground near Fisherman’s Warf. And the iron-workers had already installed the interlocking steel plates of the cofferdam on the walls of the seventy-five feet in diameter hole to prevent cave-ins and they were laying the re-bar steel in the bottom of the hole, seventy feet below the level of San Francisco Bay, which would reinforce the ten-foot thick foundation slab when the concrete was dumped into it. In other words it looked like an interesting job to me.

We had driven to the City in our converted 1958 Ford bread delivery van from Florida, but we knew we couldn’t live in it as the only Recreational Vehicle parking place was already filled with Winnebagos and converted Greyhound buses. So we rented the converted-garage apartment of a house in the south end of the Mission District on Chicago Way and parked the van at the curb.

Chris enrolled A.J. in the Guadalupe Elementary School and then signed on as volunteer Teacher’s Aide. Every morning they would walk up the hill to the school, while I walked to the terminus of the Mission Streetcar line to commute to work in the hole.

In the evenings, while Chris tutored A.J. in reading, spelling and arithmetic to give her the jump on her peers, or walked with her to the park to play on the jungle gym, I pulled the engine out of our truck and gutted its interior.

The head of an engine re-manufacturing company in Oakland lived in our neighborhood. He came by while I was maneuvering the old engine out of the truck and onto the sidewalk. Before going home, he had convinced me that a factory re-build of the 223 cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine would be faster, better and cheaper than if I were to do it myself, as I had planned. The following morning we loaded the engine in the back of his pickup and off he and it went. Had I rebuilt the engine myself, I’d have had to send out the block to be re-bored and its crankshaft turned. If Bob Caswell were still living he would have been the guy I’d trust with the machine work, but Bob was gone by then and I knew of no other precision machinists in the City whom I’d trust with that vital part of the job. Enrique Mendoza promised to return my re-manufactured engine in two weeks.
But when it was returned it came in several crates filled with unassembled parts, so I walked to Enrique’s house and hauled him out by the front of his shirt and promised to do him bodily harm if he didn’t pick up my engine parts and reassemble them as agreed. He got my point and brought his teen-aged son to help him load the crates in his truck that evening.

Chris watched the loading of our engine from the front door of our garage apartment, hoping, she said later, that I wouldn’t have to murder the guy.  Yeah, and I’m the one who is the skeptic in our family, not her.

At work on the treatment plant all was not going well. The cowboy operating the crane was careless and his rigger was too. One morning they had rigged a bundle of No. 9 re-bar with a single choker and the crane picked it up to lower it into the hole, and a 25-foot-long piece of steel fell out of the bundle and speared through the whalers of a form my men were setting. Nobody was hit by the falling re-bar rod, but it was close enough that two of my men quit on the spot. I complained to the Superintendent

The Super walked out of his trailer with me to stand on the perimeter of the hole. “Accidents happen, Mack. You know that.”

“It was due to careless rigging,” I said.

“That’s the best damn crane operator I’ve ever had,” the Super declared.

While we watched the operator rotated his boom and ran the concrete bucket out to be loaded. When he picked the bucket filled with mud he started to traverse. The bucket hooked at the end of his cable trailed behind as the operator pivoted the boom rapidly. The bucket swung outward due to centrifugal force, and wrapped itself and the cables around the street light pole on the adjacent property. The operator then tried to untangle his cables by hauling in and managed to uproot the lamp pole and drag it to the edge of the hole—over the heads of half a dozen men working the concrete in the floor of the hole. The super was on his radio telling the operator to stop.

“Best damn crane operator your ever saw, right? Let’s go back into your trailer. You can make out my paycheck. I’m dragging up.”

On the way home I stopped at the Carpenter’s Local and got a dispatch as foreman to work on the South San Francisco sewer project; I was to report for work the following day. When I got home I found Chris doctoring A.J.’s hands, plucking out slivers of glass.

A.J. was more embarrassed than hurt. “We were roller skating on the hill near the corner store. I was showing off and did a cartwheel. There was a broken wine bottle where I put my hands down,” she said, wincing as Chris painted her small wounds with tincture of Iodine. Chris immediately began to blow on the cuts as if they were burnt, puffing her cheeks and crossing her eyes to make A.J. laugh.

The job, building stairs on the corners of the sewage treatment tanks was challenging and fun. The landing, its semi-circular wall, and the staircase itself were all poured at once, so the job was more than a bit tricky. It had been years since I’d last cracked a trigonometry book; I found one at the local library and refreshed my memory of arcs of specific chord lengths.  Laying the the lines out full scale on a warehouse floor was a lot like lofting the lines of a boat and on them I built two jigs for laminating plywood to make the inner and outer forms to retain the concrete while it was being poured.  It was as challenging as building a boat from scratch.

A.J.’s school let the kids out for their winter vacation at about the same time as our carpenters walked out in support of another union’s strike. So it was time for us to get our truck together and head for Florida.

Enrique personally delivered my re-manufactured engine and even lent a hand swinging it into the truck (the engine compartment of our step-van was inside the truck and maneuvering the hoist was a two-man job). But he wasn’t on hand the day we packed up and headed for Florida.

Driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge the engine began to cough and sputter, losing power. I managed to coax it into the open door of Enrique’s factory. I was fuming when I burst into his office and told him he had a problem.

“I want the problem fixed before you go home tonight. We’re on our way to Florida to spend the holidays with my in-laws.” I bellowed.

“Don’t worry, Mack. I’ll fix it, or replace the whole damned engine for you . . . and we’ll have it done before quitting time.” Enrique promised.

The “problem” was almost immediately obvious to Enrique’s chief mechanic. One of the temp laborers had installed the wrong valve lifters and several of the pushrods had been bent. After installing the right lifters, they replaced all of the valves and the camshaft. That engine was purring smoothly but powerfully when we came to get the truck that evening. Enrique apologized profusely for the error and wished us a safe journey.

We made a record breaking crossing of the Continent—for us. We left Oakland on December 18th and arrived at Christine’s parents’ home in North Fort Myers, Florida on Christmas day, just in time for dinner. That was remarkable, considering we had to hold our speed under sixty miles per hour for those first five hundred miles to properly break in our new engine. We alternated driving and sleeping in four-hour shifts, stopping only for gas and one oil change and Mac-burgers along the way. Crossing the breadth of Texas, 900 miles, was the toughest part of that journey, but it was the only time we ever crossed it without having a breakdown of some sort.

Chris’s father, Walter, asked me to park my ugly old truck across the road in a vacant lot where the trees and palmettos would hide it from his neighbor’s eyes. That was okay by me; I didn’t want anything to spoil the Christmas dinner we’d driven three thousand miles to attend.
The end.

The Best Advice I Ever Gave

The Best Advice I Ever Gave Anyone

Stanley and I were sharing a large double in the Holiday Inn in Eugene, Oregon. It was D-Day, June 6th, but in 1967. At breakfast in the dining room Stan mentioned that on D-Day, 1944 he’d been manning one of the waist guns on a B-17 which was part of the air armada of thousands of bombers sent to make yet another daylight attack on Germany. Stan and I were close enough friends to share our war stories with each other, if no one else.

When Stan raised his blond eyebrows his forehead and most of his bald head became a washboard of wrinkled skin.  His broad smile in that round face was disarming, and his speech precise and calculated to impart the least and most positive information about the product he was selling; he tended to ask leading questions to which the only answer was yes.  And Stanley tried to avoid all negativity, especially the front-page news about the war in Vietnam, because he was easily depressed, despite his apparent sunny disposition.  I called Stan “my sunshine pump,” and that always made him laugh.  Stan had driven us down to Eugene from Portland in his new Cadillac Eldorado.  At breakfast Stanley was wearing a brown, silk sharkskin suit with a white shirt and yellow silk necktie.  His brown Price chukka boots were always highly polished.  At fifty, he was slightly overweight, but his height and finely tailored clothing concealed his thin layer of blubber; he simply looked huge and confident, even when he was dubious about his product.

We were in town to sell stock in a new corporation. Shortly after returning to our room from breakfast, and before we started making phone calls, lining up appointments with people to whom we’d pitch our stock, Stan turned on the TV, tuned one of the three news channels and watched the start of the Six-Day-War. Israel had already bombed the crap out of Egypt and its tanks were rumbling through Gaza by then. He looked away from the TV at me, as if I were some kind of oracle.

I kept my mouth shut for a change. Stan picked up the telephone handset, scowled and mumbled: “What do you think General Dynamics’ stock will do? Up, down or sideways, Mack?” Stan cradled the handset and plopped on his bed. “I’ve got a bad feeling in the pit of my gut, Mack.”

“It wasn’t the breakfast, Stan. We both ate the same stuff. You’re probably just anxious about the Market, sweating a margin call. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bottom fell out of General Dynamics’ stock today, Stanley. Those who play the New York exchange short defense contractors’ stocks when there’s any hint of another war. They are already on edge about our war in Vietnam. Contrary to what the people say, investors don’t want another war any more than the Peaceniks do.”

Stan Kelley excused himself and stepped into our bathroom and slammed the door. I heard his belt buckle hit the tile floor. I figured anxiety had loosened his bowels. I left the room and went into the package store next door. It took a while to decide what I wanted to drink; it was still early in the morning, but I knew both of us would want something. Finally, I settled for a fifth of Stoli, picked up a bucket of cubes at the ice machine and returned to our room. Stan was still on the crapper. He was loudly cussing the ventilator fan, which apparently wasn’t working, leaving him trapped on the can with the foul smell of his own waste.

I stuck the bottle of vodka into the ice bucket and then unwrapped a pair of glasses. I heard the toilet flush several times before the door opened and Stan walked into the room buckling his belt. He saw me cutting the seal on the bottle. He smiled like he’d just taken an order for ten thousand shares of the intra-state issue we were peddling. “Mack, you read my mind again.”

After a few shots, Stanley said: “Hold down the fort, Mack. I’m going to that massage parlor up the road and get my ashes hauled. I hate to leave you here without a car, but it won’t take long.” With that Stan pulled out his money clip, peeled off a C-Note and handed it to me. “Take a cab if you have to go anywhere.”

I went to the lobby and picked up the NY Times, the Portland Oregonian and the San Francisco Examiner and a bottle of Schweppes Tonic Water and carried them back to the room. I built a vodka tonic and sat at the desk reading the papers.

An item caught my eye. Gold, which theretofore wasn’t a traded commodity—except for stocks in the mining companies, was about to be set free. As a metal, the stuff was only available for jewelers and manufacturers to buy; if people wanted gold they had to buy jewelry. At the time, the price was pegged by the government at  thirty-five bucks an ounce. For a moment or two I wished I had enough cash to invest in gold, but every dime I had—other than the commissions Stanley owed me—was tied up in real estate, not exactly liquid assets (I was in fact selling securities with Stanley because my brokerage was doing too little business to pay the bills, and I had too many bills). So I filed that bit of news and tried to forget it.

I continued to read the papers. There was a good map of the Middle East in one of them covering Syria, Israel, Gaza and Egypt including the Sinai Peninsula all the way to its tip. I studied that map, for an hour or more, remembering what I’d seen of the terrain when I was on the ground in the area back in 1961. Half drunk by then, I began to think like a fucking General, an Israeli general with an eye patch, and to plan my attacks on Egypt.

At the time, Israeli ships were not allowed to transit the Suez Canal; their imported oil had to come through the Straits of Tirane, or go all the way around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Mediterranean. So I surmised that the port of Aqaba—my access to the Straits of Tirane–which Egypt’s Nasser had threatened to blockade–would be a likely place to send a bunch of my tanks and troops to safeguard the Sinai Peninsula’s tip and the port. Meanwhile, I’d mop up the Egyptians in the Sinai Desert, Gaza and move to the Canal while my aircraft bombed the shit out of the Egyptian tanks and troops and knock the crap out of Cairo. I’d call in my special forces, drop parachutists across the Canal to cut off a possible Egyptian retreat, and send my amphibious troops in rubber boats across to knock out a couple of Nasser’s air bases. Playing the role is much easier than fighting in the desert, easier than dive-bombing cities or tanks. By the time Stan got back from having his massage and getting a blow job, I had already won my imaginary Israeli-Syrian-Jordanian-Egyptian War. And I was a hero in my own mind, and half swacked to boot.

So when we went to dinner that evening, instead of making cold calls to pitch our stock, I began to reiterate my war plan to Stan the Man. God damn! I was fucking eloquent, sounded like Walter Winchell dishing dirt on celebs in San Francisco. I drew a rough map on the table cloth with my ball pen, laid in arrows showing the Israeli attacks, the Egyptian counter attacks, and the whole ball of wax. Stan wasn’t surprised, as one might think he would be. He knew I’d once been an Intelligence Officer; he also believed I had some kind of second sight.

While I held him captive at the dining table, I said: “Stan, put in a sell order for your holding in General Dynamics and buy all the gold you can get your hands on. GD is going to tank and gold is going to soar like an F-111 TFX in after-burner mode!”

Stanley followed my drunken advice and made a fortune. Years later I visited Stan in his home in Oswego, from the road his stockade fence of vertical timbers sunk in the earth reminded me of a fort in Indian country back in the 19th century. I went to the door and there Stan met me, cautiously, holding a .357 magnum revolver in one hand as he ushered me in. Stanley had made so much dough on his investments he’d become cautious as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. “Excuse the gun,” Stan said. He explained that he wasn’t paranoid; someone had recently shot out his front windows with a shotgun . . . but that’s another story.
the End

Yesterday: A Fine Day

Yesterday: A Fine Day

It wasn’t as hot or as humid as the day before. But when I stepped barefoot and in my skivvies into the wet grass out back to keep my eye on Walter while he emptied his bladder into Leo’s yard through the chain-link fence, I was attacked by a cloud of mosquitoes. I hollered at Walter and ran back into the kitchen. I nearly caught Walter’s  snout as I was closing the door. He came in, head down, tail tucked, looking up with those liquid dark eyes as if to ask what he’d done wrong. I patted Walter’s head, felt his velvety ears and scratched his chest. It’s not your fault, Walter. I’m allergic to mosquito bites. Walter wagged his tail, tentatively for a moment and then headed for the water bowl.

Half a dozen bites had already swollen to the size of robin’s eggs by the time I got into the bathroom and located the Benedryl Gel. I slathered them with the goop. The whole time I was cussing myself for going outdoors nearly naked on the eighth of August. Walter stopped lapping water and looked at me; his expression was one of bewilderment: What pissed the old man off now?

I sprayed myself with Deep-Woods Off before dressing, to ward off the few mosquitoes that got in before I could slam the door. I was remembering sequentially all the places I’d been where mosquitoes were so thick they could blacken the walls of buildings. Places like Anchorage, Beeville, Texas, and Old Orchard Beach in Maine. By comparison we have relatively few of the pests and, if the county still has the funds to spare, they’ll soon send out the mosquito suppression squads. I was dressed and sipping my first cup of coffee when the phone rang.

My wife was calling from The Retreat to tell me that the doctor told her she needed four or five more days. I tried to put the best face on it.

“It’s not such a bad place, is it?”

“Oh no. They just finished remodeling the building and this wing is like new. My room is almost as big as the library where you and Allison visited me . . . night before last?”

“Last night, Chris. The place looks new and cleaner than most hotels. And you have plenty of company, people to talk to. Here it’s just me and the dogs. . .”

“You’re right. I have friends here. Some of them are as smart as you are and we have some very interesting discussions. Yesterday . . . Did I mention Arnold? Arnold is a bi-polar stock broker. The recession threw him into a funk so he checked himself back in. Yesterday he gave our group a talk about the Standard & Poor’s downgrading the American credit rating from triple-A to double-A plus. He said it means that the credit card lenders will make more money. It won’t make it harder for the government to sell bonds. Is that right?”

“It’s simply part of the right-wing conspiracy to get Obama booted out of the White House by making him look incompetent. Read yesterday’s column by Paul Krugman. . . I’m sure glad I got out of that business.”

“The people I met in Portland who sold stocks were all a bunch of shysters or crooks. I’m glad you quit. We were pretty happy building boats and that big yacht for Don Hutson.  . .until that night I got attacked by the BART cop coming home from Richmond. That’s probably why the doctor said I should stay a while longer. I haven’t mentioned anything like that in the group sessions. . .”

“You’re in a good place right now. Enjoy it if you can. I’m okay here with the dogs. I haven’t killed any of them yet.”

“They are calling us to breakfast. I’ve got to run. I love you.”

She hung up before I could respond. I finished my cold coffee and went back to bed. Walter curled up on the floor, gave my bare feet a lick and we both slept until noon.

The End

Anxiety or Fear?

“Anxiety” is Like This:

It’s really weird.  One minute after eating a bowl of split-peas and ham soup with half a dozen crackers crumbled into it, my stomach rumbles.  It rumbles not as if gas is building up in it.  It rumbles as if I haven’t had a bite to eat in seventy-two hours.

So I haul my lard ass out of the butt-sprung easy chair by pushing down on its arms and stand up.  The room begins to revolve and that large blue painting on the west wall, a super-sized Aloe Vera plant painted by Allison in the style of Georgia O’Keefe, begins to fade.  The chocolate brown quilt covering Buddy’s crate turns tan.  Suddenly color drains from all objects in the room and I know from experience that I am going to fall on my face if I don’t grab something quickly and hold it firmly.

This morning my walker was parked with its wheels locked one pace from the chair I’d been sitting in .  I grabbed its handles just as my knees began to sag.  Instead of plopping back into the chair, I grunted hard, the way I used to grunt when making a six-G pull-up in a Grumman Cougar.  It worked.  I could feel more blood getting to my eyeballs, to my brain.  My knees stiffened and I knew it was over for the time being.  I released the brakes on my walker and stood holding it for a moment while I located the three dogs sprawled on the rug sleeping.  They were blocking the path to the kitchen.  I’m not sure why I wanted to go into the kitchen.  Perhaps I thought a drink of water might help.  So I barked at the dogs, making a noise like the air horn on a diesel tractor and they all jumped up with a start.  “Out of my way!” I shouted.  It was a command they’d didn’t know and yet they instinctively cleared a path I could push the walker through.

In the kitchen I stood surrounded by table, refrigerator and the L-shaped counters tops with range and sinks.  Damned if I could remember what I’d come to the kitchen to get.  The word “Pills” popped into my mind.  I couldn’t recall taking my morning meds.  So with one hand on the walker squeezing the brake, I reached into the cupboard above the eye-level oven for my bin of pill bottles.  As I placed the plastic bin on the drain board I could feel my pulse racing.  I recognized the feeling as ventricle fibrillation, so I turned the walker so I could sit on its seat while I opened the box and found the bottles of pills I needed to slow my pulse, to lower my blood pressure and open the arteries.

Metorpolol Tartrate, according to the cardiologist, works by lowering blood pressure and has a side effect of slowing the pulse and stopping the ventricle fibrillation—I’m not sure I believed him when he stopped the Sotolol, which I knew had been working for nearly a year,  But I can’t remember how he said it worked.  This change in meds was made after my pace-maker was installed in my chest.  No matter.  I popped one of the tiny white pills as I sat on the seat of my walker.  I took a swig of cold coffee from the mug standing on the counter still waiting for me to nuke it since two or three O’clock this morning.

It suddenly occurred to me that this episode could merely be an anxiety attack.  I’ve been more than a little anxious since my wife called from the hospital late last night to tell me that today she may be getting her discharge; she’s been in there for a month and a day.  Maybe, I thought, what I need is a double dose of Diazepam—my Valium comes in ten milligram tabs.  I popped two of them and they dissolved in my mouth before I could pick up the coffee cup.  I seemed to feel the effects of the Valium even as I was refilling and nuking my coffee, but believe me, what I felt wasn’t tranquility.  I felt fear.  Fear puts a knot in the gut and raises the hackles.  This was fear.

I sat in my walker seat waiting for the microwave to ding.  Suddenly my left arm began to sting.  It felt like a wasp or bee had stung me.  But then I could smell my flesh burning and see the cloud of powder smoke from an exploding artillery shell.  I look down at my arm and see the blood boiling around the shards of shrapnel in my left biceps muscle and the stream of blood coursing down to my left hand.  This is what I’ve feared all along.  I had no fear of death in combat, but I had a morbid fear of losing a limb.  Now it was happening.  If I were to move my arm I knew with a certainty hard to explain that my arm would fall off.  At the same time I knew where I was.  I was sitting in my walker listening to the dinging of the microwave oven telling me my coffee is hot.  This situation lasted only a few minutes, maybe only seconds, before my mind cleared and I was able to open the door of the microwave oven and extract my mug of hot coffee, which I left standing on the counter while I tentatively stood up.  The dizziness was gone, my legs felt firm.  I placed the mug on the seat of my walker and wheeled it into my office via the hallway to avoid the dogs.  I put the cup on my desk, lit a smoke and fired up the computer.  I had to write this one down; it had a certain clarity to it that you may not understand, but the fact is that I did.

While waiting for the computer to boot, I drank half a cup of coffee and smoked a whole cigarette—this home-built machine, only two years old, is slower than molasses in January.

I was also mentally asking myself what I was afraid of.  I concluded that I was afraid my wife had merely spoofed her psychiatrist in order to get out of the hospital and carry out some nefarious plan.  I have no way of knowing what she might be planning, or even if she’s spoofing.  But I know as sure as God made little green apples she’ll have something up her sleeve.

I could bug out.  My old truck is running good and I still have enough cash to fill its gas tank.  But bugging out is contrary to my nature, or to my training.  So I’ll welcome her home with open arms and take my chances.  You don’t spend forty years with a woman and then bug out when her mind is out of kilter.  I tell myself that she needs me now as she never needed me before.

THE END

THE KILLER OF THE KARAKORUM.

NANGA PARBAT, “THE KILLER OF THE KARAKORUM.”
This tale is for Hassan Rabani of Pakistan who admired one of my flying tales. Hassan was in the Karakorum in June and took fine photos of Nanga Parbat, but my attempt to reply his comment got bounced.

The Conquest of Nanga Parbat

Hermann Buhl, an Austrian climber, made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1953 and he did it solo and without an Oxygen tank.  It was an impressive feat;  one that inspired me to workout more and harder and instilled the desire to climb.  Buhl also made the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger solo and several of the gendarmes of Mount Blanc. Before Buhl conquered it, Nanga Parbat killed 31 climbers attempting to climb it.

In 1956, I just happened to be in Switzerland, where I began my Alpine climbing career.  My first climbing partner was a fellow Marine, Eugene Romer from Columbus, Ohio. “Gene” was a meticulous planner. He not only reconnoitered each peak prior to climbing it, but also read the climbing guides and often hired a professional Swiss Mountain Guide. When he climbed with me, however, it was spur of the moment, well-equipped but a poorly planned outing. I liked to “play it by ear,” and that spontaneity nearly got both of us killed on a small mountain ordinarily classified as a “nice Sunday stroll.”

I suppose I could have found climbing partners for most of the solo climbs I’ve made, but that would have delayed me too long, when I was “young and hot and cool.”

Buhl broke through a cornice a year after his book was published and fell to his death; his body was never recovered and is probably another mummy of the Karakorum.

If you’re lucky enough to find it read Buhl’s  account of his ascent of Nanga Parbat.

Buhl, Hermann (1956). Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage. Hodder & Stoughton. ASIN B0000CJH7J  Available from Alibris dot com title: Lonely Challenge.

A Quick Flying Tale

Here’s a quickie:

We’re flying south from Westwego field, over the eastern arm of the Atchafalaya Swamp. Below are scattered cypress, up to their knees in brackish water, and a few random oaks and pines on the hammocks and stands of maple and dogwood planted on dikes serving as service roads. Chris is in the co-pilot’s seat, A.J. is on her knees in the back seat of this Cessna 150, peering down at the billions of birds dotting the surface of the waters. I’m heading for the Gulf of Mexico to show them a sunset that’ll knock them senseless.

We are following a cluster of pipelines, some carrying crude, others natural gas, straight from the wells to the refineries. Ahead and below, where the trees have been cleared from the right of way the water is boiling. Chris sees the boil and asks: “What is that?”

“That my dear is what we’re here for. That’s a ruptured natural gas pipeline. When we get close enough to identify whose pipe that is, you’ll see ice drifting away from the blowout.”

I descend to two hundred feet, read the Texaco marker and ask her to pass me the mike from the Motorola portable beside our daughter.

The report to Alliance Refinery was acknowledged in Hispanic-accented broken English. By now we’re directly over the blowout.

The engine falters. Chris screams and Allison begins to cry. “Are we going to crash, Daddy?”

“Are we out of gas?” Chris asks.

I bank away from the boil, work the throttle a bit, and the engine runs smoothly. “The gas from the pipeline down there got into the carburetor. For a second it cut off the Oxygen, causing the engine to sputter. It’s okay now. I should have seen that coming.”

“I’ve had enough of this adventure, Mack. Take us home to Hammond. I mean right now!”

“That’s a shame. We’ll miss the sunset and won’t see those flamingoes.”

“I can see flamingoes in Florida. Take us home.”

It was almost dark as I made the approach to Hammond from the south in dead calm air. Chris didn’t say another word to me that evening.
The End

Anxiety is Like This:

“Anxiety” is Like This:

It’s really weird.  One minute after eating a bowl of split-peas and ham soup with half a dozen crackers crumbled into it, your stomach rumbles.  It rumbles not as if gas is building up in it.  It rumbles as if you haven’t had a bite to eat in seventy-two hours.

You haul your lard ass out of the butt-sprung easy chair by pushing down on its arms and stand up.  The room begins to revolve and that large blue painting on the west wall, a super-sized Aloe Vera plant painted by our daughter in the style of Georgia O’Keefe, begins to fade.  The chocolate brown quilt covering Buddy’s crate turns tan.  Suddenly color drains from all objects in the room and you know from experience that you’re going to fall on your face if you don’t grab something quickly and hold it firmly.

This morning my walker was parked one pace from the chair I’d been sitting in with its wheels locked.  I grabbed its handles just as my knees began to sag.  Instead of plopping back into the chair, I grunted hard, the way I used to grunt when making a six-G pull-up in a Grumman Cougar.  It worked.  I could feel more blood getting to my eyeballs, to my brain.  My knees stiffened and I knew it was over for the time being.  I released the brakes on my walker and stood holding it for a moment while I located the three dogs sprawled on the rug sleeping.  They were blocking the path to the kitchen.  I’m not sure why I wanted to go into the kitchen.  Perhaps I thought a drink of water might help.  So I barked at the dogs, making a noise like the air horn on a diesel tractor and they all jumped up with a start.  “Out of my way!” I shouted.  It was a command they’d didn’t know and yet they instinctively cleared a path I could push the walker through.

In the kitchen I stood surrounded by table, refrigerator and the L-shaped counters tops with range and sinks.  Damned if I could remember what I’d come to the kitchen to get.  The word “Pills” popped into my mind.  I couldn’t recall taking my morning meds.  So with one hand on the walker squeezing the brake, I reached into the cupboard above the eye-level oven for my bin of pill bottles.  As I placed the plastic bin on the drain board I could feel my pulse racing.  I recognized the feeling as ventricle fibrillation, so I turned the walker so I could sit on its seat while I opened the box and found the bottles of pills I needed to slow my pulse, to lower my blood pressure and open the arteries.

Metorpolol Tartrate, according to the cardiologist, works by lowering blood pressure and has a side effect of slowing the pulse and stopping the ventricle fibrillation—I’m not sure I believed him when he stopped the Sotolol, which I knew had been working for nearly a year,  But I can’t remember how he said it worked.  This change in meds was made after my pace-maker was installed in my chest.  No matter.  I popped one of the tiny white pills as I sat on the seat of my walker.  I took a swig of cold coffee from the mug standing on the counter still waiting for me to nuke it since two or three O’clock this morning.

It suddenly occurred to me that this episode could merely be an anxiety attack.  I’ve been more than a little anxious since my wife called from the hospital late last night to tell me that today she may be getting her discharge; she’s been in there for a month and a day.  Maybe, I thought, what I need is a double dose of Diazepam—my Valium comes in ten milligram tabs.  I popped two of them and they dissolved in my mouth before I could pick up the coffee cup.  I seemed to feel the effects of the Valium even as I was refilling and nuking my coffee, but believe me, what I felt wasn’t tranquility.  I felt fear.  Fear puts a knot in the gut and raises the hackles.  This was fear.

I sat in my walker seat waiting for the microwave to ding.  Suddenly my left arm began to sting.  It felt like a wasp or bee had stung me.  But then I could smell my flesh burning and see the cloud of powder smoke from an exploding artillery shell.  I look down at my arm and see the blood boiling around the shards of shrapnel in my left biceps muscle and the stream of blood coursing down to my left hand.  This is what I’ve feared all along.  I had no fear of death in combat, but I had a morbid fear of losing a limb.  Now it was happening.  If I were to move my arm I knew with a certainty hard to explain that my arm would fall off.  At the same time I knew where I was.  I was sitting in my walker listening to the dinging of the microwave oven telling me my coffee is hot.  This situation lasted only a few minutes, maybe only seconds, before my mind cleared and I was able to open the door of the microwave oven and extract my mug of hot coffee, which I left standing on the counter while I tentatively stood up.  The dizziness was gone, my legs felt firm.  I placed the mug on the seat of my walker and wheeled it into my office via the hallway to avoid the dogs.  I put the cup on my desk, lit a smoke and fired up the computer.  I had to write this one down; it had a certain clarity to it that you may not understand, but the fact is that I did.

While waiting for the computer to boot, I drank half a cup of coffee and smoked a whole cigarette—this home-built machine, only two years old, is slower than molasses in January.

I was also mentally asking myself what I was afraid of.  I concluded that I was afraid my wife had merely spoofed her psychiatrist in order to get out of the hospital and carry out some nefarious plan.  I have no way of knowing what she might be planning, or even if she’s spoofing.  But I know as sure as God made little green apples she’ll have something up her sleeve.

I could bug out.  My old truck is running good and I still have enough cash to fill its gas tank.  But bugging out is contrary to my nature, or to my training.  So I’ll welcome her home with open arms and take my chances.  You don’t spend forty years with a woman and then bug out when her mind is out of kilter.  I tell myself that she needs me now as she never needed me before.

THE END

It’s Time to Scrub the Moss of Her Hull.

 

With an offer to buy OldMack’s sailboat pending I decided to put a new tarp over her.  With Allison’s help I pulled off the flaking, tattered white tarp and discovered that the white deck and hull were green with moss.

 

Allison came over Sunday morning to do the remainder of her laundry—her washing machine is broken.  After loading the washer, I asked her to help me uncover the boat.

 

“It’s going to take a gallon of bleach and a good scrubbing to get that gunk off,” she said.

 

I handed her thirty-five bucks and asked her to buy a five-pound bag of baking spuds and a large jug of bleach; I wanted “Klaused potatoes” and eggs for breakfast to fuel me up for the day’s work ahead.

 

“I’ll have to go home and change into old clothes for this job.  I’ll be back in an hour.”

 

“Bring some buckets with you.  The dogs have chewed up all of mine.”

 

She returned wearing faded shorts and one of her husband’s oversized Tees and a fisherman’s hat.  The bag of spuds was in her bucket.  I put the bag of spuds on top of the fridge and took her bucket out to the boat.

 

While Allison loaded the washer and drier, I hosed down the boat, inside and out.  The plastic dust from the old tarp collected in the bilge, so I removed two of the planks from the cockpit sole on either side of the centerboard trunk so the gunk and water could be siphoned or vacuumed out.

 

Allison came out with a pair of scrub brushes and a brush with a long handle.  She got into the boat and scrubbed the foredeck while I poured water with bleach and soap over it.  We worked together and soon had the boat’s topsides glaring brightly in the sunshine.  I brought out my small, 1.5 gallon wet or dry Shop-vac.  Allison used it to clean the debris from under the cockpit sole planks and to open the scuppers in the hull floors. We must have removed five pounds of rotten leaves along with fifteen gallons of water with the Shop-vac.  I discovered that the leathers in my old Navy Bilge Pump had dried out and it wouldn’t suck to start a siphon.  That’s something I plan to remedy later today, if the spirit so moves me.

 

It took us less than an hour of scrubbing to clean the rest of the hull and to put a new tarp over the boat.  We finished shortly before the first rain shower began.

 

Cleaning the drains and cementing them to the hull is on the top of my to-do list for today…  The boat was designed with a system of tubes and a hose connection to which my old Navy bilge pump attaches.  It used to work fine when sailing in heavy seas, but time and neglect have taken their toll.  And then I’ll have to break loose the rusty bolts on the trailer which attach the bunks on which the boat will rest while being towed.  If I owned an oxy-acetylene torch, I’d simply burn the bolts off and install new ones, but we go with what we have on hand.  I hope to have the work finished by the time my buyer gets here with the cash.

 

As it turned out, we didn’t eat breakfast until after our work was done.  By then I was ravenous and ate too much.

 

Allison, who ate less than half of her baked potato said: “No wonder you’re so fat, Dad.  You ought to lose twenty pounds for the sake of your beat-up old heart.”  I agreed with her, thanked her for all of her help and kissed her good-bye.