Talk, talk, talk

Well, an episode, shall we call it, occurred that won me a small victory.  I have been beating the drum for us to acquire a King Air for some time, and now the opposition has surrendered and we are going to get one.  Huzzah!  Besides my desire to get away from recips and into turbines, we just need a bigger airplane.  Oh, I love flying the Baron, really do, but it just doesn't have enough payload for some of the things we need done.  It's great for running around doing most of our transportation needs, but sometimes you just need more.  The BE-18 could fill that spot, but it is really just too old, especially now that Duane, our local FBO, has finally decided to retire and shut down his airport, meaning we will lose Randy, our A&P guy who knows our plane inside and out and is an expert in its round engines, so we really need to look at parking it. Or at least not depending on it.  

What was the episode?  Oh, I was flying back from picking up some heavy cargo, flying at maximum gross weight, climbing to avoid some weather and the old bird groaned up to 12,000 feet at max continuous climb rpm and manifold pressure and wouldn't go any higher.  I pushed the manifold pressure up to 36.5 inches and rpm to 2300 to keep on climbing and fragged a jug.  Ka-Blam! Oh, that was fun.  You wanna descend down through a building winter storm filled with icing layers, sleet, blustering snow and lots -- lots! -- of turbulence on one stupid engine?  Include me out on that. I finally got the plane stabilized at something below 2,000 feet in rising terrain and limped home, but I swore never (expletive deleted) again.  You buy me a King Air or fly the (triple compound-adjective expletive deleted) thing yourself! 

What caused my engine to "frag a jug"? It seems the cylinder base studs failed, causing the cylinder to separate from the crankcase. I was keeping an eye on the cylinder-head temperatures and they were below 260 degrees C. throughout the climb -- overheating can damage the studs. I've wondered if the episode of detonation I experienced a while back due to a damaged spark plug insulator might have caused undetected cracks in the cylinder base studs or flange because it was the same cylinder that let go. Randy swore he has always followed AD 56-06-02 and P&W SB 1000 as well as AD 78-08-07 and never detected any cracks or other anomalies. He wondered if I always "heat stretched" the cylinders with a proper warm-up, which I assured him in a somewhat heated exchange, if I may use that expression, that I always do.  I always monitor the oil and head temperatures closely, carefully warm up and cool down the engines and fly within parameters. So I don't know. I suppose the cylinder would have let go at some point and it was just my bad luck that it happened as I was trying to climb out of an icing layer in a fully loaded airplane.  But better then than on take-off.

Reflecting on my actions, aside from not leaving the ground in the first place and waiting the storm out, or turning around once I saw what conditions were, I think that when the plane didn't want to fly anymore at 33 inches and 2200 rpm, I should have descended until I reached an ice-free altitude. It was an error of judgement on my part to decide to try to keep climbing caused by my knowledge of how close the cloud tops were (14,000 feet; I was almost at 13,000 feet when the cylinder separated), what altitude I had reached with a similarly heavy payload in the past without any problem and my desire to get into clear air.  I can almost hear my dad saying, "Here's your sign."

Ranch airstrip hanger being built c.1946.

 ******

We're also going to upgrade our ranch landing strip. A lot has already been done but we'll be doing a few more things, including making it friendly to ag pilots.  We need those guys. We'll be buying some of the equipment Duane has and get the required permits or whatever we need to have our own refueling facilities.  But it will remain a private airfield.  Duane was hoping that we would buy his airport but we'd have to hire someone to run it, and since, financially, already it is a dead loss, we couldn't do that.  No buyers at all appeared and when he notified those renting hanger or tie-down space that the airfield was closing a lot of them didn't even respond. Some hadn't paid their bills in more than a year, but Duane carried them anyway.  I guess, with the airport abandoned, their planes will just rot. I know there is a Stinson, Navion and round-engined Cessna there.  I guess there they will stay.

I mentioned to Jim, the gypsy duster, while discussing the demise of our beloved local airport, my engine-out adventure and he grabbed me by the shoulders gave me a big smooch before I could react and said, "Damn, woman, why couldn't I have met someone like you to marry?" 
I was so surprised and flustered that I said nothing, just half raised my hands in a "I dunno" gesture.  Jim then said, "You know, Wanda, you're the type of woman men fight over."  I thought that was way over the top and said, "Oh, I am not.  Nobody is. Men don't fight over women anymore. Give me a break.  They just go to Only Fans and blow a load, then get on with their lives." 
Jim looked at me and said, "Wanda, Wanda, Wanda, you don't understand men at all. "'Blowing a load,' as you call it in your delicate, ladylike fashion is just like eating a little vending machine bag of Fritos.  It satisfies a casual urge but doesn't mean anything, and doesn't satisfy any fundamental desire of a man's life. You, and women like you, rare as they are, do." 
I started to speak but Jim cut me off.  "No, no.  I know what you are going to say.  I know you. You will say that you are nothing special, just an ordinary girl.  But you're not.  You are special." 
He stopped speaking and stood looking at me.  I could have said all sorts of things, but idiot me said, "So now you expect me to spread my legs for you?" 
Jim shook his head and gave me such a look.  "Oh, Wanda," was all he said and walked away. And I felt like a total ass, which was what I was. 
But as I watched him walk away, he stopped, turned around and said, "Since you mentioned it, any chance you would?"  I laughed, shaking my head, and he laughed too and all was good between us. 
I related this exchange to el jefe and he asked if Jim meant special as in a "special needs" short bus individual and he agreed in that sense I was, indeed, special. Or, he asked, did Jim mean "special" in the way that a southern woman would say, "Well, aren't you just special."  He said he would agree with that, too.  Then he said that if I did spread my legs for Jim to be sure and record the action so he could send it in to "America's Funniest Home Videos."
I didn't ask him what he thought of my flying on the day in question because I knew what he would say -- "Any fool can fly an airplane when things are going well.  It's when everything goes wrong that you prove you are a pilot and earn your pay. Okay, you're a pilot. I knew that already."  Just like my dad. But, still, he didn't argue about buying a King Air any more, any model I want, any upgrades I want, cost be damned.  So I guess he thinks I'm worth something.

 ******

I happened across a comment to a post about transexuals or something -- I didn't read the post; I don't really care about that crap -- but the commenter, in deriding either the post or transsexuals, asked sarcastically how many women like trucks or tugboats?  Well, most of the time when I drive anywhere I drive a truck or an SUV, usually old, beat-up ones with winches and a dent or two. The trucks usually have a rifle rack with a Savage or Marlin rifle and shotgun and a couple of bales of hay or concrete blocks in the bed for traction. Now, if I lived in the city and had no need to haul anything, I wouldn't.  But I neither like nor dislike trucks any more than I like or dislike lawn mowers.  If you need one, you get one and use it.  I don't see what being male or female has to do with it.  As far as men liking trucks, I dunno.  I asked el jefe and he just shrugged and when I asked him what he liked he said motorcycles.  I like them, too, especially the old British ones.  They have character.

I thought about the tugboat remark a bit. I wouldn't mind owning a tugboat -- in a theoretical sense.  I like boats and ships...Navy, duh.  I really like sailboats, especially older styles like the ones Lyle Hess designed. Some of the happiest times of my life have been spent sailing. One of the things I miss most about living here is the sea, the bounding main, salt spray and sea air....

Well, anyway, thinking about that tugboat comment, I recalled when I was a kid reading a bunch of old "Tugboat Annie" short stories that were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post back in I think the 1920s or early 1930s. They were about a tough old broad who was captain of her own tugboat.  I loved those stories.  Apparently, there was a series of popular movies made based on them, but I've never seen any.  I should.  But, you know, it seems like, in those pre-feminist days women really did male jobs that today's anti-feminists scoff at women doing. I have read about women in the 19th and early 20th centuries (in contemporary literature from those times), who captained whaling ships, drove teams of horses delivering coal, worked on ranches gelding calves and branding cattle, plowing behind a team of horses and other tough, hard jobs. In a lot of cases, they did these jobs as widows, often taking over the profession of their late husbands.  That would be a major difference from a woman today doing those sorts of jobs.  
My cousin enrolled at the Maritime Academy has female classmates who intend careers at sea, one of them his girlfriend (whew! and if you've been following my blog for a while you know why I say that).  He certainly doesn't consider her unfeminine for wanting to be a midshipman on an oiler. I have a feeling that Mr. Shy Guy has cut a wide swath through his female classmates.  Still waters run deep, to coin a phrase.

I think a big reason why a lot of tough jobs are not considered right for women to do today is because for most people, men and women, jobs are physically undemanding, even the so-called blue-collar jobs, which I have heard described these days as gray-collar jobs to distinguish them from the old assembly-line, steel mill, foundry sort of jobs that most people don't do anymore. And the ones they do do are not as physically demanding as in the past. No one hauls in nets full of fish by hand or pounds spikes into railroad ties with a sledgehammer any more. Most people work at white-collar and pink-collar jobs.  I'm not sure what the latter is, though I've heard the term and can kind of, sort of, guess what jobs would be called that.
In the not all that distant past, however, life was hard and jobs were tough. There was no social safety net and if you wanted to eat you had to work at whatever work you could find, even women -- the June Cleaver type of ideal Fifties housewife was just a mid-century interlude. And it didn't touch all that many women. So women worked in cotton mills, fish processing plants and whatever jobs they could get. And even in the purported golden age of the 1950s women worked, not only in assorted office jobs, but on assembly lines.  Of course, all those jobs have long since been off-shored so now foreign women do those jobs.  But it's still women doing them.
And yes, yes, yes, there are some jobs that demand a physical strength women don't have.  Duh.  I live on a ranch.  And yes, yes, yes men and women have different work preferences. Everyone knows that.

I find baffling the real and very intense hatred of women expressed by many males, especially on the right.  Some of their personality profiles that you can glean from their comment histories at various websites fit that of serial and spree killers of women.  They typically exhibit insecurity and low self-esteem. They clearly feel threatened by a woman's success, especially in areas they consider male pursuits but that they, themselves, are incapable of succeeding at. They feel inadequate, but can't accept their inadequacy as males, as human beings. 
Instead of focusing on their own failings and attempting to correct them or accepting that there are some things they can't do and moving on, focusing on things they can do, they nurture anger and hostility toward women in those jobs.  You could just shrug that off except that some may, indeed, be murderers. 
I know of one case of a frequent commenter to a right-wing publication who displayed a deep hostility to women in his posts and was convicted of murdering one women and suspected of murdering others.  He killed the women he was sentenced for, a fitness instructor, by waylaying her as she closed up her business, overpowering her and using an electric drill to bore a hole through her forehead into her brain.
 A common trigger for a woman murderer is societal conditioning: exposure to misogynistic beliefs and attitudes shapes an emotionally vulnerable man's perception of women. And the right is full of misogyny, expressed even by leading influencers.  Are they accessories before the fact to murder?  How many neurotics have they pushed over the edge by their dismissive attitudes toward women? Is that their goal? To get "uppity" women murdered? Sometimes I wonder.

******

We're opening up a new pasture because we lost a BLM lease we've held since, I think, the 1930s.  Something to do with reinterpretation of the Taylor Grazing Act by the (pre-Trump) government. Anyway, this new pasture is on land we acquired during the economic crash after World War I that saw a lot of ranchers go bust.  It's not the greatest land and has lain fallow since the late 1940s.  But now, after having been recuperating for three-quarters of a century it seems like it will support about 1,000 AUM.  AUM stands for Animal Unit Month. It's the amount of forage needed by one animal for one month, or 780 pounds of dry forage for a 1,000-lb beef cow. It's a standard unit used to calculate how many animals can be supported on a given amount of land. A thousand beeves is not nearly what we were grazing on our BLM lease, but it's something.

Anyway, we've been drilling new wells to water the cattle we'll be running since all the old wells have gone dry. I had to fly up a hydrologist and we sat down near the old house that used to be the former owner's home.  I took the Aviat Husky since there was no landing strip, just a bit of flat land that the boys had cleared of brush.  At the house, there were old papers and assorted documents related to original well drilling and water usage.  I noted  that a well drilled by hand in 1898 had struck water at 14 feet and that seemed to be a typical depth for all the wells dug. 
Incidentally, I was shown the tool they used to "dig" a well.  It looked like a giant screw with a T handle.  A starter hole would be dug with a post hole digger -- that's like two narrow shovels at the end of wooden handles hooked together so it's like a giant pair of scissors.  You lift and slam the digger down till you get a good bite of dirt, then pull the handles open so the two shovel ends grab the dirt.  Then you lift the digger up and dump the dirt. Then the screw thing would be fitted into the hole and two men would screw it into the ground by walking around in a circle, one on each side holding the handle. When they got down around three or four feet, the length of the screw part of the tool, they'd haul it out, dump the dirt and fit a terra cotta pipe with a flange on one end, flange side up, down into the hole, screw a length of metal pipe onto the screw tool and put it back in the hole and screw down another three or four feet, fit another section of terra cotta pipe and so on until they struck water.

Well, back in 1898, they only had to go down 14 feet, as I said, before finding water.  They then erected a windmill to power a pump, built a water tank, sort of like an above ground swimming pool, to catch the water, and they were good to go, the cattle having plenty of water.  But all those wells had long since dried up so we had to drill new ones.  You know how deep we had to go to find water? More than 700 feet.  That's how much the aquifer has shrunk in just a century and a quarter -- with no large cities or farming nearby, just cattle ranching. Each well we drilled cost us about $40,000 and some had to be re-drilled because they collapsed.  Then there were the water storage tanks, cattle-watering tanks, solar energy-powered pumps, etc.  It will take years to recover the costs and begin to make a profit.

The depth we had to drill to reach water is scary.  Talk about your global warming, your "climate crisis" all you want and I am not concerned.  A warmer climate means longer growing seasons and lots of other good things. A colder climate means shorter growing seasons, crop failures.  So a warming climate can be good.  Nothing to worry about.  But, but, but but -- if you ain't got no water, hot or cold climate, you are dead.  No crops, no livestock, no food. Famine and thirst.  Game over. All done, bye-bye.  

According to our hydrologist, the aquifers are drying up all over the west and what water remains is increasingly contaminated with arsenic and even uranium not to mention the usual iron and manganese as well as cadmium, chromium, lead and selenium.  He said we were lucky to reach water at a little over 700 feet.  He's seen some have to drill down 2,000 feet to get water and some never find any water at all.

 

 

 

 

                                             

 

Bits and pieces

“Luxury has never appealed to me. I like simple things ― books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
    ― Daphne du Maurier

 All of the things little boys think are cool they still think are cool when they're adults -- sports cars, motorcycles, bulldozers, ships, airplanes, spaceships, wolves, dinosaurs. All the things little girls think are cool they still think are cool when they are adults -- dolls, babies, pretty dresses, putting on make-up, cute clothes, dancing, horses.  But society tells them they should not, that the boys should like putting on pretty dresses and the girls should like dinosaurs.
I can't say I like dinosaurs, but I've always found them interesting.  I like Jack Horner's books about them. Discovering what the world was like, life was like, 100 million years ago is endlessly fascinating and gives one perspective on the here and now, which will, in the blink of the planet's eye, be buried under a mile of rock.
I still like putting on pretty dresses, though.

“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
— C.S. Lewis

My friend Jim, the ag pilot told me about a time he almost bought the farm:

"I was flying 50 feet above the trees and was looking off to the left for ground references and when I turned back I found myself eyeball to eyeball with some nasty looking cross-country power lines. I pulled the stick into my gut and was up and over them but I’ll never forget the fear and humiliation that filled me in that moment. Why did I feel humiliated? Because I thought I was a good pilot and would never let myself be caught out like that.
"But this is how pilots get tangled up in wires. See, while cross-country  power lines are fairly thick and visible, they have a smaller but deadly ground wire above them. This wire is not “'hot,' but it’s often the one that gets us because we’re trying to clear the larger and more visible hot wires and don't see it. In fact, I suspect that many pilots don't even know the ground wire is there ― until it kills them.
"This type of accident can happen when you focus on terrain beyond the wires as you try to fly a straight spray swath over the forest. This is especially dangerous when there is forest behind the wires instead of their being silhouetted against the sky.
"Then, as in my case, a pilot might be distracted by other things going on around him. Too often you simply fly into the wires without warning."

“If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other ― the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton 

When I read "The Bell Curve" about a decade after it was published, a key insight I took away from it was not the race stuff, which was only one chapter (the 48-page Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," part of Part III, "The National Context" which totals 120 pages out of 833), but the observation that in the modern world IQ had become monetized. In the past, IQ was just one aspect of an individual's personality, and throughout the land there was a mix of the dumb, the average and the bright. The blacksmith, not the mayor or preacher, might be the brightest man in the village and be sought out for advice and counsel.
But once IQ became monetized, business, industry and academia swept through the country scooping up all the brights leaving the small towns and cities, ranches and farms bereft of their smartest and left to stagnate. Murray wrote that it was like taking the yeast out of the bread recipe and worried what it was doing to the country.
This struck me as a very astute observation. But since then something has happened that Murray didn't anticipate -- that now bright whites are shunned. Business, industry and academia do not want them, most especially those from "flyover country." There is lots and lots of overt evidence of this.
So men like Jay Forrester, Mancur Olson, William Allen White and my grandfather's friend since they met in the Navy during World War II, Alvin Kernan, now have no chance of developing their mental gifts and contributing to the larger society.
But maybe this will work out for the best. The yeast is remaining in the bread recipe. So "when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains," in Robinson Jeffers' words, the mountains will have the brights they need to restart civilization.
I hope.

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
―Antoine de St.-Exupery

"Can't tell you the number of times I'd lose sight of an F-5 in the dogfighting arena ― especially during a 'butterfly set.' A butterfly set starts out with both guys flying abreast one nautical mile apart, co-altitude and co-airspeed. From there, the flight lead says 'taking a cut away,' whereupon each guy takes about a 30-degree cut away from each other in order to float out to visual limits. At about 3.5-ish miles of separation, the lead calls 'turning in.' Mind you, each guy at this point is 'padlocked' on his opponent (meaning eyes fixated on him the entire time). At the turn-in call, the objective is to obtain a 180-degree neutral pass with 500 feet of lateral separation with the 'Fight's on!' call coming at the merge. From there each guy is executing his game plan to kill the other guy. Anyway ― back to the turn-in: that damn F-5 (or any small aircraft like the A-4, for example) had the head-on visual cross section of a needle! I'd be padlocked onto the aircraft at the turn-in, and as the plan-form aspect turned to nose-on you'd literally watch the thing disappear. . . . Not a fighter pilot alive that won't chuckle with a knowing understanding of the above statement.
"But we had a pilot in our squadron with eyesight like mine at 20/10 but she could get 'tallies' like nobody's business, like seeing F-16s head-on at 6-7 miles, near impossible. And it wouldn't take her long to see them either. Then she would spend the next few seconds trying to talk our eyes onto them. I'd usually see them well before the merge but not at ridiculous ranges like that.
"There was something else, something in addition to 20/10 that gave her the ability to sense objects against backgrounds, to sense the tiniest sliver of relative motion, to notice and pick out airplanes when nobody else could. At the doc's office, our eyes were equal, but in the real world, I knew they weren't.
"Oh, and she was a great stick too."
― Tom Bush

(Women are able to pick out very subtle color differences so, in this case, the aviatrix could see the color difference between the on-coming airplane and the sky.)

“We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin

Regarding CO₂ it's worth keeping in mind that grasses evolved as a response to decreasing CO₂ in the atmosphere; grasses are much more efficient at extracting it from the atmosphere than other types of plants. Human beings are grassland symbionts and such symbionts have a history of huge population expansions and equally huge population collapses.
Grasslands themselves are unstable: a little more rain and they become forests; a little less rain and they become deserts. Species dependent on them perish when conditions favorable to them change.
Human beings are evolved from African grassland apes, the African grasslands being created when the Isthmus of Panama formed, changing rainfall patterns in Africa, resulting in the decline of forests and forcing forest apes to adapt to the new climate regime.
The late atmospheric scientist James Lovelock estimated that CO₂ would eventually decline to such an extent that all life on the planet would become extinct and the Earth would be as lifeless as Mars. He estimated this would happen in about 100 million years.
Of course, that was based on no sudden increase in volcanic activity, something like the Deccan Traps or the Yellowstone Caldera being triggered into erupting by a large asteroid striking the earth.
But since a Seyfert Galaxy could explode at any time, sending a massive gamma ray burst at the Earth, such as is postulated to have caused the Late Ordovician mass extinction, why should we worry?

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke ― though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns ― and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” ―Herman Melville

I've noticed that a big class difference is that among the upper classes there is less of what you could call social-sexual dimorphism.  By that I mean that both the man and woman in the upper-class world will likely be equally highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated and both work or have worked at some variety of highly skilled job ― lawyer, business exec, military officer, scientist, doctor, airline pilot, university professor, engineer...that sort of thing. That's especially true for women.  No one is upset by a lady judge or robotics engineer.  Conversely, if the wife chooses to be a stay-at-home mom during her children's early years, no opprobrium is attached to her choice because her peers know she is highly educated, has a skilled profession, but chooses to carry out a different role at this time in her life because her husband or her family in general is well enough off that she can do so.
But social-sexual dimorphism seems to intensify the lower down the social ladder you go, so there are jobs that if a woman does them, she is met with male resentment and hostility, sometimes intense hostility which often expresses itself as sexual harassment, including rape.  I'm not sure why this is so, and it isn't income related as some so-called lower class occupations pay very well these days.  It's the social environment that is the cause.  And when I say "lower class," I don't mean the bottom of the barrel, but on up some indefinite ways, but definitely fading out as you go up.
In any case, hostility to a woman's profession is a clear marker of a lower class individual from a lower class background. This can clearly be seen in military records of sexual harassment: most of it occurs in E-3 and below, declining steadily as rank increases, drops off radically from enlisted to officer, where it becomes almost non-existent. In one unit I was assigned to there was not even one report of sexual harassment or any other kind of harassment among the officers, male and female while I was there. They respected each other as professionals and worked together to accomplish the mission. But there were the usual cases of female enlisted having their lives made miserable by their male co-members, and not just because of sexual harassment but by the males just being, well, dicks.

"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, but then I thought what good would that do?" 
― Ronni Shanks

There were three kingdoms, each bordering on the same lake. For centuries these kingdoms had fought over an island in the middle of that lake. One day, they decided to have it out, once and for all.
The first kingdom was quite rich, and sent an army of 25 knights, each with three squires. The night before the battle, the knights jousted and cavorted as their squires polished armor, cooked food, and sharpened weapons.
The second kingdom was not so wealthy, and sent only 10 knights, each with two squires. The night before the battle, the knights cavorted and sharpened their weapons as the squires polished armor and prepared dinner.
The third kingdom was very poor, and only sent one elderly knight with his sole squire. The night before the battle, the knight sharpened his weapon while the squire, using a noosed rope, slung a pot of gruel high over the fire to cook while he prepared the knight’s armor.
The next day the battle began. All the knights of the first two kingdoms had cavorted a bit too much (one should never cavort while sharpening weapons and jousting) and could not fight. The squire of the third kingdom could not rouse the elderly knight in time for combat. So, in the absence of the knights, the squires fought.
The battle raged well into the late hours but when the dust finally settled, a solitary figure limped from the carnage. The lone squire from the third kingdom dragged himself away, beaten, bloodied, but victorious. And that just goes to prove that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides

“There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”
― Francis Bacon

"Why break rules that no one follows anyway?  Why disrupt a system that is disrupting itself into oblivion?
"Maybe it's just that western civilization is 'drawing dead' to use a poker term, or in 'garbage time' to use a sports term.  Maybe the best thing to do in these times is avoid the mindless thrashing of the dying monster and live.  Just live."
― Some guy

 

Rebirth

 

 

I used to be alive, you know.
You were?
I'm pretty sure I was.
When was that?
Quite a long time ago.
What was it like?
I can't seem to remember.

What is a "meaningful relationship?" "Relationship" means connection.  "Meaningful"  doesn't mean anything at all. It's not even in the dictionary. "Meaningless" is there but not "meaningful." It's a word devised out of desperation, not because our language has need of it, but to avoid facing the possibility that all life is meaningless.      

 Our protagonist is preyed upon by a grief too deep for comprehension, obsessed with a feeling that he is only pretending to be alive....

 Answer Me, first broadcast by the CBS Radio Mystery Theater on March 4, 1977.

Winter thoughts

 

These long winter nights, with nothing much to do, leave me plenty of time to think.  

Oh, the days are busy enough, and 'tis the season for ice skating, which I do enjoy and haven't been able to indulge in for the past two winters, being incapacitated in one form or another.  But this winter I lash a cushion to my hind end and sally forth, a bit wobbly after so long away, but I'm getting better.  El jefe, of course, is a master, cruising around the ponds and creeks with his hands behind his back. Except when he breaks out into song.  

Then he gestures to the phrasing, sometimes spinning around. The other day he sang "All the Things You Are" as he held my hand and we skated together. Oh, my.  Oh, my.  

My mother was sitting on a log keeping the latest addition to the family warm and comfy, my mini-me beside her, and the two holy terrors were having a snowball fight, the purpose of which seemed to be to hit the other from as far away as possible, so they would hurl a snowball and if they hit -- no dodging allowed!  Chicken! -- they'd back up a few steps and try again.  When they missed, it was the other's turn. A game they made up themselves on the spur of the moment to challenge their skills and train themselves in stoicism.  I'm impressed while at the same time thinking no girls would ever invent such a game, so don't tell me a girl could announce she was a boy and actually be one. And vice versa. Just get out of here with that nonsense.

I repressed the urge to call out "Don't hurt yourselves!"  The mom in me worrying about her babies.  But I did think their game was an improvement over el jefe teaching them to belch "The Star-Spangled Banner."  When the three of them do it in chorus it is actually rather impressive.  I put my foot down when he requested breakfast, lunch and dinner of chili beans for the trio so he could teach them to....  If you're gonna do that, do it outdoors.  And, despite me, he will teach them to do it, perhaps in combination with the belching. Once they master it, they will want to demonstrate it to their mom. My task will be to observe and compliment while holding my breath and trying very hard not to laugh.

Again, something girls would never think to do. And shouldn't.  If I discovered my mini-me imitating her brothers, I would have a sit-down talk with her, explaining that young ladies do not employ gaseous intestinal tract emissions to perform our nation's anthem, and certainly not for show-and-tell at school, and never mind what her brothers do; boys have certain liberties that girls do not. That is this world that we live in.

Where was I? Oh, yes...

But soon enough evening comes, supper is prepared and eaten, kitchen policing done, folks retire to their various occupations, grandma reading, kids doing homework assignments, el jefe dealing with ranch paperwork or working on one of his hobbies; sometimes the boys will skip homework to hang out with him but my mini-me perseveres,  and me...well, here I am.

I think about some past conversations I've had that make me think how lucky I am.  But then I wonder if my luck will hold.  You never know, do you?

I recall a conversation I had with a widow at a sort of get-together after the funeral of her husband. I offered my condolences and expressed my sympathy for how hard it would be for her to manage alone after 60-plus years of marriage, and to stay married that long both she and her husband must have loved each other very much.  To my startlement, she said she never loved her husband and was relieved that he was finally gone.  I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

She looked at me, whom she hardly knew, and said, "You must think I'm getting senile or am some kind of horrible person and how could I stay married for so long to a man I didn't love, in fact, didn't even like."  

I started to say something mumbly neutral, but she kept going almost as if she were talking to herself.  "I was tired of working, that's why I got married. I quit school  and went to work.  It was the Depression and we were poor, poor like you today can't imagine.  I had only one decent dress to wear. Yes, one, and I wore it to school every day.  They made fun of me, even the teacher.  So I quit and went to work. You can't believe all the rotten jobs that paid hardly nothing I worked at.  Finally, I got a job as a waitress at the railroad cookhouse serving the line men that paid good plus I got room and found.  I could start saving money and buy some decent dresses and a pair of new shoes.  The boss saw me dressed well and said to work at the front restaurant serving train passengers.  I got tips there but it was hard work and the cook was a brute.

"One day he came in, sent to be stationed at the army camp, and we got to know each other.  Then his unit got orders to go overseas and he proposed and I thought why not, it can't be worse than what I have now.  So we drove across the state line to a justice of the peace and were married.  Why did we cross the state line?  I was not of legal age to marry in our state without my parents consent and I had not seen them since I left home.

"How long had we known each other? Six weeks.  Yes, six weeks.  After we were married, and he was quick to get me pregnant, he shipped out.  Oh, it was hard after that, so hard...."

She stopped speaking.  I waited for her to continue.  But she didn't. While I was trying to think of something to say -- I didn't want to ask any impertinent questions or say something callous -- she walked away and stood looking out a window.  I wondered if I should go over to her, but then thought she ended the conversation.  Let it be ended.

Later I told my mother about what the woman had said to me and asked if she had known any of that and my mother said that she didn't know her well enough to pry but had sensed that the household was not a happy one.  I asked why the woman had not divorced her husband and my mother said that in those days divorce was not something that was done.  Oh, maybe rich people did it, but those below dared not. A divorced woman would never be married again and she would have to fend for herself, probably have to move away to somewhere she could say she was widowed just so she could find employment.  And think of her personal situation. She quit school in sixth grade (that surprised me; I was thinking high school), worked as she told you in unpleasant situations away from home so you can imagine what sort of things happened to her.  She had no education to speak of, no training.  So being married, even a marriage such as hers, was the best chance she had.

I wanted to ask why didn't she go to a trade school, take night or correspondence courses...something, but my mother anticipated my question with a shake of her head.  Neither of us could know and there was no point in speculating.

Later I learned that she was 11 when she quit school She had three children.  One daughter was paralyzed in a car accident and she took care of her at home until the child passed away some years later. She had a son who the father persecuted until he left home, quiting high school, and she never saw or heard from him again.  The remaining daughter graduated from high school, married a city bus mechanic, had five children, widowed early (husband had diabetes, heart attack), didn't remarry, but otherwise enjoyed a normal suburban life that included her mother. All her children seemed to have normal lives, with jobs, homes, spouses and their own children.

Of the husband's situation, or what his life had been like, I learned nothing.  He had lived alongside this woman almost his entire adult life and I would like to have known his side of the story but I never found out anything.Why did he stick around and pay the bills? What was it between him and his son? What did he think about his wife?  Did he love her?  Had he once? But after he died, he was erased from the family history.

After recalling this story, I should have thanked my lucky stars and comets that I had a much better marriage than that woman had.  But I didn't.  I just worried that somehow something would go wrong in my life and all the good that I had would shatter and scatter.  So I grew glum, wondering why life had to be so rotten for so many people, and if there was a God, why he created such misery -- and worse, much worse -- for so many of those he created.  Why couldn't he have made this world a happy one? Was God a sadist? Or just a practical joker with a sick sense of humor?  And so my mind began to tumble down an existential rat hole.

To stop it, I did what you can guess I did.  I played some tunes and danced to them, dialing down my amygdala (dancing does that -- I lieth not!), and forgot about everything but the now I was alive in.

 

Lindbergh and Earhart in later years

 

The news clippings in this post I found in the family copy of this book.

Charles Lindbergh is a largely forgotten personality in American history these days.  Oh, there are echoes of his past fame -- or notoriety, depending on your point of view -- but really very little.  Out of curiosity, I've mentioned him to an assortment of people recently and more than one had never head his name, others have said the name seems familiar, didn't he invent some kind of rifle or have something to do with the movies?  

Others, more familiar with the past, do remember him as being the first to fly the Atlantic, which is not quite correct, but close enough.  But they don't know anything else about him.  About his involvement with the America First movement or the fight to keep America out of foreign wars, they know nothing.  They aren't even aware there was an anti-war movement.

Part of the reason he is forgotten is because he wanted to be forgotten.  Nothing had resulted from his public roles in the 1930s, his efforts to avoid American involvement in World War II futile.  And he had been savagely smeared.   So he had enough and was happy to just fade away.

 

The house where Lindbergh was born was demolished in 1973 without much fanfare and the property is now part of Wayne State University.  The house he built that was the site of what was then called the crime of the century, the kidnapping of his first child, still exists but is now operated by the state of New Jersey as a residential treatment center for male juvenile offenders and its upkeep has not been the best.

Mention Amelia Earhart, however, and almost everyone has heard of her and knows that she disappeared on an around-the-world flight, most believing that was the first time such was attempted. They are unaware that Pan American Airways already had scheduled air service between the United States and China and the United States and New Zealand at the time of her flight or that Wiley Post, whom they have never heard of, had already flown around the world twice.

The house where Amelia Earhart was born.

Of course, people have heard of her because there are those who make money from trying to find her airplane, and promote her adventure and the supposed mystery surrounding her disappearance.  So every few months, it seems, there's another media story announcing that a new clue to her vanishing has been discovered.  No one ever actually finds her airplane, of course, because then that would be the end of the money stream.  And even if someday her plane is found and the mystery is solved, then what?  Nothing, that's what.  A one-day wonder and then Earhart will fade back into the past and be forgotten just like Charles Lindbergh.  Both were people of their time, which is now very long ago. The issues and politics of those days are as curiously odd as are the automobiles and women's fashions of that era.

The house is now a museum dedicated to Earhart's life.

But then again, even without the financial incentives involved in ostentatiously looking for her airplane and the stream of news stories the searches provide, she would, I think, still be remembered.  There is just something about her that lingers in the imagination.  Her birthplace is on the National Register of Historic Places and is administered by the National Park Service and kept in immaculate condition.  To this day, people make trips to its out-of-the-way location in Atchison, Kansas, just to visit.  There is even a portrait of Earhart visible only from the air on a nearby hillside. 

Earhart with her fans.

To read her books is to be charmed by her personality, as everyone seems to have been who met her.  She also fought the good fight for women's equality in the workplace, and, of course, especially in aviation, where there were calls that no woman should be allowed to pilot an airplane without a man also in the cockpit.  She helped put a stop to that simply by doing what she did. I am one of many who personally benefit from her actions. Earhart was also the only woman of that era who bought her own airplane herself from money she earned (working as a nurse), then paid an instructor to teach her how to fly it.

Kansas hillside effigy of Amelia Earhart.

Earhart came from a prosperous family, her father a lawyer, her grandfather a judge and bank president.  She was of good stock, as they used to say, but she had no children herself,  thus no one to carry on her line.  So whatever good qualities she had were not bequeathed to the future, and though her fame lingers, her genes do not.

Charles Lindbergh, on the other hand, although scarcely a footnote in history today, did bequeath his genes to posterity, having 13 children -- six with his wife (one murdered in infancy) Anne Morrow, two with his secretary/interpreter, three with a German woman and two more with her sister, all of whom he supported financially and visited on a regular basis.  Some say he had even more children than that with other women.

Anne Lindbergh looking pensive.

What did Anne Morrow think of Charles' roving eye?  She wrote, "Him that I love I wish to be free, even from me." She also wrote, "I have been overwhelmed by the beauty and richness of our life together."

Sigh. 

Maybe you can understand why, although I find Charles Lindbergh an historically significant person, whose non-interventionist foreign policy I am deeply sympathetic to, who led a storied life full of fascination, I like Anne Morrow not only as an interesting, thoughtful and intelligent writer, but as a human being, while not feeling the same way about her husband, who was, when you come down to it, just a man.


“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity ― in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits ― islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Winter, nostalgia and fire

Montana in winter.  Definitely not the garden spot of North America.

January is the dreariest month out here.  It's been a long time since Indian summer and it's a long time until spring.  Cold and wind.  Overcast skies. Snow flurries.  Snow drifts. That cold north wind cutting like ice.

Oh, moo yourself!

Of course, the stupid cows have to pick this season to have their calves so people are out in all sorts of weather, day and night, hour upon hour.  Have you ever been wet and dry, sweating hot and freezing cold, famished and too tired to eat all at the same time?  And completely exhausted so that you stagger when you walk, but what you have to do is nowhere near done?  This is the season for that.

Winter in a San Gabriel mountains canyon.

My mind drifts to lovely winters in southern California, hikes among the live oaks down into canyons with trickling streams and hidden little water falls dropping into clear, granite-rocked pools.  Or strolling the paths in Descanso Gardens or the Huntington. Or enjoying a lovely day by the reflecting pool at the Getty Malibu.

But there are those Santa Ana winds-fueled brush fires, usually in late summer and fall, but, as this year, in a dry rainy season, they can happen in winter and are usually worse after a series of wet winters, so the chaparral grows lush and dense. It is quite delightful to hike through on your way up to a mountain top to enjoy a spectacular view over the hills and out to the ocean. It's made up of chamise, manzanita, greasewood, yerba buena, scrub oak, toyon, and the lovely California lilac.  The bees that pollinate the lilacs make the most delicious honey.

Descanso Gardens in winter.

But when all that chaparral dries out in the hot, arid summers it becomes tinder for fire.  And the rugged terrain of southern California, the "hills" of which have average slopes of 60 degrees and rise and plunge thousands of feet (Mt. Lukens, within the city limits of Los Angeles is over 5,000 ft. high), encourage anabatic (upslope) and very scary katabatic (downslope) winds, called Santa Anas. That these very rugged mountains are near the ocean only exacerbates the affect they have as nothing impedes them as they race to sea level, picking up speed as they go.  

If you've ever been sailing off the coast when the Santa Anas hit, you get the full force of them.  They can come upon you suddenly and, if you aren't quick to reef your sails, you could be capsized just like that. So you have a good chance of drowning or being gulped down by a great white shark rather than being burned to death like the landlubbers.

Getty Malibu reflecting pool in winter.

Fires are a natural part of the Mediterranean climate cycle, but they are made much worse because of southern California's topography.  And much harder to fight.  The flames rush upslope, feeding on the dry brush and Bishop and knobcone pines that grow on the shaded north slopes, then at the top of the ridge blazing embers and branches are hurled by the wind across the intervening canyon to the slopes of the next ridge, the heavier ones falling to set fire to the downwind ridge.  So, quickly, there is an inferno in inaccessible terrain that can only be fought from the air.  But because of the combination of high peaks and narrow canyons with steep walls and the roaring winds racing violently up, down and through them in Dresden-like firestorms, aircrews fighting them are at deadly peril.  Their water (or retardant) runs can easily be compared to making treetop-level strafing runs into a hail of anti-aircraft fire against a well-entrenched enemy. They are just as dangerous and require just as much planing, calculation of odds, calm professionalism and just plain guts to execute.

 

 

Juliana Turchetti at the controls of her AT-802F

Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss, Juliana sitting on the float.

A pilot I met and chatted with while running around flying errands, Juliana Turchetti, lost her life last summer fighting the Horse Gulch fire in Montana.  She was flying an Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Boss, a cropduster ag plane adapted to be a fire fighter by fitting it with floats with valves that open to fill with water when the pilot skims a body of water.  He -- or she! -- then flies over the fire and dumps the water on it.  It takes a lot of skill, even on a calm day, to touch the water just right with the floats to take on water and not begin porpoising, which can lead to a cartwheeling crash. And the Fire Boss, with that long, long snout, doesn't have the greatest forward visibility.

Hauser Lake, Montana, on a calm day. Note burn area.

When the winds that drive a wildfire are raging, rushing downslope from canyon walls onto a body of water such as Hauser Lake, the lake that Turchetti was trying to scoop water from, stirring up erratic waves and creating powerful downdrafts and crosswinds, your life is forfeit at the whim of fate.  The hand of fate smashed Turchetti's airplane into the lake and she was gone in an instant.

So when you see planes dropping water and retardant onto wild fires, think how brave the pilots are.  And thank your lucky stars that you are on the ground looking up at them, not in the air with them looking down on those ribbons of wind-driven fire they have to dive into.**

California Winter

It is winter in California, and outside
Is like the interior of a florist shop:
A chilled and moisture-laden crop
Of pink camellias lines the path; and what
Rare roses for a banquet or a bride,
So multitudinous that they seem a glut!

And skiers from the snow line driving home
Descend through almond orchards, olive farms.
Fig tree and palm tree -- everything that warms
The imagination of the wintertime.
If the walls were older one would think of Rome:
If the land were stonier one would think of Spain.

It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.
~  Karl Shapiro 

** During the 2024 fire season 15 Air Tractor AT-802F Fire Bosses crashed fighting fires. Seven pilots were killed.