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 in the Twin Beech from picking up some heavy cargo, flying at close to 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 -- the landing into a quartering crosswind with erratic gusts, blowing snow was...interesting. 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 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. He was directing blame away from himself and I was thinking darkly of "pencil repairs." I expect he could sense that. I always monitor the oil and head temperatures closely, carefully warm up and cool down the engines and fly within parameters. Maybe the damage evidenced itself after his work and neither of us was at fault. 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 climb 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."
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| Ranch airstrip hanger being built c.1946. |
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We're 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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