Changes

 

Things have settled down over the past few days and I've had time to enjoy the season changing.  Fall is definitely in the air. It's in the morning light, the midday breeze, the afternoon shadows.  It's even beginning to smell like autumn.  Not quite, but soon. Every morning while the coffee is brewing, I sweep fallen leaves off the front and back porches, steps and walkways.  The air has a fresh tang to it, the air cool, the low morning sun rays through the trees delightfully warm.

El jefe and I managed to get away by ourselves and take a horseback ride to one of our favorite spots and have a roll in the hay, a good, solid double shagging of me by he, under a juniper while a squirrel watched and commented.  Afterward, we picked ticks off ourselves like a couple of chimpanzees, but we didn't eat them.  At least, I didn't.

 I watched a helicopter crew doing some power line work the other day.  The helo flew right alongside the power line while a guy on the skid hung way out and wrapped what looked like tape around the line every few yards.  Then the helo would hop over the transmission tower, dropping down on the other side and the guy on the skid repeated the process and so on down the line.

The helo landed on our airstrip and I went over to see what was up.  They asked if we had any Jet A fuel they could buy off of us. I said we didn't, although once we were operating our King Air we would have, not that that did them any good at the moment. They were about to leave when I said why don't you come over to the cook house and chow down -- on the house -- and tell me what you guys were doing.  It looked strange and very dangerous to me.

So, while they were vacuuming up ham bone soup, corn bread, twice-baked sweet potatoes, buttered rice and a leafy salad, all washed down with black coffee, they told me what they were doing.  

 Technically, they were operating as an FAA Title 14, Part 133, external load flight, the "external load" being the guy hanging off the skid. They were  measuring and marking sections along a fiber optic wire, which was above the actual power transmission wires. What they called anti-galloping devices, dampers to stop the wire from, well, galloping, in the wind or because of an earthquake or whatever, would be installed on the conducting wire below where the markings were on the fiber optic cable by another crew later. To accomplish their job, the line technician -- the guy on the skid plate -- wrapped colored tape around the optic wire at measured intervals, he measuring the intervals as the helo pilot inched the bird forward right next to all those transmission lines, stopping at the tech's signal, hovering while the tape was attached, then inching forward again, over and over.

A bad day at the office. FAA photo.

Imagine the skill of the helicopter pilot being able to do that.  Imagine the guts of the technician, balanced on the skid more than a hundred feet above the ground, leaning out, measuring -- precisely -- then taping the wire, all under the thumping helo blades just above his head, in the roaring downdraft of wind from the blades.  Imagine if the helo pilot made just the slightest error in maintaining the bird so close to the wires and ran into them or forced the guy on the skid into them.  What a dangerous job, you can bet.  The slightest mistake would mean, at best, the crew installing the dampers would place them incorrectly, resulting in the fiber optic wire failing in a windstorm, cutting off phone, cable, internet, or, at worst, the helicopter crashing and both men being killed.

Does that happen?  Oh, yes. 

Anyway, after the guys has finished eating and belched a couple of times, we got to talking about current events.  They were both red hatters, MAGA men who were big fans of Trump.  They considered him one of their own.  Their parents and grandparents had been blue-dog Democrats or New Deal  Democrats and they didn't consider themselves Republicans.  They were MAGA, a new and different party that, nominally, was Republican but that was really something else entirely. 

I said that I'd read that MAGA people were dumber, more low brow, than Democrats, who were college-educated urban elites. They said those guys might consider themselves elite, but they were the ones who had ruined the country, so to hell with them.  The helo pilot had been taught his trade by the army and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars, he said, that were both pointless and stupid, that those self-described elites had gotten us into while being sure to keep their own candy asses safe at home.

The line technician had gone to community college to pick up some skills but not stuck around to get a degree.  His father had been badly injured in Iraq, gotten addicted to pain pills and died of an overdose when he, the technician, was five.  His mother remarried, a bum who wasted the family's savings then disappeared, after which she stayed single, working whatever jobs she could find to keep body and soul together, jobs that were ever harder to find thanks to the flood of illegal aliens willing to work for peanuts. His male role model growing up was Mick Foley, the wrestler.

When I chimed in with my gripes about these self-assured, self-proclaimed elites, it didn't go so well.  I sprang into the saddle of one of my favorite hobby horses, railing against the educated fools who cackle on about left brain-right brain garbage (and it is, dammit!), mentioning a guy with a Standford graduate degree and a Rhodes scholar, among others, then mentioned a Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar believing in chem trails and.... I could see I'd lost them. When I said "Rhodes," they probably heard "roads."  The brain stuff flew past them. They'd clearly never heard of Stanford, but the mention of Harvard brought knowing nods. Dweeb Central. 

So there I was, a sorority girl with a doctorate from a public ivy, feeling at home with them and their conversation, but they, gradually sensing our differences, growing cool to me.  I should have kept my stupid mouth shut.  One day maybe I'll learn. 

I would have liked to listen to more of what they had to say, but they said they had to get going and find someplace to refuel. They wanted to pay for their meal but I said it was free; look around, there's no cashier.  So they wanted to tip the servers and did so, chatting with them while I looked up the closest place they could get jet fuel and off they went. (They had planned to refuel at our now-closed local airport; their information about it was out of date.)  

I told them to drop by anytime for a free feed and a chat.  They promised they'd be back.  I hope they will be, but if they do come back, they'll probably want to talk to the cookhouse workers rather than me.