Do you ever want to run away and just start over?

“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearin’ Milk Bone underwear.”

All the hilarious comments have cheered me up immensely and perhaps prevented a murder.

I got beaten up pretty badly at work yesterday. Square peg, round hole.

L took me to the Wolves game last night, part of my birthday present. Isn’t that sweet. Nose bleed seats but it was fun. We wandered around downtown afterwards while the traffic cleared.

My plants survived. It’s supposed to warm up now.

I’m not feeling very clever right now.

The technophobe in the cavalry uniform is Happy Easter, a character from Milton Caniff’s strip, Steve Canyon. OK so I’m old and had a comic obsessed youth.

I’m looking forward to going into work even less than a usual Monday today.

Last night I burned the audio book biography of Ben Franklin. I’d never get through it reading, so my next fifty or so trips between work and home will be dedicated to learning about one of my favorite historical figures. Printer, inventor, publisher, statesman, sex maniac, he had it all.

Like Fleener I rehearse anticipated arguments in my head. Compulsively. I say my parts outloud. Some folks think I’m crazy.

Last fall I planted hundreds of bulbs. It was hard work. They’re starting to come up now. It was supposed to get down into the low twenties last night. I was too lazy to go out and cover them. I AM crazy.

Yesterday morning there was one of those scary looking centi- mille- bunchapedes in the shower. It was about half drowned so I stepped on it and sent it down the drain. My foot went numb and stayed that way for about four hours.

No one else in the house has to get up this morning, but ollie the cat is sitting upstairs by the three bedroom doors meowing. He’s been doing it for a half hour. I’ve fed him, but he won’t shut up. He does this every day. As soon as he hears my feet hit the floor, he starts talking.

The black dog is scratching at my door.

OK a big pat on the back for the first person to tell me why I used this image. What’s the reference?

Happy Easter

It’s now snowing. Windy and cold. My bare garden is infested with slate colored juncos. Always juncos. Those tough little bastards actually fly south to here. Or the the ones who just stay here, cardinals and crows and chickadee’s. I want a warbler, damnit. How about an indigo bunting just for kicks. The hawk is back though. Good hunting brother, get those woodchucks before I have to.

So I hear some interest in the story of the big burn. It will be awhile before I get to that one. I need to do it right and that means discribing the landscape and weather conditions and how they combined to create a fire storm. And I’m a little intimidated by the task of doing that clearly. It wasn’t a big fire by Yellowstone standards. Probably not even a thousand acres. But it was very intense.
I guess I make this time in my life look all exciting and romantic, but remember I’ve been verbally polishing these stories for thirty years. They make great party stories and help me compensate for the dork I really think I am. My plan after college was to work seasonaly jobs so I could develope my art on the off season. My goal was to become a famous painter. I ended up turning my back on art, drinking very heavily, not to mention other substance abuse, having truely nasty relationships with women, getting very sick, becoming so distant from reality I couldn’t figure out how to stop my beard from taking over my entire head and generally losing all confidence in myself. All this time, driven by an insane urge to compensate for my youthful athletic failures and suddenly blessed with a new body forged by fire, I became obsessed with basketball and spent the part of my life that sane people spend forming careers, polishing my game. And for what? So I can hobble down stairs like an 80 year old when I’m 55? So I can’t straighten my legs out and there are only a few positions I can sleep in without pain? So I can be stuck in a low level corporate lacky management job that requires more organization than you could distill out of a hundred of me and where I have to deal with managers who have more organization in their toenails than I will ever have? And artists who make me look like an organizational genius? And never, ever saving a fucking dime?

On the flip side….it was often FU-UN!

I once carried a five gallon gas can attached to a pack frame up a cliff was steep enough to require climbing on all fours and had little patches of open flame all around.

My job in the Forest Service was to dig fire line. That meant using a Polaski, which I guess is a pickaxe by another name. It had a horizontal blade for trenching and a vertical blade for chopping roots. You dig a path 18 inches wide down to mineral soil. In the area where we worked that meant digging through at least eight inches of duff. Duff is the decomposing forest floor that can smolder and burn and carry a fire a hundred yards underground to flare up three days after you think you have the fire out. Most of the time the areas that we were digging line around weren’t burning. Sounds like a government job doesn’t it. What we were doing is preparing areas that had been clear cut for “controlled burns” The loggers came in and took all the trees suitable for lumber and then the government contracted guys to come in and “slash” which means to cut and pile up all the little brush trees that the loggers wouldn’t take and then we came in, dug a line around it and in the late summer came back and set it on fire. That’s right, pyro’s dream job. I put quotes around “controlled burns” because they usually were out of control about 3 minutes after we set them on fire. My big “controlled burn” story will have to wait for another blog though.
We were always on call to fight wild fires when they popped up. Unfortunately (there I said it) there weren’t many wild fires that year. Not enough lightning. You see fire fighters make there money working overtime on fires. It wasn’t a real profitable year, but I got my taste of fighting wild fires.
We were working at a site late one afternoon when our boss, Terry Stranahan, Godzilla himself, or as I called him, Stammerin’ Stranny, got a call on the radio. A construction crew had been building a bridge across the North Fork in an area where the canyon wall came right up to the river. They backed some heavy equipment into a brush pile at the foot of the cliff. It caught fire and burned up through the brushy parts of the cliff. I don’t know if “cliff” is the right term, the landscape consisted of sharp vertical outcropping of rocks that went up maybe eighty or so feet up, with little draws that were moderately pitched enough to grow some hardy brush. There was about five acres of scattered fire that had pretty much burned itself out by the time we got there. But you can’t just leave it, because it will come back and bite you in the ass at noon the next day. I really don’t have much of an opinion on forest management and fire, so if you’re a “let it burn” person, work with me here. Pretend the Forest Service knows what it’s doing. Normally we’d set up some pumps in the river and hose it down until there was no more open flame and then sit on it for a couple of days to make sure it stayed out. But this situation posed a problem. You can only pump water up so far. I’d sound smarter if I knew what that height was, but I’m sure someone will tell me And this fire was well above that level. The boss scouted out the situation. The pumping truck arrived. Here’s what we did.
We had a big collapsible plastic swimming pool with and aluminum frame. It folded out to about 5’ by 8’ by 3’. Two of us teamed up to carry that up to a flat spot at the top of one of the outcroppings. Another guy took the pump. I can’t remember if one guy muscled the pump up or if we teamed up. I know we used two guys to carry the bilge pump out on the tow when I worked the river. Anyway, needless to say there’s some urgency about this so the boss is whipping us pretty hard and my lungs are on fire from the first time up the hill. Stranny looks at me and says, “Well, now we need gas for the pump.” I scramble back down and strap the gas can onto my back and climb back up. I’ll admit to being a little nervous. We now had the pump down by the river filling the reservoir and I sat down on a rock to catch my breath. Stranny spots me and says, “As long as you’re resting go get us a hose pack.” A hose pack is eighty pounds of heavy fire hose coiled into a canvas backpack mounted on a frame. The end of the hose comes out the bottom, so you can hook it up and take of, stringing hose out behind you. This is an activity that will, as an old logger once said, “give you muscles in your shit.” At that time I was 6’1” and about a hundred and forty-five. Can you say rail? My legs were already trembling and I was having a hard time catching my breath. Down the hill put the hose pack on start back up. I’m now so pissed at the boss that I’m going to show him that I’m a real fire-fightin’ sumbitch and I’m am just blasting adrenalin. I hit the top crazed, probably foaming at the mouth. They grab the end of the hose and hook it up to the pump. I can’t remember if Stranny just said, “Now string it out over that hill and down into the draw on the other side.” Or offered to have someone take over for me and I told him to fuck himself, but I hooked up and took off over the rise. I crashed through some bush at the top and came out into a bowl the size of a nearly vertical football field that was mostly burned, with little patches of flames around it. And there, near the top was the a team of women digging line across the head of the fire. The visual I get of this is that they were all wearing denim shorts and work shirts with the sleeves cut off, but that couldn’t be because they were working for Smokey the Bear and would have had to be wearing long sleeves and pants, steel toed boots and orange hardhats. I was almost ready to drop in my tracks when I saw them there, but suddenly I was so inspired and wanted so badly to look macho that I completely revived and ran that hose out like a rutting mountain goat. And probably smelling just as bad.
And that’s how I came to carry a gas can on my back through a fire.

I said “hose bag”

Old man tennis again tonight. I’m playing better all the time. I made some great shots at the net. We played three tough sets, I practically had to crawl to the car. In the last set I was up two break points on my serve and lost. I did pull off a classic serve and volley point though. I got my serve down the middle hard and Glen got all of it on the return cross court and right to me. I was moving in and vollied it hard cross court right back at him and just kept coming behind it. I was all the way to the net when his next shot crossed over about dead center and I blew one by him right at his feet. On the flip side there were at least two occasions when I thought I had overheads lined up, took a big swing and went under the ball. I guess I was thinking I could still jump. The best part of the night was when we when Glen was introducing my partner and I to the new guy. My hearing sucks but not as bad as this guy. Although it’s almost impossible for anyone over fifty to hear anything in an indoor tennis court.
Glen: “Joe this is Don.”
Joe: “Scott?”
Don: “Yup”
Glen: “And this is Bob.”
Joe: “Bud?”
Bob (in his mind) “Never mind.”
I like Scotty and Bud as names for a doubles team anyway. It’s got that cable knit sweater and wooden raquet feel about it. “Muffy, be a dear and bring us some gin and tonics please.”

Sometime in the last year I sent out an email to my staff asking for suggestions as to what I could do to make their jobs easier, more rewarding or more fun. Most of them just snickered and thought “There goes Bob again, paying lip service to being a concerned boss.” But one person replied that she would like more of my stories. That was a motivating factor in starting to blog. I had a couple of blogs going at a different location and then one evening I was in the basement and saw Q’s link to Xanga and thought, “what’s Xanga?” And that’s how I ended up here. I’m probably the oldest guy here and my life has settled into a pretty normal groove so for a change of pace now and again I’m going to reminisce.
I call the summer of 1972 the summer of a thousand stories. Both my companion, Bill and I feel that there’s at least one novel for each of us in that year. Bill graduated on time and I had to go back in ’71 to finish two quarters I’d missed because I dropped out senior year to go to Europe. So after I finished up in the early Spring of ’72 we decided that we would head out to Wallace, Idaho, his home town, and get jobs building I-90 through the Silver Valley. Wallace is tucked into the Mountains of the Idaho Panhandle, just across the Montana border. It’s primary industry is silver mining, it’s population in those days was about 1500 and it had a reputation as a wide open town. It had one of the highest ratios of single men to women in the country. There was gambling in the bars (lot’s of bars) and had five bordellos with neon signs and names like Lux Rooms and The U and I. One of our college classmates who was also from Wallace did a research paper that involved interviewing the hookers.
The summer took had a somber start because the day before we got there, there had been a fire in the Sunshine mine and 91 miners died. When we got to Bill’s house, his dad, who was on the fire rescue team, had not returned from his shift the day before. All his mom knew was that he had gone down in the mine to pull guys out and hadn’t gotten back yet. I’ll elaborate on this later. That’s one story.
When we went to get out highway construction jobs we found out that you couldn’t get a job without being a union member and you couldn’t join the union unless you had a job. No kidding. So there we were stuck in the west with no income. We briefly found work laboring for a local contractor Harry Votalini. But Bill broke his ankle playing basketball (there are lots of bball stories as well) and Harry fired me the next day. Harry loved Bill, Bill was a hometown hero. Harry didn’t like me much, I was a soft city kid who couldn’t dig like a badger. I ended up getting a job with the Forest Service, which whipped the softness out of me and Bill ended up going to work in the mines when his ankle healed. It was a summer of love, laughter, adventure and mind altering substances. Here’s a quick sample story.
It was during Lead Creek Derby, Wallace’s local festival, when they release little balls with numbers into them into the South Fork of the Cour d’Alene River, known as Lead Creek or Shit Creek (for those of you who haven’t lived in the West, that’s pronounced “Crick”) because of the horrible industrial run off from the mines.They sell numbers on the balls and the first ball under the bridge in Wallace wins the jackpot. I was drunk as a lord and coming out of one of the bars. They had one of those little gypsy carnivals set up on the main street and when the ass of a merry-go-round horse presented itself to me, I decided to do my Gene Autry impression and do the flying rear mount (rache, don’t) of the plastic pony. I took a run at it but in my stumbling drunkeness, I slammed my shin into the edge of the merry-go-rounds metal deck. Even with lots of pain killer flowing through my veins that was one of the most painful things that has ever happened to me. There’s still a scar there and my shin had a tender lump on it for years afterwards. I’m not sure but that might have been the same night that Bill came out of the bar and kicked his shoe into the air only to see it land on the roof of one of the whorehouses. He had to go upstairs and ask to get on the roof to get his shoe. He claimed it was an accident anyway.

I thought that this note alone would make a pretty good entry this morning. I found it on the basement door when I got home last night after watching the game with a friend. But when I got up this morning, still half asleep and was starting to make coffee, as I poured out the last dregs of the old pot, this is what I found sitting in the garbage disposal. At first I thought it was a discarded leftover until I saw a clawed foot. It was still alive! You should have seen me trying to get it out of there. I resisted the temptation to just push it down and turn on the disposal. I had heavy work gloves on and I still didn’t want to touch it. I used a garden spade to get him out and Becky trapped him in a container.

What the hell was he doing sleeping in the garbage disposal? And if he was locked in the basement….how did he get upstairs!!! Did Ollie catch him and decided he wasn’t tastie enough and drop him in the disposal like a good fastidious cat would? Or are bats thrill seekers that like to sleep inches away from whirling death? YIKES!