Mensa - Doorway to Nothing - 4/11/2011

It is not uncommon for an exchange with my friend, Bill Woolum, to inspire a blog. Bill is one of the handful of my Facebook contacts that is also a friend in real life. Last night our Facebook conversation began with a discussion of the Yankee/Red Sox game and ended with speculation as to which of our classmates, circa 1970, are Mensans. That may seem like a strange segue, but actually since both of us have severe attention deficit disorder, as well as other issues, it is a totally logical progression. Our exchanges often deteriorate into much more base topics (usually my doing).

I often wish that Bill and I lived closer so that we could have these conversations over beer, breakfast, or blancmange, but alas, we both love our particular coasts.
The Mensa dialog is what inspired this post. I am a member of Mensa and I expect Bill is a closet member. Speculating as to whom in my graduating class of Kellogg High School, Idaho, 1970, were possible Mensans proved to be an interesting activity.

Let me state at this time that I don’t believe my qualification for Mensa is any sort of accomplishment other than I am a really good test taker.

Mensans that I have come in contact with are generally weird and uninteresting, insufferable bores. (Except for Dave Powers and me) You will note that I have let my membership lapse. I have absolutely nothing in common with members of the organization. Contributors to their publications expend an inordinate amount of effort to try to impress each other with their knowledge. I write to publicly display my lack of enlightenment.

I believe that being smart is like being gay, it is not a choice. It is thrust on you and it is up to the individual what he does with it. My innate ability to process information has actually worked against me in my life. School was very easy and as a result I got bored and stopped paying attention in about grade six. Also, in the 1960s, in Kellogg, Idaho, tall, skinny, awkward, kids with big ears/noses that wore glasses and knew all the answers in class were not cool. I tried, unsuccessfully to be cool. I learned pretty much by osmosis, through no effort of my own. I can honestly say that I never read a textbook, other than an occasional chapter that interested me. As a result, I was, and continue to be a world class underachiever.

I graduated right in the middle of my 192 high school graduating class. That may not sound too bad unless you consider that the majority of those that finished below me would be considered special needs students in today’s society.

But, as is my modus operandi, I smoked the ACT/SATs, and went on to college, where I discovered lots of new distractions as barriers to success. I learned that class attendance was necessary to successful course completion. After one year, I was not invited back.

Getting back to the Mensa discussion, statistics would indicate that since Mensa membership is comprised of the top 2% of standardized test takers, my class should have included 3-4. I have no reason to believe that Kellogg High School produced genius above the national average. After all, we were all subjected to 18 years of heavy metal poisoning. I am thinking that would work against us.

Bill and I enjoyed speculating as to who the remaining 2 or 3 qualifiers were. It was an enjoyable exchange. I guessed the other Mensans from my class were Jim Etherton, Mike Jasberg, and Jeff Kenyon. Sorry Christy Blick, you can’t have beauty and brains. It wouldn't be fair. Bill did not disagree with any of those and added Brian Shiplett.

After our conversation ended, I thought that it is very possible that, like me, the other gifted students were also camouflaged, cloaked in mediocrity, and the high achievers from my class succeeded by sheer effort and ambition.

Filthy Water Cannot Be Washed - My long association with water - 2/20/10

There is no predicting where inspirations to write will come from. To be honest, they come often, but I am basically too lazy to transliterate from a thought to the written word. Today, I had a fusillade of motivation, possibly drug induced.

My weight-loss program includes consuming copious amounts of water. As I was retrieving a bottle of Kirkland (Costco) “Spring” Water from the refrigerator this morning, words from a Kipling poem echoed in my mind. The synapses of my aging mind are puzzling. I usually can’t recall what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I can rote recite a poem I memorized nearly fifty years ago:

“It was crawlin’ and it stunk, but of all the drinks I’ve drunk, I’m thankful for that one from Gunga Din.”

While walking squirrel patrol with Skooter this morning, some anecdotes about my association with water came to life:

When I was growing up in northern Idaho, I didn’t know much about water and I don’t think my dad did either. Whether our water was hard or soft was not an issue to my dad. All that mattered to him was that the water was wet and mostly translucent. I can remember television commercials for a water softener, “Hey Culligan Man,” but I had no idea what they were yelling about.

Dad had more important issues than the PH of our water. Ours came out of our faucet ice cold, even in summer, and that was all that mattered. I had never heard of keeping water in the refrigerator until I ventured south. In the winter, we often had to leave the water running in the faucets to keep the pipes from freezing. In spite of that, I can remember dad crawling under the house during particularly extreme winters with a propane torch, thawing frozen pipes. I know that water was never a particularly important issue during my upbringing. It was taken for granted.

Dad died before bottled water became widely available in the 90s, but I know he would have laughed at the concept of buying water. What emitted from the sink would have always been sufficient for him. I found out later that the water of my childhood contained more heavy metals than a Monsters of Rock Concert.

When we lived in the Philippines, we lived on “the economy”. This means that our house was in the local village and not within the perimeter of Clark AB. Because the water that emitted from our spigot was roughly the same content as that of a bedpan, we lugged water in huge jugs (heh heh, I said huge jugs. Obscure Beavis and Butthead reference) from the supply at the base. We actually didn’t know for sure if base water was potable, but at least light passed through it. We did not have a water heater, so showering was a dodgy process, though the water coming out of the shower head was at a minimum, lukewarm. We heated it on the stove to bathe the kids. Again, whether the water was alkaline or acidic was of no consequence.

My first experience with really soft water was in Scotland. I got into the shower and poured my usual dollop of shampoo into my hand. When I applied it to my hair, it literally exploded into lather. It seemed there was no end to the foam. Had I been an 80s hair band, and assuming they actually washed their hair, there would have been sufficient suds for band, groupies, and roadies. But the major problem was during the rinsing process. I could not rinse the shampoo from my hair. Since Scottish water heaters have roughly the capacity of a Mr. Coffee (do those still exist?), I was soon both soapy and freezing. I quickly learned that in Scotland, a bottle of shampoo can age like single malt scotch.

Shortly after my Air Force retirement I worked for the Wyoming State Engineer. That office controlled the rights for all usage of both ground and surface water. Water is a precious commodity in the semi-desert climate of the high plains. Range wars have been fought over it and there has been an ongoing lawsuit for decades between Wyoming and Nebraska over usage of the Platte River, which flows through both states. Permits were required for any water consumption. One of my responsibilities was the processing of well permit applications. One of the requests that came across my desk was from a resident of Jackson Hole who wished to drill a well on his property. The name on the form was Harrison Ford. I think everyone in the office ended up with a copy of that signed document.

My sister’s family lives in rural southeastern Georgia. They get their water from a well and it has extremely high sulfur content and emits a fragrance somewhat like rotten eggs, and sometimes comes out of the tap opaque. It causes you to come out of a bath more offensive smelling than you went in. Sulphur water is therapeutic at a spa, but makes crappy sweet tea.

I have had to learn to like water. Until December 1, 2009, when my efforts at weight-loss began, when I was "swinging on the refrigerator door" (mom's words), water would not have been one of my druthers.

Sunday Scribbling - "Where are you from?" - 3/21/09

I have traveled to quite a large portion of the world and met a lot of people. One of the first things I am asked when I meet someone new is “where are you from?” When someone asks that, I don’t respond immediately. I hesitate in order to assess whether they can relate to a response of “near Spokane” or “west of Missoula”. Sometimes it is enough to say, "out west."

Most people take pride in where they come from: “Don’t Mess with Texas.” Those from a complete shithole like Oklahoma beam with pleasure at the mention of their home state. It was even celebrated In a fantastic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. No one is more fiercely loyal to their home than a New Yorker. "Forget about it." Even the most inbred proclaim their pride in being from Tenne-damn-see or West-by God-Virginia. North and South Carolina combine to become the Carolinas. Carolina is revered in many great songs. A Carolinian radiates with pride when they tell you where they are from. They could be living in a camp trailer and dining on roadkill, but they love Carolina. I cannot conjure up that feeling for my home state of Idaho. The only song I know about Idaho is “And Here we have Idaho.” The chorus is:

And here we have Idaho
Winning her way to fame.
Silver and gold in the sunlight blaze,
and romance lies in her name.

It sounds like it was written as a fifth grade class project. It is a dreadful song. Idaho evokes neither fame nor romance. Idaho has no native sons like James Taylor or Charlie Daniel to glorify it. I think I have found a song more representative of Idaho. Here it is. If you listen closely, it is supportive of Idaho, trying to keep the developers out. Perhaps there will be a grass roots movement to adopt this as the state song.

I try to avoid claiming Idaho, as one of two things occurs when I have slipped up and admitted my association: If they are familiar with Idaho, their first response is “oh potatoes”. That is infuriating to anyone from the part of Idaho that I grew up in. To me it is no less offensive than someone saying they are from Nevada and the response is “oh whorehouses.” Potatoes are not grown in northern Idaho. In fact the part of Idaho that I grew up in, nothing grew, not even grass. But I have already talked about that in a previous post. The second common response (particularly by the aforementioned inbreds) is a blank look while they call up images of the Midwest, where all of the other “I” states are located. I just noticed this: check this out
How sad to be from Iowa that is so obscure it doesn’t even get recognized as a state by the source of all knowledge, wiki.answers.

Idaho has become a punch line. I remember when Al Bundy said that they should send all pregnant women to a state no one cares about and call it Pregaho. The only notoriety it received was from an excellent documentary on Idaho life called Napoleon Dynamite. Any national news article about Idaho is always about the capture of some miscreant, white supremacy group, serial murderer, a senator performing reach-arounds in public toilets, or some other negative imagery.

I have recently reconnected with several of my classmates from high school through Facebook. I have found very few who still live in Idaho. It is a good place to be from. Far from.

Jeff, I am not implying that everyone in Tennessee is inbred, but some of them are.

Heads or Tails - "Springtime Memory" - 3/10/09

Today's Heads or Tails prompt is "Springtime Memory." I grew up in northern Idaho and the first sign of spring was always a joy after a long, cold winter. I also lived in Wyoming for about ten years (seemed like longer), where winter is even more relentless and severe. I wrote down a few thoughts about early spring in the mountains. If you are curious as to how this piece sounds in guttural monotone, you can hear me read it by clicking here.

Springtime in the Rockies

Vernal sun erases winter frowns as surely as a drug expunges pain
Hearts encumbered by cabin fever released into the warmth
Optimistic blades of grass poke through stubborn snow remaining
Children kicking through the slush, parkas retired for at least today
Skinny deer seeking feed long buried, nourished and hopeful

Garages reorganized, snowmobiles for motorcycles and skis for golf clubs
Windows opened that had been frozen shut, fresh air in, stale air out
Birds arriving from their hibernal roost, voice their delight in song
Their melodies bring welcomed joy to the tomb like silence of arctic cold

Squirrel gangs emerge from their winter hole in the wall hideout

A single flower risking exposure, banking that it is truly spring

A wire brush to the Weber grill, search for “Kiss the Cook” apron
The marshmallow world becomes colorized in growing earth tone plots
Dry creek beds overflow with runoff, water much colder than the springtime air
Audible crazing as ice gives way, the sound of winter retreating
Budding renewal as life emerges from winter kill, a rebirth
Ecstasy in the mountains as survivors gambol in the healing balm
Hibernation ends jubilation begins, forest families take roll
Natural adversaries postpone conflict to revel in resurrection

Before hunger and temperament set Darwin’s laws into motion
All life that lay dormant, rekindled by nature’s new beginning

Sunday Scribblings - Phantoms & Shadows - 1/25/09

I have been blogging for nearly two years. Writing here, usually in response to prompts supplied by various blog sites, has brought to light memories from the shadows of the disturbed recesses of my mind. I try to recount and record these stories before they once again become phantoms and slip back into the darkness. This week’s Sunday Scribbling instructions brought back memories of elementary school.

For nearly all of my 6 years of primary education, I attended Silver King School. It was located in a small gulch just east of Smelterville, Idaho. A creek flowed along beside the school and adjacent to the playground area. Sounds like an idyllic setting. However any image you have conjured of a trout filled, crystal clear, mountain stream flowing down the valley is premature. Upstream from the schoolhouse was plant that refined zinc. All of the waste created by that refinery was washed downstream to us. Zinc is a heavy metal, and though our bodies require a minimal amount of zinc for maximum performance, we do not require, nor can we tolerate the amounts that oozed from that creek. When I think of this water, lyrics from an old Chris Rhea song come immediately to mind:

“I'm standing by a river but the water doesn't flow
It boils with every poison you can think of.”

The water was a color that I am certain God never intended H2O to be. It was a grayish/green opalescent liquid. We did not routinely wade into the toxic waste, but from time to time one of our playground kickballs would sail over the chain-link fence and one of us would fetch it. There was one kid that had some kind of seizures and every so often we would find him walking down the stream. Someone would go retrieve him too. This creek feeds the Coeurd'Alene River which, in turn, issues into scenic Lake Coeure'Alene, where we swam, fished, and water skied.

Had that been the only environmental issue we faced, this writing would not have the impact on the reader that I had hoped for. The school was also in the shadow of huge smokestacks (first one, then a second was built) which belched the exhaust from the huge lead and silver refinery that was on a hillside just a few hundred yards east of the school.

We were so accustomed to the “smelter smoke” that we hardly even noticed except on the days it was particularly pungent. This was long before there was an EPA. The focus of the government in those days was mutually assured destruction of the Russians and not air quality. The air we breathed on a daily basis was more toxic than any Los Angeles has ever experienced. If there were air quality warnings in 1960, we would never been allowed outside at all. The combination of the water and the air would have made Erin Brockovich throw up her hands and run for cover. The hillsides had been choked and were devoid of any vegetation. What did our lungs look like?


Our playground contained equipment that would be banned today. Corroded from the very air that we inhaled and corrupted from exposure to too many Idaho winters, we survived playing on it. A tetherball hung from a pole. We would beat the crap out of it but I don’t think we ever completed a game. It seemed the only rule was you couldn’t grab the rope. I do not even know if that was a legitimate game or just something we had in Idaho. It was featured in Napoleon Dynamite, a film that was a pretty accurate portrayal of Idaho life.

Inside that schoolhouse, we received a quality education. Outside we were subjected to toxins, but inside we were exposed to music, art, and literature. Though I can’t recite what I had for lunch yesterday, I can recall from memory several poems that I learned nearly 50 years ago. Any aptitude I possessed for creative writing was nurtured inside that building. Though most of our parents, who were employed by the very company that was poisoning us, had not completed high school, many of us went on to earn advanced degrees. The foundation that I received at Silver King Elementary School prepared me for the future. Thank you Mrs.Woolum.

Sunday Scribbling - "Organic" - 1/11/09

This week’s Sunday Scribblings is my 200th post. I wanted to do something special to commemorate this achievement, as it exceeds my talents and expectations by about 199 posts. I asked my son, Josh, if he could think of a Wainright story that must be told. He mentioned a few events and caveated his input by “no one is going to believe some of these.” He likened me to Forrest Gump. Admittedly, I have had some remarkable occurrences, many of which will never be documented. When I saw that the prompt was “organic”, the first thing that came to my mind was a story that only two people in the world know about. I am certain I will have a unique take on this prompt.

At 17, in the fall of 1970 I enrolled at the University of Idaho, to study I have no idea what. I was assigned a dorm room in Willis Sweet Hall in the Theophilus Tower. At eleven stories, it was the tallest building in the state of Idaho at the time. It was a brand new coed dorm. That is not as exciting as it sounds, the men had the bottom six floors and the women occupied the top five. However, the experiment must have failed because it was changed to an all-female dormitory in 1982. I probably share some responsibility for that change.

My roommate was Mike Craner from Saint Maries, Idaho. Mike was at the UofI on scholarship to wrestle. I was a walk-on baseball player. I made the team and played fall ball until academically disqualified after first semester grades were revealed. But that is another blog in itself. Mike and I immediately became close friends (which is not always the case with roomies). We were both very straight-laced and naïve. The whole campus was heavily involved in drug and alcohol consumption. We held out for a while, but soon decided we wanted to experiment.

We had a suite-mate who was a Native American from the Coeurd'Alene Indian reservation in Plummer, Idaho. He told us about peyote buttons. His tribe used them in ceremonies and was his drug of choice. The drawback was that they tasted horrible and made you sick. That was not appealing to first-time drug users. He said that we could get it in another form. It was called brown “organic” mescaline. It was ground up into capsules, thereby eliminating the nasty taste issue and resulting gag reflex. The word organic was a bit deceiving, because most poisons and addictive drugs are also organic. But, it still appealed to us. And I was an avid reader of Carlos Castenada. Unfortunately, the experience I relate here is much less spiritual than those recounted in his books.
Often, on the weekends, Mike and I would hitchhike to either St Maries or Kellogg. It was a lot shorter trip to St Maries, but often harder to get a ride, as Kellogg is on Interstate 90 and St Maries is out in the boonies. In those days, hitchhiking was a perfectly legitimate mode of travel (particularly for college freshmen, who had no car). Once home, we would have access to a parent’s car, which would give us access to girls. College guys returning to either small town was nearly as much of a draw to high school girls as a car radio to Amish girls. Even a guy as physically unappealing as I could get some play. On campus, we had to compete with guys with money, looks, and cars.

So we bought two hits of mescaline each and set out Friday night for whichever of our home towns we could catch a ride to. They were both basically in the same direction, at least initially. As soon as we put our thumbs out on the shoulder of Highway 95, we each swallowed a capsule. We were giddy with anticipation, as we had heard accounts of the incredible hallucinogenic effect of this wonder-drug. Traffic was light and no ride was immediately acquired. In addition, after 15 minutes (probably 5) we were getting no symphony of color from our mescaline. We had been swindled out of our ten dollars (things were cheap in 1970). Impatiently, I took the second capsule. Big mistake. Mike wisely decided to wait and see.

Within a few minutes we were both experiencing our first trip. It was a very cold night but I was comfortable since the sky was now on fire. I told Mike that I would stop the next car with my mind. I concentrated mightily. Coincidentally, the next car did pick us up. We were both pretty impressed by my psychokinetic abilities. The ride only carried us as far as Potlatch (less than 20 miles). That was a shame as I could actually see the music coming from the radio of the pastor and his wife that had picked us up. At that point, Led Zeppelin and Perry Como sounded the exact same to me. I could rock out to anything. Elevator music would sound like Hendrix.

We got another ride fairly quickly (though my estimation of time was severely flawed. It could have been five minutes or twenty four hours.) If you are still reading, bear with me. This post is much longer than my normal blog, but it is my 200th.

We often met interesting people hitchhiking. But this particular night we thumbed two rides that were among the most memorable. A guy picked us up in a Volkswagen Beetle that had an arrow sticking out of the driver’s side door. He explained to us that he and his wife had an argument and she came after him with her hunting bow. I know, you are thinking that this was a hallucination. The drug affected my perceptions but did not create alternate realities. His car glowed and had an aura around it but the arrow was indeed there.

As the night continued, the intensity of my trip increased. I could feel my heart beat at a furious pace and hear the blood rushing through my veins. Every sound was magnified, colors enhanced, and it was my impression that everyone we met could tell we were high. I could see the knowing look in their eyes.


Our final ride into St Maries was with two very drunk guys in a Cadillac. The driver spent much of the drive turned around talking to us. It seemed he was driving about the speed of the Starship Enterprise just before it accelerates into Warp Factor 5 (he may have been driving 35) and his inattention terrified me. The hard rock was cranked up but I could understand every word they spoke because comic strip balloons provided closed-captioning for the reality impaired. They offered us beers, which we took out of courtesy, but beer would have no affect on me that night. We stopped for the drunk guys to pee and I am not certain whether I did or not. I think some electricity and fire bolts shot out of me, but that is all I am sure of. I am certain that it would have been impossible for me to have sex on mescaline. I could not feel anything in that region of my body whatsoever. I have heard a woman describe a saddle block procedure and I am pretty certain I was similarly anesthetized. I was fairly sure my genitalia were still attached, but I could not have sworn to it in a court of law. The juice freaks (that is what we called them in those days) dropped us safely off at Mike’s house and sometime that weekend we went to sleep. Mike drifted off about 10 hours before I did (or it could have been 30 minutes). I listened to the same LP for several hours, playing over and over and watched the television test pattern, never tiring of it. This is a test pattern. Yes, in those days television actually terminated their broadcast at midnight.

People not viewing it while amped up from a double dose of Organic Mescaline might have become bored with it. Not me. I watched it like it was a feature film about indians.
Mike and I both left school after that year. We partied ourselves out of academia. He stayed local, got married, and took over his dad’s logging operation and I got married and joined the Air Force. He was the best man at my wedding. I have lost track of him over the years, so I hope he gets a chance to read this. I know it would bring back some memories. The important thing is that I did not have any lasting effects from this experience. The important thing is that I didn't have any lasting effects from this experience. The important

Sunday Scribblings - "Scandalous" - 11/2/08

This week’s Sunday Scribblings prompt is scandalous. This was a thought-provoking word and many things come to mind. I suppose that is because we live in a society where the media seeks out scandals and forces them on us as news. No one of any notoriety is allowed any privacy. It makes me thankful that I am not famous. Nobody cares about my little life. Well, that is not the topic that I am writing about.

Today is the day for much of America to set their clocks back an hour. This is called standard time and when we set the clocks forward in March it is called daylight savings time. I call it a pain in the ass. Though there are lame reasons for this ridiculous maneuver, it is just another scandalous way for the government to fuck with our lives. Like forcing us all to have digital television, fasten our seat belts, and pay taxes.

Arizona and Hawaii don’t participate in daylight savings time and several other states are voting to opt out. I play the game somewhat. My computer and cell phone automatically change. I don’t know how to change the time in either of my automobiles, so I will just wait for March to come around. I believe that the owners of most cars I have ridden in use the same method for the same reason. My alarm clock is not important to me as I am retired and don’t really care what time it is. I have learned to mentally compensate for which of my clocks are off an hour.

I have never benefitted from the time change. It generally just pisses me off. Losing an hour of sleep one day and gaining it back six months later does me no good at all. When I was growing up in northern Idaho, during the winter I went to school in the dark and came home in the dark. What did I care what time it was? Once I was invited to an Easter brunch and arrived just as they were divvying up the check. Oops.

But I am so grateful that I am not the owner of a clock store. I am much too anal not to have them all synchronized. I don’t mind compensating for an hour but would go spare with cuckoos appearing randomly, every few minutes.

I am equally glad I am not this guy.

Sunday Scribblings - "Curve" Writer's Island - "Extravaganza" 6/1/08

The initial response I get when I tell people I am originally from Idaho is invariably “oh, potatoes.” (That is if I am speaking to someone geographically savvy enough not to confuse Idaho with Iowa and start discussing corn) I guess identifying with potatoes is better than the other things Idaho is infamous for, Aryan Nations, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and a Senator Larry Craig's men's room reacharound. I will pause for a moment while the unfamiliar google these entries. Idaho is perhaps the most joked about state north of the Mason Dixon Line (I hope you don’t have to google that line of demarcation). Here are a few of my favorite Idaho jokes, though old:

This is the reining Miss Idaho
Why do most college football fields in Idaho use Astroturf? To keep the cheerleaders from grazing
What do you call a beautiful woman in Idaho? A tourist
Idaho is the only state with two capitals: Spokane and Salt Lake City. This is funny because neither is actually in Idaho but Spokane is the center of commerce for the northern part of the state and Salt Lake City is the location of the Mormon Church headquarters, which governs southern Idaho. That is a really funny joke if you can find Idaho on the map.

Anyway, you get the idea that Idaho is not the cultural center of the Universe. Well, that is not what my blog is about. The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is “curve” and the Writer's Island prompt is "extravaganza". This is what I came up with:

Idaho is that weird shaped state that resembles an intoxicated person attempting the letter “L”. The north and south have very little in common, not even a time zone. I think it is important at this time to say that I am from northern Idaho. Potatoes do not grow in northern Idaho. It is all mountains and rivers and lakes and beauty, while the south is, well……potatoes. Northern Idaho is called the "panhandle". That is not because we hit up Washington and Montana for loose change, it is because of its narrowness.


It is nearly 500 miles from a very defendable border 50 mile border with Canada to the desolation that is Nevada and Utah. But you can't get there from here. Amazingly, due to terrain, there is only one highway that links the north and south without venturing deeply into Montana. It is US Highway 95. I did not say Interstate. No way. It is a mostly 2-lane highway that we motorists share with wildlife and stray domestic animals. Or at least it was when I lived there. It weaves its way over and around mountains. Real mountains. Not the hills passed off as mountains in the Appalachians. As you can see by the map, that 500 miles is not as the crow flies. Unless he is a crow with a very poor GPS.

The most hazardous stretch of Highway 95 was the 10-mile stretch dropping into the town of Lewiston driving south from Moscow. And dropping is the operative word here. It dropped 2,000 feet and included 64 turns. Many of these turns were hairpin curves with a surely fatal drop should a driver fail to negotiate one. Dale Earnhardt wouldn’t have exceeded 30 mph for much of the ride. Couple the dangerous road with the fact that snow and ice add an infinite degree of difficulty through the winter months as well as the probability of meeting an out-of-control logging truck on a narrow switchback.

There was a weekly extravaganza witnessed by the citizens below as headlights disappeared only to reappear in places there was no pavement. There were unrecoverable vehicle carcasses of failed attempts littering the valley below as well as sections of guardrail missing or severely disfigured marking departure points of those “getting air.” Though there were many other curvaceous stretches of US Highway 95, none could match the Lewiston Hill. I do not have numbers to support this claim but I am fairly certain there were more fatalities on this stretch of highway than the rest of Idaho’s portion of US Highway 95 combined.


I have been down that grade as a passenger of many school busses piloted by white-knuckled drivers and cars driven by chemically enhanced college students.

And your reward for making it to Lewiston was to be greeted by the foulest stench you can imagine from the pulp mill that was located there. I am fairly certain the EPA has probably curtailed that operation due to the pollutants.

The Lewiston Hill road was replaced with a straighter, much more user friendly highway in 1979. An extravagant gesture by a state that spends so little on highways that the only time potholes are filled is by ice in the winter months. I have only been down it a few times since then, but it is not nearly as exciting. Last I heard, the old road was still open for bicyclists and brain-dead tourists coming to Idaho to see potatoes.

Sunday, October 27, Sunday Scribblings - Hospital

I have been submitting to Sunday Scribblings sporadically for about seven months and it has occurred to me that most of my ramblings have been very superficial and reveal very little of myself. While most of the other writers in this community take themselves and their writing very seriously, I have often trivialized the prompts and made light of whatever topic was presented. As a result, those few that read my ramblings have probably formed an opinion that I never have a serious thought. My first instinct with the prompt “hospital” was to follow my modus operandi and provide humorous anecdotes about bedpans, nurses trying, unsuccessfully, to find a vein for an IV, paper gowns, and sharing a semi-private room with a corpse. But that would have been an untruth. The first thought invoked by the prompt “hospital” follows:


My mother died in November of 1986. I was not there. I was serving overseas in the Air Force and by the time the Red Cross contacted me it was too late to come home. My father did not know to contact the Red Cross to notify me and he did not know how to make an international call. We were not the kind of family that frequently kept in touch. Communication was primarily through letters, so there was no indication that anything was wrong in Idaho. She had already been cremated by the time I was notified. I spoke to my dad and he indicated that he was fine, though I knew he wasn’t. I was a single dad with three kids who had recently survived a divorce and an immediate uprooting to a foreign country. Dad knew that my place was with them and there was no point in returning home after the fact.


In March of 1989, I was still in Europe, and received notification that my Dad was in the hospital and that his life expectancy was in the hours, not days. He was in the final stages of cancer that was so far advanced by the time he sought medical treatment, that there was none available. I left my kids with friends and immediately flew home.


When I arrived at the hospital I did not recognize the figure that they told me was my dad. He had not been a large man, but he worked in the mines for 35 years and was very strong with powerful arms and a grip that could put me on my knees. He now weighed less than 100 pounds and consisted of skin stretched across a skeleton. I am not even certain that he knew I was there. All I could do was hold his hand, put ice chips to his parched lips, a cool washrag on his forehead, and talk to him. I probably said more to him in those few hours than I had in my life. Let me explain. When I was young my mom did most of the communicating. When I reached my teens, I didn’t communicate at all with my parents. I thought I knew so much more than them, what was the point? Then I left home, went to college, got married, joined the Air Force, and never came back, other than for short visits. So my dad and I never got to know each other as adults. The man that I was trying to comfort during his last breaths was a stranger to me.


That hospital room, silent but for dad’s labored breath and my soft words to him, became a time machine. I was transported back to my youth, to our youth. The times we went fishing, watching the Friday Night Fights, the times there were presents under the tree that dad could ill afford, our late night raids on the kitchen after mom had retired to bed, going bowling, playing catch. It all came back to me in a flood. This was both my first first-hand experience with death and my first realization of who this man really was. For my entire life, I had taken both him and life for granted.


The doctor came in, said dad seemed stable, and told me that I might as well go home and get some rest and come back in the morning. I tried to insist that I would stay but he convinced me to go since I had been up for who knew how many hours, including a flight from Germany to Spokane. I had been at home for about an hour when the hospital called and said dad was gone. The nurse said that it seemed he was just waiting for me to get home.


Back at the house I grew up in, I sat in the recliner that dad had spent the best part of the time since mom died. There was a stack of papers on the end table. I picked them up and looked through them. There were newspaper clippings, both from my baseball days and from my military career. But the one thing that caught my eye was a Christmas card that I had given my parents when I was a teen. I had written a little poem entitled to my parents:
There’s a lot of things I should do, that I don’t
And a lot of things I could do that I won’t
There’s a lot of things I shouldn’t that I do
And a lot more things I should, than I do for you

Those four lines capsulize my life about as accurately as anything I could say here. Those of you who expected my usual “writing with a smirk” will be disappointed greatly, particularly Lucy. I should be back on form next Sunday.


Postscript: I carried my parent’s ashes with me for about ten years, not really knowing what to do with them. The containers began to leak so I had to make a decision. I was living in Wyoming at the time and carried them to a beautiful and unique place where I dumped them into a river that disappears underground (see website). Neither of them had ever been there and we had no connection with the area. It just seemed like a nice place. I had actually inquired about spreading dad’s ashes on the mound at our beloved Yankee Stadium, but found it was against city ordinance.

http://www.windrivercountry.com/lander/sinkscanyonstatepark.html
S

Sunday Scribblings - Town and Country

As always, I respond to the Sunday Scribbling prompt with a knee jerk reaction and go with it. This is what town and country brought to mind:

I love visiting New York for the excitement, culture, and entertainment options. I also adore Las Vegas for obvious reasons. But, I could never live in either place. Huge cities are overwhelming to me. Too stressful, too fast, and way too much temptation. There is evil everywhere, but it really stalks you in the big city. I could also never live in a rural area. I enjoy the isolation of the country on my own terms, not as a lifestyle. I am a townie. I like living in a medium sized city with access to the country. Even though I seldom venture out in the middle of the night, it is comforting to know that there are stores and restaurants open 24/7, should I have an urgent need for a lottery ticket or a Denny’s Grand Slam at two A.M. I grew up in a tiny village in Northern Idaho, where the sidewalks (what sidewalks?) are rolled in shortly after supper. I lived overseas for 15 years, where legitimate businesses in even major cities pretty much fade to black as the sun sets. Pubs in England usually close at ten thirty. That may be different now, but I am speaking from my own experience. There are after hours clubs, but you generally need to be young, heavily pierced, and have hair of a color normally found in a rainbow to fit in. Living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is perfect for me. Southern cities are unique. I have access to all the conveniences of a metropolitan city and am just minutes away from rural areas that cause Dueling Banjos to pluck in my head. Maybe I should do a commercial for the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. City living with the potential to “squeal like a pig” only minutes away.