Category Archives: Adventure

Old Man, Young Man, on a Mountain Top

Posted on August 11, 2011 by | 5 comments

I got an email from a young man who’d been reading my blog and was astute enough to notice I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and didn’t appear to have a corresponding level of grief and regret. He asked me a number of personal questions regarding all that. I answered most of his questions, but the email reminded me of the following, which I wrote a few years ago.
Old Man and Young Man
On a Mountain-top

Old man and young man
Sit, gaze at far reaches
Of valley and desert
Spanning to horizon

“How’d I get to be this old?”
Old man smiles, serene
“I wonder sometimes myself”

Young man: “I’m serious”
Old man sighs and leans
Against a rock.

“You’ve already
Heard the parts about
Cheating, lying, and
Stealing all your life.
Those can shorten things
Considerable.
Could have mine.

Those are things you need to
Keep in moderation.”

Young man frowns.
“You’re joking.”

“No. Just being
Completely honest
For once.
But those are more
Likely just to ruin
Your life than
To end it.”

Tosses a flat rock
Into the void
Eyes follow
The long descent
“I never killed myself
When I wanted to.
Never threw myself
On my sword over
Defeats I can’t recall now.
Never flang myself
Off a cliff over scores of women
I no longer remember.”

Old man digs his pocket
Pats his other pockets
Looking for his pipe.
“I never gloated sufficiently
On my amazing successes
Over the efforts of others
(Those escape my mind
These days)
To make anyone want
To kill me enough to
Actually do it.”

Tamps the pipe
Frets with a match

“I was astute enough
To recognize early
When you bed
Another man’s woman
She’ll eventually tell him.
She mightn’t say who,
But she’ll always say what
And if he’s smart
He’ll puzzle out who.
That’s a worthy thing
To keep in mind.”

Pipe bowl sparked
Glowed, smoke
Curled around him

“I’ve always lived hard
Pushed the envelope
Hung it out over the edge.
I’d rather have died early
Than not done that

“But I always kept good tires
On whatever mechanical
Critter I was depending on
To get me back
Always kept the brakes
In good shape.  And
I was damned lucky.”

They sit silent
Watch the shadows
Crawl into arroyos
Far below.

Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Silence 1966 live
http://youtu.be/FaSFzp6IDgw

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Posted in Adventure, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Poetry, Senior Citizens, Youth

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Thumbing Rides on Throwaways

Posted on August 9, 2011 by | 12 comments


I’m a lucky man because I don’t have the money to go buy ready-rolls when it comes to getting done what needs doing. In this instance I needed a garden, but I didn’t want 86 deer, 23 wild hogs and a dozen chickens in there being Communists 24/7 messing up my diggings. But I also din’t want to have to be digging holes to support any fence I wanted to put the trouble into erecting. The layered limestone wasn’t in a mood to give up any ground in favor of having posts stuck in it.

This place has a lot of old pipe lying around wishing someone would find a use for it, so a few pieces of it became the mainstay for the structural side of the job. There were other things up behind the buildings around the owner’s workings pricking him in the conscience by not being used, as well.

A roll of 3-times used/3 times discarded chain link was also among them crying for a job after being out of work longer than a US factory worker after the guys the patriots love sent all their holdings off to be done in Mexico and China to manufacture and sell back to us.

The ‘frame’ includes two welded steel triangles used to support something long forgotten, a bit of galvanized discarded water pipe, and that’s about all besides one hell of a lot of tie-wire. Ah. There’s that gate frame gives it some support on this end. But it’s strong, self-supporting and didn’t need any violations of the sanctity of the limestone substrata to allow it to become respectable.


I lacked a couple of feet having enough chain link so I made up the difference with the refrigerator shelves wired together you see beside the gate.


The whole shebang is pulled inward against itself by wires stretched across crosswise, lengthwise and diagonally from the corners, but held back from collapsing inward by the horizontal pipes. Meanwhile the chain link keeps it from falling outward.

Meanwhile, I needed support for my tomato plants:



Two scrap illuminum storm doors and old goatwire served the need.

The only cost of this fence in dollars was a couple of rolls of tie wire.


One more bug scraped off the windshield of life.

White Trash Papa rides again.

HiiiiiOhhhhhhhh Silver! Awaaaaaay!

Old Jules

Marty Robbins – Little Green Valley

http://youtu.be/WT5qegD28Wo

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Country Life, Homesteading, Texas, Thrift Stores, White Trash Repairs

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Misplaced Worries

Posted on August 8, 2011 by | 8 comments

Writing an earlier y2k entry got me thinking how often we humans tend to worry about the wrong things.  Reminded me of a guy I used to fly with a bit during the late 1970s named John Rynertson.  John was a man who flew a blue Cessna 120.  It was a lot like the 140 Helldragger I flew (pictured above).  But he was also a man prone to introduce himself to people around the Killeen, Texas airport as “one of the best pilots around”.

Naturally there were those who didn’t favor his self-introductions involving pilot skills.

John wasn’t a man who could claim a lot of friends.  But he did have a wife almost as desirable as that 120 he flew.  So pretty, she was, that whenever he wasn’t flying, John was worrying about her.  He fretted over what she might be doing when he was off flying, or when he was almost anywhere he couldn’t keep an eye on her.  Which was a good bit of the time.  Old John just worried himself silly about that woman.

Then one day he was flying with some warrant officer from Fort Hood and managed to get more airspeed than that old airframe was willing to put up with.  The 120 wasn’t rated for snap rolls.  But being one of the best pilots around, John just naturally figured they weren’t referring to him when they rated the airplane.  Wings came spang off that mama at about 3,000 feet above the ground.

Turned out John didn’t need to be worrying about what his wife was doing.  If he was going to worry, he needed to be focusing on learning to stay alive and fly at the same time.

Whatever his wife might or mightn’t have been doing while he was alive, she certainly did it after he was grease scattered over an acre of ground.

Similarly, I recall all those kids who used to spend all their time worrying about getting drafted for Vietnam, then overdosed on something and ended up corpses right here in the good old US of A with never having been fired at in anger.

A person needs to use a lot of care, consult an internal map, look at the compass and GPS, picking things to be worried about.  Otherwise he’ll spend all his time worrying about things that don’t happen while the things that do sneak up behind him and tap him above the ear with a ball-peen hammer.
Old Jules

Nat Shilkret & The Victor Orchestra – Lucky Lindy
http://youtu.be/kflQSovXfw0

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Posted in 1970's, Adventure, Flying, Free, Human Behavior, Outdoors

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Got me a new truck!

Posted on August 6, 2011 by | 12 comments

My old Toyota 4Runner went Communist on me in December, had to be parked facing downhill to allow it to be started next time.  A Catch 22 involving if-replacing-the-starter-doesn’t-fix-it has left me having to borrow a vehicle anytime I need to go into town, or have someone pick up what I need has existed from then until now.

Meanwhile this old ranch truck has been sitting up there for the last five years unused after he twisted off a fuel line.  Gale, my old bud who owns this place and the F350, has had a long run of guilt-not-bad-enough-to-cause-him-to-fix-it, but too bad to just free him up, solved both our problems in one fell swoop:

“You can have that old F350 if you’ll fix it.”

“Whoooooopeeee!”

It’s an ’83 and hasn’t been registered for public roads since the early ‘90s, but he says it ran fine until he broke the gas line.  Unfortunately, over the years other people tried to fix it, coons lived under the hood, the wiring is chicken noodle soup.

I bought a vintage Chilton Manual from Amazon dirt cheap, but it didn’t have anything much about the wiring.

The coil appears to be made of scrap iron, the electronic ignition might be a retrofit.  Not even going to tell you what the inside of the distributor looked like when I popped it.

It’s not getting fire and I’m about out of fancy ideas.  If I don’t figure something out soon I’m going to have him tow me into town and let a real mechanic work on it, put an inspection sticker on it, and register it for the highway.

I think it’s going to make a pretty good old truck.

Robert Earl Keen – The Road Goes On Forever
http://youtu.be/_tMDXgf2cH4

About 11:30 AM Saturday

Reading the Terlingua or Bust blog  http://terlinguabound.blogspot.com/ I see he’s blowing out tires something awful out there even when they aren’t on the ground.  Some of the comments suggested it’s the heat, which makes sense. 

I don’t think the roads here are much better than his are likely to be, so maybe I ought to be glad I haven’t gotten that truck on the road yet.  Getting up to Gale’s is the worst of it… about half-mile of badly eroded 2-track rotten limestone trying to tear up tires at the best of times.  But his house to the pavement is another half-mile, better maintained but still rough.  Then the three miles of pavement to the mailbox has several lousily maintained cattleguards a person can never predict whether they’ll have a loose somethingorother pop up and take a whack at something.

From the mailbox to the main highway is a lot better, state road with no more than the usual fry-an-egg-on-it hotter-than-a-$2 pistol   asphalt.

Once again I owe the Coincidence Coordinators a debt of gratitude for sparing me stuff I didn’t even think about might happen.

Thankee Coincidence Coordinators.  I tips my hat to you.

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Texas, Transportation, Trucks, White Trash Repairs

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The Runaways, 1947

Posted on August 5, 2011 by | 10 comments

Causey, New Mexico, was a dot in the road.  Pavement from nowhere to nowhere running between a scattering of frame houses, a small roadside store and gas station.  A rock schoolhouse, a church, and a few rusting hulks of worn out farm machinery in the weeds. http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/causey.html

Our cottage was on the same side of the road as the schoolhouse.  Most of the village was on the other side, including the windmill across the road from our house where my sister and I went for water and carrying the bucket between us to tote it home.

To my tiny, four-year-old mind, the center of town was the store, diagonally across the road, to the left of the windmill.  Everything of importance happened there.  Cars from other places stopped for gas.  The store had Milk Nickles.  Ice cream on a stick, covered with chocolate.  Pure heaven that didn’t come often.

If the store was heaven, behind our house was hell.  The toilet.  A ramshackle tower with dust flecks floating in the shafts of light that came through the cracks between the boards, light coming through underneath where the ground had caved away from the wall.  Home of black widow spiders and the occasional rattlesnake.  The place was a chamber of terrors for me.  I was always certain I’d fall through the hole to the horrors beneath when I used it.

Our little cottage had two rooms.  A sort of kitchen, living area in front also had a little counter where my mom tried to operate a little variety store.  Keychains, trinkets, a handkerchief or two.  Things that wouldn’t be found across the street at the store.

She was also a seamstress.  Most of my memories of that time include her huddled over a treadle sewing machine working on the felt curtains she was making for the stage of the school auditorium.  Mom was a woman twice divorced.  In 1947, that was no small thing.  In that time and place broken marriage was considered to be the fault of an untrained, unskilled, unwise, probably immoral woman.  Two divorces, three children, and no resources made my mother the subject of mistrust by the woman of the community, and disdain by the men.

Memories have probably faded and altered with the half century since all this happened.  The perspectives of a child plagued with fears and insecurities seem real in my recollections, but they, too, have probably been twisted with the turns and circles the planet has made around the sun; with the endless webs of human interactions, relationships formed and ended.

My sisters went to school in that village.  Frances, my sister who died a few years ago, must have been in the second grade.  Becky, maybe in the 5th.  I hung around doing whatever preschoolers do in that environment when everyone else is busy.  I have flashing memories of standing by the road throwing rocks at cars; trying to get the little girl down the road to show me her ‘wet-thing’.

I remember being lonely; of wishing aloud my mom would give me a little brother to play with.  “I wish I could,” she’d reply, “but you tore me up so much when you were born, I can’t have any more kids.”

That trauma of my birth was a favorite theme of my mom.  She was fond of telling me how the doctors were long arriving when I was ready to be born;  how a nurse and my dad held her legs down so I couldn’t emerge until the proper people were there.  How it damaged her insides and caused her to have to undergo all kinds of surgery later.

I recall I felt pretty badly about that.

During harvest season it seemed to me the entire community turned out to work in the fields.  We’d all gather in the pre-dawn at the store, then ride together to the cotton fields in the back of an open truck.  Mom and the girls were all there, along with the neighbors and some of their kids.  Two of the kids were about my age:  Wayne and Sharon Landrum.

In retrospect I doubt we preschoolers helped much.  My mom had put a strap on a pillowcase and promised a Milk-Nickle every time it was filled.  This was probably more to keep me busy and out of trouble than it was to pay for the ice cream bar.  I can’t imagine that a pillowcase would have held the ten pounds of cotton it would have taken to pay a nickle.

The lure of sweets weren’t sufficient to occupy smaller kids, I suppose.  There came a time when Wayne, Sharon, and I wandered off from the field.  At first it was just to take a walk, but the road was long and we must have made some turns.  Before too long we’d gotten so far from the farm we didn’t know the way back.  We were frightened and kept moving.

In the end we found the lights of a farmhouse sometime after dark.  The family brought us inside and fed us something.  We sat around a stove trying to keep warm until some of the searchers came and picked us up.

In the morning at the store all those field workers who’d had to lose part of a day of wages wanted vivid descriptions of the spankings we got.  They wanted to make sure.

That was my first experience with running away, at least on my own part.  My mom had done some of it, running away from my dad and her second husband.  My dad had done some of it, letting his kids go off, first to Arizona into the shelter of a brutal, drunken step-dad, then into the shack in Causey.

Old Jules

Johnny Cash– In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vCK8mSyhb0

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Posted in 1940's, Adventure, Country Life, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Parents

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Note from Admin:

Posted on July 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Hello blog readers,
I’m mandala56 here on WordPress, and I’m assisting Old Jules with this blog. I’m the one responsible for the appearance of the blog, editing and scheduling posts, and making changes we think might be helpful.
Today’s change is a special page at the top of the navigation bar for all posts similar to the one today narrating Old Jules’ y2k story. From now on, any y2k installments will be found under that heading, newest on the top, unless I figure out a better way of organizing them. Old Jules will make a note of a new entry in that page in his regular blog post so anyone interested in the updates will know where to look.
Meanwhile, if you have any comments about the appearance of the blog so far, my contact information is listed under the “Admin.” page at the top, and I would be happy to receive feedback. Learning WordPress is a huge undertaking and I’m willing to keep learning more about my options.
Until the next update,
Mandala56

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Posted in Adventure

Slouching into the Millennium – August 1998

Posted on July 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The Beginning

We staff members of the New Mexico State Emergency Management Planning and Coordination Bureau [EMPAC] didn’t laugh much.  We were a collection of old guys mostly retired from something else, except for a few youngsters, mostly support and training staff.

Radiation Response and Recovery [the RAD catchers] was a retiree Bird Colonel from the US Army named Sam.  Hazardous Materials Response and Recovery was headed by Joe, a retired US Air Force Lt. Colonel who’d piloted B47s for the Strategic Air Command in his youth.  Joe sat at the end of a runway in a B47 loaded with hydrogen bombs for two weeks during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Natural Disasters – Earthquake Preparedness was a shot-up in-Vietnam old Lt. Colonel, infantry.  And so on.  My program was Flood Plain Management and local coordination and training for one of the regions.  Too long out of the military to remember whether I was enlisted or an officer.

Our Bureau Chief, Larry, was a retired Master Sergeant, US Army Search and Rescue, another Vietnam vet. An enlisted man coordinating the activities of field grade officers, giving instructions, approving their work and their per diem expenditures would have been a potential source of laughter if we’d all held our mouths right, but “That’s what happens when you put an enlisted man doing the job of an officer,” was a frequent grumble every time something went awry.

The staff meeting was in the bomb shelter of the old National Guard Headquarters building in Santa Fe where our offices were located.

“I had a weird call from one of the aids to the Governor this morning.”Larry’s eyes searched our dozen blank faces. “Any of you know anything about Y2K?”   Calls from the Governor’s office to anyone at EMPAC was bad news.  We liked to think we were invisible, nobody knew we existed.  This particular governor, however, we considered a space cadet.  A flake.

We all exchanged scowls while my mind toyed with the phrase. “Y2K. Y2K? Where the hell have I heard about Y2K lately?” The thing rang a bell in my head, but I couldn’t think why.

“The Gov just got back from a meeting of the Association of State Governors. They did a big program on Y2K. He’s all excited about it. Evidently there’s some damned thing going on with computers to make them all fail January first, 2000.” Sneers and a chuckle or two.  We all agreed on something.

“Do any of you know what other states are doing? Any ideas what we should be doing? We have to send an answer over to the Gov’s office. We have to put together a plan of some kind.”

Background rumble around the table.  “Y2K?  Why the hell would all the computers crash when the 20th century turns over?”  “Damned idiot governor.”

“Hmmm computers. That’s it.” Now I remembered.

“It’s all a farce, Larry.” I was remembering a conversation and exchange of emails I’d had with my ex-wife. “Carolyn heads the department in Texas that’s supposed to be preparing for it. She told me a while back they were spending a lot of money on it, hiring a lot of people. Pissed her off when I said it was just another bureaucratic scare plot to build more empires.”

Larry stared at me, mind busy with what I’d said. “Could you find out what they are doing over there?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Also, get on the internet. Find out what people are saying is going to happen. Find out everything you can about what all the other states are doing.”

The others in the room relaxed a little. No one wanted this project and now it was clearly mine. “How much time do you want me to spend on this?”

“A week. Two maybe. We just need to put together a plan that makes sense.”

As I left the staff meeting I was feeling pleased with the diversion this offered me. Something away from flood plain management and routine emergency management coordination. I didn’t expect it to be any problem at all.

I began by sending an email to Carolyn. This was the response I got:

“The Year 2000 deal is a real threat. Lots of people have been doing lots of
work to mitigate the consequences, and we’re still ‘influencing the future’.

The real problem is that we can generally fix what we know about, but there is
so much we don’t know.

For example, the power grid – there are many many power generators and power distributors in this country, and many “embedded systems” in each company. Some companies are taking the problem seriously by contacting their suppliers (of power grid equipment, as an example) to see if components will work.

Afraid of litigation, the manufacturers hem and haw around and provide no definitive data. Yes, I think there will be power outages, thus water problems, heating problems, etc, but I don’t think the whole US will go dark, and we still have some time to work on it.

One scenario I’ve heard is that elect. companies will work to distribute what power they have so that rolling black or brown outs will limit the negative affects of the power failures.

Some good news, the banking industry in the US is in very good shape. Our only
fear there is fear itself. I think a lot of IT systems are being corrected at a
more rapid pace than originally anticipated, and governors like yours and mine
are at least anticipating problems so they can prepare for them. I think if the
people anticipate the problems, and know that someone has already developed a
work around, we’ll be fine.

Any disruptions will probably be short lived.
I could go on, but duty calls.
C.

I trusted Carolyn about as much as any man can trust an ex-wife after 25 years of marriage.

I didn’t know it yet, but for me this began the end of one lifetime and heralded the start of another.

Old Jules

Creedence Clearwater Revival– Bad Moon Rising
http://youtu.be/5BmEGm-mraE



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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Emergency Preparedness, Human Behavior, Y2K

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Too Much Blame or Praise

Posted on July 26, 2011 by | 5 comments

Visiting blogs since starting this one has been an unexpected learning experience. The general impression that almost everyone is concerned about the state of the world and the nation wasn’t a surprise.

But the fortified positions, the polarization, the nagging thought that a lot of people would gladly enforce their viewpoints on others at gunpoint if they had the option, is troubling if accurate. The middle ground, the concept of a loyal opposition, even the concept of people still potentially being okay if they have different political, religious, differing gender viewpoints just isn’t out there anymore. No live-and-let-live in the mix.

The level of rancor between opposing opinions approaches a level where it wouldn’t be too shocking if, say, a 9/11 happened in an environment limiting US victims to a particular political or religious bias, and sets of blog dialogues appearing to express:

“What the hell! They were all Tea-Baggers!”

Or,

“What the hell! They were all pinko liberals!”

Or Democrats, Republicans, Muslims, Catholics, Baptists.

There are already posts on blogs I visit saying, “Let God sort them out.”

I can’t help wondering whether I’m the only one troubled by this.

I used to know a guy, a good man, who was also an alcoholic of the sort you’d rather not be too close to. Jay was his name, an ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Air Corps, B24 pilot of um-de-umph hundred bombing missions over Germany during WWII. War hero.

By the mid-1960s Jay had a drinking problem bad enough to be placed repeatedly into the hands of the Texas Alcoholic Rehabilitation Commission to dry out. Finally, in those days a bright new shining light among the mental health medicos was the pre-frontal lobotomy, was chosen as the tool of choice for curing what ailed old Jay….. But the unfortunate side effects were that a lot of him ceased to be Jay.

But those wise medicos knew what was best for him, they’d read all the recent advances and articles, so they strapped him down to a gurney and inserted electrodes on his temples and shot the juice to him. Several times.

I’d heard about all this, thought it was fairly awful, but what the hell. A few months later I was among a group of young folks friends of his who got invited to spend a day on Galveston Bay cruising around in Jay’s cabin cruiser down there.

Jay was wearing a tee-shirt that proclaimed, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy”. And he did.

It finally killed him, alcohol, the lobotomy didn’t change that…. but he always believed, afterward, that it was a fairly shabby thing for society to have done to him, that lobotomy. Deprived him of his right to make his own mistakes. At least, it attempted to.

If you boil all that down and scrape the leavings off the bottom of the pot, that’s about the way I feel about the likely outcome of the undercurrents at work in this country.

Someone’s going to get the upper hand, one side or the other.

The ones left holding smaller bag might need a bottle to soften up the resulting enforced prefrontal lobotomies and attitude adjustments.

A Great Cultural Revolution

If old Jay were alive he’d probably buy a tee-shirt.

Old Jules

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Posted in Adventure, Human Behavior

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Reflections of a Y2K Survivor

Posted on July 24, 2011 by | 4 comments

I was one of those weirdos who believed so thoroughly in Y2K that I quit the last years of a career, cashed in my retirement, walked away from the IRS, all the bills, a house mortgage,  totally believing it was all moot because in just a few months it would all collapse.  I figured there was  a chance high enough to bet on that everyone left after the chaos would be wandering around hungry, diseased, and dying, if the computer gurus were telling the truth.  January 1, 1999, I performed the irreversible deed.  The retirement money made a down payment on 140 acres of land in remote high desert, I drilled a well, built a cabin, stocked up on countless items the throngs of hopeless survivors would need to survive a bit longer.

I knew there was a medium possibility the IRS, the land payments, all the rest would eventually come due if Y2K didn’t happen, but I thought the consequences of it happening and me not doing it were worse than the alternative of taking the plunge and it not happening. Once a person considers seriously  the possibility that society might collapse, it’s surprising how reasonable it seems to think so.

Did my best to be a refugee camp waiting to happen. I bought a lot of chicks to be eggs and food for the future hungry.  I knew I couldn’t survive long because of the shelf-life of a medication I require to stay alive, but I had hopes a few folks could survive thanks to a lot of training and experience I’d had in woods lore, emergency management, and survival. I moved in to a tent on the 140 acres in mid-1999, until the cabin was built and the well drilled.

I spent the next 16-18 months pretty much alone, sometimes going weeks without seeing another person. It was the best time of my entire life. I loved it.  I wouldn’t change a minute of 1999 until now, but they were the hardest years I’ve ever lived.  I’m a risk taker, more than most, but I’m also a damned fool.  Fool enough to believe Y2K not happening January 1, 2000, doesn’t mean Y2K won’t ever happen.  But also fool enough to know I’m not wise enough to know when it will, nor whether it will.

This blog will include some of the material written during that time. The rest is a compilation of reflections, before and since, of my varied runs at the brick wall of something rhyming with wisdom.

Old Jules
Steve Goodman–The 20th Century is Almost Over
http://tiny.cc/trxiy

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Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Country Life, Emergency Preparedness, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Poultry, Y2K

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Riding the Rap

Posted on July 18, 2011 by | 3 comments

One of the the ways youngsters in Portales, New Mexico, used to entertain themselves summer days was hopping a freight train for a ride to Clovis, twenty miles away.  We’d hang around a while doing nothing, then hop another back to Portales.

Bums hanging around the Clovis yard would tell us which trains not to catch.  A kid wouldn’t want to be on a mile-a-minute diesel locomotive as it went through Portales and end up in Roswell, 90 miles west, wondering how to get home without the war department discovering what he’d been doing.

It wasn’t quite a decade later, summer, 1964, I was in NYC hanging around Greenwich Village thinking I was a beatnik.  I decided to head back to the desert Southwest.  The easiest way of getting out of the city appeared to be to hop a freight.  Seemed logical that any train I caught ought to be going South, or West, or Southwest.

Sometime after dark the train stopped at Rochester and and two cops had their pistols pointed at me.  Handcuffs, fingerprints, paperwork, and off to the slammer.  Rochester, New York, awaiting an arraignment so’s they could decide whether to charge me with the NY felony of riding freight trains and send me off to the pen two-to-five years.

That Rochester jail was the first place I ever heard the phrase, ‘riding the rap’.  Prisoners used it to describe what happens when you’re caught (the rap) and sentenced (serving your time – riding it).

Considering how frequently we humans are wrong about almost everything, and how seldom we’re right, it’s a mystery.  We go to sooo much trouble convincing ourselves we’re right.  Once we adopt an opinion about how things are, we hang onto it with hair,  teeth, and toenails and ride it.

At the beginning of the 20th Century a consortium of top-scientists announced to that all the major discoveries science would ever make had already been made.  Human beings all over the world believed them.  They’ve continued patting themselves on the back from then until now.  The airplane, the atomic bombs, moon landings, plastic, computers, tubeless tires, television,  and quantum physics were just tying up loose ends.

In our personal lives this brave new century is a time to pick something safe, something that will stay on the rails.  Something that won’t provide us with any growth experiences.  Safety nets.  Insurance policies.  Spectator sports.  World news.

We might be bored to tears, but by damn we know who the Bulgarians ought to elect for their president, and by damn, we know who killed John Kennedy and what’s the best ball team.

The only rap we have to ride is knowing our lives are slipping away without our having done anything but a little flag-waving.  Whoopteedoo, watched the Super Bowl.  Whoopteedoo, went to a concert.  Whoopteedoo, got a car.  Whoopteedoo, died of cancer.

But by God, I was right.  Knew, by damn, who the Bulgarians should have elected for their prez.  Knew which ball club was best, win or lose.

Life flashing before the eyes during the last minute of life, I wonder if a person gets to thrill again to the 1999 Super Bowl.

Or whether he might wish he’d chosen some other rap to ride.  Chosen a life with more risk, more flair, so they wouldn’t write his epitaph, “He knew everything already and played it safe.  Sixty times around the sun and he never fixed a flat tire.”

Old Jules

Creedence Clearwater Revival- Midnight Special
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DksGi7B5BdM&feature=related

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