Walk to Work

Damn, Summer went by so fast. The Government is spasming at the end of the Fiscal Year; too much stuff going on to close out their books, and so August was a cypher. The pool is going to close (during the week) next week. Football starts. Damn.

I walked to work yesterday- it was that sort of bittersweet lovely day. I stopped to get a picture of Adam-the-Polish-Lifeguard, hardest working guy in the pool business. Twice the work ethic of most Americans. I stopped to get a picture before he is gone like the wind.

Then I trudged off to the office. It has been a while since I walked in- you know, the heat of Arlington’s summer and all that. Who wants to arrive soaked in sweat like those berserk bicyclists?

The second installment of that huge new apartment building that is going in next door is rising like crazy. Anyone who thinks there is a crisis in construction is nuts. Look at this:

And walking down toward the part of the historic Buckingham apartments, the rehabilitation is proceeding apace.

The Mercedes Dealership on Glebe is rising in a new glass sheath:

Across the street from my office the new monolith is getting glass, too.

After I got to the office I wrote a Statement of Work and looked out the window at the men who were actually working for a living.

Just after five, I shut off the computer and walked over to Willow, to join the Amen Corner.

Good crowd for a Tuesday, with John With and Jon Without, Think, Elisabeth-with-an-S, Jasper, Old JIm, Jake, Sweet Melissa and Jarhead Ray, who wanted to draw his bayonet and kill someone. We got him calmed down, but there was something disquieting. I mean really disquieting.

Jon Without was wearing a regular tie. No bow tie. I started to wonder if it meant there was going to be another earthquake.

(What’s up with that, Jon? All photos Socotra).

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Storm Avoidance

Tinkerbell was taking care of us well last night. Mac did a second installment on his 92nd birthday, venturing out form The Madison in his golden Jaguar to join some admirers at Willow.

Tink managed to doctor up a Bloody Shame (tomato juice sans vodka) for Mac with almost all the trimmings- cocktail onions, jumbo olives and hot sauce just like Big Jim used to do.

It was the first night without his looming presence behind the bar, but our buddy comma Holly and Tink were all over it- or us, as the case may be.

Aside from Admiral Tom and Clare, the Doc and Deb, and Jake and Celia, it was a little slow, for a Monday. I attributed to the lingering crisis malaise here in the Capital. I leaned over to Doc’s wife Deb to float an idea: “I think that between the debt ceiling, the earthquake and the hurricane, we have been in fight-or-flight mode for months now. The two physical dislocations of the last week have left us all disoriented and fatigued. It is a real physical manifestation of stress.”

She nodded vigorously. “That is exactly what I have been wondering,” she said. “Why I feel so strange. It is very odd, and maybe there is something we share with the animals. The radio was talked about how things were at the National Zoo before the quake, and how they responded to the drop in the barometer when the storm was approaching.”

“Cats don’t get it. Dogs do.”

The good Doctor smiled. “There is no question we managed to avoid multiple disasters this past week, though of course it may be that the hoopla was overstated.”

“Well,” I said, “the earthquake shook up Culpeper pretty well, and damaged the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral, but both will survive in good shape. The hurricane could have been much worse everywhere it passed, and in the end it turned out to be an inconvenience more than peril.”

“Maybe,” he said gravely. “The flooding in Vermont should be noted would concern, but that was a function of rain more than devastating scouring wind. Clearly everyone in politics and the media had a stake in overstating the drama. Plus, they had added staff and with everyone on the payroll, they had to do something with them.”

The conversation rolled off in other directions as Mac held court for his bevvy of admirers, and we ordered three separate signature flat-breads, the Pollyface Farms deviled eggs, two orders of the Spring Rolls, and the miniature fish and chips off the neighborhood bar menu.

“It is sort of like a port visit in Barcelona,” said Jake, slurring the ‘c’ sound into a ‘th’ like the residents of that marvelous city do. Tapas galore.”

We got Mac back to his Jag after we finished devouring the food, and I got back to Big Pink in time to tell Adam to hang on, I would be down for a dip before it was closing time. I mixed him a drink to help pass the last few minutes while I paddled, and he seemed to appreciate it.

When the evening was finally verging on completion, I checked the email that had piled up since I left the office.

My pal Muhammed wrote to ask what the hurricane was like. He had watched the wonderful old Bogie-and-Bacall film “Key Largo,” which featured a night in a killer storm with gangster Edward G. Robinson. It is a great film for a hurricane party, if the roof doesn’t come off or the tidal surge doesn’t take you away.

“Not much,” I wrote back. “This one had gust but no fangs.” He has never been through a hurrcane, and I had to think back on just how placid a place my home state of Michigan is, nestled inside all that fresh water, insulated from harm.

I have talked to people who survived the raking blast of Hurricane Andrew at Homestead Air Force Base in 1992. Andrew was a storm so powerful that it literally erased the base, and knocked it out of commission for two whole years. Huddled together in interior bathrooms, listening to the wind smashing windows and ripping parts of the building off.

Scary. Really scary.

I warmed to the subject, thinking back on the storms of my life. I went back, ticking them off, and thinking about fight-or-flight, and the way you feel when you don’t have a choice about how you will deal with the coming wet smothering blast.

Hurricanes are a good experience if you live. Not so much if you don’t. You are truly committed to the storm if you have not run, like they did in Key Largo, and even running doesn’t always work out.

I did Hurricane Iwa in Honolulu in 1982. It was the most powerful hurricane ever to hit Hawaii, and there was no place to run. It was no Andrew, but likewise there was no way to avoid it. The eye of the storm came over the lanai of the little Navy house on McGrew Loop at Pearl Harbor. Looking at the well-defined eyewall that encircled us, the sun returning briefly was the most eerie lovely thing I have ever seen.

Then, eleven years later, Hurricane Isabel came here to DC and crashed into the flanks of Big Pink and the trees danced (as I did) on the balcony with my battery-powered DiscMan CD player.

Then, of course, Saturday night we spent sleeping with Irene.

None of the three were catastrophes. Inconveniences, mostly, though there were tragedies. The strongest hurricane was the first, though of course it was in the Western Pacific, and technically not a hurricane, but a Typhoon.

I saw the power of the storm at sea, on USS Midway. The tropical cyclone was Super-typhoon Tip, and the year was 1979. It was the largest and most intense tropical cyclone in history, which was when people were talking about the coming ice age, not the other way around.

’79 had been an active storm season in the western Pacific- Tip was the nineteenth tropical storm and twelfth typhoon of the season.

Tip developed out of a disturbance in the monsoon trough near Ponape (now Pohnpei) Island in Micronesia early October, and initially tropical storm Roger to its northwest hindered the development and northwest motion of Tip, which may have contributed to its incubation as a monster.

After it got out of Roger’s shadow, the monster tracked further north and intensified from topical storm to Monsoon. After passing Guam, it rapidly intensified and reached peak winds of 190 mph and a worldwide record low sea-level pressure of 870 millibars.

At its peak strength it was also the largest tropical cyclone on record with a diameter of 1,380 miles, or more than a third of the Continental United States.

After pasting Guam, the storm took an unexpected northwestern arc and almost caught us in Tokyo Bay. It hit Japan on the 19th. We had been pier side in Yokosuka when the turn commenced and they ordered us to sortie to get away, but the storm was so vast that we didn’t quite succeed.

It is the only time I have seen green water – un-aerated, no foam- over the bow of an aircraft carrier.

There was widespread destruction. Rainfall from Tip was so intense that the flood breached a retaining wall at a fuel farm on a USMC training base near Fuji, which ran gasoline down into the tents and exploded on a spark from a heater. The subsequent fire killed 13 Marines and injured 68. Elsewhere in Japan, the typhoon led to widespread flooding and 42 deaths, and offshore shipwrecks left 44 killed or missing.

Among the other casualties was the tower of the Armed Forces Radio and Television System (AFRTS) Far East Network (FEN) radio station, 80,000 watts of US-controlled Rock and Roll, which made Japan much more boring without a US-style Top-40 radio station to listen to when we bombed around in our clapped-out Nissans and Hondas.

On the ship, we experienced some damage in terms of swept-away antennas and such, but we popped out of the southern band of clouds into the bright sunshine, and proceeded at best speed to Subic Bay in the Republic of the Philippines. We had no airplanes- they had all been flown away out of danger from Japan, and consequently all the airwing ground pounders were idle passengers.

We wound up in the Philippines unplanned for the voyage repairs and we got intensely drunk on rich dark San Miguel beer and hung out with the hookers in Olongapo City for a week.

Storm avoidance can be a magical thing. Sometimes you can run, and not have to hide.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Farewell and All That

As you know, the English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for groups of animals. There is a Pride of lions, a Murder of crows, a School of fish, an Exaltation of doves and a Parliament of owls.

Now consider the baboon, the loudest, most dangerous, and viciously aggressive of all primates. And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons? Naturally: a Congress.

But I digress. It was such a strange week followed by a surreal day that I cannot quite come to grips with it. I don’t know how you are doing, but I assume it is a sort of common experience for all of on the Eastern Seaboard.

It would have had history, had the great storm not come, what with the formal dedication of Dr. Kings Monument downtown, which was cancelled. The other big deal went off with military precision: the closing of Walter Reed Hospital, and the migration of the last patients to the new facilities that have been erected on the campus of the former National Navy Medical Center at Bethesda.

There is too much history to recount at Walter Reed, which opened for business in 1908, and contained the Army’s Medical Museum, and General Dan Sickles leg, and a monument to the forward Confederate lines in the last wild attack by Jubal Early in 1864, and the suite where General Pershing spent his last days, and President Dwight Eisenhower expired. And the autopsies of the Nazi saboteurs who were electrocuted in short order at the DC Jail at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.

That storied history is worth a story, one of these days, and the fate of the broad and historic campus remains a little hazy. Presumably it will be turned over to the tender mercies of the District Government, and the increased crush on the campus at Bethesda will be a general pain in the butt for those of us who rely on it for succor in the face of illness or injury.

But the skies cooperated, dawning gray with moderate gusts, and turned sunny and bright before noon. The wounded were moved, and that stage in the life of the post-earthquake, post hurricane capital was closed out.

People crept out of their burrows, blinking in surprise that the fury had passed by with so little damage. Many slept through the entire event on this side of the river, while on the other tens of thousands were without power, but otherwise mostly intact.

By eleven, people were in the office obsessing about the big proposal, and I went in to work on that for a while as other colleagues in the suburbs chirped on my Blackberry that their power was out, their computers useless. I contributed to a separate Executive Summary for one of the other tasks that are laying around in various states of progress, and looked up in surprise at the clock to see that the afternoon had fled, and it was time to swing by the farewell for Big Jim, the Willow Restaurant’s founding bartender.

Deborah, Willow’s Ops Boss, hosted the affair at her place in the Waverly Hills neighborhood of Arlington on a leafy street just north of the gash of I-66. She had been concerned when Old Jim and I talked to her late last week as final preparations for the farewell and the storm worked in parallel. Her house is one of those 1930s jewel boxes, hardwood floors and arts and crafts details, but small rooms and no place for people to congregate.

She was hoping to have everything outside, and that certainly appeared to be a crap-shoot.

As it turned out, it was perfect. Surreally perfect. Malcolm-the-Neighbor came by with a chainsaw to dispose of an errant branch deposited from one of the two stately oaks that shade the back yard.

Heard in the kitchen: “Women need men like fish need bicycles.”

“You are right, but fish don’t have chainsaws.”

Was it possible that twelve hours before Mother Nature was ripping oaks out of the ground and hurling them across the streets? We could hear the thin roar of chainsaws at work elsewhere in the neighborhood as the restaurant staff played beer-pong.

Big Jim assumed command of the grill, and I was amazed to hear how the other half lives: Willow had been up and running through the storm, past two in the morning and the heart of the gale. The staff was drinking again at noon, monitoring the NFL draft for the commencement of the Fantasy Football leagues that will start shortly. I do not think that knowledge that Willow was rocking in the storm would have changed my decision to hunker down at Big Pink, but it would have been in interesting option.

His departure is worth marking, since it is the end of an era for our little social set. He will continue bartending, at a place in Loudoun as he waits for the full time teaching position, but he has made the decision to get a real career and no longer live the vampire life of the liquor trade, working while the rest of us get bombed.

Old Jim and Mary stopped by, and owner Tracy O’Grady, and Elizabeth-with-an-S and her pal, and Robert the chef with his crew, and a good time was had by all. The filet mignon and the flank were coming off the grill when I saw my chance to make a graceful disengagement.

Adam-the-Polish-Lifeguard had been working on the pool when I headed to the office, and I had every expectation that he would open late in the afternoon, and I did not want to miss it.
He had worked like hell all the afternoon, methodically cleaning up the pool, then the deck and then personally bringing all the furniture up from the basement of the building.

His burly torso and Slavic blonde hair framed a big smile of personal satisfaction. He had beaten off the storm, and took a great deal of pride in what he did. He formally opened the pool around six, and I got a great swim in, wondering at the whole thing- hurricane to blue skies in twelve hours, and the wonder of the warm orange sunset over the trees.

Amazing weekend.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Good Night, Irene

As it turned out, it was a good night here in Arlington, and a relatively peaceful passing of the first hurricane here since Isabel roared through on September 6th, 2003.

I was in unit 515 at Big Pink then, on the south face of the massive building and took the winds head on from the balcony with my Discman and vodka, no ice, no power.

It was a strange and ominous day yesterday, waiting on the winds and rain. Is there a correlation between barometric pressure- the glass dropping rapidly- and mood? Is there some primordial trigger that relates to the flight-or-fight instinct?

I don’t know. I could not dredge up much interest in the wider world yesterday, even with the news that the #2 commander of al Qaida was nailed by a Predator drone strike last week in Waziristan. RIP,Atiyah Abd al Rahman, you dirt-bag.

If we can kill another four or five of the senior leadership, that will change the prediction for the future lethality of the organization.

That is the prediction from SECDEF Leon Panetta, anyway, and I like his track record. Naturally, I was contemplating other, more intimate predictions as they relate to my life and property, which appear less and less related to al Qaida and more to nature.

There is a guy named Joe Bastardi who makes his living as a weather forecaster. Joe is a body-builder out of Penn State University when he is not a weatherman, and his predictions for storm activity have been remarkably accurate as compared to those of NOAA. From Joe’s Weatherbell publication there is this about what is coming at us on the Eastern Seaboard for 2011:

“My hurricane forecast has this years total impact and power rating close to 1999… with 2008 the strongest most recent analog. I have a pendulum impact theory based on the swings between the el Nino and la Nina, but folks, there are some big ticket items at work here… most notably the backdrop of a cooling troposphere globally…”

Of course, he also said that Irene would be one of the top three recorded hurricanes to strike the East Coast, and someone besides me must have been listening to him. Maybe that accounted for the mood of anticipation, or maybe it was something deep in the cerebral cortex.

I had made my preparations. I missed the President’s bunker address as he staged his response to Irene. I was unable to walk or swim, since the pool was closed and the rain too daunting. I probably should have gone to the Fitness Center, or put the fancy bike on the trainer and peddled in lace for an hour, but instead, I napped.

The fall in the barometer was marked when I got up around cocktail hour, and decided to check the television for portents. The first vodka of the storm came with dense sheets of rain. There was no wind to speak of until the storm-enhanced dusk of evening came on. The sudden rustling of the maples announced the arrival of the first edge of the intense cyclonic breeze, and that in turn kicked in my storm checklist.

The light gear had been removed from the balcony hours before: cushions on the chairs, the snack table between the heavy Adirondack chairs, the butt kit, so it would not be overturned and shower the properties below with the remnants of my tobacco vice.

I had the balcony door open with a pair of Vice Grip pliers clamped hard on the guide rail so the heavy slab would not oscillate wildly and rip itself from its hinges as it has before.

Another couple bands of wind and rain passed through, rising in intensity. I stirred the pot of pulled brisket-cum-chili that I made to have some comfort food pre-cooked in advance of the power failure. I heard the grenade-pop of the first transformer to go, and looked with concern at the reading light to see the first flicker of the power outage. It did not come.

The candles were staged on the dining-room table along with the spare batteries, and the phones and the iPad and iPod were connected to the wall so as to be at max charge when the power quit. I watched some stand-up photo ops of brave reporters standing in the worst possible places, sea foam covered, or heavily-slickered in front of traffic and people who seemed to be going about their business as usual.

I buttoned up the place around nine and went to bed. I know that was going to mean me rising in the night, along with the wind, but I wanted to gauge the strength of the storm as it occurred.

I got up the first time around one-thirty to the roar of the wind through the thick foliage that resisted the passing of the gale, branches waving wildly but the trunks appeared to stay put in the soaked earth. The rain was sideways, and the balcony, as I leaned on the door to keep it closed from the outside. The feeling of the storm’s strength was palpable, but seemed manageable. Power was holding, and the eye of the storm was abeam the capital.

This moment on the balcony was as bad as it was going to get, and I went back to recline under the comforter in the bedroom, rising again about four to listen again to the roar.

The power held. The eye had moved another four miles in stately procession toward Philly and New York, and I was buoyed by the idea that we were going to dodge the bullet.

I got up again at five, and things were calming noticeably. I turned on the television, and the people at the anchor desk seemed punchy. “Too many facts in my brain,” said one anchor, and another shook her head in agreement.

The Doppler radar showed that there are still bands of rain to come, but the crisis was over. It was not that big a deal in Arlington.

I don’t know about trees down at the farm in Culpeper. I will have to check out the earthquake and hurricane consequences- maybe today, if things clear up fast. They are talking about sunshine this afternoon. Could they open the pool?

Before I turned off the television, I looked at the satellite image they showed of the waters off West Africa. Tropical Storm “Jose” is next on the alphabetical list for this year, and here it comes. They give it a 30% chance of intensifying.

Joe Bastardi is claiming six or seven storms will come ashore this season. If he is right, I don’t mind if the preparations for Irene were in vain. There will be more opportunities to exercise the system this season.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Waiting on the Storm

Irene good night, Irene good night,
Good night Irene, good night Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams.

Last Saturday night I got married,
Me and my wife settled down,
Now me and my wife we are parted,
I think I’ll go out on the town.

Sometimes I live in the country,
Sometimes I live in town,
Sometimes I take a great notion
To jump in the river and drown.
– by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, 1933

I don’t know about you, but I feel anticipation in the humid air that cloaks the balcony at Big Pink. I am antsy. Something is going to happen. It is slouching toward us. I sense it.

They have spiked the dedication of Dr. King’s memorial. It was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Like several million citizens, the coming storm has caused dislocation and dismay.

The President was prompted to return to the capital to demonstrate his solidarity with the Capital against the elements, leaving the vacation on Martha’s Vineyard a day early. We don’t know if the White House Communications Agency (WACA) immediately decommissioned the two COWS they set up for his vista (Cell towers On WheelS).

In the aftermath of the storm the enhanced coverage might be useful for the First Responders on the island. The locals normally prefer spotty coverage in the interest of esthetics, thinking the permanent towers blights on the landscape.

The President had been set to speak at the ceremony at the Socialist-Realist monument to Dr. King tomorrow, but the specter of Irene bearing down. Organizers had previously said they expected to draw up to 250,000 people, but no dice. The timing dedication had huge symbolic significance, being timed to the 48th anniversary of Dr. King’s  “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered nearby on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which has gained a new risqué reputation as a venue for daring couples to have public inmate relations.

There is controversy about the memorial, as there always is when something new is added to the Nation’s Front Yard. A pal out in Colorado Springs who is more focused than I am in the morning sent along a bit from London’s Daily Telegraph that sums it up pretty nicely:

“…there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry out the work. Critics have openly asked why a black, or at least an American, artist was not chosen and even remarked that Dr. King appears slightly Asian in Mr. Lei’s rendering.

Mr. Lei, who has in the past carved two statues of Mao Tse-tung, one of which stands in the former garden of Mao Anqing, the Chinese leader’s son, carried out almost all of the work in Changsha.

More than 150 granite blocks, weighing some 1,600 tons, were then shipped from Xiamen to the port of Baltimore, and reassembled by a team of 100 workmen, including ten Chinese stonemasons brought over specifically for the project.”

I think the memorial is entirely appropriate, and the location completely justified. The fact that all the production work was done in China does strike me as verging on the bizarre, but the funds were privately raised by Dr. King’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, and however they felt they had to do it is certainly OK with me. If the government had been behind it, I would be outraged.

Dr. King is one of my iconic heroes. I made the pilgrimage to his tomb and the Ebenezer Baptist Church the last time I was in Atlanta, and wandered up to the his family home, thinking of the real man and the real courage it took to get out of bed each day with the certain knowledge that violent death was coming. I liked the fact that he was human, too, and smoked. He did not like that activity to be photographed, and he liked women a great deal. He was a man in full, and he stands in my estimation as perhaps the greatest orator our nation has produced.

He was a force nature, though human and in the flesh, but also a rider of a great and inexorable gale. He did not wait on the storm. He caused it.

The other storm is approaching. The air is heavy with humidity and a certain dread. Irene’s outer bands reached Kill Devil Hills, N.C., about a half hour ago. The monument dunes where the Wright Brothers launched their gliders and then their heavier-than-air flying machine will hopefully survive intact.

I took the boys there one time to run the distance of their first flight- it is a very short sprint, and the succeeding flights went incrementally further, reaching the moon sixty-six years later.

Irene has diminished to Category One status, but it is wide and wet and still wild. She is supposed to arrive at 0200, tomorrow morning with all her remaining glory.

There appears to be time to get the usual Saturday chores complete, and I am going to have time on my hands, since the Big Pink pool is shut up tight in anticipation of the storm, the patio furniture stored safely down in the garage.

Just like it was the end of the season. Which in a way, it just might be.

I feel restless. I think I am going to go out and get some exercise. Then when the rains start, maybe read. Maybe watch a movie before we lose power.

I have batteries. I have candles. I have plenty of vodka. Let’s see what you got, Irene.

Good luck. Stay dry.

(Irene greets North Carolina. Photo AP)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

When I’m (92)

When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?

If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?
– Lennon and McCartney

Who would have thought that we would all be closing in on 64, Paul would be a senior citizen, and John in his grave for decades?

Strange. The skies opened at mid-day, and sheets of rain drenched the Ballston neighborhood around the office and the Willow Restaurant. We were in between earthquakes and hurricanes, and I was wondering if a plague of locusts might arrive before the storm hit us in earnest.

Bread, toilet paper, milk and Tampex were on the emergency preparation list for the emergency stockpile, not that I need anything except the second. Those are the products that fly off the shelf when Bob Ryan the Television Meteorologist gravely says “get ready, Washington!”

I added a full tank of hi-test for the Hubrismobile, some AA batteries, a couple 1.75ML bottles of Popov Quality Discount Vodka, several flasks of Diet Schweppes tonics, lime juice and the cooler to stock up on ice for when the power goes out after the winds drop a tree on the line connecting Big Pink to the grid.

It had been one of those days, and I was starting to lose the bubble on which of the proposals I was working on. There was a virtual Red Team on one thing, and data calls on the big IDIQ effort- you know, “Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity,” which is the government’s way of awarding you precisely nothing in exchange for the right to compete in a more limited version of free-and-open competition for Government work. Then there were two others in various states of recruiting and writing, and they began to blue together.

I wondered how long this was going to go on. The Government can’t get out of its own way without contractors these days, and given the budget, won’t be hiring any more govvies with their pensions and benefits. I think we will be OK, but you never can tell.

A colleague had leaned over to me earlier in the day, and said that the Community leadership had been planning on offering up a package of 8% cuts to the budget, and the White House had shaken its collective head and said: “Why not look at something between 18-24%”

Yike! I have no idea what that is going to mean. Obviously, the budget has zoomed since 9/11, and I am sure there are many areas that can stand some reduction, but the deficit crisis means we are going to try this with forces still in the field confronting the Bad Guys.

We did something similar after DESERT STORM and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which caused some memories to come back. I recalled the start of the Air War over Iraq, with the mass launch of cruise missiles and the impact of precision weapons. Tom was the Director of Naval intelligence, then. My pal Paul was Flag Aide, and he had to call him at the Peking Gourmet Inn the night the missiles flew. He was at dinner with the Chinese Defense Attaches!

That was a coincidence, I thought as I powered down the computer. Mac’s family had honored me with an invitation to his 92nd birthday dinner. He was born on the 25th of August in 1919, the second installment of the plague year of the Spanish Influenza. Almost a full century ago, a time when the acrid smell of gunpowder could still be sniffed in the dank lower reaches of the trenches of the former Western Front.

Mac’s family has a long history with the Peking Gourmet Restaurant. He and he wife Billie would take the kids there for special occasions, when the boys would stick the chopsticks up their noses to look like walruses.

Mac had contacted the manager, Ray Leong, and secured the Bush Room for the occasion. The specialty of the house is the Peking Duck, and theirs is world class.

I had read about the place for years in the Post, since the little strip-mall palace had attracted all the greats and near greats of this hot-house political town, and both Bush elder and junior had a particular fondness for it.

The Peking Gourmet has been operating out of the slightly thread-bare mall along Rt.-7 in Falls Church since 1978. Founder Eddie Tsui wanted to run a restaurant specializing in northern Chinese cuisine, an featuring a flagship item that few could afford back on he Mainland. He decided on Peking Duck as the specialty, and the Peking Gourmet Inn was born.

This was no ordinary ethnic restaurant. Eddie ruled out ordinary store-bought ingredients as inadequate to generate the authentic taste he was seeking, and instead founded a parallel family farm business to grow jumbo spring onions and cucumbers. He formulated his own recipe for hoisin sauce and hand crafted each pancake for the delicate wraps for the thinly sliced duck and golden glazed fat.

I parked the Hubrismobile in front of the Post Office across the alley from the mattress store and the inauspicious entrance to the restaurant sandwiched in between the Hispanic Market. The narrow corridor leads direct to the reception area, which doubles as the take-out window, a complex and tangled space that conceals a vast bright dining area swarming with Chinese waiters and Hispanic waitresses.

I asked for Mac’s party, and was walked back through the main dining room, into another through a large portal, and behind a tall oriental screen to the Bush Room, where the Presidents looked down on a round table for twelve with a gigantic Lazy Susan in the middle.

Only Kathy was there, from the Alzheimer’s Program at Arlington Hospital. Mac had spent his third career there, after the Navy and the CIA, helping other’s cope with the insidious disease as he had endured its effect on his beloved Billie.

“Hi!” I said brightly “Where is everyone?”

“The Jaguar had a flat tire,” she said, looking up from her cell phone. She already had a gin and tonic, and I asked our angular red-coated waiter – Peng, according to the tag- for a glass of white- not at Willow-style happy hours prices, I’m afraid- but crisp and good when it arrived. We chatted about the hospital, and what Mac was still doing in service to the community.

I got a contract modification that I still did not understand on the Blackberry, and sent it off in the ether as Mac appeared, none the worse for wear, with the story of the failed tire and the bandits at the Goodyear Dealer on Glebe Road.

“They had to keep it overnight,” he said. “So we just left the car and came direct.” Peng brought tall glasses of Tsingtao Beer.

Mac started the order a brace of ducks. A single duck can feed a family of four fairly well, but with the gaggle at the table, two was a minimum. Kung-pao chicken, Spicy Shrimp, steamed dumplings, spicy green beans, Scallops, white rice and all the sauces where eventually delivered to the Lazy Susan, though Peng the waiter brought the pancakes first along, with a plates of scallions and cucumbers and bowls of their Hoisin sauce, which is absolutely fantastic.

The ducks arrived whole, and a Hispanic girl sliced them right by the tableside – it was fascinating to watch the process, and the lady was very efficient with her gleaming knife.  There was hardly any fat on the neatly aligned pieces as Peng brought them to Mac to assemble what amounted to a Peking Duck taco.

The service was solicitous as the family dined with gusto, the Lazy Susan bringing the feast around in a truly moveable manner. The talk was of the duty stations where the family grew up, in London and Naples, and Coronado and Honolulu. Along with Mac’s long career in Washington, it was a kaleidoscope of the American Century played out on the background of an old- and new- Chinese landscape.

The feast was consumed almost in its entirety when a hoard of Chinese waiters brought Mac his slice of Cheesecake with a single candle. They like it when people who beat down Imperial Japan dine with them.

He smiled and dug in. “I haven’t eaten this much in years, “ he said with a smile.

All we could do was smile right back. Happy Birthday, Mac. And many more!

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Svensmark Hypothesis

“The guys who are looking for the Higgs-Boson may have blown the bottom out of Anthropomorphic-related global warming.” I said, looking at Old Jim over a glass of happy hour white, which was, on this day, a pink rose with a faint but invigorating hint of aeration. Crisp, but white is not red, regardless of what our buddy comma Holly said.

Of course, they tell us a lot of things, and it is often easier to go along. After all, Kevin the Sommelier said it was white, and he is the expert and thus the science of the color was settled.

Comma Holly looked great- she had an interview with the Nursing Department curriculum coordinator earlier in the day, and pulled out all the stops. She wants to be a Nurse Practitioner in a few years, an admirable goal. This evening she was alternating looks as she passed by the Amen Corner of the Willow bar. Sometimes with her lush raven hair pulled back in a ponytail like Elisabeth-with-an-S and sometimes with it cascading down to her shoulders.

“What the hell are you talking about now?” growled Jim.

“You know,” I sighed. “The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary component that unifies all theories of particle physics. They are using that large Hadron Collider in Geneva to do the experiments.”

“Oh, you mean the CERN at Fermilab,” he said.

“Yeah, there is a lot of stuff going on there. If they don’t create a black hole that will destroy the planet, they are going to get some good work done.”

South Side John leaned over. He was at Willow with Jake to observe Big Jim’s swan-song week behind the bar. He has been the mainstay there since the beginning, a man you can believe in, regardless of what color the happy hour white might be.

“Is this where you recite the Fox News talking points?” he said. “You make a pretense of even handedness, but then you whip out that tired Rupert Murdoch crap.”

“I am honestly a social progressive, John, to a degree. And I despise anyone who had any role in the financial and budget melt down, from Barney Friggin’ Frank and Chris Dodd to Phil Gramm and his scary wife. Cripes, I even support Warren Buffet’s desire to pay more taxes. I think he should just write a check to the US Treasury. But I suppose you mean the CLOUD experiment they did at the CERN.”

“The what?”

“Oh, they claim to have conducted an experiment that demonstrates that solar energy affects cloud cover, which in turn affects temperature.”

“That is why Greenhouse Gas has to be stopped. The science is settled.”

“Yeah, well, science is supposed to never be settled. They seem to have demonstrated that the Svensmark hypothesis is correct, which is to say that when the solar wind is weak like it has been in this cycle, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth. That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.”

“Oh for Christ sake, where do you get this stuff?”

“Science, man. It would change the models they are using, since they would have to incorporate new algorithms. But like you say, the science is settled and we can’t have any further thinking about it. There is too much at stake to consider anything that doesn’t agree with the existing model.”

“Damn straight,” said Old Jim. “I would never drink anything pink, even if they say it is white.”

“It all depends on the flavor of Kool-aid you like,” I said, and drained the glass of happy hour white.

Tomorrow: Mac turns 92 at the Peking Gourmet, with Purple Dragons.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Feel the Earth Move (Under Your Feet)

There was more damage than expected from the quake yesterday. Most of you felt it, as the rumble emanated from a point three miles under the tiny village of Mineral, Virginia. The tip of the Washington Monument has cracks, and some of the spires of the National Cathedral snapped off an plunged to the well-manicured greensward below.

That did not become apparent until later, and is of some interest to me, since Refuge Farm is located much nearer to the epicenter than it is to the National Capital Region. But maybe I am getting ahead of myself. We were working a proposal review out of the Headquarters- sort of a Sergeant Friday kind of thing, like the Day Watch out of Bunko- and I had wandered back to my real office to pound on the computer and access pearls of wisdom previously written.

I got some salad stuff from the Koreans downstairs, and was sorting through the chaos of the multiple government solicitations that have plopped out on the street as the end of the fiscal year looms next month.

Funny how stuff works. The news from Tripoli was the hot topic of the morning, but we were out of the loop in The War Room, and I punched on the clock radio in the office as soon as I walked in to catch up.

I was lifting a chopstick-load of cucumbers toward my lips when the room began to shake. It is a sad commentary on the times that I thought it might be a blast from a WMD detonated downtown and braced for the boom that would quickly follow the first seismic shock, but it didn’t come.

I realized what it was about five seconds into the rocking of he building. I looked out the window and saw the glass shimmering in the new office tower across the street.

Earthquake, I thought, and in about that much time the shaking peaked and diminished.

I rolled the chair back and ran out in the hall, where all the denizens of the eighth floor suite were congregating, voices rising and arms waving in excitement. Many of us have visited or served in Japan, so this is hardly unusual. I don’t know if there was a continued tremor- people were running down the passage and the vibration from their footfalls might have been what I felt.

Kristi’s eyes were bright with excitement and unease. She had never experienced a quake, and didn’t know how these things play out.

“Maybe aftershocks,” I said. “We used to get these all the time in Japan. I was living on Ma Midway in Yokosuka years ago. I went over to the Blackship Bar at the O Club and was drinking a Kirin Beer when I felt the ship get underway. Then I realized I was ashore. That is exactly what it felt like- an old aircraft carrier shuddering and moving ponderously forward.”

“I never felt anything like that,” she said. And then we all  went back to our desks and I started typing corrections to the proposal. Kojo Nnamdi was interviewing some on WAMU on another scandal in local District politics when he paused and said they had just experienced the quake.

I went out to tell Kristi, and by the time I got down the corridor to pass the word that it was confirmed, everyone was streaming media on their computers and before I got down the hall the magnitude had risen from 5.4 on the Richter scale to 5.8 and then 5.9.

Steve looked up from his computer as I passed his office. “They are evacuating the Pentagon,” he said, and I marveled. The quake had got my attention, for sure, but it hardly seemed that big a deal.

Current intelligence- or at least the open source version of it- has risen likewise to an entirely new level. I realized my old trade- telling people the classified news- had leap-frogged right over me.

I gave up and went back to work for a while. I decided on a smoke break to organize my thoughts on performance metrics and walked out to the elevator. When I arrived in the lobby, I discover the rest of the building, in fact the entire neighborhood, had evacuated. The space was jammed as people tried to get back to their offices, as apparently someone had issued an “all clear.”

Bizarre, I thought. I decided to call my best friend and check in, but the cell phone did not work. It was like 9-11, I recalled. Everyone was trying to get on the network at once, and I ruefully recalled the priority access code I once enjoyed as a bureaucrat that permitted priority access to the circuits during times of emergency.

The fact that this had been the largest quake in seventy years began to penetrate. I got an e-mail from Detroit asking if we felt it- they had- and a prompt to check on the farm.

I called Rosemary down at the Summerduck Barn just up the road from Refuge Farm, and she said they were fine, and the ponies had not minded the shaking. The hamlet of Culpeper had taken some hits, though, with bricks coming off the civil-war era buildings and a few chimneys taking on rakish leans.

At Willow later, talking to Old Jim, he said that his wife was picking up the pet at the Doggy Daycare, and the staff said the canines had suddenly stopped playing and gathered together, fur-to-fur, right before the tremors began. Somehow they knew.

The word this morning is that there was much more to confirm. The schools in Fairfax are all closed for inspection, and the nuclear reactors t Mineral, the epicenter, were shut down briefly for safety.

I didn’t even know there were reactors at Mineral.
Crap.

I didn’t pay any attention, being preoccupied with the proposal nonsense, but apparently there was a historic quake in Colorado, too, in the middle of the night before. And Hurricane Irene, the first big storm of the season, is bearing down on the Carolinas and will soak us, at a minimum.

I thought about the Mayan calendar that ends in 2012, and wondered if the Rapture had happened without us knowing it.

We live in Washington, after all, and none of us would have ascended, so it would be hard to tell.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Interview

We have a hurricane coming this way. Doesn’t look like we will get smacked, though the Carolinas should not be so sanguine about their prospects. We will get soaked, though, and that is not so bad a prospect, though it will make the last days at poolside problematic.

I was happy to get a decent swim in to close the day. I had just completed the World’s Weirdest Job Interview. I won’t go into it in any detail, but it featured a Chinese linguist in an astonishing playsuit with a squirming three year old in the conversation nook of the Willow.

Old Jim did not approve- “kids shouldn’t be in the bar,” he growled, but I felt bad for the young woman- single Mom, out of a contract job, waitressing when she had a TS-SCI clearance and regional experience from her active duty time. If I could help, I wanted to, but the idea of bringing a toddler to a prospective interview made me queasy.

Not to mention her legs that went up to there, not to mention her prominent bust, featured in a plunging scoop. She would have been a good match for one of the kids, less her own, of course, and I rallied the little guy could have been a grand-kid.

It was a relief when she scooped the kid up, after giving me the blow-by-blow of the Marine who had not married her. Mind blowing, in fact, but a nice kid.

I debriefed the encounter with Old Jim after she left, and we agreed the world had come to an entirely new place. I managed to navigate home in good time, and called down to Adam the Polish Life Guard at poolside from the balcony that I would be down in short order for a good dip.

The water was cool and refreshing, and I paddled next to the Indonesian guy whose languid backstroke powers him slowly up and down the lap lane.

Saying good night to Adam in the evening darkness, he commented on the unseasonably pleasant air.

“Feels like September,” he said. “I like, but seems like summer is over.”

I nodded in agreement and told him I would see him tomorrow. I walked away, shivering a little in my damp t-shirt.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Master Chief

Morning, Gentle Readers! It is one of those Mondays for which there was no preceding day of rest- a flash-back to the old Pentagon Friday greeting that went: “Have a great weekend; only two working days to Monday!”

On this particular Monday, our friendly government customer has scheduled two technical briefs on prospective bits of work, and the Bandits- or, if you prefer, Vendors or Offerors- have to be in our places in the conference room by nine over on the wrong side of the Anacostia River.

Accordingly, the morning chaos is advanced a bit. There will be time to ruminate on the Arab Spring and its consequences, since the Rebels may (or may not) have secured Colonel Qaddafy’s Tripoli, and the plucky but deranged dictator may (or may not have fled.)

That will drive Assad’s thugs closer to the wall in Syria, with the realization that really angry people can unify to toss out the tyrant, and up stream consequences in Yemen as well. Maybe even Iran, who knows?

It is enough to cause one to muse on whether or not the Iraqi people would have ousted that bastard Saddam on their own, in time, without the loss of American treasure and lives, like that of our shipmate Kurt Juengling, the loss of whose life we mourn. But of course, there will be no knowing that, not ever. And the wild optimism of liberation may only be the harbinger of something worse, but for now, a tip of the Socotra topper to the Rebels in Libya as they fire their Ak-47s to the sky.

I would remind you that all those rounds fired up come back down, and sometimes have consequences for those below.

So there is that. But there is something I was challenged to do, and I am going to go ahead and do it this morning.

As you know, we have had a run of sad news over the past couple weeks that was worth recording. As they left us, we have looked back to salute the incredible courage of pilot Noel Gayler and submarine skipper Mike Rindskopf. We noted the extraordinary internal courage that sustained a not-so-ordinary dentist named Al Brown in captivity of a savage Japanese war machine.

A pal noted that that the guys who we remember for their heroism represented only a part of a nation that completely mobilized completely for global war, and the boys overseas could only be sent there is someone else stepped forward to take their place. The transformative nature of the war on American society is so deep that the consequences echo even today, and one of the heroes of that struggle left us last week as well.

The war liberated my mother from the sad rusting valley of the Ohio River, and made my life possible. She worked for the Texas Company in Manhattan. Other women just a couple years older than her were pioneers: factory workers, pilots and all the other traditionally male jobs that had to get done to keep the war machine going.

On the 4th of August, 2011, Master Chief Yeoman (YNCM) Anna Der-Vertanian, USN-Ret, passed away after a brief illness over at the Vinson Hall Retirement Community, just up the road from Big Pink in posh McLean, VA. She merits mention with the winners of the Navy Cross because she was part of a vanguard of women who changed the face of America. After her service, and that of her sisters, there was no going back.

Anna Der-Vartanian and I were both Detroiters. She was working at a steel company in the Motor City in 1942 as the Arsenal of Democracy began to churn out the tools that won the war for Democracy. Rosie the Riveter wasn’t what she wanted. She yeaned for the flexibility and adventure of travel, and the pride of service. She began her military career in 1943. She enlisted in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service program, or WAVES, and performed clerical duties stateside. She was one of 26,000 WAVES who served in the War.

After the victory, she declined to return to civilian life, and re-upped in 1946 in the Regular Navy. At the time, there was no career path for women in the service, and she essentially invented one. Back then, women couldn’t go to sea, and those who got married or pregnant had to leave the service. Although Anna had been engaged a few times, she never got to the altar. It was her choice; she thought work was more fun.

She served all over the country, at duties stations in DC, Mare Island, the Boston Navy Yard and our own beloved Pearl Harbor. She told an interviewer that she “thought it was a great life. I loved the traditions, the uniform, the people.”

She made history in 1959, when she was promoted to master chief petty officer, the first woman in any of the uniformed services to do so.

Anna was quick on the uptake and didn’t take crap off anyone. She didn’t think about being the pathfinder for a generation of American women. She faced bias so profound that it is unthinkable in today’s world. One disgruntled reserve Senior Chief wrote a blistering letter to Navy Times when she made E-8, complaining about the promotion of women when worthy men were passed over. The letter writer later wound up junior to Anna when she was a Command Master Chief, and he continued his disrespectful behavior, being loud and obnoxious about her in front of the junior sailors.

“Fall in and pipe down,” she recalls ordering the jerk. “I thought he would have a fit, but he fell in.”

In Paris, in the office of the Defense Attaché she got a taste of intelligence work, and writing up the reports that the ALUSNA collected on what was happening in NATO and across Europe to the Iron Curtain. It ignited a passion for the secret world, but it was not easy. An Air Force Sergeant was one of those who did not get the word. He decided he would disobey Anna’s direct order. Anna didn’t blink. She locked down the office and told her people no one was leaving until the job was done.

Magically, based on her presence and force of will, her people turned to and made the jerk comply. She was a leader.

Anna Der-Vartanian retired from the Navy in 1963, and then came over to the dark side with the rest of us Spooks. The CIA picked her up as a junior analyst in 1964, and she eventually had a second career as a counterintelligence specialist. I will have to ask Maurie, the grand old lady who swims with me each day at the pool. She turns 90 this summer as well, and although she will do no more than smile when I ask her about her days at Langley and in France, she may have known Anna.

Anna would not talk about it either- that is an occupational fact of life at the Agency. She served overseas in the Clandestine Service, in the Middle East, and would only say that “she traveled frequently.”

She retired a second time, in 1991, but came back to work for the Agency as a contractor after the Aldrich Ames spy scandal devastated morale. She stayed until 2007.

In a third retirement she kept busy with French and Armenian language classes, and was a beloved Aunt to thirty-five nieces and nephews who survive her.

She was awarded the National Defense Medal and other various other decorations for her active service, and the CIA may have given her more. As a pioneer over there, too, she kept her secrets.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com