Not So Fast

(Still life with ladies hats from the back downstairs bedroom amid innovative storage systems of several eras, both metal and plastic. Crap. Photo Socotra.)

I agree with you- the episode yesterday was an uplifting prelude to the final send off. I felt good. the day was bright, though a cirrus clouds began to wave tendrils across the sky as the morning went on. I had been dealing mostly with the main floor, the domain of Big Mama and her airy library and the white carpet and the view of the glittering waters of the Bay. There was something else lingering, though, and that was the Raven Cave, his sanctuary and refuge.

My father, intimate and real, suspended like an electric clock with the plug pulled firmly from the outlet on the wall.

Once it had been a place of work for him, an place to get organized and think. Files of the Wire Company he owned, the contents of several offices he had occupied down through the years. Then, the plastic containers he used to “get organized” as he began to fill them with identical contents: office supplies, post-its, pens, and a notebook of things “To Do,” none with more than a single notation, most of the latter ones with nothing at all.

I spent a weekend in that office on one trip, toting containers up the stairs and hurling them into the garage. There was still more, though I could not imagine that it was much. The road home, soon, I thought.

Rick was up visiting, and said after church he would carry up the small amount that remained down in the lower apartment. The garage was virtually empty. Life was good. On the road, soon, I thought with satisfaction.

Rick made fifteen or twenty trips up from the Raven Cave on the lower level. Gawd, back to square one. His files, his correspondence. His endless series of plastic boxes containing pens and pencils. Gadgets from other decades, the like of which have not been seen on a store shelf in a generation. Some objects familiar, like the little reel-to-reel tape recorder he used in the 1960s. Others outré and curious in purpose.

(A sample of Raven Wreckage. Innovative storage systems, pouches, and office equipment are featured here. It is all the same. Photo Socotra.)

Things from the boat, things from the cabin. Underwater film cameras. Another high-end Polaroid Land Camera for which film is not longer made. Things.

It began to pile up as Rick shuttled and we feverishly sorted through paper and gadget, innovative plastic container system by system. A rock polisher. A broken telescope. A rock polisher? I sighed. All this has to at least be looked at, or else an act of desperation is called for. And the dumpster is full.

Crap.

I groaned. This was not going to be a simple run to the storage company. The dumpster was full and nothing more could go on top of the pile.

This has real implications:  a full-up trip to the Transfer Station, plus a trip to the Goodwill, and the Storage company today. Damn, damn, double damn.

Looking at the piles, I thought it was entirely possible that I could slip into a double dip depression. Pam came up from Down Below, and said: “You know the bathroom is still filled with stuff, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I really had no idea.”

(Time stopped down below in Raven’s Cave. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Smooth as Glass

(The door to the future, or at least one that is going to open soon. Photo Socotra.)

The Bay is smooth as silk this morning, dead calm and glassy after the winds at the end of the week that stirred up whitecaps. It was a rising gale then, sort of like the storm I felt emotionally walking into Raven and Big Mama’s house to survey the work that needed to be done to close the place out.

Forgive me for the severe case of naval-gazing. I can’t quite get my eyes back up on the horizon from the minutia of clearing out the house. I think I am about to get my life back, and it is a tantalizing prospect, and that is a concept I can thoroughly endorse.

I rose yesterday far too early to get Spike to the airplane, and saw the piles of remaining boxes with dread when I returned. Caleb-the-day-laborer came at ten- good kid. Thinking about the Army, lives north of the Bridge in the UP.

We- well, he- energetically attacked the library and the garage and got two huge loads to the dump and to Goodwill, and about three pm I realized I could cut him loose. There are some semi-precious things that need to go to the storage place- where the antiques went on Thursday. We can take those in Monday when the warehouse opens, and I will get another dumpster just in case, but the main floor is empty, and there is just the matter of Dad’s office to deal with.

So, I am taking some time today to get organized, Caleb is coming back with the truck tomorrow, and then I am going to declare myself done. My brother Spike is back in Arizona after doing yeoman’s work on toting carrying, since I fell down at the farm seven weeks ago and am still a gimp.

I hope to be on the road tomorrow about lunchtime and home Tuesday afternoon. This was a bitch, but it is done, the house is sold, and my time in the Little Village by the Bay in Michigan is just about over. Whew.

It was a great sunset last night, which I took in on cane and with a stiff whiskey. I have the day today to screw around and pack the car to determine what we take over to the moving and storage. God and my folks are smiling, I think.

There is more to be done, of course, and this is not over. Next up is the Probate hearing in a couple weeks, the funerals four weeks after that and the folks are done and buried and their affairs, except for a couple niggling details, wrapped up. Damn, this was a lot of work.

I will be cautious on the road, and cautious with the leg. If my brother had not been here things would have been a disaster. As it was, we had a celebration of sorts. It did not work out the way I expected, but it certainly worked out.

I put one of the last pictures of Raven and Big Mama on the counter of the kitchen so their smiling faces looked out across the work I was doing on the house. They are smiling, and that is the way I am going to remember this.

(Still life with phones, vegetables, Big Mama and Raven from 2011. Photos Socotra.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

One Dumpster Away

(Second dumpster filled up by three pm. Photo Socotra).

I had a chance to ponder many things after I got Spike to Pellston Regional airport for his (gulp) 0540 flight. They must originate the string-of-pearls routes here, places like Cheboygan and Alpeena being the next stops on the way to a great hub at Detroit or Chicago. You have to start somewhere, I imagine, since no one in a real town would get up this early to insert themselves into the air traffic system.

The village adjacent to the airport- no grand “International” in the name- was silent at quarter to five. The approach lights to the field and the navigation strobes lit the night with strange vigor, like a garage light left on after the owner has gone to bed.

Spike stuck his hand in the window of The Beast after I asked him to check and ensure his airplane was really there and his departure was for real. “I can’t thank you enough for coming,” I said. “This would have killed me.”

“I had to be here,” said my brother.

“And you get to leave,” I said. But I grinned. “There really isn’t that much left that we cannot throw away.”

(Spike finds another pile of crap. Photo Socotra).

I returned to the house thirty miles south, exchanging flickers of high beams with the oncoming traffic. There was no artificial sweetener in the kitchen to doctor the coffee, the jar that contained the yellow envelopes having disappeared in the chaos of the previous afternoon and the wreckage of the Chinese take-out that constituted dinner.

I drank my morning pot with Pond Hill Farm raw honey, which has been lingering in the fridge from a couple trips back. It is filling me with energy, and a certain unwarranted optimism that I can get this task done and get on with life.

I curled up with the email I had ignored the day before in my makeshift office on the card table in the kitchen. I read one thoughtful note about the statistical likelihood that voters make up their minds about the Presidential election six months before the actual voting.

That makes the decision point next month. The old slogan “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” has a certain resonance, don’t you think? I have to say, that all things being equal, I am better off. At least I have an idea about my future and some major things that will not be in it.

Notably, that includes this wonderful house, this spectacular view, and the crushing weight of all the things that filled this space: files, notes and knick-knacks.

Raven and Big Mama were the last of each of their generations, and they never could bear to part with anything that came their way, and Big Mama loved to organize it, annotate where appropriate, and jam into some box or cranny.

Me? I am emotional. I had drinks at the end of Day Two with the expectation that we were essentially done with the job. I was so wrong. I have come to hate the crap that once was the backdrop to my life, and to those I love.

A second dumpster is full to overflowing, and it is that steel rectangle that stands between me and freedom.

That is not to say that I could not walk away from the mess as is. I have some great friends- Pam-the-Renter is a salt-of-the-earth gal who swears she will give the place a dusting when I am gone, even though we know the place is going to be gutted in the remodeling.

All projects have similarities, if they are big enough. Wild enthusiasm is followed by abject depression. Eventually they lurch to some sort of conclusion, with the search for the guilty and awards to the non-participants.

I was feeling lost somewhere between stage one and two.

There had been enormous progress. The important furniture is gone, two sets of china packed neatly with the remaining antique furniture and a full moving van full of useful things had gone to the Goodwill. A dumpster had been filled and collected.

What is left is…crap. Another full dumpster load worth. There are mounds of plastic organizers to contain the detritus of the long and productive lives of people who could not throw anything out. I suppose it was the Depression still calling out to them, I thought, hurling packets of cancelled checks, some as much as thirty years old, neatly sequenced and bound with disintegrating rubber bands into the maw of the dumpster.

Mom kept some of my old fitness reports from the Navy. All of them have my social security number on them, prominently placed in the upper right corner. I have no idea what has been pitched, since at some point it becomes the act of numbly picking up files and scattering them into the chest-high green steel box.

We engaged a young man named Caleb to serve as a spare pair of hands and a strong back at $12 an hour. Another good local Up Northerner. I am going to ask him to shuttle between the dump and the Goodwill today, and he was ruthless in the library, though a quick inspection at day’s long end yesterday revealed another cabinet of obsolete format floppy discs and office supplies.

Caleb had no sensitivity to the objects, and I was mildly surprised to find my mood of hostility to the junk with which I was either directly or indirectly associated all my life. I am working under the assumption that what my Mom placed in her meticulously organized binders is what was ready for prime time, and suitable for preservation for another generation. Those are in storage, I think.

The family photos have migrated down to Dee’s house on Torch so she can look at them.

I am glad she too them. If I had seen those precious things yesterday afternoon, I would have hurled them into the green metal void.

This would be fairly easy to walk away from, as I say. I have the money and no longer own the house. But I am a man of some honor and have an obligation to clean up the mess as best I can, gimping around on one leg.

There is nothing here that cannot now be hurled into the gaping jaws of the green steel beast.

I am one dumpster away from liberty.

(Spike’s nest on the floor on Day Three. The beds had gone away that afternoon. Photo Socotra).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Moving Daze

(The famous Dumpster, our ultimate friend. Photo Socotra)

 

I knew we were o trouble when the Dumpster was filled up by lunchtime. That put us behind on pace and into a frantic series of phone calls to the Little Traverse Dumpster Corporation.

 

Brenda said: “Residential? I can have a pickup next Wednesday.”

 

“We won’t be here,” I replied, the hairs going up on the back of my neck. “Can you get something sooner?”

 

“Well, if you were commercial I might be able to slip you in tomorrow.”

 

“Trust me- we are industrial,” I said firmly. “There is a Hospital loading dock on the other side of our fence.

 

She acquiesced, and I kept my fingers crossed that we would have a place for all the crap. It looked like a near thing. The Baynes moving crew was late by a half hour, but burly young Mac inspired confidence as we walked through the house identifying what was to go to Goodwill, what would head for the Dumpster of the transfer station, and what would be wrapped with care to go into storage, which we will throw away in a couple years.

 

There were thrills and chills throughout the day. Mac said “Do you think Goodwill will take all this?”

 

“Gently used only, no mattresses,” said the lady at the donation center with a trace of suspicion in her voice. I can only imagine the things people have tried to ‘donate’ to them. Just like me.

 

The process of liquidating files started slowly and gained speed as whole years went flying into the green maw of the Dumpster in the drive. Income taxes 1955. Cancelled checks- great decks of neat green rectangles, years and years of cancelled checks on banks that have been gobbled up by others. They flew in the air like leaves before the gales- and it was a gale that chilled to the bone.

 

Spike and I concentrated on the garage as the Baynes destruction crew worked steadily through the living room, dining room and the bedrooms.

 

I did what I could, considering the leg was starting to shoot stabbing pain up my back. “I am sorry I am worthless,” I said in exasperation. Spike nodded and we went back to the cascade of crap moving from the house to the truck or into the great green metal maw of the Dumpster.

 

Till it was full, anyway. Mac wrapped up one truck that headed for Goodwill and did not come back, a good sign. The other truck was about to leave for storage when Mac asked which of us would be coming with him.

 

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t want to put my brother in storage.”

 

Spike looked over at me. “I am not so sure,” he said with a grin.

 

The issue was, from Mac’s perspective, was that he thought we had engaged a storage unit. My heart sank. “No, Belinda told me on the phone you guys did the storage. Much consultation on the cell phone and eventually he agreed to take custody of everything that was temporarily too valuable to throw away.

 

The shadows lengthened as I finally gave up and poured a stiff one and went out on the deck to watch the sun go down. The new owners are going to like this place a lot, I thought.

 

Wish we could keep everything. Then I looked at the full Dumpster and realized we never really own anything at all.

(Spike with Million Dollar sunset in reflection. Photo Socotra.)

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Clearing Out

(At some point, we found a box of Aunt Rhoda’s dress hats. Just the finishing touch for the well-dressed estate cleaner-outer. Photo Socotra.)

 

Well, it was a circus. Spike called to let me know that his airplane suffered a bird-strike on final into Alpena, and there was some controversy over whether the machine was subsequently airworthy.

 

“They are flying a mechanic in from St. Ignace,” he said. “Should have the matter resolved in an hour or so.

 

“Well, first, that is good news that you are on the ground safely,” I said, gazing out over the hulking hood of The Beat. “But I suppose waiting at the Pellston airport isn’t going to be a good use of my time.”

 

“No,” he said. “Maybe you can drive over and pick me up here, or there is a bus. But it has to come from Pellston.”

 

“Crap. I am just going to turn around and go back to the house and wait and see what the mechanic says.”

 

He clicked off and I turned around at the strip mall at the north end of town. The new owner- and she is the owner, as of Monday, wanted to tour the house with her architect, so there was that, and of course Big Mama’s pal Dee was supposed to come up from Torch Lake, and The Dumpster arrived, suspended from a cage-like hauling frame attached to the back of a battered F250 pickup.

 

With that cavernous container in place, there was a place to start moving things, and I set about it with a will.

 

No, you know exactly how it went. “Christ, there is a metal model car for every one that they had owned in the sixty-five year marriage, from the Model A through Raven’s PT Cruiser,” I muttered to myself. My younger son called and asked if I could look around and find a picture of Raven in his dress blues to go along with those of his other grandfather and me and him, of course.

 

That meant looking at the albums that rested ominously on the shelves in the library. Annook had taken fifty boxes of books out of the house and donated them to the Village library and the place was still full of crap.

 

That is what I was looking at in bewilderment when Dee showed up, and she asked if she could walk around the house and take it all in. I said: “Sure,” and continued to separate things into “retain” piles and “trash.”

 

There was media in a wild number of formats. VHS tapes, of course, CDs, some weird video complete with a player I could not recognize. Old floppy discs.  And the complete letters from our Grandmother to her daughter. Where to start? Where does it end in the Dumpster?

 

Of course it wasn’t all trash, the stuff that was going on an increasing stack to go to the Dumpster. Big Mama’s “Harry Potter” files, for example. Her interests ran far afield- there were binders about current films, circa two years ago, and then white binders for all the members of the family, current and now past, and Historical Society files and bundles of papers containing oral histories of the Little Village By the Bay.

 

And plain trash.  I picked up the copy of “The Thirty-Six Hour Day,” by Mace and Rabins.. It is a guide to dealing with the ravages of Alzheimer’s. I thought about Raven’s long journey- the vibrant man I saw in all those photo albums and the radiant quality of Big Mama’s beauty. Then I threw the book into the pile to go to Goodwill. We don’t need it anymore.

 

And curios and knick-knacks and photo albums of sales conferences of companies that don’t exist any more and people who no longer live.

(Dee and Patti The New Owner, right. Gracious Lady. Photo Socotra.)

 

The New Owner showed up in a sleek charcoal Grand Cherokee about the same minute that Pam-the-Renter got off for lunch at the hospital to remind us not to throw out her stuff, which was segregated from the rest of the debris in the garage.

 

Patti-the-owner was elegant and gracious. I was genuinely pleased to meet her, and she had some grand plans for the place. “I have been waiting twenty years for a view like this,” she said as we went out on the cantilevered deck. She shook her raven hair. “I just want a place where I can retreat from the world, but that has enough of a town to keep my husband interested. He would hate to be out in the woods someplace.”

 

Her Architect showed up shortly thereafter as I was tottering back and forth from the stacks of boxes in the garage, and Sue from Boyne City stopped by to say “Hi,” and then Spike appeared miraculously in the driveway.

 

“Bunch of the former passengers just rented a mini-van at the Alpeena Airport,” he said, dropping his bag on the driveway. “What needs to get done?”

 

“Everything,” I said. “But we got a dumpster, and that is a start.”

 

We disposed of Aunt Rhoda, her estate and papers as a start. I opened another box and found Grandpa, who I never met, and his adventures in putting the telephones on the Panama Canal, and wiring the capital. Jesus- what are you supposed to do with this stuff?

 

At some point it was pointed out that it was approaching cocktail hour, and we knocked off to eat some pizza and drink wine.

 

Pam-the-Renter hit it off with the new owner- as did we all. He husband used to play English football for Arsenal, my favorite UK team, and she is witty and wry and actually knows the guy who produces TMZ, the guiltiest pleasure on television.

 

The sweeping nature of the reconstruction she anticipates means she may be able to rent for another year. Good news there, and the changes are going to be breathtaking. A wall of glass along the whole rear of the house, and walls being blown out to accommodate a new master suite that will incorporate the original garage attached to the main house.

 

“I don’t think we are going to have to worry about cleaning up too much,” said Spike, when we were finally alone in the house.

 

I took a deep sip of vodka. “And we have a Dumpster,” I said. “I wonder what we can trash tomorrow. The movers come at 0830.”

 

“Sounds like fun,” he said, yawning. “I can’t believe I was in court in Arizona yesterday.”

 

“I can’t believe we are all here,” I said. “And I guess it is just a question of getting ‘er done.”

 

It was not a bad sunset. The new owner said we could all come back and see in a year’s time what she and Kiki had done with the place.

 

We told her we would be delighted. All we need to do is move some crap to the Dumpster and we are done.

 

(Spike looks out at the Bay. Photo Socotra.)

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

The Beast

 

(The Infiniti FX35 at rest in the Little Village by the Bay. Could it be the best cross-country ride ever? Photo Socotra.)

 

OK- a performance car review it is not what I intended this morning, but I have flogged a variety of cars across this eight hundred mile route, and I am impressed.

Previous rides include the Syclone hot-rod pickup truck, the Bluesmobile police interceptor, two flavors of Mercedes (CLK500 and GLK350), a Caddie SRX, a Jeep Grand

Cherokee and some weird Chrysler hybrid I would not touch again with a ten-foot pole. Plus the old Sebring and Taurus and Mercury Villager of the mini-van phase of

my life.

Call it ten vehicles for comparison. I did not expect this 800 miles to the Little Village on the Bay to have a trifecta of monsoon, blizzard and gale force winds. So,

stand by and take the challenge drive with me.

I mean, I was going to give you a road test of that slick black Infiniti FX35 anyway, but I had no idea it would be an endurance contest. I thought it would be about the things you can readily ascertain by the evidence of your senses and experience. I had no way of knowing that the voyage of discovery would hold…wait, I knew exactly what was out there. I had the graphic of the storm in front of me.

I had planned too much to not go, so I went.

That is normally how the accident investigation kicks off, and I knew that, but for exactly the reason that accidents happen because people think they need to do things that they have planned because…they were planned.

Anyway, the Hertz people were gracious and the bulletin board invited me to hobble over to space #445, where The Beast awaited. It was glistening black, so dark you could fall into it like a moonlit lake.

 

I unstrapped the leg brace so I could squirm into the driver’s seat. I surveyed the cockpit: well laid out. Weird place for the electronic key, but having seen the

approach by Chrysler, Mercedes and Cadillac, I was able to figure it out. Ignition is a button to the right of the wheel. I fiddled with mirror settings: they are

huge, well placed, and there is an interactive screen on the dashboard to control navigation, rear camera, status and all sorts of fun facts on the state of the

vehicle.

The Hertz people had installed one of their “Neverlost” systems on a stalk that partly obscured the audio system controls, which you will not see in a civilian

version of the FX35, and I discovered I could get the two navigation systems to argue with one another about the best approach to leaving the airport and getting to

Big Pink, a disconcerting stream of information apparently linked to some ancient way-point entered into the Infiniti onboard GPS by another renter.

Five grand on the odometer. New car smell. I was ready to roll.

I looked out over a massive hood with aggressive bulged above the wheel wells. The black front end jutted out assertively. The flanks were massive. The ride was firm.

 

It accelerated like a bat out of hell. I liked it. The Infiniti was a beast, I decided.

 

I swung by Big Pink to get a hug from Rhonda the concierge and collect my bags, and glanced at the partly sunny skies. That was not going to last long, but there was nothing for it but to do it, and I rolled west on Route 50 to hit the Beltway and points north and west.

 

The car was peppy. I was impressed: the V-6 engine sips premium fuel and channels the horsepower through a seven-speed automatic trannie. I found it was most comfortable loping along at 80; top speed was advertised as 137 knots, though as I fiddled with the wiper controls to deal with the increasing amount of rain on the windshield. Rear window wiper adequate, though the minimal surface area was well compensated by the massive mirrors and the rear camera, when engaged.

 

Climbing up the front-range to the Allegany Mountains, the rain transitioned to a driving monsoon. Truck were throwing rooster-tails on Sideling Hill, approaching

Breezewood, the Village of Motels, the monsoon transitioned to a full blizzard.

 

Accumulation was significant, maybe four inches on the grass alongside. The pavement was treated, and the snow turned to slush that flew in a clinging gray mess onto the wildly flailing windshield wipers.
Hole-in-the-Wall was a near white out at the tunnel entrance. Johnstown was obscured in white, and I wondered just how intense the snow was going to get. I had a button near the cup holders that read “Snow,” and I pushed it. The ride seemed to settle out, and I wondered what it did- engage all-wheel drive?

 

The Satellite radio worked great. The Fuel economy was fair- about 20MPG, according to the on-board status module- could be better, I thought, and running on the recommended premium would be a daunting prospect, since The Beast has at least a twenty gallon tank that yielded a cruising range of well over 400 miles.

 

Damn, I thought. That was going to mean just one fuel stop between Washington and the Little Town by the Bay. Much better range than the Caddie SRX or the Mercedes GLK350. If I were fleeing the capital region, the Infiniti FX35 would be the refugee vehicle of choice.

 

Heading downhill towards Pittsburgh, the white-out transitioned with lessened altitude into the monsoon again, and the feeling of claustrophobia in the narrow

Jersey Barrier concrete channels of the construction zones grew. They are slowly widening the turnpike, but to do so they have to chop at the living rock of the hills, and it is bad enough in clear weather.

The signs direct the trucks to hug the barriers in the right lane, which puts any overtaking vehicle in the “Sui-Side” blind spot just where the rain is channeled into a blind gray spot in the right rear of the semi trailer. Nerve-wracking to punch the accelerator and punch through. The Beast tracked accurately and with authority.

 

Done with Pennsylvania at East Gate, the rain diminished across the Ohio Turnpike.

 

If you hear me complaining about how boring the Ohio Turnpike is, remind me sometime that “boring” is infinitely preferable to “thrilling.”

Passing Youngstown, the clouds lifted and there were patches of blue in the West. The nice woman in the navigation system informed me there was a gale warning fifteen miles ahead, as the turnpike arcs northwest adjacent to Lake Erie. I did not have time to be bored as the wind slammed against the Beast’s massive flanks.

I realized just how hard it was blowing when I finally stopped for gas near Elyria.

 

Climbing down from the driver’s seat and positioning the cane to leverage myself upright, the gale almost knocked me down. The Beast handled the wind a lot better

than I did.

The winds diminished at the big right hand turn at Toledo, and the sun came out. Three hundred easy miles later, I was wheeling into the Little Village by the Bay.

 

Each vista reminded me that this might be the last time I pass this way, to a place that has been home for a long, long time.

 

I parked in front of the house in the big driveway. Still had fifty miles to go on the second tank of gas. Damn, I thought. That is impressive. Best ride of ten vehicles, though they all had their strengths. The Beast had it all. It is a car I just might buy.

It is that good. I dragged the bags out of the back, and dug out the phone book. I needed to find a dumpster to rent, and I had to get to work.

 

(Storms behind, the Village by the Bay is lovely. Last time I will see it from the deck. Photo Socotra.)

 

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

Travel Advisory

“In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.“
~Mark Twain

I thought I got a memo about the end of winter. Big Pink’s Porter staff swept through the unit last week. They were checking the convectors in preparation for the cut-over from warm to chill-water cooling for the summer. I was sweating on the street last week, hobbling along on my bad wheel.

I have broken the shorts out of long-term storage and been wearing them. Those are just a couple reasons why I am squirming a bit this morning. My pal Joe was the first to chime in on Saturday: “Snow in Western Pennsylvania,” he wrote, with the schadenfreude of someone who is not planning on flogging a rental Infiniti across
the high plateau of the Keystone State to meet obligations in the Little Village By the Bay.

I got up early to check Traffic land’s highway cameras on the route west. I felt good about what I saw in Pittsburgh- just wet. No accumulation. I streamed National Public Radio from the Iron City to see the local forecast, and then clicked over to the Weather Channel just to check the detailed forecast.

Crap. It hasn’t started yet. According to the gleeful graphics- bad weather makes for bigger ratings, I guess- the savage low pressure front is going to back northwestward across New York today and tonight, funneling bitter cold air down into the back of the tropical moisture.

“This strong Spring storm will bring heavy rain to eastern New England and heavy, wet snow to western parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland and northern West Virginia.”

“Five inches of snow,” I read, and up to a foot in the higher elevations. “Most valley areas should only see 1 to 5 inches, but a few isolated areas could get as much as twelve inches.”

Crap. Rain I can take. Heavy wet snow is something else. Five hours to Pittsburgh on clear roads.  Maybe I can get ahead of it- though I guess I will just have to take it low and slow and get over the mountains as best I can.

Was that Infiniti FX35 all wheel drive?  More from the road.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Call Me Ishmael

(CAPT Ahab’s good ship Pequod. Painting by J Dillon).

I have a lot of scrambling to do today to get on the road to the Little Village By the Bay. There is that book I am supposed to be editing, and now that the Annual Meeting of the Professionals is over, I am on the hook to deliver the copy for the Spring-Summer issue to the lay out people.

I have to be somewhere else tomorrow, a long way down the concrete alley that leads to the Wolverine State, and have resigned myself to a day at the office trying to get things unscrambled. As part of girding my loins for travel, I have decided to call myself “Ishmael” for this voyage.

You know the story, and I won’t belabor the parallels with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I do not expect to meet the Great White Whale on this trip, I will, however, keep my eyes peeled for the Great White Cruiser of the Ogemaw County speed trap.

Hell, I may be driving a Great Whale. In Moby Dick, Ishmael is setting out from New Bedford in hunt of the great sea mammals. I am setting out as a mammal myself onto the great concrete river. For Ishmael, it begins on a dark-and-stormy night at the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford. You will note that the Pennsylvania Turnpike runs through Bedford, PA- and it will take me to the great state surrounded by all the fresh water in the world,.

There is a cautionary tale in the first chapter of Melville’s masterwork: As was the custom of the day, Ishmael agrees to share a bed with an absent stranger. When his bunk-mate returns to the Inn, he is revealed as a heavily tattooed harpooner named Queequeg.

Both are naturally alarmed, but it works out OK, I guess, although there are plenty of pages to turn before Ahab meets his fate- and I think I only read the Classic Comics version. Nonetheless, I am going to be on alert at the Super Eight, just in case. Not that there is anything wrong with it, of course.

Islmael’s ship was the Pequod, which in this tortured extended metaphor would be the likely name for the vehicle I am going to flog across the waves of the Interstate. In the book, of course, the voyage of the Pequod pivots on a foggy Christmas day, the last holiday I saw the parents alive, Ishmael sights pots dark figures in the mist, which I find evocative of the fog that would roll in over us all over the next five days.

The Hertz people were kind enough to set aside an Infiniti FX35 Cross-over SUV for my exclusive use for the trip. I tried to get another Caddie- the SRX I rented last year was a blast to drive, but they were sold out. Besides, I have already written a review of that 1,900 miles behind the wheel. I don’t think I figured out the bells-and-whistles until I was approaching Rockville on the way home.

What attracted me to this version of an automotive Pequod was the size of the cargo payload. I have no idea if there is anything I want to bring back, but there will certainly be a ton of crap to haul to the dump, or to Goodwill, or to storage. I am steeling myself to let stuff go. We will see how well I do on that.

(Generic 2012 Infiniti FX35 at rest. I specified a big white one. Photo T. W. Benjamin.)

The FX35 seems to have some possibilities. I curled up the the Car and Driver review before I mashed the button to reserve this precise vehicle. They say: “It looks brawny… in the bulging, muscular fashion of a Dodge Viper rather than the square-shouldered idiom of a Caterpillar tractor. Moreover, its greenhouse is tidy, rakish, and sleek, and this particular FX35 didn’t even have four-wheel drive. Instead, it funneled every bit of its 280 horsepower to its rear tires.”

I think the snow is done for the year. Hope so, anyway. The last few trips have mandated All Wheel Drive. But I think Spring might have arrived in the Northland. It is supposed to be 53 up there tomorrow. Plus, it rolls pretty well:

Zero to 120 mph: 39.1 sec
Street start, 5-60 mph: 7.2 sec
Standing 1/4-mile: 15.5 sec @ 91 mph
Top speed (drag limited): 137 mph
My great thanks in advance to Mr. Hertz for letting me explore the possibilities.

(DOHC 24-valve V-6, aluminum block 213 CU engine. Aluminum heads, Nissan engine-control system with port fuel injection- and probably starboard, too. It generates 280 Brake horsepower at 6,200 RPM. We will see how it does in Ogemaw against the Great White Cruiser. Photo T. W. Benjamin.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra

Unrelated

(Mac holds the newspaper with his story in The Community Section. Photo Socotra.)

I am sitting here at the breakfast table in Big Pink, looking out over the pool and the Culpeper Gardens Assisted Living Facility. The eight-story building with the exposed concrete beams serves as a red brick metaphor to my mornings as the sun creeps down its flanks.

It drew my thoughts to Mac’s article in the local base rag, which he showed me at the luncheon yesterday. One thing led to another, as it does on a Saturday, when the mind can wander a bit. There are two or three strands of a story going through my mind, and I am not sure which one to pursue.

The delightful uncertainty of a morning without the office in it makes me feel a but weightless. Pursue one path I must, and with alacrity: I need to get my act organized and ready to take on the road to the Little Village By The Bay.

The house up there is sold, I think, a good thing, and the bad thing is that the house is still full, and must be emptied by next week.

In order to do so, I need to get a manuscript to lay out, write an article about the Spring Meeting of our little professional association- where I saw Mac- and edit the seventy photos while wobbling around on my weak pin and cane.

After the social hour, I got to sit next to my 92-year-old buddy Mac, who had an article done about the long sad sweet story of his wife Billie’s abduction by the ravages of the cruelest of diseases- Alzheimer’s.

The article is by Sharon Walker, of the Henderson-Meyer PAO shop, and starts out this way:

“This is really a love story, and it even has an attractive fairy tale quality to it: Beautiful, talented young people come together, make a Family and travel the world courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

Mac is from Iowa, and Sarah Vivian Gilliland, “a Virginia girl,” married in June 1948, after he proved his mettle in World War II. She was an airline stewardess and a registered nurse.

Nowadays, retired Rear Adm. Mac lives alone in what he calls his bachelor pad. His beloved wife, nicknamed “Billie” by her parents who expected a boy, died in 2002 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

“You don’t die of Alzheimer’s,” Showers explained. “You die with Alzheimer’s.”

I read the rest of the article with interest when I got back to the office, since Mac has been my mentor on the long and painful journey with Raven and Big Mama.

That fed back into a reverie of what needs to be done next week 800 miles away, and how I am going to get there to do it. Crap.

When we parted, Mac vowed he go back to his bachelor pad at the Madison, make some popcorn and catch up on his mail. I suggested that he might want to venture out to Willow that evening, since it would be the last time to talk until I got back, and God only knows when that is going to be.

(The Joint Staff J2 with Office of Naval Intelligence Sailors. Photo Socotra.)

The Luncheon was brisk and efficient. The Professionals were honoring Tony with the annual Red Tie award, a tribute to the bad old days of the conflict across the world ocean with the Soviets. Once a year, in association with the Canada-UK-US maritime conference (“CANUKUS”), the analysts of Naval Intelligence would gather to have lunch and say what they could about what they did professionally in public.

To advertise discretely their membership in the Spook Fraternity, the members of the Professionals wore distinctive red neckties, embroidered with the Star and Anchor of the Red Banner Soviet Fleet. There were several of the ties in evidence, most in pretty good shape considering the years they have been hanging on the tie rack in the closets of their owners.

Full-time Spookdom only last so long, and is really a young person’s game. After retirement, Tony took on fund-raising for the Foundation that RADM Sumner “Shap” Shapiro established to do good works for the community. That is mostly the award of scholarships to the kids of active duty and civilian intelligence professionals. He raised over $50 grand down through the years on the annual golf tournament he held out in the Shenandoah Valley.

I was seated next to Mac, and Tony and his wife were across the table from me. Tony looked frail, and I thought of my Dad.

In the old days, there was a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge to be done at these luncheons. Not so much, anymore, now that we are a little between peer-competitors on the waves. Not that there won’t be some coming excitement with our Chinese pals and those industrious Indians.

Chairman Jake did his usual masterful self-effacing job in herding the agenda along, and President Terry was at her radiant brassy best. Jake asked Dave to give a run-down on the Foundation’s health, Nels rose to update the joint essay contest with the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, and gave a nod to AFCEA’s intelligence director, Steve, who was seated with some of the usual suspects at a corner table. Mark addressed the awards cycles, and JTodd negotiated the tricky shoal waters of his assumption of the management of the golf tournament that Tony managed for a couple decades.

The current Intelligence Officer to The Joint Staff (J2) is an old pal, and the first woman to serve in the job. Liz-with-a-Z is on the two-star list and I am betting she will have a Combat Support Agency directorship in her future. The daughter of a full Admiral, she is also the granddaughter of a Rear Admiral. Liz-with-Z has a Blue-and-gold Navy pedigree, but she walked the length of the Appalachian Trail (almost 2,200 miles!) before coming into the Navy, getting a unique perspective on the worlds of Mind and Nature.

She delivered some remarks on what the OPINTEL game is like these days, and what the Chairman expects in the Age of the 24 Hour News Cycle. Unfortunately, the specifics are not for attribution, so you are just going to have to wish that you had been there.

So that is another strand wrapped in the first one, the curse of those you love having their minds stolen, and then back in the Bluesmobile to realize how much I despise the clog of traffic that is Tysons Corner, even at mid-day. Construction everywhere, endless cycles of the traffic lights. Unbelievable.

I made some desultory progress at the office and then at five wobbled over to Willow. Mac was already there, having pushed his high-speed walker (breaks, chrome trim, speed-load basket) over from the Madison. I slid my cane under the bar, wondering if a walker was really the ultimate answer to my current impaired locomotion.

My younger son came by for a beer, and it being Friday, Tracy had a special on the menu to continue the tradition of the Lenten Fish Fry. The special was a double Willow Burger with caramelized onions and cheese on a roll baked by Kate Jansen. I was not hungry, lunch so recently in the rear view mirror, but it was fun to watch him tuck into it.

He passed a career milestone this week. He sat for his Warfare Qualification Board, and passed with flying colors. That means he will be entitled to wear the gold pin announcing to the cognoscenti hat he is a certified, board-reviewed professional. I had one of the pins, which I got as part of the dress-up we did for the wedding in Toronto last year in dress white uniforms.

I was subsequently been informed that it is not authorized for display by those of us who retired prior to the establishment of the device (and the Corps of Information Dominance to which it connotes membership) and I thought it might be nice for a pin that I wore to be the first one he does. Mac was gracious enough to present it. It was awesome.

“That is three generations of Naval Intelligence,” I said.

“Plus a couple in between,” laughed Mac.
(Liz-with-an-S, Tinkerbelle and Serena. Photo Socotra.)

The girls behind the bar laughed, and posed to mark the occasion.

So, that being about as much in a day as my aching knee could handle, I motored home and crashed early. This morning an associate forwarded a book review from the Wall Street Journal. It purports to be the inside story on a sensitive intelligence operation conducted on the High Seas that occurred when the Admiral was in the Pacific.

None of us wants to get in trouble with the government, so I can’t comment on it- safer that way- but the lead paragraph states that someone- apparently in a position to know- passed a note to the Soviet Embassy informing them that the CIA and the Navy were trying to recover something that was extremely valuable to them. It was signed “A Well Wisher.”

Having been immersed recently in the accounts of the establishment of the National Security State, the Red Scare, the VENONA decryption and Alger Hiss’s treachery lately, I am intrigued by the fact that someone in the government as late as the mid-1970s was still rooting for the Other Side.

I am not surprised. But like I said earlier, the strands are perfectly logical in my mind, and yet utterly unrelated.

Or are they?

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Stoneman’s Cavalry

(The Band, Levon Helm second from left.)

The voices of pop music of the 1950s, sixties and seventies were stilled yesterday. The one that came as the larger shock- not the eternal teenager Dick Clark- but the one that signified our voice, the one of inchoate rage and calls for revolution.

Which is sort of queer, actually, since Lavon Helm was all about the roots and the struggle of the hardscrabble American South. He was the Arkansas voice for several incarnations of a Canadian band. It was a long road from Turkey Scratch, AK, to Woodstock, NY.

What was that first name again? His Canadian band mates had difficulty in pronouncing it, and Levon went with the flow and changed it, eh?

The gritty-voiced Arkansan drummer of The Band, succumbed to cancer at the memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. It was not that far from his adopted home in Woodstock, NY.  He was seventy-one, just a decade older than my little cohort, and his passing suggests that the clock is running faster than I had previously thought.

Helm was a junior in High School when Arkansas-born rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins heard him play the drums and hired him as a drummer for his band. Too young to drink legally, Lavon relocated with Hawkins to Ontario, Canada where the gigs paid better. “Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks” played six nights a week in Ontario. They were moderately successful- good enough to intersect with Dick Clark’s rock-and-roll money machine and appear on American Bandstand.

In 1963 the Hawks were tied of taskmaster and front man Ronnie Hawkins and started their own bar-band as “Levon and the Hawks,” among other names. They were sought after session musicians, a bit like the legendary LA session group “The Wrecking Crew,” who are actually the people who provided the driving beat of the Beach Boys classic “Pet Sounds.”

It is the session roustabouts of the music world who define the sound of the rock epochs, and the Band was one of the best.

When Bob Dylan electrified us all by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he hired Levon and fellow Hawks Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Jaime “Robbie” Robertson as his back-up band for national and international tours.

(The modest pink house that spawned a legend, and gave its name to Casa Socotra, the other Big Pink.)

They continued their collaborations for decades after, but it was the two albums the Levon and the boys recorded as The Band that stand as monuments in the rock pantheon. “Music From Big Pink” played off the mystery of the then-rumored Dylan sessions. The one that came after was a surreal trip through the American South and frontier, the eponymous second album “The Band.”

Along with “Up on Cripple Creek” and “Rag Mama Rag,” Levon invited us into the Silver Rush of Colorado, and then to the devastation of a defeated but still proud South at the end of the bloodiest conflict in American history. Robbie Robertson wrote it, but it will be forever associated with Levon Helm’s vocal artistry and accent.

That bugged me at the time, and has all down through the years since I first heard the plaintive lament to a society scourged by war and privation. Depending on whose version you are listening to, the lyrics can be heard as:

“Virgil Caine is my name
And I served on the Danville Train
Till “So Much” cavalry came- or wait, “Stonewall’s Calvary?”
And tore up the tracks again…..”

Whatever, right? Just a song, right?

But “so much” doesn’t make much sense. And Stonewall Jackson never had any Cavalry. His brigade was an infantry outfit, and their marching skills were renowned as “Jackson’s Foot Cavalry.” No horses. And Jackson was killed at the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, just down the road from Refuge Farm. And why would he be tearing up the tracks in the Confederacy, anyway?

But Robbie and Levon were right. The correct lyric is “Stoneman’s Calvary,” and therein lies a harrowing tale, if you haven’t heard of it.

(Union Major General George Stoneman with unwavering- and unforgiving gaze.)

Six-foot-four-inch Major General George Stoneman was ordered by General US Grant to take 6,000 mounted Union troops to form up just outside Mossy Creek, TN, and conduct independent raiding against military and civilian targets in northwest North Carolina and southwest Virginia.

It was 147 years ago this month, and the lyrics may be muddied but the emotion is authentic and real. Stoneman’s orders were to ‘destroy, but not to fight battles.’ The war was winding down, but Sherman’s March to the Sea had demonstrated the effectiveness of the strategy of total war: the punishment of Southern civilians to ensure complete capitulation.

Stoneman’s Cavalry set out on 24 March to set the torch to the enemy.
Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House on 09 April, 1865, the last of his troops being North Carolinians fighting mostly to go home. Stoneman’s cavalry continued to burn their way across the countryside.

Unconditional Surrender Grant correctly believed that Stoneman’s raid, in conjunction with a simultaneous raid by Northern cavalry in Alabama, would ‘leave nothing for the rebellion to stand upon.’
He was right. There was little organized Confederate resistance remaining, though that did not stop the pillaging.

The march to the Virginia border took Stoneman’s men through early April. Lee was fleeing west after the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. Stoneman’s main body occupied Christianburg, VA on 05 April, and the destruction began in earnest as the cavalry tore up the tracks to the railroad and hurled them onto bonfires to heat and twist them into useless steel pretzels. Fearing no opposition, Stoneman divided his forces in the face the civilians, and set four columns to burn their way across Virginia to the Tar Heel State.

Stoneman’s command was reunited in Danbury, NC, the day Lee threw in the towel. The war may have been over to the north, but the destruction continued. The excursion into Virginia disarmed the remaining militia of North Carolina, thinking raid was done.
It wasn’t.

Stoneman’s Calvary returned to Asheville,NC, after raiding across the state for almost two weeks after Appomattox. His men sacked the town on April 26, long after Abraham Lincoln had taken a steam packet down to the James River and visited the office of his opposite number, Jefferson Davis, and joined the Ages at Ford’s Theater on the 14th.

So, if you think about Virgil Caine, think about working on the Danville Train when Stoneman’s calvary comes to visit.

I am still working on:

“I’m with my wife in Tennessee,
When one day she calls to me:
Virgil, quick come see,
There goes the Robert E. Lee…”

It is an awkward phrase, that one. I cannot find a locomotive named for the defeated general, though there were later all manner of things named for the courtly confederate field marshal, including trains and the Duke’s of Hazrd Charger RT 440.

The one that springs to mind as contemporary is the Rebel Commerce Raider, CSS Robert E. Lee.

That ship was captured by Union blockaders in 1863, though. So I don’t know how Mr. Cane’s wife could have seen it in 1865, hundreds of miles inland.

So, I guess I will have to contact Mr. Robertson, if I want to know. Can’t ask Levon.

Too damn bad. But I will keep listening, though, at least until Stoneman’s cavalry comes again.

Copyright 21012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com