Sink-Ex

I am a little smaller this morning, not so pumped up. We deliver a proposal to the Government this morning, first thing, and as I write the boxes that contain the binders are waiting in Gaithersburg to be driven down to Ballston for further transport and delivery to Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia.

 

Aside from the confusion about the 9/11 attack that killed Ambassador Stevens it has been a wild week. The confusion mostly seems to be about the media, which is perplexed at the impact of that stupid film with the puerile assault on Islam, whose delicate sensibilities were bruised by a movie that no one in the region had actually seen.

 

Aside from a flash of outrage, we were busy putting together the proposal- this is the death rattle of the Government’s Fiscal 2012, and by the time the contracting officers issued the solicitation, there was less than a week to turn around a massive set of documents that clearly demonstrate our technical expertise and make the case that our company should be selected.

 

That was not always what occupied the day. I got a note from the Left Coast a couple days ago that ex-USS Coronado had been delivered by tow-ship to a closure area in the western Pacific. She was not just a ship on which I served, she was my last ship.

 

I will never forget the last night I was underway on her, and stepping out on the smoking deck to puff a cigar under the stars in the OpArea adjacent to the Marine base at Camp Pendleton north of San Diego.

 

That is it, I thought at the time. The last time to be part of a ship, a human cog in the intricate machine that can steam the world ocean and bring everyone home safe and sound.

 

Coronado had an interesting role in the history of the wired world. She started out as an LPD- an “Amphibious Transport Dock” in the parlance of the amphibious Gator Navy- the second unit of the Austin-class, and fitted out with additional space in the superstructure to act as a command ship, if necessary.

 

She was a Vietnam-era construction project by the Lockheed corporation, with keel laid in 1965.  After two years of delays due to union issues at the shipyard, she was finally commissioned in 1970- just in time for the big draw-down as we left SE Asia in 1973.

Accordingly, she was a “low miles” ship, and a platform that could be modified for other purposes. She found those in 1980, when her designation was changed to “AGF-11,” or “Auxiliary General- Flagship.”

 

Her first assignment in that role was to relieve the USS La Salle in the Persian Gulf, when the Shah was still around. She then bounced around the Med, playing a support role in Operation Eldorado Canyon, the strikes President Reagan ordered against Qaddafy’s regime in Libya for the disco bombing in Berlin. Funny how things come around, isn’t it?

 

I was assigned to the staff of the Commander, THIRD Fleet, twice. The first time we were a shore-based staff tasked with Theater anti-submarine missions in the Pacific. That was an intolerable for any Admiral with a whole Fleet at his disposal, and in 1986 Coronado embarked the staff in Pearl Harbor. Stints as replacement for MIDEASTFOR interspersed the following few years, including the time of Operation PRAYING MANTIS, the culmination of the Tanker War in the Gulf.

 

That put her in the middle of two of the five largest naval actions since WWII, so she had her combat creds. I met her when she was back as the THRID Fleet Flagship, this time berthed at naval Station North Island in San Diego.

 

It was a great duty assignment. I could walk to work from our house on Alameda Boulevard, and life on Coronado Island serving on the USS Coronado was pretty damn good.

 

The Good Ship AGF-11 made some history in San Diego, too, as the first combatant ship to embark women as part of the regular ship’s company. Then, under VADM Connie Lautenbacher, we were tasked to make her the most capable command ship on the planet.

 

Her original design featured a well deck aft below the flight deck that could be flooded down to permit Marine amphibious vehicles to float out and go ashore. We filled in the vast empty space with a new office building that included command spaces for the Joint Forces Air Component Commander and his staff along with the ground pounders and Fleet commander. It was way cool, and I got the only private room that I would have in my career. It was an office-cum-stateroom with a cool couch that folded down into a bed.

Life was very good.

 

In there was a Rim-of-the-Pacific exercise and a return to Hawaii and the OpAreas off Pearl with a host of units from foreign navies. It was a great tour, and when I walked off in 1997, I was proud of what we had accomplished with tin-cup financing to make the most advanced command and control capability afloat ever.

 

The Fleet was shrinking, though, and despite the tax-payer’s money we spent, the clock was running on a hull that had more than 30 years steaming on her.

 

The first indignity came in late 2003 when she was transferred to the Military Sealift Command. That would enable contractors to replace sailors in the crew, saving costs. Of course in those days contractors- mercenaries, if you will- complicated Cornoado’s role in the Rules of War, and she slipped back into the regular Navy.

 

Her last hurrah was as replacement for the Blue Maru- USS Blue Ridge, flagship of the 7th Fleet.  Coronado was the stand-in during a major overhaul for Blue Ridge, and then decommissioned for good in 2006.

 

Seems like such a waste, since we spent so much money and made so many innovations inside her hull.

 

But of course ships are nothing more than refined iron oxide inexorably attempting to return to that state, and no hull lasts forever. The last hurrah was across the international dateline yesterday.

 

As part of Exercise Valiant Shield, she was towed to a target range in the Marianas, and set upon by a series of warships and B-52 bombers from Anderson AFB in Guam, and blown to pieces.

(A B-52 returns to Anderson after smacking my stateroom on AGF-11).

 

Well, a certain amount of hull integrity remains, since she started her new mission at the bottom of 3,000 fathoms as a marine habitat and artificial reef yesterday.

 

A Sinking Exercise- SINKEX, for short- allegedly benefits the Navy by “providing crews the opportunity to gain proficiency in tactics, targeting and live firing against surface targets, which enhances combat readiness of deploying units.” For those concerned about litter on the world ocean, former Navy vessels used in SINKEXs are prepared in strict compliance with regulations prescribed and enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

Coronado’s last mission, a joint one with Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces, come just in time for the JMSDF to get ready to take on China in the disputed Senkaku islands. The PRC calls them the Diaoyu Islands, and it appears that the Japanese are not going to roll over on the PRC’s astonishing claims to the entire South China Sea.

 

So, Coronado’s last mission might have been right at the beginning of something completely different.

 

As that balloon might be going up, I have to wonder this morning who- or what- is going to be living in my stateroom now?

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

 

Double Down

(Jubilant jihadi celebrates at the US Consulate in Benghazi. Photo Reuters).

 

I am listening to an NPR fund drive, streaming live from a city where I don’t live, and the jolly money-raisers comment wryly that they cannot stand the political advertising on every other media link, and that only public radio can provide the news without the oily hands of the politicians.

 

I grimaced, since the coverage on my favorite media outlet is so intrinsically committed to the progressive vision that they either can’t see it, or it is agenda driven and quite clever.

 

I don’t mind- it is fairly easy to shred out the spin that comes from people who have already made up their minds long ago about how things should be, and naturally support the means to arrive at the predetermined destination.

 

The point of the bile that rose this morning was the coverage of the outrage sparked by a remarkably crude video castigating the Prophet as a variety of unsavory things. Over the hours spent trying to figure out the final details on an end-of-the-fiscal-year proposal to the government, something began to crystalize as the details on the bloody events of 9/11’s anniversary began to emerge.

 

There was the usual blather in the wake of awful news. Some people seemed concerned about the affront to a great religion contained in an amateur video trailer that went viral in an Arabic translation. I watched it, just to calibrate myself, and since I find the militant exercise of most organized faiths to be vaguely offensive, decided this one combined the intellectual basis of a frat party with the production values of Plan Nine From Outer Space.

 

It is also free speech and protected by the Constitution. Get over it.

 

But with all the swirl of maybe-apologies and horror over the murder of the United States Ambassador and some brave young Marines, I realized what this was. It was the commemoration of 9/11. It was deliberate, and if different in methodology, was another act of war by the assholes we have been killing with such grim efficiency in two wars.

 

You can cut directly from the disturbances in Cairo to the military attack on the consulate safe house in Benghazi. The former had the trappings of the demonstrations about the harmless cartoon with the Prophet wearing a bomb in his turban, to the pre-positioned mortars carefully targeted against the Embassy safe house.

 

It was as deliberate as the Underwear Bomber in the jet over Detroit on Christmas Day.

 

It is a direct affront to the United States, and permit me to express it, a direct affront to you and me. The Bad Guys have doubled down again: clever, adaptive, implacable, and opportunistic. They did it again- successfully. How do you like the Arab Spring so far?

 

So what are we going to do about it? Set up a blue-ribbon commission?

 

We do not even recognize that we are in a war that has no deadlines for troop withdrawal. You cannot win what you will not even acknowledge, can you?

 

(Insert picture of Ambassador Steven’s corpse here. I took it out. Made me too angry.)

 

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

Pilgrimage

(Viewing the 9/11 Memorial from the perspective of LCDR Otis “Vince” Tolbert’s grave. Photo Socotra, 9/11/12).

 

I waited until the actual minute of the impact that Flight 77 hit the building had passed. Then I gathered my crap together for the day and drove over to Ft Myer, which nestles around the west side of Arlington Cemetery like the fat on a kidney.

 

I stopped at the Commissary to get African Violets, one bunch each for Dan and Vince. Then I drove over to the back gate of the cemetery, showed my Arlington pass to the guard, and drove the silver Panzer slowly down the hill.

 

Approaching Pershing Drive, I saw a white sedan with blue lights flashing, blocking the way ahead. Another white sedan approached from the right, and turned towards me, slowed down and stopped, driver’s window to window. I was prepared for a brusque direction from the Secret Service to “halt” and wait until the important people had moved on.

 

“Looking for the exit?” said the nice man with the short hair and neatly-knotted plain tie.

 

“Nope,” I said.

 

“Going to visit?”

 

“Yes, Sir.”

 

“Which section?”

 

I put my hands out the driver’s side window and shrugged. “What day is it?”

 

The man nodded. “Section 60,” he said.

 

“I am happy to wait outside the security perimeter,” I said.

 

“He is done with that,” said the man, courteously. “If you turn right and head toward the fence, you may be able to get to the 9/11 section that way.”

 

“Thanks,” I said. The man was very nice and very professional. I thought he might have been in his early thirties- he would have been a teenager back on The Day, and this is the only way he could imagine the anniversary and the endless war. The man waved me on, and I turned right and drove slowly toward the maintenance complex on the edge of the cemetery. Then I turned left until I could see the knob of the memorial, and the somber line of graves in its shadow.

 

I got there and there was one other couple decorating a grave. The wreaths had been placed on the pentagonal granite common memorial to all those who died. Then I walked down the first row of stones, and placed flowers with Dan and then Vice. It was a lovely morning.

 

Just like the one when the world changed.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Vibrations

(Dignitaries from some other observation of this day. Tish and Jim are to the left. Photo DIA).

 

I have been feeling weird all summer. I was taking down the Christmas lights this morning- don’t ask- and it suddenly struck me. Wow, I thought, the reception on Saturday night was a thing of great pride and joy.

 

And it was also identical to Jimmie Stewart’s disorientation at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You know, the part where the impact of his life and work at the Savings and Loan is wiped out, and that Banker Lionel Barrymore ran everything in town.

 

I will get back to that, but that wasn’t the point at the time, and it didn’t really hit me until I dropped the long end of one of the strings of lights over the lip of the balcony, and I realized the guy downstairs, if he was looking out, would see dancing Christmas Lights on this anniversary of horror.

 

I don’t know about you, but I have withdrawn from my usual media bath of blather. I listened to the end of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade when the clock-radio turned on at 0445, and then Ravel’s marvelous Le Tombeau de Couperine on the classical station.

 

It was the same time I rose that morning eleven years ago at the BOQ at Fort Leslie J. McNair. I showered and got on with it, just as others were doing here in Washington.  I drove off post and out of the District to the Pentagon.

 

I took the shortcut through the spaghetti of roads that all intersect on the big Five Sided Adult Care Facility, marveling at the clarity of the pre-dawn sky, and the brilliant pin-points of stars that wheeled in the velvet blackness above.

 

Then up the GW Parkway to Langley, where I was working on the sixth floor of the Original headquarters building of the Other Government Agency.

 

Dan and Vince and their crew were done with the morning brief. Rick and Tish, the Director and Deputy Director, had been and gone- Tish only as far as the next fire-wall in the newly opened wedge when it all went down in fire and ash.

 

I made a mental note to stop by the Harris Teeter supermarket and get flowers for the graves. Life is a lot easier since I got a pass to Arlington. Back then, it was a long walk down the hill from the Old Chapel to the gravesites over looking the vast bulk of the Pentagon, and in the next several years it was a point of honor to walk the same path.

 

I can’t do that anymore. Maybe next year.

 

Anyway, the divorce was in full flower of anger and hurt and passion that week, and for weeks and months to follow, and I wish I could say that is what had me so anxious that summer. If it was, I could chalk all this up to the uncertainty of surgery and the pain of recuperation.

 

Back then I made a note in one of the green fabric-covered notebooks I used to carry to try to organize my thoughts. In that summer, I was convinced that we were slow-waltzing to some sort of catastrophe. I could show you in the volume with “Aug 2001-Jan 2002” on the spine.

 

Things were falling apart as I wrote during a meeting in the basement of The Company about Intelligence Capabilities in the new Millennium. The date scrawled at the top of the page is 15 August, 2001. The date has an ink box around it for emphasis. I apparently had a lot on my mind. The words sear still.

 

“I have made an insightful and positive comment.” I wrote in the block letters of my meeting notes. “Which will buy me the time to go back to scribbling…my private and darker view if that things will fumble along as they are, driven by resources and narrow politics, until something awful happens. This is predicated on linear extrapolation- and that does not coincide with my understanding of history. That process lurches along in tectonic change- resistance to change being so formidable that until pressure builds inexorably to a trigger point that causes the whole fault line to rip and thrusts across a broad area….I despair in our ability to predict the unpredictable. The end of Israel? The loss of New York or Washington?”

 

There is more, of course, and the scrawl of later notes, part cursive and part block, accounts for the nature of The Day, but I won’t trouble you with that. It is still too raw and fresh to see it. I have not been back to these volumes until this very morning, which is as bright and fresh-washed as that other one.

 

So, I told you about the “It’s a Wonderful Life” epiphany. I was taking down the Christmas lights- don’t ask- and it struck me that seeing the Ex and the whole extended family and friends was exactly like the movie interlude in which George Bailey never existed. The sundering of all those connections made the decade fly away, and made me realize, dimly, the magnitude of what was lost in the attack.

 

The kids were grown and with children of their own. They had changed in profound ways, and yet the last connection I had with most of the in-laws and friends was a decade ago, and the memories exactly mingled with the monstrous evil. It felt as if I had been struck by a bus, or been working in an office in the new wedge of the Pentagon on a fine late-summer sunny day. And then gone.

 

It was weird. Now I have to go to work. I imagine the President or someone will be making remarks at the precise minute that American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, so I will try to be late.

 

This is a strange morning. It is so much like that one. Like I said, I have been feeling the same sort of anxious vibrations that I felt that summer not so long ago.

 

Like something is going to happen.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

New Years

Time for Celebratin’

 

  (Early revelers occupy the Amen Corner at Willow. All Photos Socotra).

 

There was an opportunity to meet the new in-laws Friday evening, and I wanted to do something special to mark the occasion. I contracted with Kate Jansen, baker extraordinaire, to do one of her famous cakes. That is how I came to be parked at the very busy Willow Bar at half-past five to collect it and load it into the Bluesmobile for the trip over to Rockland’s BBQ where the informal gathering would be held.

 

There were no familiar faces in the crowd beyond Big Jim, and New Chris, and Tinkerbelle and Jasper. Tracy O’Grady came out to work the crowd, and assess the prospects for business. I was sipping a Happy Hour White and killing time until the moment came to have the cake brought out from the walk-in reefer behind the bar.

 

The iPad was propped in front of me with a C.J. Box thriller on the display. I have been reading the Joe Pickett stories compulsively, maybe because the mayhem in the vastness of Wyoming seems so far away from the normal mendacity of the capital.

 

Although I tried to pay attention to the story line, there appeared to be a family gathering in progress, something to which I was attuned, since I was about to depart for one of my own. The mention of the Detroit Tigers caused me to prick up my ears and close the iPad just as the body of a Park Ranger at Yellowstone was discovered after hours in one of the scalding hot springs. The aroma described by Mr. Box mingled with the smell of the flat bread and fish and chips in front of the man next to me at the bar.

“You are not going to believe the Tiger we met on the way here. It was in Pennsylvania.”

I looked over at the man at the end of the bar who was holding up a baseball with a scrawled signature on it. Two women next to him puzzled over the identity for a moment and one brightened suddenly.

 

“It says 1968,” she said. “I bet it was Denny McClain.”

 

Huh, I thought. Denny the wonder pitcher, shopworn hero of my youth. Last pitcher to win more than thirty games in a single season. Cy Young Winner and MVP. Then bum and jailbird. The perfect hero for the Motor City.

 

“Hello, Vic” said a voice over my shoulder. It was Jon-no-H, the first friendly civilian face I had seen since arriving. We talked about whether his bow tie matched the faint blue stripe embedded in the window-pane pattern of his sport jacket. We avoided talking about the new unemployment numbers, the serial outrages of the TSA and anything vaguely reeking of politics. All the news- even the good news- was bad, and better avoided.

 

I glanced at my watch and realized it was getting on time to collect the cake and head across town. “Would you help me get the cake to the car?” I asked. “I have my stupid backback with me and don’t want to drop it.”

 

“Of course,” he responded.

 

I waved at Big Jim to get the check for the wine and the cake. “What did you have written on the top?” he asked. The cake appeared in a white box on the bar in front of us and I opened it up to show him.

“Time for celebratin’, I said. “It is a quote from the invite to their reception.” I opened the box and showed him. We oohed and ahhed over the rich chocolate lettering on the pristine white frosting for a moment and I was happy everything was spelled properly, even the one that was supposed to be spelled wrong, like the missing “g” from a politician’s diction. “Oh, that guy over there has a baseball signed by Denny McClain.”

 

Jon is from Buffalo originally, and he is a big baseball fan, even though his hometown only has the Bisons AAA franchise. “Didn’t he wind up in jail?” I nodded. The man at the end of the bar was walking our way and I turned to greet him.

 

“Scuze me,” I said. “Didn’t you say you ran into Denny McClain and get a signed baseball?”

 

“The name’s Mike,” he said. “And yes, he was there at the Harrisburg Senator’s minor league game. I guess he signs balls to get by these days. He fished in his pocket and brought it out for us to inspect.

“Wow. That is awesome,” Said Jon-without. “Lookit that. World Series, All Star Game, Cy Young and MVP. That was a hell of a year for Denny.”

 

“He will always be my favorite,” I said. “He did all that before they made relief pitchers a specialty profession and expected the starters to actually finish the game if they could. Sometimes on two days rest.”

 

Mike nodded happily. “A real experience meeting a legend,” he said. “Too bad.”

 

Jon-without smiled. “There is a lot of that going around these days,” he said.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Mike. “But I got the ball. I used to have a signed picture of Mickey Lolich, too, but it was in the basement and it got flooded.”

“Imagine that,” I said. “For every door that opens….”

“A window leaks,” said Jon-without cryptically.

“Right you are, Sir,” said Mike, “And nice to meet Tigers fans.” Then he pocketed his ball, shook our hands, and moved briskly off toward the men’s room.

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

 

 

 

 

Cannonball Runs

(Brock Yates fills up the Ferrari Daytona piloted by racing legend Dan Gurney on the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophey Dash, 1975. Photo Car and Driver Magazine.)

If you think I am going to talk about the convention, you would be wrong. I am being resolute in my opposition to encouraging any of the candidates. Perhaps like ravenous bears, they will go away if we do not put our trash out too soon.

I got off on something else that echoes the present without predicting it (history does not repeat itself, though it does rhyme) when a pal wrote me about a scheme to deliver recreational vehicles to Snowbird destinations, saving the owners the inconvenience and expense of driving to their winter roosts, and cheap travel to those willing to drive.

I had to laugh. I am not doing that on a bet, but I remember a thing called the “drive-away service” that used to appear in the want-ads (remember those?).

The point was to link auto owners with low-budget travelers to take cars to distant places for the just cost of the gas. It used to make a lot of sense in the days when we were splitting our time between Ann Arbor and the distant Utah resort town of Park City. We would leap into the car with a cooler and twenty hours later would have left the Motor City behind, and arrived in the snowy uplands of the Great Intermountain West.

We drove fast, and for the most part, accurately.

My favorite story was about the old Brock Yates cross-country race that ran from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, NYC, to Redondo Beach just north of LA. The winner was the one who had the fastest elapsed time over the public highways.

It is a measure of how things have changed that such an enterprise these days seems reckless and irresponsible- like the winning time one year by pro-racer Dan Gurney in which he modestly explained that he “at no time had ever exceeded 175mph” in his Ferrari Daytona to post the winning time.

The race itself was an act of guerrilla theater named for the famed distance driver Erwin George “Cannonball” Baker, whose exploits in the pre-interstate America were legendary. In 1933, Baker had driven coast-to-coast in a Graham-Paige Model 57 Blue Streak 8, averaging better than 50 mph for the trip. His record of 53 hours 30 minutes stood unchallenged for nearly forty years.

Hence the inspiration for the “Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash” and the Cannonball Run movies with Burt Reynolds that followed.

Growing up in Hot Rod Detroit made us all, by definition, car people, boys and girls alike. Perhaps the testosterone coursing through our veins had something to do with the boys acting out a bit. My first speeding ticket was awarded by the Bloomfield Hills cops to me after piloting Dick Areen’s Charger R/T 440 at 120 in a 50 zone, and I was nothing special, except one of the first in the Class of ’69 to discover the wondrous properties of the police gun.

A larger animosity, only partly amused, existed between car people and activists like Ralph Nader and his acolyte Joan Claybrook. Joan was a particular bur under the saddle of Car and Driver Magazine’s editor Brock Yates, who would have termed Joan the very manifestation of the Nanny State, had the term existed then.

(The Honorable Joan Claybook).

Claybrook later ran amok as the Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Jimmy Carter. Her advocacy of all sorts of very practical things on the highway was catapulted to prominence during the fuel crisis, and Dick Nixon’s imposition of a national 55mph speed limit.

As we found out later, the double-nickel speed limit contained in Nixon’s National Maximum Speed Law was actually slower than the quickest average speeds of point-to-point travels of Cannonball himself without Interstates.

The enthusiast community was pitted in direct confrontation with the new speed limit, which was viewed across the chasm of the Red State/Blue State divide of the day. I recall attempting to drive 55 the day after Tricky Dick’s speed making the announcement and almost being run down by aggressive Detroit drivers before I gave up and flowed much faster with traffic.

In the interest of fairness, I hasten to remind you that Nixon was a Republican of some kind, with distinct statist tendencies, a tradition carried on by other Republican chiefs.

“Car and Driver” Magazine was a progressive enthusiast rag edited by literary bomb-thrower Brock Yates that went ballistic over the loss of fun with the new speed limit, which was piously supported by the insurance industry, and Ms Claybrook in particular. She wanted ugly bumpers and those pesky seatbelts and lower speed limits to protect us from ourselves.

The Sea-to-Shining-Sea race was conceived in 1971, and gained new life with the fuel crunch in ’73. The run was not a real competitive race with high risks, but intended both as a celebration of the Eisenhower Interstate System and the stricter enforcement of traffic control capabilities at the time.

The first running of the Trophy Dash was held in May of 1971 and the winner was a 1971 Dodge Custom Sportsman van, called the “Moon Trash II.”

The race was run four more times, in November of 1971 and ’72, then a hiatus until 1975, and then a final iteration in April of 1979, the very month I shipped out for Japan. I always wanted to participate, and the accounts of each one of the races was riveting, and none had a casualty of which I am aware. Naturally, advance publicity of a crowd of lunatics hurtling West needed to be avoided, lest Smokey be perched waiting on every highway overpass.

The most remarkable effort was by Yates himself riding with racing legend Dan Gurney. They pulled into Redondo Beach with an elapsed time 35 hours and 54 minutes to travel the 2,863 miles . That is an average speed of approximately 80 mph (130 km/h), while collecting only one ticket along the way. Dan said that snow in the Rockies cramped his style, since the overall record for official Cannonballs will stand (forever) at 32 hours and 51 minutes by Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough in a Jaguar XJS in the last Cannonball held in 1979.

And so, into the ashbin of history for a great party on wheels, and the grim grayness of the Safety State. There were other, unsanctioned runnings of the legendary Cannonball Run, but that was it for the age of the genuine Merry Roadsters.

I mention that in the context of the drive-away experience: four college students answered an ad to ferry a Caddy Coup de Ville across the country, promising to “not exceed the speed limit” and “drive only during daylight hours.”

They finished second in the race, behind Brock Yates and Dan Gurney, who drove a Ferarri Daytona, and ahead of a van that had been modified with a two-hundred gallon fuel tank to minimize gas stops.

70_deville.jpg

The caption under the delivery Caddy was: “Didn’t burn a drop of oil on the 40-hour trip.”

Don’t accuse me of living in the past. I just can’t drive 55.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Commemoration

I got a note yesterday from the people who are still in my old line of business. They have had a solemn ceremony commemorating the murder of some comrades in the 9/11 attacks.

The tenth anniversary was last year, one with all the bells-and-whistles, but this one will be down-sized. I guess it is time. The plan is go with a big deal every five years, inviting the families and such, and I am on-board with that. The next big deal will be in 2016.

I wonder where we are all going to be then. The officer who announced the change, in consultation with the leadership that was in place at the time of the attack, will be gone and probably retired. I will likely be on social security, or bitching about the lack of it.

Like Mac says, he only celebrates the birthdays that are divisible by Prime Numbers that are not three.

We need formulas. They keep us sane.

Or they can keep us nuts. I, suppose. One of my pals who does daily blogs about the madness of politics and the corruption of our Republic couldn’t bring himself to do anything except write about the bear infestation on his mountain.

I was trying to avoid thinking about politics, and then got to thinking about 9/11 and all that came after it, and the kids we have lost and the kids who have been maimed. Then I could not string a paragraph together without thinking of them, and all those who are out there trying to keep us safe.

One of the things that scumbag bin Laden used to boast about was that he was going to bankrupt us just like the Mujahedeen did to the Soviets.

I look around and think that he lucked out on that prediction, or maybe we lucked out and at least we shot him before it all fell apart. At least he will never know if he was right.

We will.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

 

Mark 2

(Mark Two- or Mk 2- defensive hand grenade. You may wonder how this is a defensive thing, but I believe everything I read on Wikipedia. Photo Wikipedia.)

Back to work it was yesterday, and back into a new old world that puts the things of summer behind.

Some of those are good things to put away- wheelchair and crutches among the unlamented artifacts- and the trudge to the HQ building of my government customer was the longest hike since the accident in March. It was exciting to be able to do it, and if along the way someone rolled a pineapple out of the pavement, I do not think I would have been able to jump on it.

A couple generations of American Dog-faces used to call hand grenades “Pineapples,” due to the serrated exterior of the standard Mk 2 defensive hand grenade. The grooves facilitate the fragmentation of the device for maximum lethality, and assist the hurler in gripping the mini-bomb. Developed to replace the Mk 1 used in the Great War, the devices were most heavily used during World War Two, though the grenade was still in issue through the conflict in Indochina. It was phased out gradually, with the Navy and Marines being the last users, as usual.

If there is one thing that should alarm you more than the idea of Sailors with Guns, it should be a Sailor with a rifle and a couple Mk 2s on their bandoleers.

Anyway, I was untroubled at the time by the notion that a grenade was going off in my little Sailor’s kitchen.

Trudging up to the building, I was happy that the rains of morning had passed and if the leg ached, at least I was dry and comfy when I got to the meeting. I did not know that a pineapple had gone off at Big Pink, and my kitchen was the target.

I did not know it at the time, though I should have had an inkling of the slow-motion explosion.

My white budget microwave sits on the corner of the long faux marble counter with which an owner two generations removed had updated the kitchen. I noticed a dark stain on the edge of the appliance, and a small pol of dark viscous substance had spread on the counter surface.

I dutifully mopped it up, wondering what had caused me to spill something in such a relatively remote area of the working surface.

The next day a similar stain appeared. This time a minor clue struck me. Perhaps something was leaking from above?

I opened the cabinet and surveyed the deep-storage larder. On the first shelf was the raw honey from Pond Hill Farms in the Little Village by the bay. The stuff is eternal. I took the jars down and washed them, and then washed some of the dark muck off the shelf.

There were some interesting other things toward the back, part of the post-attack stockpile that I had not seen in a few years, all unopened, but the latest “best by” date on the bottom was in 2008, the year of hope and change: a can of Clapper Girl baking soda can I purchased because I had only seen the brand on ancient roadside signage as a kid, in the back of Raven’s Rambler station wagon headed west across Iowa. Some sliced water chestnuts. A tall bottle of Vietnamese Nuoc Mam fish sauce, apparently in preparation for some time when I was really going to get into wokking the hell out of some regional delicacies.

A good idea from a couple years ago, I imagine, though I could not recall buying it intentionally, and may have been placed there by the Stir-fry Fairy.

Life has a way of going on. It might have been on the eve of the Republican Convention when the grenade went off, and the consequences were still dripping by the start of the Democratic Convention in Charlotte. I was in search of mushrooms to add to a sauce that seemed appropriate to the mood and weather, and that is when I discovered the debris from the can of Safeway-brand Fancy Sliced Pineapples.

OK, OK, I know the pesky things are high acid, and I know that over time chemical reactions can occur in the inky blackness of a hermetically-sealed can. But this explosion was tempered just enough to press the sugary acid juice up against the lids of the pineapple, bowing the top and bottom and sides to look remarkably like a hand grenade.

I have all the cans out of the cabinet now, not exactly the way I intended to start the week. But at least the clean-up will keep my mind off other things. Do you think that food should be rotated? I sighed and started to make another list to replenish the strategic stockpile of Vietnamese and other specialty food items.

It is precisely as I said. There is something about a Sailor and hand grenades. I had no idea that they come in all sizes and flavors.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra. Best By 2008.
www.vicsocotra.com

Regular Season

(Treading Water at the end of the Regular Season. Self portrait by Susan Jacobs. http://www.susanjacobsart.com).

I saw the Verizon trucks here on Saturday morning before leaving for the farm. The last time they were here running fiber in Big Pink, Comcast went stupid for a week.

Is this a moment in which the nefarious Phone Company is playing at sabotage to convince us that FiOS (fiber optic system) is superior to the lackadaisical approach to customer service by the cable monopoly? If the outages are a strategic attack on coverage of the two Conventions, I am in favor of it.

I can’t bear to deal with what passes for a customer service center in Metro Manila. Not that I do not enjoy talking to “Skip” from Luzon. But there is no information there, and no satisfaction. I saw that things were still out when I got back from the pool. We had decorated Konrad the Polish Lifeguard like a Christmas tree in preparation for his ride back to the group house on his bicycle.

I contributed a bottle of Absolute Citron. Cindy from the sixth floor had an icy cold beer from her refrigerator upstairs, there was a container with a huge slice of Maury’s birthday cake from the ceremony at poolside earlier in the day, and two or three plastic sacks of mementoes from the appreciative pool users. We were concerned that he would fall over with the number of bags, particularly after a couple shots of Absolute, but he was serenely confident.

His teeth gleamed in the early dusk, his rich tan helping him to fade into the background like the Cheshire Cat.

Maury is sweet, if a bit mysterious. She is 91 or so this season, and still swims twice a day. She was part of the original cadre of employees at the CIA, and still won’t talk about anything except that she used to travel a lot. She must have been a looker, back in 1948.

I take an interest in her health, since she is still driving and has the parking space next to mine where the Panzerwagen now rests between missions.

I got the last real workout complete in the afternoon under gray skies and went back up to the unit to cook dinner and read until seven, and then gathered my equipment to support the last push to The End. Radio, cigarettes, lighter, towel, iPad and travel cup filled with clear adult beverage.

There is a subtle protocol to the end of the Regular Season. I set up camp under my usual umbrella. Montana had her cushions and Discman at her place near the smoking area she hates so vehemently.

I kept my eye on the State Department lady who was swimming with her little girl. I jumped back in with about ten minutes to go. They continued to swim lengths, nearly getting out one time before coming back in. They did not want to leave, and I was too delicate to tell them that the Regular Season was over. Everyone mourns the passing of the summer in their own way.

Montana gathered up her stuff and walked out of the pool. There had been a time when we agreed to split the difference- she could be the last on the pool deck if I got the honor of last out of the water. It was a sort of Demeter and Neptune thing, a compromise. Not tonight. She glared at me as she walked out, so there could be a competition coming Sunday night, two weeks hence, which in football terms, would be the Super Bowl to this night’s ending of the Regular Season.

Eventually, with the minute hand of the clock on the pink brick wall stood straight up, and they walked up the steps. I followed behind, and was the last one out. We were all toweling off when I saw the little girl run back to the edge of the pool and stuck her legs back in to bathe them one last time.

I ensured that I dragged my flip-flop through the water when she and her Mom departed the gate. Done. Deal sealed. I squashed over to where Konrad stood before the pile of stuff he intended to carry off on his bicycle. Doc came out to say good-bye; the snowbirds are preparing to flea for warmer climes and this really is it for her and John and the grandkids Olivia and Tenley.

That little dark-haired young women who came around to hand on Konrad’s every word was there as well, and Cindy and I left the two alone after toasting the end of the Regular Season of swimming. The two, bonus weekends of swimming loom- the pool is still completely functional even if it remains padlocked during the week. I will have to transition to some other form of workout at the end of the day and avoid slipping into a repetitive regimen of 12-oz. curls at the Willow Bar.

Going up in the elevator, we compared notes on what was to come. The last two weekends of the pool normally feature one of them with heavy dank rain, even if the official start of the Fall is not until the 22nd of the Month, and the clock adjustment not until the 4th of November.

The pool will open again on Saturday, 25 May, 2013 at ten AM. There may be some other stuff that happens between now and then. I think there is an election or something, maybe another war on top of whatever is happening in Syria without us, and what may happen with Iran. There could be a regular mess before the next Big Pink regular pool season rolls around again.

Maybe not, if we keep our wits about us. We can do this, fellow citizens. Not willingly, of course, but we can do it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com