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I went for a walk with a friend the other day, and on a whim, wandered down toward Pongo’s house.
And, to explain the significance of that – I have to go back a few years for most of you…
If any of you remember high school, you know how it could be a tangled up knot of stress, from the academics, which were hard enough, to the social aspect, where everyone was trying to figure out where they fit in the overall pecking order, to the after school stuff, where you often found out where you stood by being on the receiving end of some of that pecking.
I remember when I was in high school, the first thing I wanted to do when I got home was to pet my dog, and play with him, and scritch him behind his ears, and I could just feel that knotted ball of stress from school slowly unwind. It was amazing how beneficial having a dog could be right after school like that, and although we didn’t have a dog when our son was growing up years later, he found one anyway, right when and where he needed one.
And the dog he found had started out life as the runt of the litter in a cardboard box of puppies, being given away in front of a Safeway store in Bremerton, Washington. Pongo was suspected of being a mix of something Australian, a bit of shepherd, a bit of Husky, and the rest was of indeterminate origins. However, to really narrow it down, anything short of DNA testing implied something much simpler. In spite of being the runt, in his youth, Pongo was half husky, half stegosaurus. He was, as all good dogs are, the best friend of his boy, a young lad who had grown up, just like Pongo did, and unlike Pongo, eventually moved away from home.
Pongo ended up living with the boy’s dad, Jack, and the two of them grew old together over the years. It was in Jack’s front yard that you could find Pongo every day, holding down his patch of sod. And it was there that the most reliable form of therapy for any human was lovingly waiting, every day, when our son walked by coming home from school. And every day, Pongo did something no human could possibly do, which by now, thanks to Bill Watterson, had a name:
Pongo offered up Fuzz Therapy.
Once Pongo was let off his leash, he laid down in full expectation of some good-ole behind the ears scritching
And he did it with love.
He didn’t chase sticks anymore, nor did he chase Frisbees ® but he could definitely give some Fuzz Therapy.
A number of years after he graduated from High School, our son and I went back to the street where Pongo lived, and sure enough, he was still there, still holding down that one patch of sod he’d been holding down for so many years, and when he saw our son, Pongo’s tired eyes lit up at the sight of a long lost friend, and he struggled to his feet, a little bit at a time, and slowly ambled over to where he knew he’d get some petting and loving. And from what I saw in the next few minutes, it was obvious that Fuzz Therapy was a two way street.
Pongo both getting – and giving – Fuzz Therapy
Jack said that Pongo’d been getting on in years, which was obvious, as well as being sick, which was not, so we were glad that we stopped by when we did. And our son, going through the stresses of being a young adult, trying to balance the risks and benefits of running his own business, figuring out backup plans for both the job market and the financial risks and benefits of college, was able to get some Fuzz Therapy one more time.
Jack taking Pongo for a short walk
Some months have gone by, and we’ve gone past Jack’s place several times since the visit in these pictures, but it has become clear that the last time we saw Pongo was the last time we would ever see Pongo…
So Pongo, my dear friend, the one who brought our son such happiness, such love, and such peace, wherever you are, I wish you an eternity blessed with a whole, healthy body, the ability to run and chase to your heart’s content, and may you get as much from the Fuzz Therapy as you gave.
===
(Pongo - as seen by the Google Street View camera in September of 2010)
At first Heidi didn’t know what she was part of that evening.
She refilled our glasses, she kept the food and drink coming, and then she did what all good waitresses do.
She left us alone.
We were sitting in a nondescript restaurant, the three of us, sharing stories, memories, and laughing ourselves silly.
The last time the three of us had been together was about 32 years earlier, and I got to pondering about the journeys we’d all not only taken, but survived to get to this table in this restaurant. What had brought us together was a funeral, the death of J.C. Masura…
J.C. as we knew him, looking out the back of a C-130 high over somewhere. Photo copyright by and used with permission of the Masura Family.
…who’d been our commander many years earlier when we were all in the same Civil Air Patrol Squadron on what was then McChord Air Force Base. J.C. had been a loadmaster on C-130’s and C-141’s, back in the day, and up until recently had run an aviation maintenance facility at an airfield near his home.
Of the three of us there in that restaurant after the funeral and reception, there was Aaron.
He told a story of being up on Mount Rainier during his Civil Air Patrol days, trying to put his tent together and it being a tangle of poles and cloth. He told of J.C. coming over, and being relieved that he’d have help to solve this problem. J.C. did help. He said, “Son, if you don’t get this tent up, you’re gonna die. So you’d better figure it out.”
And Aaron did.
The most vivid memory I have of Aaron was when we were trying to ram him through the bushes (<–story) on one of our searches. This evening, however, he was sitting across the table from me, in a uniform that spoke of honor, valor and courage. A uniform that spoke of someone who no longer needed to be pushed through bushes, but led people through walls.
As we sat there, reminiscing, and as Heidi kept our water glasses and plates full, Aaron told stories that had us laughing, and shaking our heads in amazement.
He told of coming back from one of many missions to a country in the Middle East, ‘the sandbox’, exhausted to the core, and climbing onto a ubiquitous, anonymous Air Force cargo plane that was to take him home, only to find himself being welcomed onto the plane by a loadmaster with the familiar name of Masura stitched to his uniform. It seems J.C’s oldest son (we knew him as Jimmy) had followed in his father’s footsteps, and was now a loadmaster himself, with enough stripes on his arm to put the fear of God into even the highest ranking officer.
Aaron, the highly decorated soldier, slept most of the flight home, watched over not by a stranger, but by a friend.
Heidi came by about then to refill our glasses, and it was obvious to her that she was seeing, and was part of, something very special. It was obvious we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Typical of such reunions, she said, was folks from college getting back together. She was amazed to hear that we hadn’t seen each other since high school, and even more amazed that we’d gotten together at all.
Then there was Bill, who I’d been able to keep in touch with a little more. I have many memories of Bill, some of which have actually been written down. One of those involved our Civil Air Patrol Squadron, a regional Drill competition (<–story) in Oregon, and the memories of the looks on people’s faces when they saw us beating them at their own game.
Bill was dressed in a suit jacket and tie for the funeral, had become a world traveler, working as a biologist and traveling to every continent on the planet, and some places that don’t come remotely close to being continents. Bill told a story about going back to Antarctica, where before they could study the penguins, and the wildlife, one of the first orders of business was getting things habitable, and during that time it was discovered that the ‘facilities’ had been buried in 7 feet of snow since they were last there. By the time they got everything dug out and opened up for use, they discovered several inches of frost on the toilet seat.
No. Really.
It was chilly. (photo copyright and courtesy of William Meyer)
We laughed about the “when I was your age” stories that would grow into: “When I was your age, we didn’t have these fancy things called toilets, we had to dig through 7 feet of snow just to get to a seat with a hole in it. And it had FROST on it. And we had to melt that off ourselves…”
“With our Butts.”
Yeah, I can see that…
We’d get post cards from Bill every now and then, telling of his adventures in warmer climates, too. He told one story – and it wasn’t even a story, but just a vignette, of writing one of his post cards, in this case to his sister, sitting under a tree somewhere in Africa, and writing it by candle light, because it was all he had. When a scorpion crawled across the postcard as he was writing it, looking for bugs that might have been attracted by the candle, he decided it was time to call it a night.
Heidi came back and checked on us, and the stories continued.
I’d had some of my own adventures – some of which I’ve written about, some not, and we marveled, literally, not just about the various journeys we’d gone on to get to this table, in this restaurant, but the fact that we’d survived them all. Even though we were there for hours, each one of us had stories that there wasn’t time to share that evening, and each one of us had stories of adventure and danger, as well as growth and promise that we realized would have to wait for another day.
We pondered that, and found ourselves all taking a collective breath. As we did, we realized the restaurant had grown quiet. There was no conversation, no bustling of waiters. In fact, the only sounds we heard were those of clinking dishes as the staff cleaned up the restaurant, which had closed around us.
We were the last customers in the place, and the doors were locked.
Heidi, bless her, came by one last time, and let us out…
…and stood in the parking lot for another half hour, talking and shivering in the dark, but vowing that we would get together again without someone having to die in order for it to happen.
There were friends who were not able to make it this time, and friends who would not make it, ever.
And it got me thinking…
Why do we wait so long?
One person asked me, “Why is it we wait till we have nothing but weddings and funerals to get together?”
Why do we often just get stuck in our little ruts and miss out on some of the cool stuff of life, like sharing stories and laughing, and – why does it take something *more* special than just getting together to get us to get together? (yeah, I read that a couple of times myself too before I let it go, but it works…)
I mean – the three of us hadn’t been together in over 3 decades.
Me surrounded by two world travelers, Bill on the left, and Aaron on the right.
Not a week later I had occasion to go to a friend’s birthday party. I was fighting off a bug and wasn’t feeling too well yet, but for heaven’s sake, it had been years since I’d seen him, so I went. He’d hit the big 5 decade mark, and wondered the same thing… why do we get stuck in our little ruts?
I know the answer to this – and there’s a story in it, which I’ll tell later, but in a nutshell, it’s because it takes more energy to get out of a rut than it does to fall into one.
Sometimes that energy comes because you see patterns and realize if you don’t change something, the pattern is pretty predictable. Sometimes the energy comes in the adrenaline fueled by the sudden, tragic realization that nothing lasts forever, and everything, everything comes to an end, whether we want to believe it or not.
So – and I’m realizing I’ve been ending a lot of stories with this theme: Make sure you let the ones you love know that while you can.
Hug your husband/wife.
Hug your kids.
Hug your parents. Even if it’s a verbal hug, with a phone call, card, or email.
Just do it.
A friend wrote recently that he’d found out another friend had passed away, and somehow 10 years had slipped by since they’d talked. You never know when your last words with someone will indeed be your last words with someone.
Sometimes a telephone call will reopen doors to old friendships. Sometimes you’ll find those doors have closed and it’s time to move on. That might hurt, but regardless the door’s position, at least you’ll know, and you’ll be able to open or close it yourself. And you’ll actually have a chance to know what those last words with someone will be. Make sure they’re good ones.
In the end, what changed is that I did just that.
I picked up the phone and checked up on some old friends and kept in touch with them more. I found some doors opened wide again, and found some doors closed – I write all this from experience, both joyful and painful.
And I tried, as best I could, when I saw that one of those doors had closed, to make my last words good ones.
So take care of yourselves. This is the one time we have through this life.
Take care of each other, too. You never know when you’ll need each other.
Oh, and if you happen to meet a waitress named Heidi, working at the Outback Steakhouse in Puyallup, Washington, who keeps your glasses full and allows you to enjoy your reunion time with your friends, give her a good tip.
She deserves it.
===
Footnotes:
It’s been a year since the events in this story unfolded, and it took this long to think them through, get some perspective, apply some of the lessons I learned, and be ready to share them with you. That might make a little more sense now that you’ve read it.
Aaron is still in the Army – he invited us to help celebrate his promotion recently, and we shared more stories, more laughs. We kept the promise to get together more often, and made more promises to do it again.
Bill and I got together the day after my birthday last year along with another friend, Mark, and have kept in touch more. He’s doing a little less exploring, but still doesn’t have a “desk” job. He couldn’t make it to the promotion party because he was strapped into a small airplane, flying around the hinterlands of the country in an airplane, counting Elk.
Jimmy’s still in the Air Force, I saw him at Aaron’s celebration, and they got along like the old friends they are, not with the stuffy formality you might expect of an officer and an enlisted man. It was fun to see that.
J.C.’s wife – well – widow – hard to write that, but it’s true - is doing all the things you do when you’ve lost a loved one. That first year, I can tell you from experience, is a hard one. I’ve kept in touch with them as I could over the last 12 months, not as much as I’d like, but far more than the previous 30 years or so.
And as time, and the years, go on, I’m realizing more and more that the things that are valuable to me are less and less the things that gather dust, or rust, or whatever. They’re the relationships I treasure with friends old and new.
Now go out there, and find some treasure. (and then come back and share what you found, you might help other people get out of their ruts with your stories.)
Take care,
Tom
I’m always amazed at how intertwined things can be so as to become a braid of events that become larger than the sum of their parts. One of them came together just recently that left me pondering many, many things, but I have to leave some details to my special guest author. You’ll understand why in a moment. But first, the strands themselves:
- A couple of weekends ago, we said goodbye to our beloved grandma for the last time. It caused me to look back a bit, at the 94 years of her life, and the lives of those around her.
- This last weekend, I went through a stack of 4 x 5 transparencies, some 50 years old, some older. Some had color as bright as the day they were taken, some were black and white. And while I was searching, a picture came up that hadn’t seen the light of day more than a couple of times in the last few decades. And it caused me to look back, both figuratively and literally, a bit more.
- Then last Sunday there was an article in the paper about the 50th anniversary of the 1962 World’s Fair, in Seattle, Washington, but most importantly, there was a story about Belgian Waffles.
- And that reminded me of a story my mom told, and wrote, about those very Belgian Waffles, which were an absolute hit at the fair, and which made a lasting impression on her.
And over time, hearing those stories, and seeing the pictures, made me realize that history, and we can call it that, wasn’t dull and dreary, faded black and white images. It made me realize that life way back then was just as full and vibrant as it is today, with real people, living life as best they could, sharing responsibilities and joys just like we would…
…and then I saw a connection between all of those disparate thoughts, those strands of the bigger braid being woven together up there that I hadn’t seen before.
See, in 1962, the grandma we said goodbye to a few weekends ago was younger than I am now. She babysat my sister and me so a young couple could have some time off and spend a whole day away from the responsibilities of raising two young children. That young couple was my mom and my dad, and while my grandma watched us, mom and dad headed north, to the Big City of Seattle, to see the World’s Fair – and – well, actually, let me introduce my guest writer for today, telling the story of the beginning of that braid, the very story of the Belgian Waffles mentioned in that newspaper article, not as a historical event looking back 50 years, but through the eyes of a young woman, only in America for a few years, still learning about the country, the climate, and the culture.
Oh… And the waffles.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my mom.
A memory of the 1962 World Fair
By I. Roush
It had been only two years since I had come to the States when the Space Needle was built in Seattle for the 1962 World Fair.
The pictures I saw in the papers reminded me so much of the equally famous Fernseh Turm (TV tower) in Stuttgart, in the area of my home town in Germany. The two looked like twins, and that alone made me want to go to see it at the Fair.
The big stretch of cement, I-5, did not exist then, so we had about 2 hours of anticipation and conversation as we drove up what was then known as ‘Old 99’.
I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what to expect at the Fair.
Was I ever surprised!
My dear mother-in-law volunteered to take care of our two little ones, our 3 month old baby and a toddler, which gave my husband and me a chance to make a full day of it, a very welcome treat from full-time parenting.
Because it was billed as a “World Fair”, I decided to wear my Dirndl, a traditional dress from my part of the World, Southern Germany, which included Bavaria and the Black Forest.
At the Fair we walked from exhibit to exhibit and marveled over new inventions from all over the world. It was not only inventions but also people from all over the world. This could be clearly seen in their faces and many times also in their clothes.
It was fascinating, and a tremendous amount to take in. New gadgets for the household were demonstrated in one building, in another was an enormous rotating oven that was almost hypnotic to watch as it churned out hundreds of the well-known scones at a time. But even so it seemed they could not be produced fast enough to satisfy hungry Fair-visitors.
In another building was the art gallery. I remember one painting of a seascape which was so realistic that I felt the need to stay back for fear I might otherwise get wet. (I decided right there and then, that’s the way I wanted to learn how to paint water.)
Then we saw something special.
It was the Belgian Waffles. I never had heard of those.
By this time my tired feet reminded me that it was time to take a break and my stomach was in total agreement with them.
There was quite a large crowd standing in line already in front of the raised platform from which those waffles were handed down. They looked so inviting with that generous helping of luscious ripe strawberries and an even larger portion of whipping cream on top.
My husband and I looked at each other, and then realized this wasn’t such a hard decision to make, so we joined the waiting throng to be served. We hadn’t been there very long when the lady, who was handing down those yummy looking waffles, stopped and looked right at me. I’d never seen her before, and couldn’t imagine she had anything to say to me, so I looked left and then right, but there was nobody else who seemed to feel singled out by her. But then she pointed her finger right at me and with a loud voice announced:
”You probably have to go back to your booth, so I better serve you first”.
My Dirndl had given me away.
I realized that she had seen the Dirndl and thought I was one of the people who was actually part of the fair, but of course I wasn’t. There was no booth or exhibit I had to hurry back to.
Then again, I couldn’t argue with a person who was in the process of doing her ‘good deed’ for the day.
As I stood there trying to figure out what to do, the crowd helped make the decision, parted, and graciously made a path for me to receive the waffle the lady was offering me.
My dear husband didn’t wear any ‘Lederhosen’, so he could not pass as my Bavarian escort but she was gracious enough and served him also.
Happily carrying our plates, we looked for the nearest bench where we could sit down, I could rest my tired feet and enjoy those wonderful Belgian Waffles to the fullest.
That memory of the 1962 World Fair still brings a happy smile to my face and a warm feeling to my heart.
Thank you Belgian waffle Lady!
===
So – the strands of the braid come together with a thank you to the Belgian Waffle lady, a belated thank you to my grandma for babysitting my sister and me those many years ago, making this trip, and this story, possible – and a very special thanks to my mom, who wrote the story you just read. (You can see her below wearing the Dirndl in a photo taken around that time, also in a photo taken a number of years later, when she discovered that making dolls wearing Dirndls was fun, too, and one of her and dad, taken a few years before the story happened)
We were in Eastern Washington a few weeks ago, and brought home a couple of boxes of the world famous Washington State Apples. It got me thinking about all the wonderful things you can do with apples. You know, apple sauce, apple pie, my favorite apple crisp, or just simply baked apples.
You don’t need anything special to bake apples, You can bake them in a dutch oven over a fire, or in a regular oven, or like my sister did a while back, in a microwave. She cored them, put raisins and brown sugar in the hole, then nuked them in the microwave for a few minutes. The smell was absolutely divine, the kind of smell you want to come home to – and the smell would make even the rattiest shack feel like home, no matter where it was. I found myself pondering, and realized my mind had drifted off to a story my dad told about another box of apples and a baked apple recipe that had some rather special requirements.
You see – well, let me take you back to the late 1950′s or so…
Dad was in the Air Force, and worked in Crypto, that is, codes for the first few years there. The Air Force had trained him, and then sent him to where codes would be used, a lot. Now given that this was during the Cold War, the hot place to be code-wise was actually a very cold place to be geographically, and that was as near as possible to the transmitters where the codes were being transmitted from. That place was from what was then the Soviet Union.
The closest thing the US had to those transmitters were some of what were the most inhospitable hunks of real estate on the planet, that being a part of Alaska known as the Aleutian Island chain. The hunk of real estate dad was stationed on was an island almost at the west end of the Aleutians.
The messages that dad intercepted were often encoded and then sent by machine. Dad would sit there, with a headset plugged into a receiver, and transcribe these messages that were sent out in Morse Code on an old manual typewriter. Understand, he might be able to decode what the coded messages said, but not what they meant, and it was often someone else’s job to decode that level of it, so dad would sit there with his eyes closed, and type out into letters the short and long beeps he heard in his headsets. It got to the point where he’d learned the code so deeply that that part of his brain was essentially on autopilot (this would come into play over 40 years later – in a story yet to be written). His fingers were typing out the letters, while his brain was thinking about something else, anything else, for that matter, anywhere else, as the Aleutian Islands were about as far as you could get from the “Lower 48” of the United States and still be in the country. For those of you who don’t know anything about them, a short history lesson:
The Aleutian Islands came as a package deal with Alaska when the US Secretary of State William H. Seward bought it from the Russian Government in 1867 for a little more than $7.2 million, or about 2 cents an acre. There were some who thought that was a touch expensive for the land once they saw it. In fact, there were some who thought the land was so remote that it would be too expensive even if it were a straight-out gift.
However, Alaska proved its value in the gold rush of 1896, and the Aleutians were also considered valuable strategically – even as far from anything as they were. I mean seriously, the Aleutian chain goes out west so far that you can see tomorrow from the end. In all reality, today should be tomorrow in the middle of them, but the International Date Line zigzags around them so they can all at least be on the same calendar day as the rest of the United States. Not only that, some of the islands of Alaska are so far west, and thus so close to Russia that you can see it from there.
No, really.
They were fought over by the US and the Japanese during WWII, and there have been persistent rumors that some of the islands had a few visitors from Russia during the Cold War.
It’s hard to grasp how far away Shemya is from – oh – anywhere, but one fellow stationed there put it into perspective. See, using the common denominator of a McDonalds as a sign of how close or far you are from what we consider “civilization”, in the lower 48 states (that is, the continental United States) it is physically impossible to be farther than 115 miles from a McDonalds restaurant. But there’s a sign on the east end of Shemya that makes it very clear that a Big Mac is not in your immediate future. At that point, you’re 1500 miles from the nearest McDonalds.
If that doesn’t put it into perspective, let’s try this: If you were in Seattle, would you drive to Des Moines, Iowa, for a Big Mac? That’s the distance…
That’s how far out there Shemya is.
On the East end of Shemya is a reminder of how far from Civilization you really are.
(Photo courtesy of and © Lucas Payne Photography, used with permission)
So because of this remoteness, and because supplies had to be shipped thousands of miles across the North Pacific, they had to be ordered months in advance of their planned use, and given the quantities needed and the difficulties in delivering them (due to both distance and the often inhospitable weather), they were brought in infrequently by barges in loads that included up to a six month supply of everything from food and fuel to paint and paperclips.
One barge bringing in fuel was grounded in bad weather and was simply left there. The fuel was pumped out, and over the years, what remained of the barge was cut up; the usable pieces were cut away to be used for repairs that required hunks of steel. The old adage of “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without” was very much a part of life on the Aleutians at that time, and soldiers, sailors, and airmen learned to make do with what they had, even if it showed up as steel in the form of a grounded barge.
What they had back then were either the bare basics, and sometimes even those were hard to come by, or an astonishing amount of stuff worn out from use or weather left over from World War II that was cheaper to leave there than it was to take back to the lower 48.
Early on, heat was a challenge (namely because there wasn’t any). And solving the heat problem created new, different problems. The preservation of food, which had been easy in the lower temperatures, became difficult when the heat (in the form of oil burning stoves) was on. The food couldn’t just be left outside. While that would have kept it cool, the wildlife would have considered it a buffet, and given the barge schedule, feeding the animals wasn’t something anyone could afford. Another solution was needed, so, with nothing but time on their hands when they weren’t working, the guys who wanted cold sodas or beers went back to the way some of their parents had solved problems like this without electricity–they nailed the crates some of their supplies had come in to the sides of buildings with the open ends facing into the windows, built supports under them so they’d stay, and went inside. They opened the windows inside the heated building, and–voila!–their own little crate refrigerators. (Modern versions of these persisted even into the ‘70’s)
The heat that was welcomed by humans created another problem. It was also welcomed by some of the local wildlife:
Rats.
They got into everything, chewing through walls and getting into supplies. Some, searching for warmth, even got in bed with some of the soldiers stationed there.
They had to be dealt with.
And when you get a bunch of bored young men out in the middle of nowhere together with a problem to solve, they can often get pretty creative in solving those problems. Remember how infrequently supplies were delivered? That went for any kind of entertainment at the time as well, which explains how early on, before things got too civilized, one intrepid group of soldiers developed their own way of dealing with the rats. They decided that, instead of killing them outright, they’d have some fun with them, so when the rats chewed holes into the buildings and popped their heads up, looking for either heat or food, they got sprayed with varying colors of spray paint that had come up with the supplies. Each guy got a different color, and then the group took bets on whose rat would show up next. The image of a group of bored soldiers on one side of an oil stove, facing off with a rainbow of rats on the other, is hard to get out of my mind…
Over time, as more and more equipment was brought out, the various outposts in the Aleutians became more ‘civilized’ – but there was no letup on the fact that you were far from home.
By the time my Dad got up there, buildings were made of brick and cement and were definitely built to handle the weather and climate. He spent a little bit of time on an island called Adak (where the rainbow of rats were), but spent most of his time further west, on an island called Shemya. And out there, the weather was routinely so bad that the standard issue wind sock had worn out and had been replaced with a far more durable one.
USAF Wind Sock, Shemya, Heavy Duty, One Each
(click to enlarge) Photo courtesy of and © Buck Woody , used with permission
The reason dad was out there was because out there was some of the most advanced and powerful electronic equipment of its time. Not only were there electronic listening posts (receivers), but there were electronic transmitters, and on Shemya, there was a radar unit.
This radar unit was huge.
There were several there over the years, but one in particular held some fascination for my dad and his compatriots. It was the radar known as the AN/FPS-17 – at the time it was among the most powerful radars in the world.
Now because of all the tremendously expensive electronics that were out there, the buildings and control rooms they were in had to be dry. In fact, the various buildings were heated by a combination of all the electronics that were in them, the huge oil burning heaters that were running constantly, or both. So as cool and damp as the air was on the outside of the buildings, it was warm and dry, although a bit stuffy, on the inside, since they recirculated the air they’d warmed up.
So if it’s not clear yet, because of the remoteness of the location, the complexity of resupply, and the incredibly unpredictable weather, they were very conservative with their supplies, trying hard not to waste anything, and given that weather, the radar unit took several years to build, so remember that they only had what had been brought up on the latest barge.
If, for example, one of them got a hankering for a hamburger, and there wasn’t any beef on the island, there wouldn’t be any burgers in the buns.
If, on a cold day, one of them wanted a mug of hot chocolate, and it was stuck on the barge that was waiting for the weather to clear, well, he went without the hot chocolate.
And if there were times when the desire for something as simple as hot chocolate was almost palpable, and you just wanted something warm…
…like when the fog was so thick you’d need a chainsaw to get through it.
…or when the mist was so heavy you needed to lift it with jacks just to walk under it.
…or when the cold was so bone chilling that the fact that you were out in the middle of nowhere was overpowering, and as much as you might have just wanted something simple from home back then, if it wasn’t on the island, you weren’t getting it unless months before, someone had thought to put whatever that was onto a barge to be shipped up to Shemya for the once or twice yearly resupply missions.
So… whether you liked it or not, the options were pretty limited, and you made do.
But the longing for something familiar, the homesickness – even though they’d never call it that, would just get to be so overpowering as to be debilitating. Everyone from the commander all the way down to dad and his fellow airmen realized that keeping morale up was important, that bad morale could be dangerous that far from anywhere, so jumping on any bout of homesickness right away was pretty important all the way around.
The routine there was as simple as it was monotonous: Day after day, dad would do his shift, typing the codes that came into his headphones while his mind was elsewhere. The headphones dad wore shielded some of the constant hum of the electronics, and the only break from the routine was to go outside, where he’d brave the weather or the fog monster, and he’d go just for a change of scenery. Later, there was more entertainment and recreation, but while he was up there, he, like all the others before him, had to make do with what he had…
And going outside helped sometimes.
The air was so much fresher than the dry, overheated, electric air inside the control building around the radar and communication processing equipment. For the most part, you could walk anyplace that wasn’t fenced in. You could go down to the beaches, or on the north side, to the cliffs. There were caves to find, of all things, gemstones in. One of the fellows stationed there found some Jade in one that he made into earrings for his wife. Another found a walrus tusk on the beach that he gave to his wife. Both still have them to this day. So you had a lot of freedom to ‘get away from it all’, as much as you can have on an island, but even outside, if you got close to the radar antenna, you could actually feel the electricity. In fact, along that note, the instructions had been pretty clear: you stayed out of the radar beam, and as they were testing it, after the thing had been on for a while, it became clear to even the least technical of them that there was one place on the island you didn’t want to be, and that was in front of that radar antenna.
Why?
Well, it was simple things, like the grass on the hillside in front of the radar dying after it was turned on.
And when there was snow everywhere else, there wasn’t snow in front of the radar antenna.
Someone also noticed that seagulls tended to drop dead if they hung around too long in front of the radar antenna.
And with the weather occasionally socking the place in with, sometimes you were stuck inside and couldn’t go out at all, even if all you wanted to do was watch the seagulls. About that time, the combination of the boredom and the isolation got to one of the fellows. The almost constant fog, the cold, (it rarely got above 50 degrees, even in August), the wind, even though it brought some of the cleanest air on the planet (that is, when no one was testing Atom bombs in the vicinity) started getting to him. It was just so isolated, and after a number of months of mind numbing work, boredom, and loneliness, the fellow was simply homesick, and mentioned that he had a craving for the one thing that reminded him of home, and that was the smell of baked apples.
The other fellows, my dad included, realizing the beginnings of that homesickness, thought, “Baked apples our friend wants, baked apples we can provide.” So one fellow took the four wheel drive pickup they had down to the mess hall and got a crate of apples. The others pondered which of the hot pieces of electronic equipment they could use to warm the apples up on.
And then, as they talked, they looked around and realized what they were standing next to, started putting two and two together, and realized that thousands of miles away, Dr. Percy Spencer, the inventor of the magnetron tube that was used in the huge radars on the island, had melted a candy bar in his pocket just a few years earlier just by standing next to one of the very first ones made. Curious about the candy bar, he tried it again with popcorn. This time with it not in his pocket, he blew popcorn all over the lab he was working in, and later literally got egg on the face of one of his coworkers as he exploded the very first egg with microwaves.
And then…
Well, no one’s sure anymore who came up with the idea, but given the rudimentary supplies they had available to them (remember, what was up there came on a barge, and not very often, at that…) they started thinking of Dr. Spencer’s invention and realized that he was dealing with an itty bitty magnetron tube that was melting candy bars, popping corn, and blowing up eggs from several inches away. Dad and his buddies were seeing dead grass, cooked seagulls, and melted snow a half mile away, and without even taking the apple crate out of the truck, they devised a cunning plan to perform some ‘emergency maintenance’ on the radar unit with the dead grass and seagulls in front of it, and it was shut off.
The constant humming that had become background noise completely disappeared. The crackle in the air was gone, and that feeling you get of just being around so much electricity was simply not there. The huge Fairbanks-Morse diesel generators that had been straining to create the electricity to run this radar were suddenly just loafing. You could hear the wind whispering through the antennas. You could hear the seagulls calling. Over the hill, if the breeze was right, you could just barely hear the ocean, and the walruses and sea lions arguing about whose turn it was to be on that particular hunk of rock.
It was… Peaceful.
For a moment.
And then all that gentle background noise was shattered by the sounds of a rusted out muffler on a four wheel drive Dodge Powerwagon firing up and three guys blasting out along the edge of a cliff in it, out to where the dead grass and seagulls were, where they dropped off the crate of apples, and then hightailed it back to the building that had all the controls and the radiation shielding in it.
A Dodge Powerwagon, similar to the one mentioned in the story, with the Radar Antenna and the generator building in the background.
(Photo courtesy of and © Don Erdeljac, used with permission)
Once they were all safely away from the radar beam, the switches were thrown, and the generators lugged as they once again struggled to generate the 1.2 megawatts of electricity needed to power up the radar again, and the electrons surged through massive copper wires, tubes, capacitors, and finally the antennas as that crackling hum came back.
About twenty minutes later, they decided that the apples ought to be done, so there was another reason for ‘maintenance’, and once again the four wheel drive truck raced out to pick up the crate of apples.
They were surprised to find the metal parts of the crate were hot.
They were surprised, and delighted that some of the apples had popped and oozed syrupy apple juice all over the ones below.
And they were overjoyed when the apples that done were smelled exactly like baked apples should smell. They got some gloves off the dashboard where they’d been warming up and loaded the crate into the truck and took it back to the control building, where the homesick friend was trying, with marginal success, to keep his head in his work. Dad grabbed one end of the crate, another fellow grabbed the other end, and a third one held the door open as they all came piling in. That smell, that wonderful, sweet, syrupy smell of baked apples came wafting in with them, and at first, their homesick friend thought he was imagining things, but then he looked up, and saw the crate, and smelled the apples, and he smiled, and then he laughed.
They did indeed smell like baked apples should smell.
Not only that, but they tasted just like baked apples should taste.
And dad said he never had any as good as those baked on a windswept hillside on a remote island in the North Pacific, by a radar half a mile away.
===
In researching this story, and it took a couple of years of it, off and on, it became clear to me that not only did my dad use a radar that required enough power to run about 300 homes to bake apples a half mile away, but while most of the radar we think about is designed to find airplanes several miles away, the one that my dad and his buddies were using to cook apples was designed to find missiles…
In space.
===
(And now, seriously, unlike most of my stories, where I do all the research, all the writing, all the editing, so many people helped with the research on this one that I simply have to roll the credits. While my dad told me the original story many years ago, it was missing enough context, likely by design, to keep me from knowing exactly when and where it all was, since the location he’d been in was a pretty secure military installation, and most of what he was doing there was stuff he simply couldn’t talk about. I could not have written it down and made it make sense without the help of all the people below who willingly shared their memories with me, gave me their time, their own stories, and graciously allowed me to use their photographs to help tell this story from over 50 years ago. I have tried hard to bring this story to life as much as I could while I still had the access to these people and I trust those who were up on Shemya and the Aleutians who shared with me first hand thoughts about what it was like to be there. If there are any inaccuracies in the story, they are mine.)
Don B., whose widow Brenda took time out of her day to listen to questions coming out of the blue about her husband, and then told me the story about the rainbow colored rats on Adak.
Michael: You were the first to point me in the direction of Shemya. I’d heard stories of Adak, and had been focusing all my attention there – thank you so much for taking a fading memory and pointing me down a path that actually let me see the hillside my dad had talked about. Until that point, I didn’t even know what island out in the Aleutians to look for.
Tom – Your pictures, your detail, your encouragement all helped get me pointed in the right direction. Your stories (including your Saab stories) helped bring life to the story I was trying to write, especially when the stories he was telling included references to cooking seagulls that had strayed too long into the beam of the radar. 
Don E. – Many, many thanks for digging through your memories, sharing your stories, your patient explanation of everything, and the use of the photo in this story.
Lucas – This picture of McDonalds Point did such a good job of putting into context how remote Shemya is. I’m hoping the combination of it for those who were right brained, and the data I was able to get from Von (for the left brained types) helped to make the picture complete. For those of you curious to see some amazing images from up north, take a look at Lucas’s site – there are some wonderful images up there.
Von – Thank you for the willingness to help out with the information showing how far Shemya is from something so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. I’m hoping our information along with Lucas’s picture above help drive the point home just a bit…
Buck – Thank you for your feedback, your friendship, the photos, and relating your experiences, they made it come alive, and made a very big world feel like a very, very small place.
Barbara – thank you for your input, your thoughts, and all the items and stories on your website. They helped me see a place I could only see in my imagination.
Of course, my dad, who remembered the story well enough to tell me so I could share it with you.
And last but certainly not least, my family, whose patience as I researched and wrote it over the years can’t be overstated.
Thank you. I couldn’t have done this one without you.
I’m always amazed at the forms my time machine takes, often when I least expect it.
This time some film negatives I’d found and scanned into the computer several years ago just to see what they were, combined with a note I found on an archived CD made for a trip down memory lane to take me back to a simpler time. So, with very little editing, here’s a story from 1996…
I spent the weekend with the kids down at my folks’ place, and made apple cider with the apples from our trees in the back yard…
- The truck full of apples we took down to make Cider with.
…on a cider press that’s probably 100 years old. It used to have a hand crank, but my Grandpa at one point put an old electric washing machine motor on it and ever since I knew of it, it ground the apples into pulp at the flick of a switch. You still had to squeeze the juice out by hand though.
- Lys and Oma making Apple Cider on a cider press that was about 100 years old
After making the cider and cleaning up, and while Alyssa and Oma (German for Grandma – my mom) did only the kinds of things that granddaughters can do with their Omas, Michael and I went to what had always been my grandparent’s farm and went for a walk among the trees (douglas fir, cedar, oak), basically where I grew up. I went for many walks out there with our dogs and BB gun when I was a kid, and often went just to think and clear my mind.
My Grandpa had passed away some years earlier, and at the time, it seemed like my grandma was planning on selling the farm, so I felt I needed to take Michael out there and show him what I used to see and where I used to go exploring before that all changed. It was very strange, and I found myself quite disoriented sometimes. There were trees in places in the back of the farm that had been completely free of trees before. Areas that had been ponds no longer existed at all. What was reality simply didn’t match up with what I had in my memory.
We came to the front of the farm and saw that my grandma was boarding some horses on the land and they came up to us and just wanted some attention (and some Apples).
- Michael and the horses
So we petted them, and Michael later stood up on a stump and scratched one of them while the other one nuzzled him… It was really neat. It’s one of those experiences I hope will stay with him for a long time…
Michael and I explored the swamp in the back, and watched several frogs try to jump away from him, one rather large one managed to escape just as his boot stepped down. He was as surprised as the frog was (but probably not as terrified). We kept wandering and exploring, and saw an area where the water was too deep to be a swamp, and became a large pond. We heard rushing water and went through a fence to find a beaver dam. Michael had on his black and yellow “fighter fighter” boots because he “might” want to go into some water, so when he did, naturally he went in just a little too deep, and the water flooded over the top into the boots…
At that moment I decided that I had a chance to either have some fun and make a memory with my little boy and get my feet wet, or gripe about the fact that his boots and pants were wet and — it was a no brainer…
I waded into the creek in my shoes — the water was COLD (it came from, as I recall, Sprofsky Springs), and went through the swamp and then hit the beaver dam. We later waded down the creek from right below the dam, just to explore, and got completely soaked. He loved it. Lost his balance, I caught him just as his bottom hit the water…
We came back, me squishing in my wet shoes, him sloshing in his wet boots, and saw this HUGE anthill and were both watching it intently when this fairly sizable spider walked into the picture.
Mistake.
Even though the ants were much, much smaller than the spider, they took it down. It was like watching “Nature” on PBS. Michael, who’d decided he was scared of spiders, suddenly found himself seriously rooting for this one, and was first interested, then incensed that the ants could do that to a spider. It was truly amazing. Michael first wanted to throw things at the ants, then thought better of it, and decided he wanted to know what ants REALLY liked to eat, and maybe he could get their attention away from the spider with that. I thought that was nice. He wanted to save the spider, but didn’t want to kill the ants.
Afterwards, he had a rock in his hand, and was wondering how the ants would react to it. I thought back about 20 years, and how I’d thrown rocks at the ancestors of those same anthills, and how typical that was of a young boy. He asked what would happen if he threw the rock, and then asked if they would attack him. (Given what he’d just seen, that was a pretty valid question). I didn’t say yes, but kind of let him make up his mind on his own. He ended up dropping the rock on the ground next to the anthill, feeling some vindication because he may have killed some of the ants that had killed his new found spider friend, but also feeling good that he hadn’t killed all of them…
We sloshed and squished back to Oma’s, and ended up having some of the cider we’d made that afternoon with dinner that evening.
Eventually I packed up some of that cider, a lot of memories, and headed back home as the kids drifted off to sleep in the back of the car.
It was truly a wonderful weekend, and I went back to work on Monday morning to a job I enjoyed, a job that allowed me to support my family, but away from the trees and forests where I grew up…
Sigh…
God has been good.
Take care, folks.
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