Saab Stories…

May 21, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 5 comments


One of the things I’ve done for years is tell my son stories about – well, I call them “Stupid things that Papa did when he was little” stories.  The goal of these was in some ways to make sure he realized I was human and could make mistakes, but also that if you looked at something just right – no matter what it was, you’d find some humor in it.  And… hopefully… a lesson.

I’d always figured I’d had a relatively quiet childhood, but the other night, I was telling him one of these stories, and his jaw dropped,

“How did you survive to be old enough to breed?”

Of course, me telling him the story as history, and then him repeating it back to me as stupidity, made for some incredible laughs, as well as lessons on what not to do, and precisely how not to do it…

So with that… A Saab story.

­Over the years, I’ve owned a small herd of Saabs, and I’ve learned that you cannot have a Saab without having a story to go with it.

In my case, I’ve come to the conclusion that the stories far, far outnumber the cars, but that’s okay.  As long as the Saabs last, the stories last longer.

When I was growing up – I had a 1967 Saab 96 with a 3 cylinder, 2 stroke, 850 cc monster of an engine.  Monster?  Monstrette? Monstlette? – Beats the heck out of me what you’d call it – this was in the days when the high school car to be seen in was a Chevy Camaro with a 350 cubic inch V-8 engine.  Anything less and you weren’t part of the “in” crowd…

My car had a 3 cylinder, 46 cubic inch engine.

A two stroke.

You mixed the oil with the gas.

Like an outboard.

Oh, I wasn’t part of the “in” crowd. I was so far from the “in” crowd I couldn’t even see it.

The car was built with an integral roll cage so strong that one of the ads they used to have on TV showed them rolling the car down a hill – sideways, and then having a guy drive off in it.

It was like driving the result of an illicit liaison between a Sherman tank and a chainsaw.

So I had some friends who also drove some cars that weren’t Camaros (heck, given what I was driving, NONE of my friends had Camaros) – one was a buddy who drove a 1965 Dodge Dart, and since his dad ran the local propane dealership – that car ran on – you guessed it – propane.

So my buddy Bert and I would, as teenagers the world over do, spend weekend evenings driving aimlessly, burning oil and gas (in my car) or propane (in his) – and one day, he mentioned to me this railroad crossing, that if hit at the right speed, would get you airborne.

Now on this particular crossing, that was advisable.  The rail bed was several feet higher than the road bed, so the pavement climbed steeply up to the rails, crossed them, then went down the other side.

Sherpas guarded this crossing.

Now given that trains weigh more than cars, the rail bed had actually sunk quite a bit – so crossing over meant climbing up to greet the Sherpas, then going down into the rough no-man’s land that was the rails, climbing back up from the rails to the top of other side, then finally back down.  It was kind of like crawling over the crater of a volcano.

It could tear the suspension out from under your car if you did it slow.

If you did it a little faster, you’d sail right over the crater that was the tracks, land on the other side, and it would be this wonderfully gentle jump.

We didn’t do it just a “little” faster.

Oh, one additional piece of information here is that this road ended up at a T intersection, and you have to imagine that the arms of the T are sagging a bit, as the top part of the T was in the middle of a curve.  Big picture what this means is that it was a blind intersection.

You will see this material again.

So my buddy Bert tells me about this railroad crossing – and how, if you cross it “juuuust right” you catch air.   Not just the “oh, we’re flying over the volcano” air, but “Wave bye bye to the Sherpas” air.

Okaaaay…

Then he suggested that he and I take the Saab out there that evening and jump it. (and, given the adventures he and I had already had in the Saab, this suggestion was not out of the ordinary)

So we headed out there.

Something to remember about country roads is that in the summer they’re often paved with ‘poor man’s asphalt’ which consists of a mixture of oil poured on the road followed by lots of gravel  Eventually, enough cars drive over it , and enough of the oil evaporates that the oil and gravel slowly transform into pavement.  Until that happens, it’s just a bunch of very loose, light colored rocks, each one looking for its own personal windshield to hit.

We headed out 507 heading south, hung a left on 336th, and I accelerated to get to the crossing.

Whee.

It wasn’t very exciting – in large part because I couldn’t see much of it (it was getting dark), and I wasn’t going fast enough, Bert assured me that hitting the ramp from the other side was much, much better.

About that “going fast enough” bit – from the intersection to the crossing is 528 feet.  The acceleration of a two stroke Saab, while it sounded like the engine was absolutely screaming, was not what one would call head snapping.

So we headed further up the road, up a hill to a spot where I could turn around.

Now Bert had said that to land properly after jumping the tracks, you had to hit the gas just as you hit the ramp up the crossing, to lift the front end off the ground.  That might have worked with his rear wheel drive Dart, but the front end of my front wheel drive Saab wasn’t going to go up when I hit the gas, it was just going to go faster.  Not by much, but still, faster.

He wanted me to hit the tracks at 60 mph. (Please note: the fact that the speed limit’s 35 is completely irrelevant here.)

So I came roaring (such as one does with a 3 cylinder engine) down the hill toward the , – well, the engine wasn’t roaring, it was screaming, it was the pavement that was roaring with the noise of the tires on that gravel.  I made it up to 60, and instead of seeing a road in front of me at the place of the crossing – that white crushed gravel in my headlights –looked like I was driving straight toward a white wall… I’d slowed to 50, and Bert wanted me to hit the gas to go faster.

I left it at 50, and we did, indeed, hit it.

The car, and the seats, rocketed up and hit us like airplane ejector seats.

The roar of the pavement was gone, many feet below us.

And the sudden silence, as we found ourselves floating up against the seatbelts, was deafening.

We waved at the Sherpas as we went by.

We looked across at birds that had been flying overhead.

We looked down at our houses – both of them – four miles in either direction from where we were.

We could see airplanes in the pattern at McChord AFB.

We looked at each other, not fully comprehending that we had both become passengers in a physics experiment.

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling.

“Have we hit yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

And then we did hit, and all the roaring came back, along with the sound later identified as my freshly rebuilt exhaust system plowing a furrow into the road.

And we bounced.

Zero G Silence.

And hit again.

Three times, and by the time the wheels stayed on the pavement long enough for the brakes to start being useful, that T intersection was getting awfully close.

I stood on the brake pedal.

Now the Saabs of that era had a rudimentary antilock brake system.  They were designed so that if you did what I was doing (standing on the brake pedal) – after so much pressure had been applied – a check-valve under the back seat wouldn’t let the back brakes take any more, and all the rest of the braking would go to the front wheels.  The logic of this was that if the back wheels locked up, the car could spin (anyone ever having done a handbrake turn knows how this works).  In this case, I stood on the brakes till the FRONT wheels locked up, let go, stood on them again, they locked up again, stood on them a third time, but by now the stop sign at the intersection was getting awfully close – and I had to turn right or left.

Straight forward was not an option. There was (and actually still is) a large tree on the other side of the intersection.

The stop sign whipped past, I spun the wheel to the right.  Bert says we went up on two wheels.  I don’t know, I was hanging on to the wheel for dear life, and all I knew was that while for the last few seconds had been all about deceleration to either stop before crashing, or slow down enough to make the turn, now it was literally a race for our lives in acceleration, because we had no idea what was coming up over the little hill from the left side of the T intersection.  Whatever it was, could have been a motorcycle, could have been a logging truck, or anything in between, it would have been doing at least 55 mph – the speed limit on 507 there at the time.

Since we were so blatantly running a stop sign without even the remotest chance of actually stopping , any other traffic would have had no warning of the little red jellybean of a Saab suddenly appearing  in a cloud of blue smoke in front of them.  As hard as I’d been standing on the brake pedal before the stop sign, I now tried to shove the gas pedal through the floor, to get every one those 850 cc’s and 46 horses to keep us from  becoming a hood ornament  on a Kenworth.  I didn’t take my foot off the gas or look back till I’d redlined it in third, and then I could breathe.

Bert and I stole a glance at each other in stunned silence, the only background noise being the unbelievable roar of the two-stroke through a pavement-modified exhaust system.

Nope, our parents were not going to hear about this one, not for a long time.

But while I was writing this in an almost entirely Right Brained (creative) kind of way, the old Left Brain started getting curious – and started pestering me until I really got to thinking about the whole thing, the bouncing three times, the hitting the brakes three times, the “have we hit yet? …. I don’t think so…” and started to do some math.

The distance from the Sherpa guarded railroad crossing  to the intersection to is  a little over 1/10th of a mile.

According to Google Earth, it’s 628 feet.

I was going at least 50 mph when I hit it.

That’s 73 feet per second.

That meant that from the moment we launched past the Sherpas, I had just under nine seconds before I was going to arrive at that stop sign. (628/73~=8.6)

The crossing was so steep that it bottomed out the suspension and squashed the tires, which then helped launch the car even higher than the road angle itself would have.

I’ve calculated about how long it took to say that “Have we hit yet?” bit – and it seems to average about 3 ½ seconds.  At 73 feet per second, that would have put us about 256 feet past the Sherpas when we hit.  Timewise, that seems about right.  However, we need to factor in the ballistic trajectory into the whole thing, which cut almost 100 feet off that range and translated it into a number I could hardly comprehend.

According to the formula for a ballistic arc, which this was, if I had a 73 foot/second velocity at an angle of 45 degrees, we’d end up with a range of 167 feet.

I’m using the formulas here to do the calculations – and the only variables I know for sure are the launch speed (50 mph = 73 feet/second = 22.35 meters/second) and the time it took to say ‘have we hit yet? … I don’t think so…” (about 3 ½ seconds) – that leaves us with a launch angle of about 45 degrees, which seems hellaciously steep, but combining the slingshot effect of the suspension and tires, plus the absolute craziness of the actual railroad crossing (which has since been repaved to be far, far gentler) – is the only thing that comes close to fitting.

We’ll also end up with a height of 12.74 meters – which, if I can believe it (and I’m perfectly willing to have someone correct me)  translates into about 41 feet.

Holy flopping cow…

That meant we had 461 feet, or just under 5 seconds of barely controlled chaos left from the moment we hit the ground before we’d get to the stop sign.

But we bounced three times.  The noise of that first hit was so great we thought we’d broken all the windows.

Call it a second and a half in the air for the first bounce, a half second for the second one, and a quarter second for the third one, that’s 2 ¼  seconds in the air again – haven’t touched the brakes yet, but no gas, either.  We’ll say I was averaging 45 here, – that’s 66 feet per second – that’s another 115 feet.  Add to that the two times I was on the ground – we’ll call that about 2-3 car lengths each – that’ll end up with another 45 feet.

Add those together and you’ve got about another 193 feet gone before I could even think of hitting the brakes.

Unless something miraculous happened, I now had 167 feet, and just over 4 seconds, before I was going to slide through the intersection.

I hit the brakes – hard.  The front wheels grabbed for a split second, then locked up on the gravel and started sliding.

I let up and hit again.  They started sliding again, but I’d scrubbed off a little bit of speed. I let up and hit a third time, felt the wheels lock up and at that point I was at the stop sign, still doing at least 25 mph, but locked up front wheels don’t steer worth a dang, so I let up on the brake, spun the wheel, jammed it into second, and simultaneously realized, as the engine started screaming, and the broken exhaust roared to life, that second was too low a gear to be in. I got up to 32 mph (the top of the range in second) and went to third, floored it for a bit, and only then checked the rear view mirror to confirm that we were safe.

It is only now, more than 30 years after the fact, that I understood why we never found the marks on the road left by the exhaust system.  We were looking about 100 feet short of where we actually landed.

So I started this by mentioning that I’d had these “Stupid things that Papa did when he was little” stories I told my son.  There’s more, lots more.   I’ll be writing them down as I can.

Take care – and no, just in case anyone thinks about doing this – I don’t recommend it.

If any one of a number of things had gone wrong, (losing a tire on landing, a car in the intersection, brakes not braking enough) I wouldn’t be here to write this.

I find myself wondering what would have happened if I’d just said no.  (Note: multiple teenage males, “no” is not an option…sigh…)

But 41 feet?

Oh… my… gosh…

Telephone poles aren’t that high!

Be safe out there…

Hunting for Buried Treasure

May 15, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 3 comments


After a wonderfully busy Saturday that made me want to spend Sunday being comatose, Michael (my six year old) came up to me, with far more energy than children should be allowed to have on a Sunday afternoon, and said, “I want to go treasure hunting.”

“…and just where do you want to do this?” said I (trying to maintain my important job of holding one end of the couch down)

“In the back yard. You draw the map.”

— Now let’s see if we can follow the logic here…

“I draw the map, put an “x-marks” on it somewhere, and we dig there and we find treasure?”

“Yes, we find treasure there.”

“So what if I put an “x-marks” over here?, will we find treasure?”

“Uh huh.”

“So if I draw a bunch of maps, each with an “x-marks” in a different place, we’ll find treasure all over the place, right?”

“Right.”

I could feel my hold on the couch slipping…

“So even without a map, there would be treasure anywhere we dig under the back yard…”

I drew a map.

I had him go out and measure off paces, from the gate, to the sandbox, to the slide, to the fence, and as he came back each time, we made one more measurement on the map.

We went out, got our digging tools, and started pacing. We ended up in the shade by the fence in the back yard, in a spot where he’d dug many times before, and started digging.

He dug a bit, then I dug, and we chatted about life, how things were going, the boat ride we’d taken Saturday (where he’d actually driven the boat). Since it was hot, we decided to put some water into the hole, so many trips with buckets later, we had it full.

I asked him if he wanted to take his shoes off.

He knew what that meant, and with a big smile he took his shoes and socks off and stuck his little feet into the muddy water.

I joined him a couple of minutes later (having gotten a couple more buckets of water in the meantime)

So we sat there, our feet invisible under the surface, talking, giggling about how icky our feet were, what mom would say if she saw us, why there were pine needles growing out of our toes, stuff like that…

And I realized something…the time we were spending together on a warm, lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon, was wonderful.

Michael was right.

There was treasure in our back yard, anywhere we dug.

Because the treasure wasn’t gold or silver…

…it was time.

The view from the Balcony… Forgiveness, Writing in the Dirt, and “No Worries”

May 2, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment


I was at church this morning – sitting in my usual spot up in the balcony, when Pastor Dan started to talk about Holy Communion – and about forgiveness.

I’d heard it before – but something clicked this morning, and to explain it, I have to tell a little story…

Where I work, there’s this concept of “No worries” – almost like the “Hakuna matata” bit you hear in “Lion King”.  Examples of how you might find it used would be like this:

You, talking to boss, needing to take the day off on short notice, “Hey – um – I’m sorry, but I need to take my outer Mongolian wombat to the vet.”

“Oh, no worries!”

Hmm…

You, after something had muffed up… “… so that’s where we stand.  It’s broken, and this is what it’ll take to fix it.”

“Okay – no worries – we’ll fix it and get it done.”

You, after you muffed something up. “Hey – I – um – I muffed this up – and we’ll have lost some information…”  and as you’re standing there ready to flog yourself for muffing something up, your boss says, “No worries, let’s figure out what it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again and move on.”

Something about this is feeling familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.

I’d been in work environments where the attitude is quite a bit different – where you had to watch your back every minute, where the only time you’d feel someone’s hand patting you on the back was when there was a knife in it.  It wasn’t a pleasant situation in the least.

In fact, it took me about 4 months of working where I work now to understand that someone patting you on the back could literally be doing just that… Patting you on the back…

And after awhile – I realized that this whole concept of “No worries” was just that… If you heard those words from someone, they truly meant “No (zero, zilch, nada) worries.”

The problem would be dealt with – and then the issue, the ‘transgression’ if you will, forgotten.

* Poof! *

Gone.

No.

Worries.

Period.

This is still sounding familiar, but I still can’t put my finger on it.

…

Waitaminute!

Hmm…

The problem dealt with… the transgression… forgotten…

Haven’t I heard words like that before?

Wait – wait… seems this was written about a LONG time ago, in a country far, far away, by a guy who used to chase sheep around the countryside…

Yeah… Book of Psalms – chapter 103…

 12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

 “But wait.” (in the immortal words of Monty Python) “there’s more…”

Paul’s letter to the Hebrews… chapter 10 (he wrote long letters) verse 17 – plus or minus a couple…

Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more…
And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin.

Hmm… There’s still something out there that I’m missing…

<shuffle shuffle>  – yeah, here it is…

…so this whole “no worries” thing – the deal is, I let my boss know either I muffed something up – or it got muffed up, or it muffed itself up (computers are very creative when it comes muffing things up).  And he says, “No worries, let’s figure out what it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again – and then move on.

Wait – so I don’t have to keep beating myself over the head with my own failure?

…and this whole forgiveness thing…

So the deal is, I let God know either I muffed something up, or it got muffed up, or it muffed itself up (people are very creative when it comes to muffing things up).  And God, even when we muff it up ourselves,  goes, “No worries, let’s figure out what it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again and move on.”  In fact, in that story those quotes are from – you can find the whole story here.  Jesus Himself says to a gal who was caught “in the act” of a pretty serious sin, “No worries, let’s figure out what it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and move on.”  But think about it – the people accusing her said she was caught “in the very act.”  Um… you don’t do *that* kind of sin all by yourself, so it’s clear that she “had help” muffing up – but they were going to make her pay the price, and the guy gets away scot free.  But Jesus saw right through that, all the way to the bit about “It kind of makes sense that those accusing her may have had a little experience with that particular sin” –  because of what happened next.

What happened next?

He wrote in the dirt, it’s never clearly stated what He actually wrote, but her accusers left, starting from the oldest to the youngest after He started writing.  Yathink maybe He was writing the names of the people who’d already done *this* particular sin?

So they left – and there’s no one left to accuse her.

And Jesus quite literally saved her life, because they were looking to stone her – and kill her.  And he said, “No worries… Go – try to do better.”

And He forgave her.

Wow.

No worries.

Can you imagine how hard it would have been to accept forgiveness at that level?  But that’s what He told her to do.

And hard as it is sometimes, I’m supposed to accept this whole forgiveness thing, whether it’s from my boss at work, or from God.

And I’m supposed to do my best to learn from the mistake, and move on…

Because my boss isn’t accusing me of anything…

And God isn’t accusing me of anything…

Hmmm…

No worries.

Cool.

Compliment? Insult? You decide…

April 25, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment


“Yes… Caffeine headaches are SOOO much worse than your coffee”

 — My daughter, who works at Starbucks, when she came over this morning and I offered to make her a cup.

(I’ve been known to make coffee that spoons would stand up in for a couple of seconds before they melted)

Sigh…

: )

Plumbing…

April 23, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 2 comments


Plumbing.

The bane of the homeowner.

A few years ago, I learned that you can’t call the landlord, or the property manager, or your folks. Unless you want to pay the price of a plumber, the job’s yours.

We learned in our house that very small things can cause very large problems.

It all started with the kitchen sink, which has one of those little screens to keep the crud from going down the drain.

Well sometimes it’s easier to flush the crud down the drain than it is to try to pick it out of the screen thing, so I’ve learned that jabbing it with a fork and then giving a good twist means the screen will pop up, the crud will go down, and there will be peace in the world.

There is, naturally, a warning to go along with this, that being that you don’t want things to go down the drain that the screen was meant to trap… So you have to be careful. Twice I had to take the drain apart when a fork or a spoon went down there.

But forks and spoons have built in safety features. They’re straight, and the trap under the sink isn’t, so they stay.

Now imagine, if you will, that you’re running low on dish washing liquid, and to do the dishes you’ve taken the top off the bottle to pour water in and get all the dishwashing liquid out.

Imagine, if you will, that after the dishes were done, the drain seemed to drain a lot slower…

So I figure, hey, there’s something stuck in there… So I pull out the plunger and go at it like I was trying to win a butter churning contest.

No luck.

I pull the drain apart.

Can’t find anything.

I run the snake down.

Nothing.

I put the sink back together and try it again.

Still slow. I mean, if you left it there overnight, it would drain out, but otherwise it would start off fine and then act like it had hit a brick wall, well, more like a rubber wall, because it would go down, stop, and then start slowly coming back up again, almost like an echo.

Hmmmm…

Then the bathroom sink started draining really slow.

So I took that apart…

…and ran the snake down…

— and nothing…

Okay, I’d spent about 8 hours of a weekend under kitchen and bathroom sinks, ripping plumbing out and getting absolutely nowhere.

So I did the ever popular male thing, if it doesn’t work, get a bigger hammer.

I attached a hose to the sink downstairs.

I ran it up to the kitchen sink, and had my 7 year old son Michael go downstairs, with the instructions, “Turn it on when I thump once on the floor, turn it off when I thump twice.”

So Michael the Helper trotted downstairs, all full of pride that he was helping solve this Major Household Problem.

I wrapped a towel around the end of the hose to make a seal, rammed it down the kitchen drain, and then thumped on the floor.

The hose gurgled, and hissed, and burped, and wiggled around as the water came up, and then like a cannon blasted water down

the drain.

I didn’t hear or feel anything give way, I didn’t hear or feel any kind of a plug, or for that matter resistance…

So I thought I’d fixed it.

I thumped twice, and the water stopped.

I pulled the hose out and water started coming back up, like that echo I’d seen earlier, only this time it was much bigger…

Hmmm…

I rammed the hose down again, and thumped…

… and the water started again…

And I kept at it until I heard this little voice from downstairs, “Papa-a-a-a-a? How come the ceiling is dripping?”

Uh – oh…

It was at this point that I instinctively knew what had happened.

The pipes were set up like a T, with the kitchen on the right side and the bathroom on the left side. Whatever was plugging things up was down on the vertical part of the T, and in essence, that one thing was plugging both drains.

You will see this material again.

I ran downstairs, and yes indeed, the ceiling was dripping, right from where the bathroom was.

I ran upstairs, and into the bathroom.

Or what had been the bathroom…

See, when I’d blasted the water down the kitchen sink and it couldn’t go anywhere, Mount Vesuvius erupted in the bathroom sink, cleaning all the crud in the drain on the way out and distributing it evenly all over the bathroom, and of course what didn’t stay in the bathroom went downstairs.

Oh good…

So now the bathroom sink’s full of brown crud, that echo effect has the kitchen sink in the same condition, and I obviously haven’t come anywhere near solving the problem, I’ve only made it worse…

But at least this time I know where the problem is, right?

Right.

So I go downstairs where Michael was, stepped around where the ceiling was still dripping, looked up and saw that there was a cleanout plug on the pipe that had to have the problem.

So I got this huge wrench and reefed on it.

No dice.

Bigger hammer time. (I’m a guy, remember?)

So I put a pipe on the end of the wrench and tried to do a chinup on it.

Of course that’s when it broke loose.

So I got back up on the chair, carefully, and started loosening it to take it all the way off to see where the problem was. Just to be safe, I got a bucket to catch any water that might dribble out. 

While I was loosening it, Michael, who’d gone upstairs, came down, and Alyssa, 12, came over to see what was going on.

The next part happened in slow motion.

As I was unscrewing the last little bit, the water (and black, unmentionable, icky crud) from the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, and all the pipes in between finally found a place to go.

My face happened to be about 4 inches from that spot.

My eyes, ears, nose, and throat were filled with water so black it was opaque. In the background, through the gurgling, I heard the the sound of two children laughing like only children can laugh.

They still talk about it, and the stains in the shirt are still there.

Oh, and I found the lid to the dishwashing liquid.

Spandex, cyclists, and nailguns

April 20, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments


A few years ago I worked across the street from a building that was in the later stages of construction.  That meant that all the city sounds, of traffic, of seagulls, of boats, were built on a foundation of construction noise – of saws, hammers, workers, nail guns, and forklifts of various kinds, lifting building materials into the building.

This building was right along the ship canal, in Seattle, where daily, hundreds of stubby working boats earnestly tugged their barges, or huge ships glided (glid?) through with a serious air, or sleek, sexy, expensive yachts knifed through the water, each leaving a special wake all its own.  The wake would hit the rocks at the side of the canal long after the boat had passed.  It was a nice place to sit and think, and have lunch, or just watch the boats…  Between the building that I worked in and this one was a bicycle path.  Being Seattle, there were a lot of bicycle commuters.

One morning, they’d blocked the bike path off for some construction, and all the bikes were coming on the road between the building I worked in, and the one that was under construction across the street. As I was headed into the building, the noise in the background, I noticed this wave – no – wake, just like the boats, but this was not of water, it was a wake of silence heading toward me, and as I turned to see why – I saw this black cyclist coming toward me.  Now when I say ‘black’ – I mean, black helmet, black wraparound sunglasses, black shoes, and black spandex, from head to toe.

I know there are people for whom spandex is a bad thing to wear.  There are people for whom, quite frankly, spandex should be illegal.

I know.

I’m one of them.

But the person riding this bike had every right to wear it.  This spandex was flat where it needed to be flat, curved where it needed to curve, and rippled where it needed to be rippled.  Frankly, it was a testament to the brilliance of whoever invented it, and a testament to the hard work of the one wearing it.

At the same time, it covered every square inch there was to cover, while making quite clear what, exactly, it was covering.

The silence left in the wake of that cyclist was profound.

Saws stopped.

Hammers stopped

Nail guns stopped.

Work… Simply… Stopped.

The cyclist, for a moment, stopped too, as the light at the intersection turned red.

And while it was red, there was – there’s no other way to say it but – complete silence.

It turned green, they cyclist started off, and all the workers, stunned at the complete example of physical perfection they’d just seen pass by, cheered like only construction workers can cheer.

And then, with a smile, they cheerfully went back to work.

What I’d noticed, because I was closer, is that smile was shared – because as the cyclist rode past, the one part that wasn’t covered, broke into the slightest of grins.

…on the bus…

March 6, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment


The other day I was riding the bus and the couple sitting next to me was in an animated conversation.  Much to her frustration, the guy was clearly thinking a long time about something the gal had said, and she blurted out,

“You’re an over-analyzer”

In all seriousness, he responded, “Yeah, that problem took me three years to figure out.”

Salty Sea Dogs

February 25, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments


So I’m out for a doctor prescribed walk – down by Shilshole Bay marina on Puget Sound.

As I often do in places like this, I close my eyes and just listen, to see with my ears, and find the waves gently lapping at the hulls of hundreds of sailboats.

There’s a train, with eight locomotives idling on the tracks across the street.

Two seagulls are fighting over a little piece of something or other…

A couple of Canada geese fly by, encouraging each other along with their honks. In the background to the west are the sea lions, occasionally barking…

The lines of the sailboats creak just slightly as they hold the masts straight, and I open my eyes to see that the weathervanes are all in formation, sniffing at the breeze.

Into this nautical environment walk two characters straight out of central casting for Moby Dick. The one on the left has this mop of a beard that’s just asking to be wrung out.

The one on the right has this little cap that makes me think of the skipper on Gilligan’s Island…

The conversation they’re having with their hands draws me in, making me wonder what conversation they’re having with their voices, so I wait, wondering what kind of shipboard drama is being recounted, what story is being remembered, what adventure is being relived.

They get closer, and the story in my imagination are shattered by reality as the only words I actually hear from them are, “…well, have you tried Linux on that system?”

Misty 42

February 6, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 2 comments


The picture at the end of this story was shot in Grad School – Ohio University, sometime around 1988 or so.

I had a friend and classmate, Johnny Crawford, a wonderful shooter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was truly a lot of fun to be with – but he had this one habit that just got to me after awhile… it was his penchant for saying, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve…” – and then fill in the blank with something that he’d done and he knew I hadn’t.

Understand, he wasn’t gloating, he wasn’t being mean, he was just telling me how cool it was to have been able to do something he had done, and, in his eyes, I hadn’t lived till I’d done one of those things.

Well one day he says, “Tom, you ain’t lived till you’ve shot F-15’s bein’ refueled.” – now of course I knew that he wasn’t talking about F-15’s being refueled on the ground, he was talking about that complicated aerial ballet that means you’ve got two airplanes flying around 250 – 300 mph within about 40 feet of each other, pumping highly refined kerosene from one to another at a rate of about 6,500 pounds a minute. This is enough fuel in one minute to run your average family car for a year.

Uh… Yeah…

Eventually I got a little tired of never having lived – so I needed to figure out where I could find a refueling base, because that’s where I’d need to go to get onto a KC-135 refueling plane to take that shot that was going to ensure that I lived.  I went to the library, and checked out a book about the military, and it gave me the location of all the bases in the United States.  And funny thing, but there was a base with a KC-135 wing 68 miles away, the 121st Air Refueling Wing of the Ohio Air National Guard.

Hmmm…

Now anyone who knows me knows I am just plain dangerous with a telephone.  My wife says I can talk to anyone, and sometime I just end up sweet talking my way into things that even I end up baffled at once everything’s all said and done.  She once complained that I could get into a 20 minute conversation with a telephone operator. (She was wrong… it was 45 minutes, and I did, actually, the telephone operator used to be an air traffic controller when Reagan was presi – well, that’s not important right now).  So about 3 telephone calls later, I’m on the phone with the PAO (public affairs officer) of Rickenbacker Air National Guard base, in Columbus, Ohio.   I explain to him that I’m a grad student in photojournalism at Ohio University and that I’m working on a story on the Air National Guard (partially true, well, I was starting it – and a picture was worth a thousand words, right?) and was wondering if there was any chance of getting up on a refueling mission to take some pictures.  So – after talking about that and security and stuff for a bit, he suddenly said, “How’s next Tuesday?”

Next…

What!? –

It had to be harder than this…

It just had to be.

Nope.  Tuesday it was…

Plane took off at 10:00.  We’d be refueling some Missouri Air National Guard F-4 fighters who were on a training mission.  I had to be there 2 hours earlier, which meant I had to leave an hour before that, and so on. I borrowed a car from a friend and found the airbase, talked my way into see the right people, made the right introductions, signed the right paperwork, and out the door I went, still completely baffled… It just had to be harder than this…

One of the things to understand about military planes is that they are generally not built for comfort, so the plane was loud.  This being an Air National Guard plane – the same folks had flown this same plane for years, so to them it wasn’t much different than you or I driving down to the store to get a quart of milk.  However, they’re going a little faster, they have 4 engines pushing them along, and the store’s a lot further away.  At one point, I was up in the cockpit and the navigator did some calculating, and noticed that if we continued at the rate we were going, we would be late to meet the planes we were to refuel, and since we were the only gas station around, us being late could easily mean those flying jet fighters would fly about as well as crowbars, and that’s not good. So he saw we were going 300 mph, and told the pilot to bump it up to 330.  The pilot reached up and wrapped his hands around the 4 throttles and – well, ‘bumped’ them up a bit.  I had no idea a plane that big, could accelerate that fast at that speed.  I was watching the airspeed indicator, and we went from 300 to 330 in a blink.  I was very glad I’d been holding onto something when he did it or I would have ended up in the back of the plane.

We got to the refueling zone – and I was told that the way the refueling is done, is that the pilots of the tanker, and the pilots of the planes needing the fuel fly directly at each other, the tanker flying 1000 feet higher.  When they get close, they both head in the same direction – so, say the tanker I’m in is flying east.  The planes needing the fuel are flying west, toward each other, and at a given point, everyone heads north, so that the F-4’s are below and behind the tanker.  Our call sign was Pearl 07. Theirs were Misty 41 and 42.

The weird thing, for lack of a better word, about all this is that it was happening in three dimensions.  I mean, if you’re here on the ground, and you point to something, your arm is generally parallel to the ground or close to it, because whatever you’re pointing at is usually on that same ground, or close to it.  When I saw these planes – I was in the back of thfe tanker, looking out the back – and they were swooping in from the right, and they were off to the right, and down.  Not just ‘over’ but ‘down’.   One of the planes was leaving what looked like a white smoke trail, and I heard over the radio, “Pearl 07, Misty 41, I’ve got a fuel leak, returning to base…”

I don’t know about you, but a fuel leak you can see at 300 miles an hour must be a pretty significant fuel leak…  He left.

Misty 42 came closer – into what they call the pre-connect area in the back of the plane, and just stayed there for a bit – I was amazed at how big the thing was, and had the widest lens I had on my camera (a Nikkor 24mm ) – I was framing the shot when Gus (the boom operator) said, “Misty 42, forward 50” – meaning he needed to come forward 50 feet to get into the area where the boom could connect.  Now I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting much acceleration out of that plane – I mean the plane can go twice the speed of sound, for crying out loud – but when he came forward that 50 feet, it was like he’d been shot out of a cannon, and then he stopped, parked right where he needed to be.  Somewhere in there, just before he hooked up I reflexively squeezed off a shot, and that was the only shot I got that was worth anything – after that he was just too close.

He took 3,000 pounds of fuel, I don’t know why I remember that.  He wasn’t there very long, and then, since Misty 41 had already left, Misty 42 peeled off in ways I’ve only seen in movies – and there just isn’t a comparison to seeing it in real life, as opposed to seeing it on a screen, where, no matter how much they try to show the three dimensions of what’s happening up there, it’s still a two dimensional screen.   It just doesn’t cut it.  It was so, incredibly, cool.

We turned back east and headed back over Illinois, Indiana, bits and pieces of Kentucky, and finally made it down out of the wonderful sunlight, down through the clouds, and into a rainy Ohio afternoon.

We debriefed, I headed back toward Athens in my borrowed car with an exhaust leak, and stopped at a Burger King on the way to get a late lunch while I had the color film developed next door.  What I didn’t know is that this particular film developing process didn’t use fresh chemicals for each batch of film.  They used them until the film didn’t come out good anymore, and then changed the chemicals.

Guess whose film was the last one through that batch of chemistry?  The prints just didn’t look quite right.  It turned out that the film, though developed, was simply not printable in color, the three colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) didn’t develop at the same rate – and there just wasn’t a way to color balance all of the colors at the same time.  After a lot of thought and frustration (considering what I’d gone through to get this picture) I ended up out of pure frustration printing it in black and white.

This, surprisingly, was a dang good idea…

Of course, by now it had been a long day, lots of driving, lots of flying, and because of the car, lots of carbon monoxide, and now I had to go to the darkroom on campus to print the pictures. Of course, it was always a social event because there were 50 enlargers in the darkroom, and everyone was working on their own images, and every now and then, you’d go out into a finishing area and look at them in white light instead of the orange safelights, to see what the thing really looked like, wash it off, spot correct dust, etc…

…and, if you had a particularly good one, you might find yourself examining it a little longer out there where other people could see it, if you know what I mean…

One of the things in that original image was that there was this huge black area in the bottom right of the picture, part of the inside of the plane that that wide lens caught.  I was trying to figure out how to make the picture work without cropping too much, and yet that black area just sucked your eye right down there when one of my classmates walked up and saw the picture.

“Wow! Cool picture! Who take that?” (he was from China, and this is how he talked)

“I did.”

“No, Tom, you not take that picture, don’t joke… Who take that picture?”

“Seriously, I did.”

He could see I wasn’t joking – honestly, by that time, I was too tired to joke.

“Okay, fine… Where you take that picture?”

… but I wasn’t too tired to string him along a little and mess with him…

“Missouri.” (understand, Missouri is three states west of Ohio, easily a day’s drive)

“Missouri?  No, Tom… You joking again.  Where you take the picture?”

“Okay, I’ll be more specific… 26,000 feet above Fredericktown, Missouri.”

There was a look of consternation on his face, and finally resignation as he realized I wasn’t kidding.

“Okay Tom, you not joking this time… When you take the picture?”

– This one was like feeding a straight line to a comedian, and the only thing I could do was the last thing he’d expect.

I looked at my watch.

His eyes got real big, then he just threw up his hands and gave up.  The thing is, at the time he asked the question, I’d taken the picture about 6 hours ago – so the most logical thing to do was to look at my watch and find out how to answer his question.

I was so hoping Johnny would come by so I could tell him I’d lived.  He did, later – but the reaction from my classmate was the best.

That said, below is the shot of Misty 42.

Misty 42 – an F-4 flown my the Missouri Air National Guard. Photo by Tom Roush – from an Ohio Air National Guard KC-135.

…and just recently I found a video that someone else had taken that’s pretty accurate for what it was like.

The above shot would have been taken just before the video starts.

PS – years later – I got back in touch with him and sent him this story.

His response: “Tom, you have Lived!”

🙂

Point and click

February 3, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 28 comments


I’ve got my ‘every six months’ checkup going on to see if the cancer they killed in me a few years back is still dead.  I had it twice – between two of the checkups it came back – so I don’t – shall we say, ‘count my chickens before they hatch’.

As a result, these checkups are generally preceded by two weeks of anxiety that builds and builds and builds until I get the results back.

I mentioned to a fellow at work that it was happening, and he said, “So, you must be used to it by now.”

I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that it’s not something you “get” used to…

I tried to find a way to explain it – and finally told him this:

“It’s like every six months, someone holds a gun to your head, and they slowly squeeze the trigger.  You can hear the springs in the gun compressing, you feel the muzzle shake a little as their muscles quiver, and you tense up, anticipating the explosion.  Adrenaline pours through your body.  You try to keep from shaking, from crying, because the gun exploded twice before, and you don’t want to go through that again.

This time, there’s a loud “click” of the hammer slamming down on an empty chamber.  Just that sound explodes in your ears. Every muscle in your body jolts tight as the sound echoes – then rings away.

No bullet this time.

Good.

But it takes awhile to recover.

And no… you don’t ever get used to it.

Tom Roush

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