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Cleo…

July 15, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment


It was in “Athens-by-God-Ohio” that I met her, the feistiest, orneriest, funniest little old lady (short of my mom) I could ever hope to meet.

Cleo was 88, and I was there in Grad school a number of years ago, getting my master’s degree in photojournalism – and I was there without a car.  This limited the stories I could do to pretty much walking or busing distance, and I found that Cleo lived just down the street.

Cleo was as independent as they come, and lived alone, in her own house.  She did her own grocery shopping, did her own chores, and spent occasional afternoons at the senior center in town playing cards or just reminiscing with the dwindling group of friends her own age she could relate to.

Her kids thought she was too old to live by herself, so they decided that she needed to be moved into a nursing home.

In Columbus.

68 miles away.

She disagreed, but it seemed that they were pretty insistent, and they moved her there.

Remember “feisty”?

Well, she promptly hopped a Greyhound back to Athens.

They didn’t mess with her anymore after that.

In talking to her, I found that she did her chores on Saturday, and since I was trying to find a story – I thought that it would be interesting to see what kinds of stories could be told in the pictures I could get of her doing that – so I made an appointment with her for Saturday morning around 10:00.  After we talked and joked a little, I told her that her job was to ignore me, and to just do what she would normally do.

And she did..

She swept.

She dusted.

…and she mopped.

Now when she mopped, she put on these old floppy galoshes, grabbed a bucket of water and whatever cleaner she used, and sloshed water on the floor and mopped it up.  There was no grace to the movements, no pretense.  She wasn’t putting on a show for me, in fact, she was in her own little world, and completely ignoring me, which was just perfect.

I took some pictures of the mop and the galoshes, thinking that would make a good detail shot, and then, as I was focusing, she picked up the bucket and started for the back door.  I followed, getting a shot of her opening the old, dilapidated screen door, and at that moment, the light came on in my head – she was going to throw the water off the back porch!

I literally jumped past her as she hung the mop onto a string, spinning 180 degrees in mid air so I landed facing her somewhere in the middle of the little back yard.  I must have instinctively focused the lens (a 24mm Nikkor) somewhere in mid air because I don’t remember doing it.  I hammered down on the shutter release for the motor drive of my Nikon FM-2 just as she did her back swing to lob the water off the porch, and got a series of 5 shots of the water sloshing out of the bucket into the yard.

Number 3 was the best.

1/250th of a second at f/8.  It wasn’t an easy print.  I printed it as high contrast as I could get – but that meant that the highlights (specifically her right arm, where the sleeve ends and the arm begins) were blasted out pure white and needed to be burned down so you could see detail.  I dodged out the galoshes, making sure you could see them, and used a touch of potassium ferricyanide on the wet mop hanging on the string to make it less of a blob.  I burned the wall of her house down a little darker (photographically, not in real life) so it would fade into the background a little, bringing the water up a bit in the process.

She was 88 years old back in 1987, so I’m sure she’s gone now, but she was a neat lady.  I’m glad to have known her.

Cleo and mop

Cleo throwing the mop water out. © 1987 Tom Roush

432 Slipped Disks…

July 9, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment


Many years ago, my mom and dad decided they wanted a fish pond in the back yard.  Now since fish ponds aren’t something you can just get at the local hardware store, it had to be “assembled” and “installed”.
Now installing a fish pond involves removing a lot of dirt out from where the fish pond is about to be, and it is definitely one of those things that involves sweat equity.  By the time you’re done, those fish better dang well be happy they’re there, because it took a lot of work to get them there.  She’d done a good bit, if not all of the work to do the installation – and had a vested interest in keeping those fish alive.

On the flip side of things, while gold fish aren’t really all that expensive, the idea of something taking the fish that, say, hadn’t earned the fish with that sweat equity, that just – well – it irritated mom.

A lot.

And one day, a poor, unfortunate creature made the incredibly bad decision to go fishing.

Now some of the creatures that had gone fishing in mom’s fish pond were raccoons, and they were moderately successful.  Some of the creatures were neighborhood cats, who just couldn’t seem to ignore the little orange – what would you call them, “containers of food”? – swimming  around in there.

Note – the image you have in your mind of these creatures fishing does not involve little raccoons or kitty cats sitting there in little kitty sized chairs, with kitty or raccoon sized fishing poles, waiting for the little fishies to bite.  They got a little more intimately involved than that, and got very close to the water, and then just scooped the fish out with their claws.  Kind of like combing some grunk out of your hair, only instead of hair, it was water, and instead of grunk it was a fish.

But this day was different.

This day the creature was running a little short on claws, and actually, a little short on fur.  See, one of the creatures that apparently liked hanging around mom’s fish pond watching said fish was a fairly large garter snake.

Now garter snakes aren’t poisonous, we used to play with them when we were kids, my cousin, bless her fuzzy little heart, would find baby ones and put them in her pocket, then come into the house with her hands full (note: her hands were ALWAYS full in these situations) and ask her mom, “Mommy, can you get the dime out of my pocket?” (it didn’t matter what she asked for – the goal was to get her mom’s hands in her pocket.)  Just so you know, her mom HATED snakes.  Her mom reached into her pocket expecting to find a dime, and instead found something that gave her an absolutely astonishing case of the heebie jeebies as she found, with her fingers, an itty bitty snake.

The polite thing to say here at this point is that my cousin laughed.

A lot.

And my aunt freaked…

A lot.

It’s one of those things you can look back on and laugh.

Well, my cousin can, not sure if my aunt can.

And that’s the kind of stuff we did as kids with garter snakes.

But… this is my mom’s story…

My mom was a little different when it came to snakes, and one day she’d found that not only was her fish pond short one fish, but the creature that had gone fishing had done so without a pole of any kind…

It was the snake.

And it most definitely upset mom.  That was HER fish, from HER pond, and no dang snake was going to take that fish from her without a fight.

So she did the first thing she knew she needed to do.

She got her camera, and took a picture – just to prove she wasn’t telling a “fish tale”.

Then she got the pitchfork – mom’s goal was to scoop the snake up and fling it away from the fish pond.

However, snakes are very good at slithering, and slithering snakes sneak stealthily away from (quick, what’s a word for pitchfork that starts with ‘s’?”).  Okay, let’s see if we have all this right…

  • Get picture of snake trying to eat goldfish… Check…
  • Got goldfish out of snake and back in water…. In progress.
  • Oh – yeah… Wail on snake with pitchfork… Not checked…

See, it was only then, after she’d gotten a picture of it that she realized scooping said snake up was not going to work, and the snake made what might have been a bit of a mistake somewhere in there.

See, mom wanted the snake gone… She didn’t necessarily want it dead, she just wanted it gone. She had more invested in her fish (by a couple of bucks) than she did in the snake, and so among other things, it was simple economics…

The snake needed to go.

But the snake didn’t go, and then it looked up at her, and then, suddenly, thousands of years of history of women and snakes converged into one moment in time.  I’m sure that if Eve had had the same pitchfork Mom did, the whole Garden of Eden thing would have been a WHOLE lot different.

Mom started absolutely wailing on that snake as if it was the son of Beelzebub himself.  (Come to think of it…J).

This snake did not know what hit it.

In fact this snake didn’t know what KEPT hitting it, but it most definitely let go of the fish.

The slithering snake dropped the goldfish right about then – so she snagged it and threw it back into the pond, where it swam speedily away…

Mom tossed the fish back into the pond, then grabbed the snake by the tail.  It was as long as from her waist to the ground.  It then made the mistake of looking up at her – with goldfish scales in its mouth – and it hissed.

Bad snake…

And the pitchfork was used, once again, for a purpose for which it was not designed, but was quite suitable for.

The snake, by that point, was getting to be pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.  In fact, with apologies to Johnny Hart, trying to slither with 432 slipped disks was a bit of a challenge, and it was then that she carried it a few hundred feet away – across a little creek, and hucked the snake over there like Indiana Jones would have flung his whip.

And the funny thing is – that snake never bothered mom or her fish again…

Go figure.

Heeere snakey snakey snakey....

One live snake… One live goldfish… (this will soon change)

Jet Skis, Water Skiing, and Blue Jeans

June 24, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments


A few years ago, I worked at Microsoft in a department that was producing a huge product, one that took a couple of years to build.  There was this time, during a release cycle, that we called ‘crunch mode’ – kind of an ‘all hands on deck’ type of a thing, where dinner was brought in so we didn’t feel we had to go home to eat with our families, and could work a few more hours.  Several of us would joke, wryly, that we only worked half days at Microsoft… You know… 12 hours on… 12 hours off… Fridays were greeted with “Thank God it’s Friday, only two more workdays till Monday!”

There are some who would have said the schedule was brutal.

There is every likelihood that they would have been right.

Crunch mode lasted for months.  It was, to put it mildly, very wearing on folks, and their families

Now Microsoft, to its credit, realized that this constant ‘crunch mode’ was hard on morale, and as a result, whenever there was any kind of milestone achievement, they’d have a party.  When we shipped a product, oh Lordy, you haven’t seen a party till you’ve seen Microsoft put on a party.

So after about a year of crunch mode, we shipped a version of Site Server, and had what they called a “ship” party at a park at the south end of Lake Sammamish.

If you wanted to, you could take the afternoon off, go play games, go water skiing, or ride a jet ski, or just hang out by the grill where they were barbequeing herds of formerly wild animals, grilling fields of corn on the cob, and mixing up just-shy-of-Olympic-sized swimming pools of cole slaw.

It was, in a word, impressive.

When I got there, some of my coworkers were slicing through the water behind the ski boat, and all three of the jet skis were out there cutting swaths into the lake.

My boss’s boss (Mike) was eating with a friend at one of the picnic tables, saw me wandering in, and suggested I go play, as I’d been working pretty hard.

I looked out at the jet skis, and realized, with a start, that…

–          while I’d never ridden one,

–          kind of thought they were a rich person’s toy,

–          and couldn’t possibly imagine buying one…

…deep, deep inside, I REALLY wanted to ride one.

And there was absolutely nothing keeping me from riding this one.

Heh…

So I went out there to see what it would take to make this happen, and it turned out all I had to do was fill out some paperwork, wade out into the water, and get on.

Well, I was wearing a pair of boots, so that wouldn’t do, so I took them and my socks off, then scrunched my pants up so they wouldn’t get wet, signed the paperwork, and waded out to climb on.

Once on, I was given an astoundingly brief set of instructions,

“Squeeze this to go, let up to stop.”

“Go easy on it till you get into the deep water, we don’t want to be sucking rocks into the impeller”

“Don’t do donuts”, and

“It won’t steer unless you’re hitting the gas”.

“You’ve got 10 minutes.  Go.”

Kind of dazed, I chugged out into the deep water, conscious that the three cylinder, two stroke engine sounded an awful lot like my old Saab, and decided to make the most of my 10 minutes.

The waves were lapping gently at the hull, the ski boat was doing a circuit, and I was trying to get used to the idea that this thing underneath me that was moving in such an unsteady way, was actually safe.

“Okay – here goes nothing…”

I hit the gas.

Oh…………….

My………………………….

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The acceleration was unbelievable.  I was at 50 mph before I knew what had happened.

I reached back and grabbed my eyeballs before they got lost in the lake.

The handlebars, which until moments earlier, had moved freely in my hands, now felt like they’d been dropped into quick drying concrete.

The air, which until moments earlier, had only been something I was breathing, was now trying to rip my glasses off my head.

The water, which until moments earlier, had been something you could dive into, was now the consistency of granite as the jet ski skittered and bounced across it.

And the jet ski itself, which until moments earlier, had been this unsteady, gangly kid at his first time on a bike, was now this fierce monster, ready to conquer anything in front of it.

The speed slowly crept to 60, and I saw I’d be crossing the wake of the ski boat, so I slowed down and tried to turn a little bit.

This was when I remembered the instructions “it won’t steer unless you’re hitting the gas.”

Coasting straight at something while you’ve got the steering turned hard to one side is a little disconcerting.

I hit the gas, and the strange thing was it steered from the rear, like a turbocharged forklift – a little unusual if you’re used to things steering from the front, but the fellow was right, it did not steer unless you hit the gas.

I suddenly understood the allure of these things… I could now say I had ridden one, and, given the price tag, still thought they were a more of a rich person’s toy, and still couldn’t imagine buying one. But wow… I definitely understood why people bought them.

I know I used up more than my allotted 10 minutes, but finally headed back in.  They waved me to slow down early, and I idled in, the adrenaline still pumping, my hair firmly blown back, and a grin superglued to my face.

A line was thrown out for me to catch, and I was pulled the rest of the way to the dock.

When I got off, I had to step into the water again and wade back to shore and then up to the picnic table where I’d left my boots and socks and everything.  When I put my boots on, I noticed that my pants had skootched down a little bit while I was out on the lake, and the bottom two inches or so had gotten wet as I waded back to shore.

–          Now have you ever had a snappy comeback to a question, just perfect, witty, urbane, amusing – but thought of it an hour, or a day, or a week too late?

–          I am the master of coming up with a snappy comeback at least an hour too late.  In fact, sometimes my brain chews on something for months, honing it until it comes up with an amazing, but completely useless comment because it’s too stinking late.

–          For once in my life, I did not have that problem.

Mike was still sitting there with his buddy when I walked by, with my two inches of wet jeans.

“Whatcha been doin?”

“Water Skiing.”

Mike’s buddy’s jaw dropped.

Then Mike, bless him, ‘explained’ with an absolutely straight face, “He’s very good.”

And as I walked away, I couldn’t help but smile.

==

The Prodigal Father

June 17, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 3 comments


Have you heard the story of the prodigal son?

It’s in Luke 15:11-32.

Read it – then read verse 20 again.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

Why did he do that?

Let me tell you a story that might help you understand.

One day I got home before my son did, and for the first time in a long time, I would be able to make him an after school snack, and just sit with him while he ate and talked about his day.

I stood at the window, waiting, watching, remembering.

This was my son, the one I’d fed from a bottle.

The one I’d changed thousands of diapers on.

The one I’d burped and who’d burped on me.
My son.

The one whose first steps I saw.

The one I’d played with and loved and taught to ride a bike.

The one whose skinned knees I cleaned and bandaged.

My son.

He was the one I’d seen grow as a cub scout, as a young soccer player, soon to be a football player, and later on, an Eagle Scout.

My son.

And while looking out the window, waiting for him, I slowly began to understand what verse 20 means.

I stood there – yearning for a chance to share some time with him, and suddenly I understood why the father of the prodigal son “saw him while he was a long way off”.

He couldn’t see him from “a long way off” unless he was actively watching for him.

And as I was standing there, it was as if thousands of years vanished in a kinship as two fathers stood, waiting for their sons. The sons they loved – we loved, and cherished, and wanted the best for. I could feel him, and almost see him standing there, next to me, the prodigal son’s father.

And I wondered…

How long had he been doing that?

How many days had he stood there, watching, waiting, hoping?

The father didn’t know all the son had done while he was gone – it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had returned. That – that was worth celebrating!

He couldn’t slaughter the fatted calf unless he had one! That meant, in all that watching and waiting, he was expecting the best! He was expecting his son to come home.

He slaughtered the fatted calf to celebrate his son’s return.

I fixed an after school snack for my hungry boy.

And I understood, as I sat there, with my son, chatting about his day, why the prodigal son’s father stood there and watched for his.

He loved him. He cherished him. He wanted what was best for him. He wanted – he wanted to spend time with him.

And I realized that there are times when we go off on our merry way – wandering through the fields of pigs in our lives (verse 16) – that our Father is standing on His front porch, watching, waiting, pacing…

Waiting for us to come home so He can slaughter the fatted calf for a celebration….

…or sit at the kitchen table after school and share a baloney sandwich with us.

Synergistic Stupidity, The Marshmallow Mobile, and the Little Tractor that Could…

June 10, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment


When I was a kid – growing up in Roy, Washington, the things we did for fun were limited not by batteries, but by our imagination.  Electronics like video games and the like were simply not a part of the definition of fun.

Gasoline, heavy metal, and explosives were – but I’m getting ahead of myself…

It’s one of those things you talk about to your kids when you’re a grown up, you know, the “Back when I was a kid…” kinds of things –

One of the things I’d do often was ride the bike I used on my paper route out onto Fort Lewis, over by Chambers Lake, and just explore.  One of my customers was also a friend.  He had this late ‘60’s blue iron monster of a car.  No idea what the make was, and it had no distinguishing characteristics other than the following:

  1. It was blue.
  2. It had 4 doors.
  3. It had a V-8 engine.
  4. It had a suspension that rivaled the stiffness of the Sta-Puf Marshmallow® man.

Now there were two types of roads on Fort Lewis:

  1. The kind that had been surveyed, graded, paved, and marked by professionals, and had speed limit signs to keep you on the straight and narrow, so to speak….
  2. The kind that were unsurveyed, ungraded, unpaved, and were made by a teenager driving an M-60 tank. They most definitely didn’t have speed limit signs, because the roads were so rough that a sane person didn’t need them.

Now, sanity aside, guess which ones were the most fun to drive on?

…and guess whose car was just a touch inadequate to use on said roads?

Yup – My buddy Mike’s car with its Marshmallow Suspension just didn’t do too well out there … In fact – there was this one place where – well, the road wasn’t even a road… See, the water going out of Chambers Lake goes into what’s called Muck Creek… And just as it does – it goes under one of the paved roads.  The thing about this road and the bridge is neither of them were stressed for 60 ton M-60 tanks to drive across – so the Army had put this ford in beside the bridge for the tanks to cross the creek on.  Understand, this isn’t a ford as in Ford car – but ford as in “shallow spot in the stream” – they’d put huge blocks of concrete down so you could drive across/through the creek to get to the other side without sinking in.

That is, if you were driving a tank.

Now somehow, Mike and I had decided, in that synergistic stupidity that only happens when young males make decisions together, in which the decisions made by a group of young males are far, far superior in both the quality and quantity of their stupidity than any one young male could possibly achieve on his own, that his car would be an absolutely optimal piece of equipment to get stuc – er – to drive through said creek, across the ford and up the other side. The fact that a perfectly good bridge was right there was completely irrelevant. Oh – I didn’t mention the fact that the banks of the creek at that point were actually rather steep, the rocks in that area were all round – like ball bearings, and scraping the bottom of the car on those rocks as you went down was to be expected.

That is, if you weren’t driving a tank.

So, Mike driving, we slowly coaxed the car down until water was washing over the tires – and then started up the other side – at which point things started scraping again and those old tires really didn’t work too well.  Now, being guys, the mentality there was simple: If a little power wasn’t getting us up the other side of the creek, well, more power would be better.

Right?

Riiiiiight….

Mike’s old, smooth tires on the smooth, wet rocks of the creek bank simply didn’t offer any traction, and try as he might, all that hitting the gas did was dry off the rocks as the tires started steaming the creek water off them.

Hmmm…

While we were trying to figure our way out of this conundrum, lo and behold a couple of guys showed up… in a tricked out 1954 GMC suburban… (by ‘tricked out’ I mean it actually still had functional paint and had mag wheels.  Think about what kind of surface mag wheels are good for – if “round wet rocks” isn’t at the top of your list, you’re on the right track…)

So these guys figured they were going to be our heroes and save the day…

They backed their suburban down the bank in front of the Marshmallow Mobile®, tied a rope to it, hit the gas, and promptly got stuck up to their axles.

So – big picture here – the Marshmallow Mobile® is in the middle of the creek.  A rope’s tying it to the Suburban on the bank.  Both of them hitting the gas only gets them up as far as – well, both of them getting stuck a little further up the bank.

Wait – it gets better…

Lots of testosterone fueled pondering ensued – which was interrupted by a third vehicle driving by, seeing the commotion, and the driver realizing that he, being far more manly than these poor, wretched peasants stuck in the creek, would be far better able to get us out than we were…

Little did he know…

To be honest, I don’t remember the kind of car that that one was – all I remember is standing on the bridge, looking down at three vehicles, all tied together, with their 3 V-8 engines putting out several hundred horsepower, and the only achievement was that the gas was being turned into smoke and steam from the tires on the wet rocks.

After a few minutes of this I realized that clearly the thing that was missing wasn’t power, it was traction.  So I walked over to my Grampa’s farm (my options being rather limited since all available vehicles were busy either farting exhaust bubbles into the creek or redistributing the gravel on the bank) to see if I could borrow one of his tractors to help pull the folks (and my buddy Mike and his Marshmallow-Mobile®) out.

Grampa wasn’t there – in fact, nobody was, so in my (ahem) Infinite Teenage Wisdom ®, I figured forgiveness would be far easier to obtain than permission, so I ‘borrowed’ one.  This was an old Ford Tractor that had a transmission with 12 speeds forward and 3 in reverse.  First, as you might imagine, was pretty low.

When I got back to the bridge – all the cars were tied together right where I’d left them, just like the children’s story, the “Little Engine that Could” – only with three stuck locomotives and no caboose.  I looped a chain from the back of the tractor to frame of the car in the front, put the tractor in first, and, with 3 V-8 engines roaring plus a little 34 horsepower tractor chugging – everyone doing the delicate gas pedal dance of hitting the gas hard enough to try to move, but not enough to run into the person in front of them (it was a bit of a challenge), our little choo-choo-train of cars made it out of the creek.

We untied the ropes, unhooked the chains, and went our separate ways.  I took the tractor back to Grampa’s and put it back in EXACTLY the same spot it had been in (still nobody home).

And… I never volunteered to ride in the Marshmallow Mobile® again.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I was ever asked to.

Moral to the story?

Heck, when I started writing, I was just writing for fun, and I didn’t think there would be one – but I guess there is one, and that’s this:

Raw power will not always get you out of the trouble that gravity can get you into.  Sometimes it’s the steady application of a very small amount of power in exactly the right place that will do the trick, rather than hundreds of snorting, whinnying, or roaring horses applied in the wrong place or the wrong way.

B-52’s, Karma, and Compromises…

June 3, 2010 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 4 comments


Another one of the stories I told Michael about his heritage, this one about his Grampa, his step-great-Grampa, if there is such a thing, and a B-52.

My dad was stationed at Castle Air Force Base in Merced, California in 1967, where the 93rd Bombardment Group was based.  The 93rd at the time flew B-52’s, and they trained pilots and crews both in the planes and with simulators.  They did this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  When they weren’t flying the airplanes, these pilots and crews were in the simulators, practicing.

And my dad fixed those simulators.

A few hours north of Merced is Santa Rosa, where dad’s mom and stepdad lived.  Dad’s stepdad, we’ll call him “Grampa Bill” fancied himself to be an artist and photographer.  This is a point that could be argued pretty heavily.  And, it turns out, when dad and mom were a young couple and dad was stationed elsewhere, Grampa Bill wanted to take some photographs of mom that could at the very least be described as ‘inappropriate’.  I won’t go into any more detail other than to say that when dad found out, he stormed in to see his commander and asked if he could have some leave so that he could go pour a goodly amount of chlorine into the gene pool.  His commander declined the request, but sent someone to check on mom.  She was fine, but that incident cemented the relationship between dad and Grampa Bill into something very, very simple: Dad hated Grampa Bill, with a passion. And honestly, as I see it, he was right.

Now it’s not that he could have done anything about it overtly, but as the years went by — well, you’ve likely found out at some point in your life, there is this thing that’s known by several names…

Some call it “The Golden Rule”,

Some call it “What goes around, comes around.”

And some call it “Karma.”

And when you find yourself watching, almost from the outside,

…how “The Golden Rule” is turning things toward you,

…and you find that things that have gone around are coming around,

…or, put another way, watching Karma setting up a situation for you – whatever you call it, it’s almost impossible not to smile.

Such was the case with dad and Grampa Bill.

Dad worked with or near airplanes.

Grampa Bill wanted to take pictures of airplanes.

More specifically, he wanted to take a picture of a B-52, taking off.

…and dad could make that happen.

Now the thing was, Grampa Bill didn’t want to get a picture with a little camera he’d be holding in his hand. He wanted to shoot the picture with a camera that looked like a small accordion and came in a small suitcase. It was a film camera, the kind that uses film not in rolls, but in sheets, 4 inches by 5 inches in size.  You had to look through the actual camera, not a viewfinder, and to be able to see the picture you were about to take, you had to have your head under a dark cloth to focus and frame the shot on the ground glass (think frosted glass) in the back of the camera.  This image you saw on the ground glass would be upside down and backwards.  When you were satisfied that it was framed right, you shoved a film holder into the back of the camera by the ground glass and from there on out you couldn’t see through it.  You closed the open shutter and pulled out the slide protecting the film from stray light.  Then and only then was everything set.  If you opened the shutter at that point, the film would be exposed, and you’d have your picture.

It was, as you can imagine, not a fast process, and you can probably figure out that it’s not a camera you would use to take images of, say, moving objects.

Like, say…

A B-52…

Taking off…

Toward you…

But that’s precisely what Grampa Bill wanted to do.

At Castle Air Force Base.

Where dad worked.

Where they flew B-52’s.

And…

…and an absolutely evil plot started festering in dad’s brain.

See, dad knew several things that Grampa Bill didn’t know:

He knew how much of the runway the plane would use up to do a normal takeoff.

He knew that aerodynamically, while most planes take off with their noses pointed to the sky, when a B-52 takes off, the pilot actually has to aim the plane 2 degrees nose down to climb for the first little bit.

More importantly, Dad knew the pilots flying these planes.

Now, if you happen to be standing at the end of a runway – and on the other end there’s a half million pounds of raw power accelerating directly toward you out of a black wall of smoke created by not 1, not 2, but 8 of some of the most powerful jet engines of the time, there’s a good chance you’re going to leave something in your pants as it goes overhead – liquid or solid, doesn’t matter.

If the person you asked to get you to this position knew the pilot, and also had a years long score to settle with you, those chances would likely lean toward the solid, and it would best be time to start digging yourself a hole.

Remember?

Dad worked on the B-52 flight simulators – so he knew, and was acquainted with, all the pilots who trained in them.

And he knew this one.

Dad had explained to the pilot that he’d be out there one Sunday with his step dad, who wanted to take a photo of this takeoff, and as a last request, said to him, “Do you think you could keep it on the ground a little longer this time?”

There was a look between them, and as is often the case, words were not exchanged, in that guy to guy way we men often communicate. But the pilot clearly understood what was meant, and he did indeed agree to keep it down on the ground…

…a little longer.

Every Air Force base has what they call a ‘perimeter road’ – a road that goes around the perimeter of the airfield.  You are not supposed to get any closer to the runway than that road, and even while you’re on it, you’re not supposed to stop once you cross under the flight path.

Dad and Grampa Bill got into one of the Air Force trucks and headed out toward the runway.

Grampa Bill was having trouble believing his good fortune.

Dad turned the truck off the perimeter road and up toward the runway, where there was a sign that started off with, “Authorized Personnel Only” and got significantly more threatening with every word, ending in something along the lines of “Deadly Force Authorized”.

They drove past the sign.

Dad drove Grampa Bill out to the end of the runway to pick out a good vantage point to take the picture from.

Grampa Bill’s excitement grew.  This was better than he’d hoped.  He’d be allowed to get far, far closer than he’d dare dreamed.

In taking him past the signs, dad also took him in past the approach lights at the end of the runway, so they wouldn’t clutter up the picture.

When they stopped, he was almost beside himself. Grampa Bill proudly set up his camera, meticulously judging exposure, focus, depth of field, while 2 miles away, the B-52’s pilot got the his bird into takeoff position.

He’d finished the pre-takeoff checklist with his copilot and pushed the 8 throttles to takeoff power.  The plane shook as the jet exhaust made a black wall of smoke behind it.

It took a few seconds for the thrust to build and the sound to reach the far end of the runway, but once it got there, the deep rumble of raw power stayed, getting louder with each passing second.

The pilot held the plane back with its huge brakes and waited till they and all systems were cleared for takeoff.

He’d told his copilot what was happening, and while they didn’t deviate from the checklists or official cockpit language, they did share a grin under their oxygen masks.

They were given clearance, and the plane started to roll.

Grampa Bill sensed the movement and tried to hold his excitement down.  The ability to stand right at the end of a runway while an airplane, not just an airplane, but the mighty B-52 took off directly overhead was an astoundingly rare treat.

Nearby, Dad stood by, calmly leaning against the front fender of the truck, also conscious of the opportunity of an astoundingly rare treat.

Now depending on its load, a B-52 has a takeoff speed of about 163 mph, and its wings sag when it’s on the ground, to the point where the engineers at Boeing designed extra landing gear out there just to support the wingtips.  As the plane accelerates, those wings start to fly themselves first, before they create enough lift to take the plane up with them.  They have a range of about 22 feet of ‘flap’ at the tips – so as the plane got closer, and faster, and bigger, and louder, those wings started flying,

But the nose was still pointed directly at Grampa Bill.

And his camera…

On the Tripod…

At the end of the runway…

The pilot, a major, kept the plane on the centerline, and felt the yoke slowly come alive in his hands as the 8 engines overcame inertia and brought them ever closer to takeoff speed.

Grampa Bill saw the tremendous contrast between the black wall of smoke, the white and silver plane, and the incredibly bright landing lights and wondered, for a split second, how that would affect the exposure setting on the camera.

The pilot felt the rumbling cease and the plane smooth out as the wheels left the pavement – and then aimed the nose down the 2 degrees, at a small tripod with a black box on it just off the end of the runway, to start the climb.

At that moment, Grampa Bill’s thoughts of exposure, focus, and timing were suddenly replaced with a rather urgent need to decide between liquid and solid.

Beside the tripod, Grampa Bill tried to be manly and stand his ground, but from his angle, the plane just couldn’t climb fast enough, it wasn’t even aimed up – in fact, it looked like it was actually aimed down, right at him. Those 8 engines, inhaling more air in a second than he breathed in a year, looked like they were going to inhale him, vaporize him, and blast the remaining bits into that huge wall of smoke behind the plane.

In the cockpit, the pilot thought he saw movement near the tripod just before it disappeared below his windscreen.

Below, the plane’s shadow passed with the fury of a tornado, the violence of an earthquake, and the heat of a blast furnace.  The jet blast tore the canvas top off the truck they’d driven out to the runway in, knocked the camera and tripod over, and sent them all diving for whatever cover they could find.  (This being an airbase, the only cover available was the truck they’d come out in).

And in the decision between liquid and solid, a compromise was made.

Both.

The last time I saw them, all the pictures Grampa Bill had taken were being stored in boxes in a chest of drawers in the attic.  They’re 4 x 5 negatives – or sometimes 4 x 5 positives.  I’ve looked through them all.

And there’s no picture of a B-52.

I still find myself smiling at that…

And somehow, I think those many years ago, under that truck, his ears still ringing, my dad smiled, too…

(C) 2010 – Tom Roush

(note: here’s a short 2 minute video of several B-52’s taking off – from beside the runway – not at the end of it, and they’re taking of higher than the Major did – but it’ll give you an idea of what it was like.

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…

: )

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.

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!”

🙂

Tom Roush

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