In reality, I’m a pretty boring guy. At least I thought so until I start recalling how much of the world I’ve seen and some of the experiences I’ve had. They say, “Judgement comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgement.” I would agree with that statement. Especially after I tried to put a frozen hotdog on the end of my knife to cook it over an open fire. I learned the hard way that hotdogs, while still frozen will allow a knife to penetrate completely through them and into whatever is forcing the hotdog onto the knife. In this case it was my left hand. I still have the scar on my hand where the knife entered my palm and the tip exited the back of my hand. I was lucky I skillfully missed tendons, nerves and bones. The scar is a reminder that I need to use common sense when handling both a sharp knife and hotdogs.
As a young boy, about six years old, my parents moved my brother, sister and I from beautiful sunny southern California to the dusty logging and mining town of Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho. Being in a new school and with a desire to make my mark as the toughest first grader, I was a frequent flyer to the principal’s office. If it wasn’t because I was fighting or doing whatever I could to disrupt the class, I was damaging something. First grade was just a blur for me. I hardly remember it. What I do remember is my teacher, Mrs. Conde was nice and I really liked her. (I don’t think she would have said the same thing about me.)
Second grade was when things really started going downhill. My teacher, Mrs. Perkins was a sweet lady with curly red hair that I could easily make stand on end. She also had the temperament of a redhead. (My sister is a redhead so I can speak from experience) Needless to say, we clashed from day one. I only remember a few things from second grade, but what I do remember is Mrs. Perkins had a red ping pong paddle and a green ping pong paddle and she would let me choose which one I got spanked with. (Daily by the way) I think she woke up every morning smiling because she knew she was going to give me a hack that day.
Around Christmastime of that school year, I finally had enough and took the green ping pong paddle and laid it against a curb at recess and broke it in half hoping it would alleviate half my hacks. It did not of course. She just no longer gave me a choice of colors.
The final straw with Mrs. Perkins came just after we returned to school from our Christmas vacation. Everybody was happy to get back to school and show off their new clothes. Including Mrs. Perkins. One January day, she made the mistake of leaving her brand new white sweater draped over the chair at her desk. For some reason I must have been in an especially rotten mood that day, because I took her sweater and threw it over the hanging fluorescent classroom lights. Now, if you remember those lights, you know that they would get hot and the dust build up on them would sometimes get hot enough to start smoking. In fact, there were times when we would scream “smoke!” just to get someone to pull the fire alarm so we could extend our recess for a little longer. (I never pulled a fire alarm) Anyway, this happened to be one of those days. Her sweater landed right over the top of the fluorescent light’s ballast, which if you didn’t know, is the hottest part of the light. Within minutes, the sweater started smoking, I started panicking and the class started screaming. Mrs. Perkins had no idea what was going on until she heard the chaos and turned around to face the class. What she saw was kids screaming, some running for the door in anticipation of the fire alarm being pulled and then she noticed her brand new sweater smoldering near the ceiling. Of course the fire alarm was pulled only to have Mrs. Perkins reach up and pull the smoking piece of yarn from the light and start stepping on it to make sure any flames were out.
This little stunt landed me in the principal’s office again and I’m sure my parents were called.
I think the principal conspired with Lynden Johnson to have a hotline or red phone installed between the school and my house. My parents were regular visitors to the school. I’m sure they wondered then if I would ever turn out to be anything good.
More of my antics to come.
I promised a little more about me. Here it is!
Later that year, on another excursion of the principal’s office, I helped the custodian with a broken piece of brittle Formica tile. I just happened to have brought my new knife to school that day. I “won” it as a prize in my Cracker Jacks box and was eager to give it a try. As I was sitting in a hard plastic office chair waiting to be escorted into the principal’s office, I noticed a piece of tile on the floor with a corner missing. I knew it needed to be replaced so I pulled out my trusty knife and opened the blade and went to work. Before the office secretary caught me, I had almost the entire tile broken out and ready for the custodian to do his magic with glue and a new tile square. The secretary and later the principal did not appreciate my help or show any concern for the asbestos I probably inhaled. In fact it only seemed to make matters worse on this particular visit.
Needless to say, I was not invited back to that school for the third grade. I was forced to attend another school not too far away. Now I only had to walk seven blocks in the opposite direction to school instead of the eleven to the north, which I did for two years. The only problem with walking to the south was now I had to walk past the school that was used for our special education students. Back then, special education students were segregated to their own school and not allowed to attend the same school as the “regular kids.” The theory was the “regular” kids would not be held back and the teachers could teach at the appropriate grade level all day long. It kind of made sense, but I’m sure it wasn’t fair.
What made this walk so difficult, is every day as I walked past the old hospital (that’s what it was before they turned into the special ed school), I was reminded of threats that had been made to me should I continue to misbehave in school. Obviously, I was smart enough to correct my mischievous ways for the third grade. I also spent that year getting used to the new school and the lay of the land. As fourth grade rolled around, I was back in my natural form. Dennis the Menace had nothing on me. My teacher, Mrs. Benner saw something in me that others overlooked. She saw that I was smaller than the other boys in my class and after a school year of daily fights both at school and on the walk home, she suggested I be held back a year so I could be in class with boys my same size. She must have owned chihuahuas because that what I was. I was not afraid to fight anybody. And who knew TV’s Championship Wrestling wasn’t real. I guarantee you the moves worked only in real life there was blood and crying. One day after school, while walking home, another boy, my friend, Tim Lovell whipped a willow twig at me and as it hit the back of my head, the tip wrapped around snapping into my right eye. Needless to say, the Chihuahua came to life. By the time I was done beating on poor old Tim, he was bloody from head to toe and I had his blood all over my clothes and new shoes. This was real bad. I’m sorry Tim.
The most painful part of this entire experience was Tim and I were on our way to a Cub Scout meeting “at my house” where my mother was our den leader. When we got home, she took one look at me and kicked me out of Cub Scouts. She never even asked what happened. Mothers have a 6th sense. (Sometimes) I remember a different day, I was of course up to no good and my mom decided I needed a good licking. I also had a 6th sense and took off running before she could cock her arm back and hit me. As we ran through our tiny house my brother, who is just fourteen months younger than me and now in my same grade (Or maybe I was now in his grade) decided to duck behind the corner of a wall to get out of our mom’s way as she chased me through the house. The unfortunate part of this is my parents lived on a pretty tight budget and often times bought clothes and shoes on sale for us kids. That meant we usually had the same style and patterns of clothing. On this particular day, my brother was wearing the same shoes I was wearing and as our mother ran up to the corner of the wall, she noticed toes sticking out wearing the same shoes I was wearing. Without looking, mom reached around the corner and popped my brother on the face. He started crying which only made things worse for me. Not only did mom get after me again, but she made sure she told our dad when he got home from work. I would later learn more about the term “double jeopardy.” The rest of the year was a blur, but I can recall being banished to a different room whenever the Cub Scouts met at our house.
Swim lessons:
I was in about the second grade when our parents decided I needed to learn how to swim. Swim lessons were offered by the City’s Parks and Recreation department and were held at the beginning of June at the city park located along the northshore of Coeur d’ Alene Lake. And the swimming was actually in the lake itself. The insturctors (high school kids) would let us raft out to a swim dock using some sort of floating device and then once on the dock, told us we had to swim to another dock that seemed to be 10 miles away. It was really only 50 to 60 feet away, but for a kid who did not know how to swim, it was terrifying. More so, when the high school kid shoved you into the water without warning. When it came to my turn, I always managed to make it to the other dock, but I would never put my face in the water and swim like they showed us. Because of this, I flunked swim lessons. No matter how many times they told me to swim like them, I refused to put my face in the icy cold water. I think my brother passed on the first go around.
Because of my parent’s strong desire to help me learn to swim, they found an indoor pool at the local YMCA and of course, signed me up for the swim team. I couldn’t swim 10 feet let alone 25 yards from one end of the pool too the other. As time went on, I did learn to swim. Mostly because of a new friend I met there. His name was Brian Reba. His family owned a local grocery store and he was an amazing swimmer. I bet he spent hours helping me learn to swim and eventually, I got pretty good. Not Brian Reba good, but really good. I think it was easier because the water was warmer. Belonging to the YMCA swim team meant competing in swim meets. At first I got my clock cleaned and as time when on, I was doing the clock-cleaning. I raked in some may ribbons of the next few years, we quit displaying them on the bedroom wall.
During this time in my life, my parents would occasionally pack us three kids up and we would all pile into the family “carryall” (This was the precursor to the modern-day Suburban) and drive up to Glacier National Park where we would camp for a week or two. Dad had built a box that fit in the back of the carryall that, when opened, made a kitchen and cooking area for the old Coleman camp stove. We all slept in a very heavy canvas tent that seemed like it took 3 hours to put up and take down. It was terribly hot in the summers and there was no mosquito netting to help prevent those flying vampires from entering through the cracks. Sleeping in a tent in Glacier National Park was risky business back then. Not only did you have the mosquitoes trying to drain every drop of blood out of you, but there were bears. A lot of bears. At least once every trip, our parents would wake us up in the middle of the night and scoot us into the carryall while Yogi and his friends helped themselves to our trash. It was about as routine to us as it was for the bears.
At some point in our youth, dad built a fiberglass canoe that we could strap to the top of the carryall and haul up to Glacier with us. We generally always camped at Kintla or Bowman Lakes and dad was always eager to get the canoe in the water. He also always took either my brother or myself with him. (I think it was so we could do the rowing) Even though we could swim like fish, we always wore our life jackets in this canoe. Partly because dad made it, but more so because the water was so cold, if we fell in, we would either freeze or drown before swimming 50 feet. One lesson I learned from these camping trips was, if you’re going to go camping, go somewhere without bears, mosquitoes and icebergs in the water. Thus, as I got older and began to experience the world on my own, I found I was much happier around palm trees and sand.
On one particular day, at Kintla Lake, our dad took my brother with him in the little canoe. They would troll with their fishing poles held over the side or locked in rod-holders attached to the small boat’s gunwales. Anyway, they were trolling along and all of a sudden a very large dolly varden (bull trout) grabbed onto my brother’s line and began towing that poor little canoe and her crew across the lake. It was several hours before they made it back to camp and I think mom was worried enough, she contacted the park rangers. When my brother and dad walked into camp holding this lunker of a fish, we all thought they were joking. At the time, it was the biggest fish I had ever seen. Rather than dad checking to see if it was a record breaker, we ate it. And that night the bears got the leftovers.
One of my most memorable moments during this period of my life came when, as a cub scout (before I got kicked out), we wrote letters to some of our local military troops in Vietnam. I just happened to draw the name of Dale Baltzell. In a round-about way, we knew his family. My mom got her hair done at the same place his mom did. Anyway, I sent Dale a letter and forgot about it and him. Several months later, I was playing outside our house when a military man came walking up our driveway. I didn’t recognize him, but he asked if my name was Alan. I told him it was and he asked if my parents were home. Part of me was very curious at this point. I couldn’t figure out if the government was coming to get me because of all the goofy things I had gotten away with (hooky-bobbing on school buses, throwing rocks at old, abandoned building windows, etc.) As it turned out, after talking to my mother, this was Dale Baltzell. He was home from Vietnam and decided to look me up. That night he took me to his house where his mother made us dinner, then we all went to see the movie True Grit at the drive in theater. He even gave me a 20 Dong piece (Vietnamese money) that I still have today. After that I never saw or heard from him again until one day, a few years later.
Because of the trouble I was causing and I’m sure many of the other incidents that I thought went unfounded, I was given a choice after my first tour of the fourth grade. I could either attend a Montessori School in the area or get held back where I would be with boys my own size. One afternoon, my parents took me on a tour of the Montessori School and that’s all it took for me to help my parents make up their minds. At least in a public school, I still got to be me. I wasn’t worried about getting “hacks” or sent to the principal’s office, but I was scared to death of the teacher at the Montessori School. I’m sure she was a wonderful person outside of school, but on our visit, all I remember is meeting Satan’s sister. She was mean and unfriendly. She spoke to me like I was the enemy and if my memory serves me well, she even slapped a ruler on the desk for effect. She was pure evil and there was no way I was going to go there. I remember telling myself, I’d hop a freight train out of town before going to that school. Fortunately, I got to remain at my familiar school, but had to suffer the embarrassment of attending the fourth grade again. The other kids may have made fun of me and if they did, I secretly beat them up, but for the most part, my parents got to live in peace after that.
By being held back in the fourth grade, it put my brother and I in the same grade. While we did not have the same teacher or classes together as we got older, we did have the same friends. It was not odd for someone who just met us to ask if we were twins. In our same grade was two sets of fraternal twins. These are twins who do not look the same. I don’t remember if we ever got any mileage out of this, but I doubt we ever tried to pass ourselves off as twins. My brother tended to be quiet and reserved and I’m sure the teachers fought to have him in their classes, while they cast lots to see who got me.
At one point during these grade school years, my parents bought a lake cabin on Hayden Lake in northern Idaho. Actually, I think they traded some vacant lots near North Idaho College for the cabin. In addition to it being remote, it was unfinished and had no running water or electricity. It was also at the far end of the lake. The only way into it was a very long bumpy ride on a dirt road or by boat. More often than not, I think we went by boat. There were several good things about this cabin. We would go there as a family. My brother, little sister, mom, dad and I would get into our little boat loaded down with groceries (and mouse traps) and speed across the lake on a Friday afternoon for a weekend of peace and quiet. It really was great. Very peaceful. It was like camping only in a big building. And the mouse traps, it wasn’t long before my brother and I would get so bored we would have to have a mouse trap fight. Either he or I would hide behind a bed in the upstairs loft and hurl cocked and loaded mouse traps at the other who was preoccupied with something else. These ambushes eventually went both ways and we would lob them back and forth for what seemed like hours. And yes, some of the mouse traps were used. We did not care back then. We rode our bikes without helmets, fought to see who got to lay in the back window of the car, and seatbelts, what seatbelts? My dad even took those out of the cars we had.
Growing up in Coeur d’ Alene was a great. Back then it was a small town. We didn’t even have a McDonalds. A lot of the streets were still dirt and everybody’s parents were working class people who instilled strong work ethics into their children. They were either miners, loggers, worked in mines or logging mills. My dad happened to work for the City. He was one of the guys who helped the city grow by designing sewer systems, curbs and streets. He used to call them “LID’s” which I think stood for “Local Improvement Districts.” Maybe they were an improvement for some people, but for me, the city began to go downhill as more and more people moved in. Luckily, my parents decided the “big city life” of Coeur d’ Alene was not the place to be and bought some farmland in the middle of Washington State.
Overnight, in the early 1970’s, we were farmers, riding motorcycles to change water, driving old cars that our dad would find and try to fix up. I’m sure my dad had no idea what he was doing, but he knew one thing for sure. He was now his own boss and only had to worry about taking care of his family and paying his bills and loans on time. I guess he also needed to worry about my brother. As good as my brother was or is at everything else, my brother was not a good driver. It wasn’t long before he ran one of our old trucks into a piece of irrigation equipment and then backed an old station wagon into a small canal. We were all glad to see him climb out of that one, wet and embarrassed, but alive.
We were also very fortunate in that my mother’s father would come up every summer to help us. He brought his little camp trailer up and tapped into our sewage system and power and lived in his little trailer. My grandma, his wife, was still addicted to the city life and stayed in San Diego where she could socialize with her friends and dignitaries. Grandpa on the other hand, was perfectly comfortable living in his little trailer 1200 miles away from his wife. He grew his own garden and took real pride in his produce. For my entire life, he was retired and as far as I knew, never had a job since the late 1950’s. He knew how to operate equipment and was also very proficient in driving our old combine. Unlike today’s combines, it did not have a comfortable cab to sit in. I think grandpa liked this the most. He always had an old shotgun with him and would lean it, loaded, against the railing as he harvested corn, beans or whatever we raised. As a pheasant would fly up, grandpa would somehow simultaneously continue to drive the combine, reach over, grab his shotgun, shoot the pheasant without missing a single stalk or knocking my brother or I off the deck next to him. Of course it was my brother and I who were his bird dogs and we would spend the next fifteen minutes trapsing around in the hot humid corn field searching for that mortally wounded bird. We (my brother and I) thought this was great. We loved bird hunting without a dog. It was a challenge and my brother got really good at it. Me not so good, but I still had fun. After finding the pheasant and making sure it was dead, we would bring it back to grandpa, who was still moving through the field in the combine. We would jump onto the moving combine. I guess we were safe because the ladder was behind the big drive wheels. After climbing to the platform where grandpa was at, we would tie off the pheasant to the handrail where it would sit and ferment throughout the rest of the hot day. At the end of the day, grandpa would shut things down and grab his stringer of pheasants and cart them back to his trailer. He would spend the rest of the evening preparing these birds by skinning them, boiling them and then taking all the meat off the bones and sticking the meat into a blender. He then made his almost famous pheasant puree. He would spread this pate on sandwiches for the next few days. My brother and I were gone the second he began to boil the birds. It stunk bad and living on a farm with cows, horses, chickens and manure, that says a lot.
My brother and I got our first and only bb guns when we were about 12 years old. They were more for plinking stuff since we were already shooting the .22 rifle and 410 shotgun. The bb guns were never much of a problem until two things happened. First, I killed a tweedy bird and began to perform an autopsy on it and my mom got upset at me. The second problem came to light after we had the mobile butcher come to our farm to slaughter one of our steers. Some of the steers were almost like pets, but others were just plain mean. On this day, we (my brother and I) were pretty excited. One of the mean steers was getting slaughtered. His name was “Kinky” because he had curly hair. I’m sure we both thought Kinky would taste better than any of the others. Our troubles began shortly after the butcher started removing Kinky’s hide. He kept making little comments about finding bb’s under the steer’s hide. I’m not sure how many there were, but it wasn’t too long afterwards when our bb guns were taken away from us.
My brother then saved his money for a new .22 rifle. His very own. He has always been a very good shot and he proved it again with his first shot using his new Western Auto .22 rifle. With open sights and at about 100 years, shooting downhill at about a 20-degree angle, a skunk made the untimely decision of walking across the canal road below. There was nothing but open fields and a small canal behind the skunk so my brother took aim. Without any sort of rest or prior sighting in, he squeezed the trigger on that .22 and the skunk jumped about three feet straight up into the air and fell to the ground dead. We both looked at each other and thought this was going to be a good gun. Now, because the wind usually blew in from the west and the dead skunk was west of the house and because we needed to see exactly where the bullet entered the body, we decided to hike down to it. We figured it hadn’t had time to release any of its stink oil. Anyway, as we started getting closer to it, it became obvious that it was not actually a skunk. It turned out to be our neighbor’s pet cat. I’m not sure who worried the most about that afterwards, but I know neither one of us ever told a sole until now, fifty years later.
So life was great, growing up in the country, going to Church every Sunday and actually having family meals together. It may sound a little corny in today’s world, but this was also back when our family was no different than any other family we knew. Norman Rockwell painted ideal pictures of what life was like back them. It was back when the United States of America was the very best country in the world and we knew it. We were just getting out of the Vietnam War and for the most part, we, the United States was respected and envied by the rest of the world.
It was about this time when my mother opened the local newspaper and saw a picture of a young, newly hired police officer in the near-by town of Moses Lake. It just happened to be Dale Baltzell. I knew instantly our paths were going to cross again. I just hoped it wouldn’t be him pulling me over some day. As it turned out, I eventually began a career as a law enforcement officer and would one day, get to work with him. I think Dale was always that hero I looked up to. He seemed to be the good in the world and I wanted to be like him. I was fortunate enough to know him throughout most of his law enforcement career, but unfortunately, like too many people I know, he retired and passed away shortly thereafter. I still think about him a lot and miss him even more.
After a few years of farming, our dad returned to his city job in Coeur d’ Alene and of course we followed him back. We spent the next couple years living a more rural lifestyle on the outskirts of Coeur d’ Alene. We were able to ride our motorcycles from our house to the nearby Canfield Mountain trails (at least until my brother came home with a ticket from the local county sheriff). It was still a small town, but we could feel it was getting bigger and beginning to close in around us. Somehow, our parents ended up with the same lake cabin on Hayden Lake and just like before, we spent most of our summers and parts of our winters out there. It still did not have running water or electricity, but by now, my brother and I figured out it had good looking neighbor girls. Sadly, on one side of our cabin was our neighbor who just happened to be the Chief of Police in Spokane. His daughter was the cutest, but he was pretty intimidating. Needless to say, we kept our distance.
Two years later, I had the opportunity to spend my summer as the deckhand on a cruise boat out of Anacortes, Washington. I jumped at the opportunity to be one of two paid crew members who took weekly charters to the many San Juan Islands and into western Canada. It was great. I think I had a new girlfriend every week and back then, we did not have cellphones so when some still wanted to stay in contact, they had to write a letter. For some reason, any letters for me always went to the neighbor’s house.
While I was slaving away in the San Juan Islands, my parents decided to move back to our little Eastern Washington farm town. They sold whatever house we were living in at the time and moved without letting me know. I could probably make a bad joke about now, but when the summer was over, my parents actually showed up and brought me to our new house. I was just starting my junior year of high school.
Like a yoyo, on Valentine’s Day, 1980, our parents moved back to Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, and left my brother and me in a cheap motel in Ephrata. Our room had a couple bedrooms and a kitchenette where were could cook our macaroni and cheese, but it wasn’t the same as home. We made the best of it. Two teenage boys living alone during the week, working and finishing our senior year of high school. Unfortunately, the motel’s owners kept a close eye on us. But, we were also smart enough not to ruin a good thing. We were able to have swimming pool parties and the occasional “guest” in our room. By this time in my life, I figured out that being nice to people had its advantages. In this situation, the hotel owners turned a blind eye to most of our late-night activities.
It really wasn’t that bad and never really boring until after May 18, 1980. On that beautiful Sunday morning, I was supposed to go back out to our farm and finish cutting up an old steel wheel line (irrigation equipment) when at about 8:00 a.m., there was a sonic boom. Sonic booms were something we heard fairly often growing up. Especially living near Moses Lake, which was a testing area for Boeing aircraft. We even had the SST Concord there for a while. The boom on this particular day was different though. It was a boom that came from a long way off and not like the crack we were used to. Thinking nothing of it, I got into my truck and headed out to the farm. To get to the farm, I had to drive south and west of town and as I was driving, I noticed the sky was getting very dark. After about fifteen minutes into the twenty-minute trip, it took me to get from town to the farm, it was so dark, that I had to turn on my headlights. Still, thinking nothing of it, (remember, I’m eighteen years old) I began working on the wheel-line. Then it began to snow. It was 80 degrees and in May and I was wearing a tee shirt. It shouldn’t be snowing. After about a half hour of deductive reasoning, (remember, I’m only eighteen) I decided that something terrible had happened and loaded up my gear and went back to town. As I got closer to town, I noticed the cars in front of me were throwing up dust that blinded me if I got too close. I got back to the motel and turned on the TV. All the news (both stations) were talking about Mount St. Helens blowing up. It was pretty cool. We just sat in our motel room and watched. Eventually, we had about four inches of ash dumped on us. Everything shut down and we all tried different methods to protect our vehicle engines from ingesting the ash particles. We also started running out of food. I remember people saying the world was ending and some saying the ash was poisonous. The emergency didn’t last all that long, but there was nothing to do while the community cleaned itself up. About the only good or maybe bad thing to come of it, depending on how a person looked at it, was our school was shutdown. We would later learn that someone had left some windows open and ash had somehow been scattered throughout the building. We never had any finals and sadly, even my brother and I’s graduation was an abbreviated ceremony.
Throughout my developing years, our parents always took my brother, sister and myself to Church. It was almost our entire social life outside of school. Our friends and neighbors went to the same Church. We attended a Sunday service every week and followed this with Sunday School. We were taught right from wrong from the very beginning. We learned values and a way of life that has stuck with each of us through the years. That frame of mind has formed us into who and what we are today. I mention this because our mother always reminded us to make sure we were in Church on Sunday, even if she could not be there to take us. Mom has passed on now, yet even today, I think about her reminders. I remember what was important to her and the most important thing to her was to raise good children, with high moral values. She always wanted us to be good citizens and contribute to our community.
Following high school, I think 70 or 80 percent of our graduating class went to college in the Spokane area. My brother and I were no different. It was like high school all over again, but this time, if you didn’t want to be around someone, you just didn’t go around them. Eventually, I ran out of money and decided I needed to see the world and joined the United States Coast Guard. I wanted to be a police officer on the water and this was the only option I thought I had at the time. As it turned out, I was assigned to a 400-foot icebreaker based in downtown Seattle. At first, I wasn’t too excited. It was not law enforcement, but it had potential. I heard these big boats went all over the world and being a poor little country kid, I kind of liked that idea. Within six months I was in Lima, Peru and then Valparaiso, Chile, and then I was lucky enough to spend Christmas in Antarctica. I was away from home for five months and sent and received a lot of letters. I was even allowed to call home once using the Ham Radio community’s old Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS). That was an experience. I was somewhere below the Antarctic Circle talking with my mom and dad, 9,000 miles away. I would say something like, “Hello over” and then there would be six or seven mic clicks and I’d hear my mom say, “Hello” and a few seconds later, “Over” and then the mic clicks again. I’m sure if we had something important to talk about and we would have said more than “Hello.” Two years later I would be on my way to Antarctica again only this time, I was gone for seven months and never called home once. I think I only wrote five letters in total. I guess by this time, I was an old salty dog, having traveled all over the North and South Pacific Oceans and didn’t need to talk to home as often.
On another trip, this time up north, I had to wonderful opportunity to see more ice. Hundreds of square miles of ice in the Arctic Ocean. Usually, on this ice were bears. Huge, monstrous Polar Bears, each looking for its next meal. Apparently, seals were off the menu when we were sailing around. You see, we were not allowed to just throw our trash overboard into the open ocean, because it would not penetrate the thick ice and sink to the bottom of the ocean. So rather than toss our garbage over the side, we (the deckhands) would stow our garbage in a huge nylon net on the fantail or back of the ship. It made the back of the ship smell like a dump and it would have attracted flies had it been warm enough for them to survive. What it did attract is polar bears. Hundreds of them. Now being young and curious, a lot of us sailors would go to the back of the ship and take pictures of these beautiful creatures milling about as they got up the courage to board our vessel and rummage through the trash.
One day, I was one of those young sailors gawking at the bears and never thinking they could get to us when one rather large bear decided he or she would stand on its hind legs and bring one of its front paws up and grab the deck we were standing on. This paw was only about five feet from me, but it looked like it was 3 feet in diameter. It was huge and you never saw ten adult men scream and run as fast as we did that day. I don’t know if that bear ever climbed aboard the ship and I don’t really care. Considering the size of that thing, it could do whatever it wanted. All I know is half of us probably went below to change our pants. I’ve done a lot of scary things in this world, but that incident ranks up there in the top three or four.
The United States Coast Guard was great, but I still had that hankering to be in law enforcement. At the time, there was nothing for me in the Coast Guard so when I had the opportunity to leave and become a police officer, I jumped at the chance, but that only lasted about three years before the Coast Guard called me up and convinced me to come back. Apparently, the money for Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs had finally begun to trickle down and the Coast Guard was going to dive headfirst into the drug interdiction business. So, off to Heaven or rather Corpus Christi, Texas I went. I loved the place and the people, but I only loved part of the job. As it turned out, it was nothing like I had been promised, except for the travel. Working law enforcement at the federal level was a completely different animal. I was from Washington State where there is no such thing as a Grand Jury at the local level. There were also “Rules of Engagement.” The people wanted us to do the job and hoped we could make a difference, but the government only wanted to make a show of it. At that time, none of the federal law enforcement agencies shared any information and protected what precious information they did have and other resources within their own silos. The only time I really got to have some fun occurred one early morning as my team was getting ready to do some local operations. We stopped at a quick stop or 7-11 type of store for gas and snacks. As I was walking into the store, I passed a pickup truck and noticed the male in the truck was beating the holy crap out of the naked female next to him. Chivalry was never one of my forte’s, but that morning, something clicked in me. Before myself or the bad guy knew what was going on, I had his door open, and pulled him out of the vehicle, and handcuffed him behind his back. I think one of my guys later said the bad guy was cuffed before he hit the concrete. While I was busy keeping this dirtbag on the ground, one of my teammates, Mike (actually Miguel) was escorting the naked girl to our government truck. I’m sure he was going to get her a blanket, but I never saw one until the police or down there, the constables showed up to take the guy to jail and take the girl home.
You would think doing drug interdiction for the Coast Guard would have been fun and glamorous, but the only really good thing about it was the travel. In the eighteen months I was with this program, I was able to travel all over Central and South America and the Caribbean. We would usually fly to some resort town a few days before a U.S. Navy ship would pull in for a liberty call and then we would mingle back on board the ship before it weighed anchor and set sail for some type of training operation. With us (the Coast Guard) on board, we were able to conduct law enforcement operations whenever we found a suspect vessel out on the high seas. If that happened, which was rare, we would take down the Navy flag and raise the Coast Guard flag, essentially turning the big gray Navy ship into a Coast Guard ship. This was because the Navy did not have any law enforcement powers while the Coast Guard, which was still part of the Department of Transportation back then, did have law enforcement authority. We were in the drug interdiction business, but never found any large quantities of drugs. What we found back then was literally thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of black market contraband such as video cassette tapes, alcohol, cigarettes, and electronics. On nearly every boarding, we encountered human beings attempting to sneak into the United States. Even back then this was a major problem. The only difference is we simply sent them back to their original countries without any protest or coddling.
Eventually, I returned to my old job in the small eastern Washington County where I lived. It was a great career and I worked with some of the best people on earth. Most are still dear friends of mine after all these years. Sadly, some are dying or dead, but I guess that gets to happen to all of us someday. At some point, I will write more about some of the experiences I had during my law enforcement career and later career and life.