Second Time’s the Charm? November 12, 2007
Posted by physics309 in Old Lyme, San Angelo.1 comment so far
When I came here to work at the Coast Guard Academy a couple years ago it was with the full understanding that it was just a temporary position. I was filling in while an active duty person was sent to graduate school. Well, my contract is up in May and they have three people coming in next fall to replace me, so there is no chance that I will be working there next fall. When I took the job, this was an ok prospect. I would get to spend two or three years in New England and then move on. The problem is that I now don’t want to move on. I like it here. New England is a wonderful place. Additionally, my son likes it here and wants to stay. He’s in a good school and is making some good friends. We’re both motivated to find a way to stay.
There are some colleges in the area that are advertising for physics professors and I am applying to them. But, I have to do my due diligence. I have to have a way to pay my bills and support my son next year. If I don’t get one of those faculty positions, I will have to go whereever I can get a position.
That is why I did something extreme today. I started the process of working for myself. Now, you have to know that this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. I worked for myself when we lived in San Angelo ten years ago and it was terrible. When I was done I swore I would never work for that jerk again. He was a very demanding boss, never let me take a break, was overly critical of everything I did, and it was not possible for me to do enough work to make him happy. If there was work to do, I was expected to be working. And, when you’re self-employed, there is always work to do. He didn’t let me relax in the evening. I couldn’t go out with my wife anywhere. He begrudged me time with my son. What are you doing in bed? I know its 2 AM, but now that you’re awake I’m not going to let you go back to sleep until you get up and take care of this thing that’s bothering me. I was glad to get a regular supervisor after a couple years of that and said I would never do it again. Clearly, this falls in the ‘never say never’ category.
Well, I’m taking my experiences from last time to heart. I actually did pretty well as a self-employed and learned a lot. I know about how to make a business run and I also understand about being my own boss. That undergraduate degree in business came in handy before and will do so again.
So, I worked hard today at my new business and was very productive. In fact, I got everything done that I wanted to get done today. Things are going well and, at the end of business hours, I felt ok about quitting and doing something else. If things go well, this venture may provide me with sufficient income to support us while we continue to live here in Connecticutt.
Or, I could lose everything I’ve invested and will have to move on. Such is life.
Tornado Alley September 3, 2007
Posted by physics309 in McKinney, San Angelo, Science.add a comment
My posting of the other day has put me in a stormy mood. I don’t mean it put me in a bad mood, I mean it just made me think about memorable storms. As a result, I’ve decided to spend the next few days discussing some of these storms, beginning with the smallest and moving into the worst of all.
I spoke of the nature of the storms of north Texas in a previous posting. This is the violent weather of Tornado Alley, which stretches from north Texas up into the Dakotas, with the most violent region being smack in the middle of Oklahoma. The central region of the nation is peculiar in the way there are strong air currents coming from the Gulf of Mexico and cool air masses moving down from the north. The southerly air masses are filled with moisture and heat and when they collide with the cool, northerly air masses the moisture will condense and the heat will cause violent thunderstorms. Frequently, tornadoes will also result. More tornadoes occur in Tornado Alley than the rest of the world combined.
If you like storms, and I do, this is the place to be. They are beautiful and awe-inspiring. They are also dangerous and you have to take care. I would think that anyone from the region could tell you not to drive into moving water, no matter how shallow it appears. It only takes a few inches of water to sweep a car away. But, it doesn’t matter how many times they warn the public about this, it seems someone gets killed in every storm because they drove into moving water and got swept away.
Another danger is low lying areas. These storms are so violent and can drop so much rain that low lying areas will flood so quickly you can’t outrun the rushing water. This can even happen far downstream of the storm itself. Anyone camping is warned not to make camp in an arroyo because a storm upstream will result in a mountain of water rushing down. Yet, someone gets killed this way every year.
Even in the towns, low lying areas can get dangerous. I was almost caught by one once. I was driving in a storm and took a turn. By the time I realized the low lying intersection was flooded, it was too late. I crashed into the flood waters and was actually floating. I was trying to think of what I was going to do when I realized I was still going forward as a result of my momentum. Eventually, I could feel my tires make contact with the ground on the other side and I just drove off with no damage done. I took an extra careful look before going around that turn in the future, though.
These storms can come any time of day, but seem to have a preference for the early morning hours. We would frequently wake up during the night to the sound of a big storm. I would lay in bed and listen to the sounds and feel the house shaking to the violence, before it quickly ended and I would go back to sleep. One night, the cat wouldn’t come in at bedtime and I just left it outside. I woke that night to one of these storms and was just about to drift off to sleep in the quiet afterwards when I heard this pathetic, ‘Meeooowww!’ I went to the front door and found this toothpick of a cat. It looked just like something from a Bugs Bunny cartoon with its hair soaked all the way through and looking like it was half its normal size. It was weeks before it would even step outside the house again.
San Angelo had some terrific thunderstorms, some of the most violent I’ve ever seen. Without knowing it, we actually got a taste of things to come on the Memorial Day weekend of 1995.
We went camping at Dinosaur Valley State Park, just outside Glen Rose and about an hour west of Ft. Worth. This is a very cool state park that preserves dinosaur footprints. You can go walking down through the river and see all of these footprints preserved in the stone, set there tens of millions of years ago on an ancient seashore. An interesting note is the big hole where a slab with some of the best footprints was taken out. I finally got to see this slab in the fall of 2005 when I visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
We camped out in the park with our 18-month old baby and had a good time of it playing in the shallow river. That evening we witnessed an amazingly violent thunderstorm out in the distance. We watched the lightning show for a long time before finally going to bed, after feeling comfortable it wasn’t coming towards us (we had learned our lesson at Lake Texoma). We moved to San Angelo almost exactly a year later and people were still talking about that storm and how much damage it had done. Even after a year there were still houses with damaged roofs. So many were damaged during the storm that they hadn’t been able to fix them all even after a year. The roofing business is a good one to get into in Texas.
Just arriving in San Angelo was an adventure. We rented a large truck to move all of our household goods. I was driving the truck and towing one car while my wife drove the other car. I saw a mileage sign for San Angelo and, based on my speed, estimated we would be in San Angelo in an hour. A storm was brewing ahead of us, but I didn’t think much of it. But, it kept getting worse and worse, causing me to continually slow down. I saw another mileage sign after a while and, based on my new speed, estimated it would take an hour to get to San Angelo. We kept going on and the storm kept getting worse, causing us to slow down even more. I saw yet another mileage sign and again estimated it would take us an hour to get to town! This was becoming a Twilight Zone kind of trip! We heard on the radio that tornado warnings were being issued for the area ahead of us, so we were driving into the teeth of a bad storm. This made us pull over and wait for the worst to pass. The roads out there are really empty and we hadn’t seen anywhere to take cover, so we just pulled to the side of the road and hunkered down to wait for the storm to end. This really didn’t take very long. These storms have an enormous amount of energy, but usually don’t last very long. In short order, things had cleared up and we were able to get back on the road.
There wasn’t a lot of damage in San Angelo, but some of the surrounding little towns got hit. And, this was our introduction to the west Texas weather. Storms were few and far between, but they were real barn busters when they came in. I’ve heard meteorologists talk about the weather in west Texas and particularly in the panhandle region of Texas
There’s hardly an area in the country with worse weather than that region. The panhandle is known as the Llano Estacado, the Plain of Stakes. There are actually several stories of where this name came from, but my favorite is that the Spanish explorers found the area so flat and featureless that they were afraid they would get lost and drove stakes in the ground to leave a trail so they could find their way back out again. Looking at the names of the towns in the area tells you what its like: Levelland, Lamesa, Plainview. It’s also about 5000 feet in altitude with a long, slow drop off to about 1000 feet in the rest of northwest Texas. Air masses can move gently from the north and suddenly drop down that incline, or meet another air mass coming up from the south. With few trees to provide shade, the ground heats up and causes convective air currents, resulting in sudden thunderstorms. Dust devils are common sights out there and there are times you can witness many at once. These are mostly gentle areas of convection that will lift up the dust and debris from the ground and make it swirl around in the air (also very common on Mars). We use to chase them around the playground when I was kid. I was so used to this phenomenon that I would talk about them in my classes in South Dakota without realizing that many of the students had no idea what I was talking about. All of these features create havoc for the weather forecasters.
The local ones forecasters love to tell stories about the out-of-staters that show up in the region for the first time and try to make weather forecasts like they would somewhere else, just to be stymied by the unpredictable and violent nature of the weather and caught by surprise by how quickly it will change. You can always tell a longtime west Texas resident by the way they will always be glancing at the sky, checking the weather. They know, just because it was nice five minutes ago doesn’t mean it will be nice five minutes from now.
Building a Family – The Problems Begin August 26, 2007
Posted by physics309 in McKinney, San Angelo.add a comment
I started the story of how we had problems building a family. But, the birth of our son wasn’t the end of it.
Our new son was a beautiful baby. I’ve heard so many parents say that and then you see the pictures and can’t help but think, ‘That is one ugly baby!’, but he really was a beautiful baby and a happy one, too. He loved to play and was very interactive from a very young age. Of course, our families were very happy for us. But, it didn’t take us long to begin to realize that there was a problem. He suffered from rages. Not just anger, but real, mindless rages.
He started exhibiting them even before he could crawl. He would throw one of these horrible fits and throw a toy as far as he could, then throw another horrible temper tantrum until he got it back, just to explode and throw it again. This would go on for a while, if you let it. The fact that we dealt with them differently was a sign of stress to come. His mother would give him his toy back, then give it to him again, and again, until the rage went away and he became his sweet self again. I wouldn’t get the toy for him at all and, once he got old enough to get it himself, I would take it away from him. I didn’t want to encourage the behavior.
All of this started at such a young age I was convinced from the beginning it was a chemical imbalance. Truth be told, I suffered from rages when I was young; I mean white hot, senseless rages. My guess is that he got it from me. I didn’t have them nearly as often as our son, but they came unpredictably. Eventually, they became less frequent as I got older and I was better able to deal with them as I had the few I still had. It’s been many years since I’ve had one. I felt this would be the case with my son, too. We just had to be patient and help him through them.
But, my wife would listen to these horror stories my sisters would tell her about kids attacking their parent with knives or ending up in institutions. She was really being barraged with worst-case scenarios and didn’t want to hear what I had to say. Everyone was an expert and were constantly glad to tell us what we were doing wrong and what we needed to do. We started getting a bunker mentality and just didn’t want to interact with anyone so that we wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore. Along the way, she began to believe that our son was suffering from serious psychological problems.
By the time we got to San Angelo he was fully mobile and his rages were so bad we had problems with babysitters. He would be ok for a while, then suddenly start throwing things and breaking things around the house. We would actually get phone calls from the babysitter that we had to return. I remember a couple of them being in tears when we arrived home. Things would be broken and there might be holes in the walls or doors.
Going anywhere different became such agony that we frequently made the choice to just not go. By the time we got through the kicking and screaming to get him dressed and in the car we would be so tired and frustrated we didn’t want to go anymore. Normally, one of us would stay home with him while the other went out. Those times when we simply had to take him would result in me just manhandling him, taking him forcefully out to the car and strapping him into his car seat where he would scream and kick until he wore himself out.
All of this paints life as being a complete hell for us, but it wasn’t at all. He was such a sweet, loving child most of the time. He played very well and was so smart that we could play and do things far above his age level. For routine traveling, getting him to go was no problem at all. It was usually just the strange or different or transitions that caused him to have his rages. Having different babysitters all the time would trigger them. The times we were able to get a regular babysitter, he would become familiar with the person and it wouldn’t be a problem. Taking him to school in the morning wasn’t a problem because we did it every day. Taking him to the playground wasn’t a problem because this was something he understood. Taking him to the store was a problem because he didn’t enjoy it and this would trigger a rage. Making him suddenly quit what he was doing would trigger a rage, so we would give him several warnings when we were going to do something. That way he was mentally prepared.
I learned after a while that my wife was taking him to see a psychologist while I was at work. She did this without consulting with me and tried to hide the fact from me. Her method of doing behind my back disturbed me, but I didn’t mind in principle because any help was a good thing. What I was fearful of and wanted to prevent was him getting a label of having a mental problem. One thing that came of it is that we were able to get him into a special pre-kindergarten class in the local school district. It was a very progressive school district and this special school was highly recommended and recognized across the state. It helped him in the short run, but would cost us everything in the long run.
I was in San Angelo for a one-year appointment at Angelo State University. At the end of that year I needed to find a new job. My wife was very firm on the subject, though. Our son was in this special school and we were going to stay. I took odd and end jobs at first, but these didn’t work out very well and required me to be away from home for long periods, something that was having a very bad effect on the family. Eventually, I just had to go unemployed. My wife went back to work, but couldn’t make enough to support us. I collected unemployment and did as much Navy Reserve duty as I could, but we were spiraling downward in debt.
After the first year of this I wanted to leave, but my wife fought with me about it and I ended up caving in and we stayed a second year. I had begun working on a start-up business plan and things were actually going pretty well, although I wasn’t making any money. I was devoting as much of my time and energy as I could to this effort in the hope that it would pay off. It didn’t, but I came very close and that’s another story.
Working from home gave me a lot of flexibility with my son. His school was in the morning, only and I would pick him up every day. We would put him in daycare in the afternoon, but he hated naptime and would disturb the other kids. I dealt with this by keeping him with me until after the daycare naptime was over. This was pretty nice. We would come home after I picked him at school and play on the bed. He called them ‘funny games’ and we always had a good time rough housing. Then, I would fix him lunch and let him watch some TV before going to the daycare for the rest of the day. This was a good bonding time for the two of us.
One of the games I played with him was a thing we called wee-boom. It started with one of his stuffed animals, his Everyones, as he called them. I tossed one of them in the air one time while playing with him and made the sound ‘weeee’, then I went ‘boom’ when it hit the ground. He loved this and wanted me to throw them as high in the air as I could. Eventually, he wanted to do it himself. I don’t mean he wanted to throw the stuffed animals himself, I mean he wanted me to throw him in the air.
We started pretty small. I would toss him lightly and catch him, making the ‘wee-boom’ noises. As we got more confident, I would toss him higher and higher until I was tossing him as high as I could, maybe as high as ten feet and he would just giggle and smile the whole time. I would do this for until my arms were sore and then I would, ‘What we do we say?’ And, he would hold a finger up and go, ‘ONE MORE TIME!’ I would then toss him one last time, catch him and flip him over my arms to land on his feet. He loved this and would come up to me going, ‘Wee-boom, daddy! Wee-boom!’ I loved doing it with him almost as much as he did, even if it was quite a workout.
Well, he was having problems somewhere, I was never able to figure out exactly where. But, he was very upset and started saying he was a ‘bad boy.’ When I asked why he said that I pieced together that someone was telling him that, but I couldn’t figure out whom. I would have really torn into them if I had ever learned. I could tell this was really hurting him and just telling him that it wasn’t true and that he was a good boy wasn’t doing it. So, I started using wee-boom as therapy.
He would ask to play wee-boom and I would go, ‘I don’t know. Wee-boom is only for good boys. Are you a good boy?’ He would nod his head or maybe whisper that he was and I would say, ‘That’s not good enough. You have to say it.’ He would say, ‘I’m a good boy,’ but only in a whisper. That was good enough and we would play wee-boom. This became the ritual. I would always ask him if he was a good boy and he would have to say it. Just nodding his head wouldn’t do. After a while, he didn’t whisper it, he would say it louder and louder, eventually he would shout, ‘I’M A GOOD BOY!’ This is what I was trying to achieve. He was feeling good about himself again and he acted like it. This is the way I thought we should be dealing with the problems. Encouraging positive behavior and thinking and discouraging bad behavior and negative thinking.
We were making progress. It was slow and difficult, but it was really visible. After the second year of his school he was old enough to go to regular kindergarten and I insisted that we were going to leave San Angelo. I started applying for positions and was encouraged when I made the short list at a school right away. After being out of academia for two years I was afraid I wouldn’t be competitive. I didn’t get that particular job, but I eventually got the job at the University of South Dakota and we moved to Vermillion, SD in the summer of 1999.
We almost made it, but things were to fall apart completely within a year.
Special Pets August 24, 2007
Posted by physics309 in Mayport, McKinney, San Angelo, Seabrook, Taipei, Vermillion.1 comment so far
Most of us, at one time or another, have had a special pet or two, the ones that just stand out with special memories. With nine kids in the family, we had a lot of pets over the years. There were even times when we had a lot of pets, like the time we found 10 kittens abandoned alongside the road. We also had a variety of pets: certainly cats and dogs, but also horses, mice, fish (We even had a piranha at one time!), snakes, birds, a legless chicken, frogs and salamanders, spiders, and pretty much anything else one of us could bring home. Out of all of these, there were three pets, all dogs, which really stand out in my memory.
The first was a beagle we had in Seabrook. I hesitate to call it a pet. We were more like a way station for it. It came wondering in one day and took up residence with us. We ended up calling it Hound Dog. Hound Dog was really something. He would hang around with us for months, and then disappear for weeks, before showing up again. He would come back, all skinny and scratched up, and flea-bitten, and badly in need of a bath, but otherwise OK. He was just out running around in the woods and having a good time. Once he got rested up and put some weight back on he would disappear again.
He had some really interesting characteristics that make me laugh even today. One was that he would like to chase cars, which isn’t all that unusual, except he would bite the tires. We would watch as this crazy dog ran after the cars, biting the tires as it drove down the street. One day he must have gotten a good chunk of one because the car just ran right over his head – buh-thump! Hound Dog just got up and came walking back home with this look as if to say, ‘Got that one!’
His bark was something special. He couldn’t just bark, he had to warm up. ‘Huh! Huh! Huh! A-roooooh! Huh! Huh! Huh! A-rooooh!’ This just provided us with endless amounts of amusement. We would sit around imitating him for years afterwards. One night he was in the yard barking at the Moon, or something, and driving Pop crazy. Every time he would start barking, Pop would yell at him to stop. He would quit for a little while, and then start again. Instead of just bringing him inside, Pop would go to the door and yell at him again. Then, he started again and Pop came out and got him in mid-warm-up. ‘Huh! Huh! Huh! Aieeee!’ I always imagined he must have strained something that time.
He loved to follow us kids around when we went out somewhere, looking for some adventure. When he was around, he was always with one of us kids. He really was a great pet. When we moved to Taiwan we found a farm out in the country that was glad to take him.
The next memorable pet was right after that, when we got to Taiwan. Mom decided she wanted this Lhasa Apso puppy and named it Meh Leung (Mandarin for Beautiful Dragon). Meh Leung may be the only animal I’ve ever met with nearly human intelligence. She was not only very intelligent, but very much aware of what was going on around her and could make decisions based on that. It was weird sometimes to see just how intelligent she was. But, she also had a sense of humor, which really made her fun.
A great example of this is this time we were playing ball in the house. This house was very large and had plenty of room for us to play in. It was also made of concrete, so balls seemed like an obvious thing to play with in it. On this particular day the ball got away from us and went bouncing down the steps. Through some miraculous set of bounces it ended up in the toilet in the bathroom at the bottom of the steps. One of my sisters and I chased after it and when we found it in the toilet, we just stood there staring at it. We argued about which of us was going to reach in there and get it when I finally agreed, but only if my sister didn’t tell anyone. Of course, as soon as I reached in there she went running upstairs and told everyone else. Everyone started calling me ‘Toilet Hands’ and I chased them around and touched them with the ball. This started a big game and whoever got touched had to stick their hand in the toilet and be the Toilet Hands.
This was going on for awhile and Meh Leung was watching and playing with us when the ball went bouncing into yet a different toilet. Well, she just jumped right in after it. I don’t remember how it happened, but someone flushed the toilet with Meh Leung standing in it. When it was done, she jumped out and started chasing us while we were yelling ‘Toilet God.’ She just loved it! When she dried off, she would go running back to the toilet and wait for one of us to stick her in and flush it again. I think we played Toilet God for at least an hour that day.
I could tell all sorts of stories about Meh Leung, she was such a great pet. We couldn’t take her with us to Europe when we left, so we gave her to a family friend. But, even after 35 years, all you have to do is mention ‘Toilet God’ to us younger kids and we’ll erupt in laugher.
It took a while after Meh Leung before I had another great pet. But, in 1985, my wife and I stumbled on a stray and adopted her. She was a puppy Labrador, about six months old, according to the vet. She wasn’t one of the big yellow or black labs, but the smaller white ones. My wife and I met at Snowshoe, West Virginia and white rabbits are called snowshoes, so we named the puppy Snowshoe. She ended up being just the best pet I ever had and I really loved her.
It didn’t take Snowshoe long to get into some misadventures. We found her at Thanksgiving and a few weeks later we were having a Christmas party at our house. I put a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses with decorative wrapping out on the table. A little while later my wife asked me about the Kisses. When we looked, the bowl was empty and there was a doggy with a stomach ache. I was finding dog poop in the back yard with decorative aluminum foil in it for weeks after that. We were officially on notice.
One of the things about Snowshoe is that she loved to go for walks, and so did we. One day my wife asked me if I wanted to go for a walk and we realized Snowshoe got all excited when she said it. She understood what we were saying! We had to start using code words for things, and we had to change them because she would figure out what the code words meant. I mean, the dog could have worked breaking codes for the NSA!
She was normally a very gentle and loving dog. All of the kids in the neighborhoods where ever we lived loved her and would come around to play with her. But, she was the terror of any cat that came around. When we lived in McKinney, we lived on the edge of a big open area on the edge of town and there were a lot of wild cats in the area. We tried to intervene between Snowshoe and any cats we came across, but sometimes we weren’t fast enough. One time, Snowshoe went right for this cat. She was blazingly fast and was on this cat before we even knew what was happening. Well, this cat was no wimp and just latched itself on Snowshoe’s face with its claws. Snowshoe was running around with this cat latched onto her face, making a screaming sound while trying to shake the cat off, which caused the cat to dig in with its claws even more while the dog was shaking its head like crazy, which just made the dog shake its head even harder. My wife was yelling and jumping up and down, and I was chasing Snowshoe trying to break up the fight. It was like a scene from a comedy show! Finally, the terrified cat let loose and went running for safety. Snowshoe was just glad to get the thing off her face and let it go. I checked Snowshoe to see if her eyes were injured before turning her over to my wife. It made her feel better to give scarface the baby treatment for a while after that.
Then there was the time when she was chasing a cat and it climbed a fence and jumped over it, into someone’s backyard. Snowshoe ran around to the front of the house looking for the other side of the fence, before turning around and running back. Just as she was coming back, the cat climbed over a different part of the fence and landed right in front of Snowshoe! The two of them were so surprised that all they could do was stare at each other for a couple of seconds before the cat ran off. Snowshoe stood there looking around with an expression on her face that seemed to say, ‘There’s cats falling out of the sky!’
Another time, we were coming back from a walk and ran across a cat sitting on a brick wall. Snowshoe chased it and the cat made a running jump onto a light post. The problem was, this light post was made of galvanized steel! The cat grabbed it with its claws, but couldn’t get a hold of it. We stood there and watched as the cat slid down the pole while its claws made this loud screeeeeech sound on the galvanized steel. It finally jumped off and made a run for it. Snowshoe just looked at it running away, as if to say, ‘Stupid cat!’
Then there was the time when she didn’t kill the kitten she trapped and we ended up with another pet. My wife adopted this little kitten and named it ‘Nano.’ Snowshoe and Nano became best buds. It was like a Bugs Bunny cartoon with the dog and this little kitten. They even slept together and would rough house together.
One day, Nano was teasing Snowshoe by coming down the steps, but only part way. When Snowshoe went chasing her, the cat had a huge head start and would escape. I watched this happen three or four times and decided to intervene. I took Snowshoe around the corner and waited for the cat to come down the stairs. She kept coming down even further when she couldn’t see Snowshoe anywhere. Finally, when she was nearly to the bottom of the stairs, I gave Snowshoe a little shove and she just tore into the cat! I swear, that cat lost a couple of its nine lives when it saw Snowshoe coming around the corner! Snowshoe came running back to me after it was done eating the cat and was just licking me and wagging her tail! She was so happy! The cat wouldn’t play any more after that. Spoiled sport!
I think I could write a whole book about Snowshoe. She was a great pet and friend and a great source of amusement, while driving us crazy at the same time with her misadventures. She was always glad to see me when I came home, even if I had just stepped out to get the mail and that unconditional love was a wonderful thing. She finally died in the spring of 2001 when she was about 16 years old, when we lived in Vermillion. I dug a grave for her in my backyard and we had a little ceremony for her. My ex and my son came over and we buried her with some balls and doggy treats. I think I took her death harder than my marriage breaking up and I haven’t had another pet since then. Maybe someday, but not yet.
San Angelo August 14, 2007
Posted by physics309 in San Angelo.1 comment so far
San Angelo, Texas is way out in the middle of the west Texas desert. Hot and dry are the key words when talking about this country, but San Angelo is like a big oasis out there. It is a very sizable city of over 100,000, but without any suburbs. The city limits really are the limits of the city. You can stand on the edge of the city and have housing on one hand, and nothing but desert on the other. The counties around it have populations of 5000, 6000, maybe 7000 for the entire county, so it is very empty once you get out of the city.
The town started as a result of Fort Concho that was built along the Concho River to protect settlers and cattle drives from the Indians, particularly the Apache and Comanche. These were particularly fierce tribes that lived out in the Chihuahua Desert of west Texas and Mexico. Of course, the forts out west had no resemblance to the way they are depicted in movies. They were open, with no walls, and usually had a large parade ground in the middle. This gave the soldiers plenty of room to shoot if the Indians attacked. The fort is still there and is a very nice tourist draw. It’s been well preserved and restored and they have several events there every year.
The heart of the city is the river. Without the river, there would be no city there. Unfortunately, they don’t take very good care of it and it is highly polluted. There’s a rare fresh-water oyster that grows in the river and produces the Concho pearl, which are highly valued. Hopefully, they’ll survive the city’s effects on the river.
To get there, you have to drive through a hundred miles of open range that looks like something from a 1950s science fiction movie. There are these empty, wide open views surrounded by flat-topped mesas. It’s amazingly beautiful, but I always expected to see a giant spider crawling over one of those mesas.
The mesas themselves are worth seeing just in themselves. They are all flat on top and rise to the same level. This is because they are remnants of when this area was all under water. The top of the mesas (tabletop in Spanish) is where the water line was. They were all eroded to the same level by the wave action before the ocean receded.
Today, the land is still very salty in many places, which makes it hard to grow anything, even with irrigation. But, where the salt isn’t bad, the land is as fertile as you could ask for. The big crop out there is cotton. They don’t grow it by the acreage, they grow it by the square mile. In the fall, when the bolls open up and you can see the white cotton inside, the landscape looks as if a snow had fallen. But this snow is money. Serious money. Some of those farmers out there have money to burn, and then some. There needs to be a center of commerce for all of that cotton and money and San Angelo provides it.
One of the strange things about San Angelo is that it became a center for Wiccanism and there was quite a large community of Wiccans there. I give a lecture about pseudoscience in my classes and I mentioned the belief of many Wiccans in their ability to perform magic and discussed how this wasn’t true. Well, word got to some of the local Wiccans that I had said that and one of them came to see me in my office one day. Now, I don’t have a problem with Wiccanism. They are not Satanists, as many people try to portray them, and they don’t engage in sacrifices or practice illegal acts. They simply believe in that everything has a spirit to it and they worship these spirits of the natural world. Innocent enough. But, they can’t perform magic.
Well, this Wiccan came to me and we had a very nice conversation. I really enjoyed it and she told me a lot of things I didn’t know. But, she insisted that she could do magic and I insisted she couldn’t. Finally, I said that she could not turn me into a toad, no matter how much she claimed she could and she said she could. I said, ‘Fine. Turn me into a toad!’ She said if that was the only way to convince me, then she would. I gave her a snippet of my hair when she asked for it and she left. Like I said, it was actually a pleasant conversation and there was no anger involved. However, I have never been turned into a toad. Although, in retrospect, it seems like I have this appetite for insects since then (that’s a joke, by the way). I must add, as someone pointed out to me, I don’t know that she actually performed the magic.
The thing that made this community of Wiccans a strange thing to see in San Angelo is that it is the buckle of the Baptist Bible Belt and the Baptist are highly intolerant of other religious beliefs. I can hear a bunch of Baptists screaming at me already, but I stand by my statement. They not only don’t like it when people follow other faiths, but they’ll be glad to tell you so. They expect everyone to follow their beliefs. Two particular practices they were very intolerant of and I found amusing were dancing and drinking. Of course, I engage in both.
This practice by the Baptists leads to a bunch of jokes. They say that you should never take just one Baptist fishing with you because he’ll drink all of your beer. Take two, that way they’ll keep an eye on each other.
Beverage stores weren’t allowed in town, so as soon as you drove passed the city limits sign there would be a row of them. I knew this guy that owned one and he told me how he made a fortune selling bread in his store. The Baptists would come in and buy a bunch of booze, then buy a couple of loaves of bread to put on top. If anyone saw them, it looked like they had a bag of groceries with the bread sticking out the top.
The really funny part of this is the pride they take in the city heritage. The city was founded as a place for the bars and brothels for the nearby fort. They have some of the brothels preserved in the downtown area and talk them up. I can just imagine how pleased they would be if the ladies were still practicing their craft today.
We lived in San Angelo for three years and I really enjoyed it. I don’t know if I would be willing to move back, but I had a good time while I was there.
Flight lessons May 21, 2007
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San Angelo was way out in the empty desert of west Texas. This was a great place to do something I always wanted to do – fly. The skies were clear because there were no large mountains and no major air corridors through the area. It was possible to fly around the area with little concern about running into anything.
In the summer of 1996 I went to the local airport and signed up for classes. My first lesson, the instructor had me take off. I went through the pre-flight check-list, which took a while because it was my first time. After that, we taxied down to the end of the runway. This is something I had problems with. You don’t steer a plane on the ground with the stick and hands, the stick works the flaps. You steer it with the pedals and your feet, which works the wheels. But, I managed to get us to the end of the runway without running us off into the grass and pointed the plane up the runway for takeoff.
I throttled-up the engine, released the brake and rolled down the runway, picking up speed as we went. When we were fast enough, I pulled back on the stick at the instructor’s command and we lifted off the ground and were airborne! The plane rocked a little left and right before stabilizing and then we were climbing!
It was terrifying and wonderful at the same time. At an altitude of about 5000 feet, we flew around the area with me at the control the whole time. The plane was a small Cessna and we were really squeezed in. It was hot and sweaty in there and we had the windows cracked open to provide some ventilation. It may sound funny, but you could really suffer an attack of claustrophobia in a one of those things, all the while looking out at the big, blue yonder. But, I didn’t care about the conditions because I was flying! In between glances at the instruments and controls, and listening to the instructor, I was looking out the window as much as I could. Here were all of the familiar landmarks, but from a new angle. I was taking it all in when he told me the class was over and it was time to head back.
When we headed back to the airport, I fully expected the instructor to take over for the landing. Instead, he instructed me on what to do and I took that baby in all the way. Pushing in the stick and easing up on the throttle, the place slowle descended. Keeping my eye on the runway and the airport guidance instruments, I steered that plane straight down the path until we were right over the cement. With one last push, we hit the ground and the plane lurched a little before settling down and going straight. The whole thing was so exhilarating!
I continued my lessons, working on my mastery of the plane. Every flight was a thrill and I was constantly getting better at the craft, learning something new every time we went up. One time, it was so still that when I did a circle I came back and ran into my own turbulence. The sensation of flying was wonderful. I would have dreams of my flights, they were so wonderful. I would wake-up from them, wishing I was back in the sky.
And then it ended. The instructor’s wife hated living in San Angelo, which was a very remote place. She finally pressured him enough that they packed up and left. It all happened so suddenly that they didn’t have time to find another flight instructor. By the time they were able to hire someone, my life had come apart and I couldn’t afford the time or money.
I’ve never gone back, but sometimes I still dream about those flights. It is certainly on my list of things to do to go back and finish my license.
Easter Egg Hunts April 2, 2007
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My son loved search games when he was small. We would play hide and seek and this was just his idea of heaven as a little boy. One day I came up with the idea of hiding something and making a map to it for him to follow. We called it the map fairy. I would put the map in his bed for him to find when he woke up and the search would be on. It was a always a good time.
I guess all of this started with Easter egg hunts. My son would go crazy with these. We started the first one when he was just old enough to walk and he caught on to the idea very quickly. We would do Easter egg hunts every year until he was too old to do them. If there was a sponsored Eater egg hunt in town somewhere, we were there.
We lived in San Angelo out in west Texas desert between 1996 and 1999 when he was just at the age when Easter egg hunts were great adventures. San Angelo had a big one every year. I hesitate to call it a hunt, because nothing was hidden. It was more of an Easter egg race. They had this big field where hundreds of plastic eggs would be distributed, each filled with treats of some kind. The kids would line up at the starting line and it looked like a picture of the Oklahoma land rush. A hundred kids would be crowding the starting line, waiting for the signal to start. Then, with a bang they would dash out at headlong speeds, grabbing everything that they could put their hands on. It looked like a colorful swarm of locust denuding the country side of anything edible. I had a vision of some grown-up tripping and falling in front of them and then only a pile of gleaming bones remaining after the kids moved on.
It would only take a few minutes before the field was stripped to the ground, but there were always enough eggs that everyone came away happy.
It’s been a while since the map fairy visited. Maybe I need to do some research this week.
