"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."
A foggy one out there, warm and a little sticky. New York finds itself immersed in a heat wave, again. Might as well go home and sweat back in Florida.
What to write about today?
There's the conversation Peg and I had in a hotel bar in Wellsboro on Sunday with a nice couple from the Lehigh Valley up looking at farm property. We mentioned we had come down from Corning, and soon the conversation turned to how inexpensive rural property is in Pennsylvania compared to upstate New York. Our new friends knew the reason: fracking. It's allowed in PA, but not in NY. The result? The groundwater in Pennsylvania isn't fit for drinking or for irrigation, a slurry of chemicals and salts. These people have lived for generations in some of the most beautiful countryside you'll ever encounter, and sold away their birthright like Esau in Genesis, this time for a quick handful of cash instead of a mess of pottage. But a mess is what was left behind.
Or maybe the gnawing existential angst that's settled over this household after the double-whammy of my mother's death and the dramatic deforestation of Wyldswood by Hurricane Idalia. George has done yeoman's work already clearing the downed trees and debris, but now we're looking at perhaps months of uninsured land-clearing and a reminder that the Big Bend is not immune from the sort of disaster that befell us after Michael. I'm not sure why this one has hit us so hard--maybe we're just older, more tired, and don't have the gas in the tank for another post-hurricane comeback tour. Not that many years separate today from Mom's final hospital bed.
On a cheerier note, I've inexplicably played two decent rounds of golf in a row, yesterday's 47 over nine holes proving the similar outing the day before wasn't a fluke. What's different? Why are things suddenly clicking? Well, not having Richard the bartender pour me a Jameson's on the rocks seems certain to play a role. I've also made my exclusive focus when I line up on the ball holding my head in precisely the same position until the club makes contact, not letting my center of gravity or noggin move even a millimeter on the upswing. What I give up in distance I make up with accuracy. This is progress.
No, today the news provides the grist for this morning's thought exercise. You probably read the story this week of the Delta flight from Atlanta to Barcelona that was forced to turn back to Georgia after a passenger experienced a GI emergency in-flight. And by "GI emergency", I mean a loss of bowel control that left flight attendants ineffectually spraying vanilla scent over a literal stream of fecal matter flowing down the aisle of the jet.
I myself worried about a similar fate while flying myself home to Florida the day after my mother died. Peg and I wandered north Dallas looking for a diversion from the horror of what had just happened in the ICU, and ended up at the seafood restaurant owned and managed by my stepsister's wonderful son. We sat at the bar with a cocktail, sampling the oysters they'd shipped from both the northeast and from Washington state. After several delightfully salty and delicate offerings, I slurped one that clearly had turned, tasting like it had been scooped from the floor of a gas station restroom.
"You might want to check your stock--I just got a bad one," I cautioned our host.
Peg looked concerned. "What did you do with it?"
"Well, I ate it of course."
My tissue paper alimentary tract provides a constant cause for concern with my beloved P. I'm sure she was thinking I'd be back in the ICU bed Mom had just vacated, sick with vibrio vulnificus septicemia.
But I dodged the bullet, and the next day's flight home was uneventful.
Not so a couple weeks after that. Having learned nothing, I attended a clam bake with P, once again featuring raw oysters and clams. And, once again, I encountered a bivalve that had clearly seen better days.
"Oof. That was a bad one!" I exclaimed.
"You didn't swallow it again, did you?" P looked more angry than worried this time.
"What was I supposed to do?" her idiot husband replied.
A valid question, that. We only had cloth napkins at this fancy feast, and I was sitting across from a guy who'd graduated from MIT. Only a philistine would've spit half-chewed oyster onto his plate.
This time I was less fortunate, and within twenty-four hours commenced a weight-loss regimen that left me shivering and unable to travel more than a few feet from the restroom. And yet I needed to fly back to Florida the next day. As things played out, the bad oyster wreaked havoc for only a day or so, and by the following afternoon when I crawled into the cockpit of the Columbia I was a new, albeit thinner, man.
Which reminds me of a brother Eagle driver, years ago, who wasn't so fortunate.
Back when I flew jets and dinosaurs roamed the flightline, we hosted a competition called William Tell every couple years at Tyndall. Willy Tell was the premier air-to-air weapons competition in the world back then, drawing teams from across the planet to Bay County for a week of simulated dogfighting, live gunnery and missile shoots, and general fighter pilot fun.
On this particular year, Kadena AB in Okinawa sent of four-ship of Eagles on a nonstop flight from the Pacific to PC. The night before the trek, the base hosted a going away dinner for its conquering heroes, featuring lots of sushi (this being Japan, after all).
Early the next morning the four of them set off for Tyndall, flying a northern circle route to save time. And somewhere over the Aleutians, the flight lead realized he'd perhaps ingested a bad bit of eel or tuna. He sweated along, hoping he could make it to their final destination.
Now key to this story is the uniform one wears when flying over very cold water. We aptly called it a "poopy suit", basically a dry suit worn over a fabric one-piece and under the flight suit and g-suit. Its purpose was to keep a downed airman alive if he was forced to bail out and bob around in forty degree water. These suits are completely water-tight. We wore then at Langley most of each winter for our training flights over the North Atlantic.
As the story goes, somewhere over the Yukon Territory Blue One found that although the spirit was willing, the body was weak. The first squirt escaped his poor straining sphincter. And then more. As in lots more. Before too long our intrepid aviator found himself immersed from the waist down in burning excrement, trapped there by his poopy suit.
Still able to improvise, he decided that diluting the acidic slurry might diminish the burn. So he pulled open the neck of the poopy suit, and poured his water bottle down his chest.
As it turned out, all this accomplished was to raise the excrement level to his nipples without stopping the pain. And now he had no water, although his lower colon continued to churn out spoiled sushi detritus and dehydration began to take hold. Tyndall was still hours away. Would he give up and divert. Never!
After maybe three more agonizing hours, Team Kadena landed at Tyndall. A welcoming committee of dignitaries waited at the base of the ladder as the first jet was marshaled into its parking space. Engines shut down. Canopy rose. But the pilot, ashen and unable to move, simply signaled for help. A crew chief hustling up the ladder quickly surmised the nature of the emergency, and summoned medical assistance.
And so, like the poor Delta passenger a few days ago, our protagonist's flight ended with a stretcher and an ambulance ride. I never heard how the team fared at William Tell, but it couldn't have been great.
With that, I need to get ready for a hearing in a couple hours that should not be happening at all, but the judge is feeling peevish and apparently has decided to go forward so he can castigate the lawyers for wasting his time. All things considered, I'd rather write about excrement.
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