"Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold; … the icy fang and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind…bites and blows upon my body; I shrink with cold; what freezings I have felt, what dark days seen, what old December’s bareness everywhere!"
-Bill Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two
It's finally arrived, the snow P's been anticipating throughout our brief return to Corning for the holidays.
Of course, now we're both worried because Slane scampered outside around sunset to frolic, as is his wont, and hasn't been seen since. The AirTag on his collar tells us he's nearby, within a house or so. I just hope he's not a Catsickle.
P and I woke up periodically last night to check for him on the steps, to no avail. I told her he just needed to hunker down somewhere tight and covered so he could retain his heat on this 22 degree morning.
How did I know what to do in cold weather? Everything I can tell you about roughing it in the great outdoors I learned during an unpleasant couple weeks at Fairchild AFB, in December of 1987, enduring survival school and then resistance training, otherwise known as POW School.
I'd just graduated from pilot training in Mississippi three weeks before, and was looking forward to Christmas in California with the family once I'd finished my brief TDY in Washington state. But between me and holidays under the palms stood an endurance exercise of wandering through the woods---very, very cold woods---as my very patient survival instructors did what they could to impart a little wisdom we hoped we'd never need after a shoot-down.
Peg used to live in Spokane. She says it's a pretty town, if too cold for her liking. I never saw Spokane, having spent the entire two weeks either in the VOQ, the classroom, or the woods. Peg lived there at the same time, interestingly enough. It leaves me wondering what might have been if I'd wandered over to the BX or the Officers Club on this trip.
Sigh.
That didn't happen, however. Instead, we spent a couple days in an auditorium classroom setting, learning about sucking check wounds, what to do about a stick protruding from one's eye socket (cover the good eye, oddly enough--it'll keep you from looking around and swinging that stick around as the wounded eye tries to track), how to tell what's likely edible among the flora, how to field dress the fauna, the rudiments of creating a solar still as a source of fresh water---all the sort of stuff a 2024 white nationalist militiaman would pay big money to learn.
After a couple comfortable days in a heated space, we were bused into the woods and introduced to our survival instructor, a grumpy but kind technical sergeant whose AFSC guaranteed he'd pretty much spend his entire 20 in this spot, teaching city slickers how to survive in the wild. I would think the exercise might get old at some point. If so, he never let on.
We spent the next six days in the aptly named Colville National Forest (we thought they were saying "Coldville", which sort of fit), just north of Spokane. Usually in December the place is snowy, with temperatures approaching zero, or below, at night. We gladly would've taken that over the weather during the first four days, which consisted almost entirely of a steady blowing drizzle in the mid-to-upper 30s. It was impossible to keep anything dry, and we spent our evenings shivering around the fire in damp BDUs before retiring right after dark, which probably meant six or so in those days just before the solstice at that high latitude, to our homemade, one-man lean-tos made of a tarp stretched over a bed of pine boughs and camouflaged with more pine boughs on top. The sleeping space was only a few inches tall, again to make it difficult for bad guys to see but also to keep escaping body heat close. Frankly, I never slept better in my life.
A day or so into the training, I developed a genuine fear that I might be the incredibly rare individual who flunks the course. You see, I couldn't tie a knot to save my life. The instructors only taught us one, the versatile bowline, a knot that was easy to tie and could be used for everything from a tourniquet to the ropes pulling the tarp tight over our heads at night. And it was supposed to be an easy knot to teach; holding the bitter end of the rope, recite the following: the rabbit pokes his head out of the hole, circles the tree, then goes back through the hole. What's so hard about that?
To this day, I couldn't tell you. And yet, I had to have remedial training to get past the one objective standard for graduating from survival school: being able to tie a bowline. My instructor's demeanor shifted from scorn to pity as he watched me grow more and more frustrated when Mr. Bunny's head ended up somewhere besides the hole from which he emerged, or circled the wrong tree. We got through the exercise, but I lost a modicum of masculine self-respect that day.
Normally our meals consisted of 600 calories a day delivered in C-ration cornflake bars left over from some ancient war; maybe Horatio Gates's troops gnawed on these same stale biscuits as they awaited Burgoyne at Saratoga. About three days in, our instructor introduced us to a white bunny we named "Stew", an adumbration of the day the sergeant unceremoniously picked the little feller up by his hind legs and beat his brains out against a rock sticking out of the ground, with Stew screaming until he didn't anymore. We then sat through a field demonstration of how to skin, gut, and roast a rabbit. Of course, a starving airman wouldn't waste the organs or what was in them, and so we each were forced to take a little pinch of what was in Stew's stomach to learn what one might be willing to eat if sufficiently starved. I was not sufficiently starved, however. The stuff tasted like Skoal flavored with bile.
On our last two days in the woods we practiced escape and evasion, wandering to rendezvous points where "partisans" would pick us up to be carried to a "safe house", where we could rest before the next leg of the walk. Our instructors were now enemy soldiers with AK-47s trying to capture the downed airmen.
The group was broken into two-man teams. I was paired with a short, fat staff sergeant whose next assignment involved flying around in the back of an airborne command post. He confided that he'd grown up in Chicago, and knew nothing about basic Boy Scout navigation or living in the woods. He also let me know he'd done nothing to train physically for this exercise. Perfect.
So, the hills were filled with perhaps twenty or thirty of these teams, paper maps and compass in hand, flailing through wet underbrush on our quest for a red surveyor's ribbon tied to a tree on a dirt roadside. My quivering, portly partner soon twisted an ankle while sliding down a hillside, and I got to make a leg of the journey with the fat bastard slung over my shoulder until I could find him a suitable walking stick.
My instructor told me later the whole scene was comical, with us thinking we were evading our pursuers while they sat together on the next hillside eating lunch and watching all of the foliage across from them quiver as dozens of us tried to stealthily make our way through the woods. These guys all had a little bit of a chip on their shoulder toward the entitled, clueless officers they trained, and wanted us to know they could've rounded up and captured us in an hour or less. But what would be the fun in that?
The first night of escape and evasion ended with all of us crammed into a little log cabin, forced to spoon because there wasn't enough space on the floor for us all to lie flat. The intimacy had its upside (Not that! Get your mind out of the gutter!) when the temperature outside dropped to 6 degrees. The next morning we awoke somewhat refreshed, and trudged under brilliant cobalt skies for the last leg that led to the same blue bus that had taken us to the woods six days before.
Soon I was back in the Qs for a long-anticipated shower and shave, piling my clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed before bounding into the steamy bathroom. When I emerged, clean and smooth-faced, the smell of wood smoke and BO almost knocked me back into the shower. Would it be possible to wash away the aroma of six days in the woods, or should I just burn the pile of green camo festering there? I ultimately gave the former a try, and was pleasantly surprised that the clothes ended up smelling fine.
The next part of the TDY, which involved a brief stay in a pretend POW camp, deserves its own post.
A week later, I emerged into brilliant sunshine and a warm breeze from the Alaska Air flight from Spokane to Los Angeles. It was a week before Christmas. I weighed 149 pounds, a weight I have not seen since, and was white as a ghost. Mom almost didn't recognize me.
Today's agenda involves a brief, fairly low threat hearing to close out a probate case that has lingered too long since the poor decedent got his head blown off by his sister-in-law, plus a couple phone calls and a visit from Bill the Plumber to come up with a scope of work and price to fix all the plumbing woes we've had at Tara lately. We'll be gone for five months; what better time to schedule a project that will entail shutting off the toilets for a couple weeks?
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