A turkey run to Turkey Run, part 1: What could possibly go wrong?

I’m considering not taking vacations anymore. Too stressful.

I have to go back to work for at least a week before my stress levels fall enough for the stress of work to start getting to me again. Then I start needing a vacation, because the last vacation was too stressful. If Joseph Heller hadn’t already written it, I’d hit the best seller list with my own Catch-22.

Let’s start at the beginning, when we decided to vacation at a place called Turkey Run State Park. It was the vacation that ended up being a turkey.

A few days earlier, as I cleaned my glasses, a temple fell off. The temples are the parts that hang over your ears. Remove one, then try to wear your glasses. Yeah.

Whenever it’s time for new glasses I try to get the same frames, because the only thing worse than wearing glasses is wearing new glasses. And every time, that particular frame is no longer available. Every time. It’s like some kind of sick joke within the frame making business.

But this time, the optometrist office didn’t tell me the frames weren’t available. They told me the frame manufacturer wasn’t available. They’d been bought out. The optometrist was going to try and find some spare parts, which was fine except I was about to drive three and a half hours away.

Here comes the repeating theme of this story, which is that things kept working out even as my stress levels rose. During my last eye exam, my eyesight had hardly changed at all. I slipped the old glasses into the new case, and there they waited for a catastrophe just like this one.

It reminds me of the line from Apollo 13, which went something like, “I think we’ve had our glitch for the mission.” They didn’t stop to consider there might be more than one glitch.

We managed to fit all our camping gear, and the dog, into my beloved 2006 Ford Focus. I probably wouldn’t have used the term “beloved” before, but I really did love that car.

Guess I’m telegraphing the ending.

Wait--I have to sleep outside with you? What did I do?

Let’s go back to the dog, Bae (It’s short for Baewulf, and yes, I know it’s misspelled—don’t tell him). Bae had started his fall shed. He must have been exhausted, growing so much fur. We would open a window, and a tornado of hair would blast past us. It looked like a cloud of smoke, pouring from the car. No wonder he sleeps so much.

Meanwhile, Emily got a sore throat the same night we put a deposit down on a campsite. By the next morning she had a cold so bad I’m still not sure it wasn’t the flu. I bought a case of Kleenex and a barrel of Nyquil, and she laid on the couch and didn’t complain, because she’s not me. We were still going on vacation, she declared, because our deposit was non-refundable.

We’ll just eat the cost, I told her. Your health is more important.

She swept aside a two-foot drift of dog fur and gave me a glare that actually made me retreat into the next room. “I’ll pack the car,” I told her. She really hates wasting money.

The strange thing about this whole story is that we had a wonderful time, whenever we weren’t miserable. We’ve compromised on our camping style: She gave up the two-man pup tent and hard ground, and I gave up the giant camper with a generator and satellite TV. The important thing is the inflatable air mattress. We had a nice site, a roaring fire, and S’mores. We had some great hiking trails that traversed rivers, suspension bridges, and canyons. Yes, there are canyons in Indiana.

We had leash laws.

This was one of the less scenic areas!

See, in a state park there are rules, and one is that you keep your pets on a leash. The lady with the dog on the trail either wasn’t holding the leash tightly enough, or was letting her dog roam, and drag the leash behind it. It saw our dog, Bae. It wanted Bae.

It wanted Bae for dinner.

I found myself quite literally in the middle of a dogfight. To our dog’s credit, he went on the defensive. However, Emily was there. When there might be a danger to Emily, “defensive” becomes a snarling, clawing, biting, 90-pound whirlwind of kick-ass. There’s no reason I can think of why my attempts to drag him away didn’t result in major blood loss.

Which brings us back to our “all’s well that ends well” theme. No injuries. The lady dragged her dog away and apologized profusely, and once Emily knew Bae was unharmed she restrained herself from going after the lady.

There was also no injury half an hour later when a much friendlier dog came running after Bae, wanting only to make friends but not realizing our dog had just been traumatized.

Leashes, people. It’s a thing.

We lasted about a day and a half. Emily was still sick, the dog was stressed, and that was it. We decided we’d come back the next week and spend a few more days there, because Turkey Run State Park was really a wonderful place.

All we needed was transportation.

Next: The “Trip” Back

S'Mores, people.

Six mile trail

Emily pointed out that there was no one to replace her at work, and I couldn't argue because I've used that line myself--and because I'm often within striking range of not one, but two crutches. So she worked the office at the Pokagon Saddle Barn today, and I worked off the frustrations of the last week by hiking six miles. Now my feet hurt, too ... but not as much as hers, I'd bet. This photo was at around mile four.

Our system has crashed

You may have read my earlier Instagram post, which went like this: 

Photos like this should always begin with "no one was seriously injured". It was a very sudden end to our vacation trip, thanks to a young man who was blinded by the evening sun. Now we have a car jammed full of camping stuff at a tow company in Logansport ... We're working out the logistics. Do I need to tell you a story will follow later?

Which is fine, but things change, and I did say "serious" injuries. I have the traditional airbag rash, strained forearm muscle, and a mysterious gash on my right index finger that we just can't figure out. Emily's right foot is bruised and swollen, and we're in the process of getting an x-ray, just in case.

The dog--and the other driver--seem fine.

Firefighters escape injury after dust explosion at Abbotsford furniture ...

Do You Remember?

This is my 2009 9/11 column. Sadly, nothing much had changed since then.




SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK


I have this recurring nightmare. I wake up one September morning, look around the neighborhood and check the news, then realize I’m the only person who remembers what happened on September 11, 2001.

Maybe it’s not such a terribly unrealistic thing to worry about.

Where were you on that morning? I headed home from work with no particular plan other than getting some sleep, and turned on the TV for background noise while I got ready for bed.

A shell shocked newscaster was reporting that an airplane had just hit one of the
World Trade Center towers, and that the other was on fire.

“Wow,” I thought, “what a horrible coincidence.”

Then I realized it couldn’t be a coincidence. The only logical answer was that an airborne news crew had been dispatched to cover the fire, and accidentally flew into one tower while filming the other one.

It didn’t take long to realize something even more horrible was going on.

Where were you that moment? The moment the world changed forever? Do you remember?

My then-girlfriend was a 911 call taker for the New York City Fire Department. Having a similar job myself, I knew she was having a really, really bad shift. Still, although I couldn’t remember which part of the city her dispatch center was in, at least whatever was happening seemed to be limited to the Towers.

Then a newsman at the Pentagon in Washington reported hearing the building shudder, as if something huge had hit it.

The United States was at war, as surely as the moment bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As I shoved a videotape into the VCR and pushed “record”, I remember thinking that September 11, 2001 would be one of those dates remembered forever, just like Pearl Harbor Day.

Will it be, though? Forever is a long time – how many school kids today can tell you the date of the Pearl Harbor attack, or the date when Kennedy was shot? Who remembers the date the Confederacy bombed Fort Sumter?

I had my scanner on, but there was an odd silence at first. Everyone was glued to the TV, if they weren’t actually on TV. I watched a reporter, standing in a Manhattan building with the burning Towers behind him, as he repeated what we knew, and what we didn’t. Suddenly, just behind him, one side of a Tower seemed to slide away. A wall is collapsing, I thought. A lot of people just died.

It wasn’t just a wall.

High rise buildings have burned before. The Empire State Building was also hit by an airplane, and survived – but it wasn’t made with truss construction. Other burning high rises didn’t suffer the immediate destruction of their fire protection systems, the explosive heat of a jet fuel fire, and an impact that blasted off critical insulation material, all at once.

Engineers and firefighters alike later realized the collapse was inevitable. Trusses are only as strong as their weakest member, and without any form of protection they fail early when attacked by extreme heat. There was never a chance to save those buildings.

I stood – apparently I’d never sat down to begin with – frozen in place as I realize what happened. A lot more people just died than I’d thought. A lot more.

Which Borough was my girlfriend’s dispatch center in?

By now the scanner was becoming active again, as word went out across the country. In an extraordinary first, every emergency service was being placed on standby. The military was mobilizing; every single airplane in the sky was being grounded. No one knew what was going to be hit next, or how many of the enemy were out there.

I hurried to the firehouse, picturing what would happen if someone flew a plane into downtown Fort Wayne, or rammed a gasoline tanker into a building, or detonated an ammonium nitrate bomb. At the very least we’d be moved up for standby; we might even end up on the scene. Rumors whirled, but one thing we did know was that anyone who could organize four hijackings could coordinate a dozen attacks, or three dozen, or a hundred. We’d been caught flat footed, and the possibilities were endless.

I wonder if anyone remembers the fear of that day, the stress of not knowing who had attacked, or what could come next. I wonder if anyone even remembers that, while we’ve killed or captured many of these extremists since, the remnants of their organization, and others, are still out there. Planning.

My department didn’t get called out that day. Like everyone, the Albion volunteers who could get away from work stayed near a TV. After awhile the repetition became too much and many of them wandered to other parts of the station, or just stood by the doors, looking outside at a brilliantly sunny world that was no longer so bright.

I made increasingly desperate attempts to reach my girlfriend. Surely, even in this, she’d get a break sooner or later? I didn’t realize how much critical communications equipment that had once stood at the top of a Trade Center Tower.

The dispatch center, it turns out, was across the river. She spent the morning talking on the phone to people who were about to die.

Oh, but that was a long time ago.

The economy has taken everyone’s attention away from the events of eight long years ago. (Fifteen, now.)  Generally, Americans are homebodies: They concern themselves first with their economy, health care, taxes. That’s why, despite years of extremist attacks and killing of Americans and American allies, it wasn’t until 9/11 that we really had it knocked into us that we were at war with another ideology. Once things settled down and the economy soured, our thoughts went elsewhere again.

But that doesn’t change a thing. Thousands of people are still dead. 343 firefighters were still murdered trying to save others. We could pull every soldier out of every country in the world and bring them home right now, and we’d still be the Great Satan that those crazed terrorists have dedicated themselves to bringing down.

For the sake of all those who died, and all those who may die in the future, please: Remember.

Hayride

I caught this pick of the Pokagon hayride loading up a couple of weeks ago. It's part of the saddle barn, which remains open for trail rides every weekend until Halloween.

Star Trek at Fifty

One of my earliest memories was watching the Apollo Moon missions on TV.

One of my other earliest memories was hiding behind my mother from a frightening image on TV: a giant, alien, disembodied head. No, this was before Nixon. If you don’t know how those two could possibly be connected (besides an early indication that my generation watched too much TV) … then you don’t know Star Trek. (That episode, by the way, was “The Corbomite Maneuver”.)

Could it have really been fifty years ago? A whole half century since the single most influential entertainment show in television history debuted.

Yeah, that’s a big claim, but think about it. That weird space show with the bad special effects did more than spawn a bunch of movies and spin-offs. It influenced people who became astronauts themselves, as well as scientists of every stripe. It became a cultural phenomenon, to the extent that even people who hate science fiction recognize “Live long and prosper”, and “Beam me up, Scotty”. It went all the way from there down to a little kid who was inspired to write stories about space himself, and who now defines himself as a writer above almost all else.

Just to be clear, that would be me.

Lots of electronic ink is being spilled this week over the big five oh. Why did Star Trek become so huge? The simple answer is that it held one thing that so much futurism of the time didn’t: optimism. It posited a future universe in which we not only survived nuclear weapons, racial conflict, despots and election campaigns, we triumphed. We went out beyond our world together, as one race.

Can’t we all just get along? In Star Trek, we did. That was what it was about, not the rubber alien faces and over-emoting.

On a personal level, it led me not only to write stories myself, but to have my first fictional role model. I was a shy kid, suppressing my emotions, misunderstood—alien. The character of Spock spoke to me … I even had a blue long-sleeved shirt with an insignia on it that looked a lot like his uniform shirt.

The less said about my haircut at the time, the better … although it may help explain why I wasn’t the most popular kid.

As a teen, it seemed like I was in an exclusive club, maybe too exclusive—sometimes I thought I was the only Star Trek fan in the state. In a weird way, I was upset when it went from a canceled cult show to a franchise. It was like losing ownership. But now Star Trek belongs to the world, and after fifty years it’s still going strong.

That’s a good thing—the world needs all the optimism it can get.

An Interview with Ingrid Hahn

An Interview with Ingrid Hahn

Could we at least finish summer, first?

September Sixth is the day I first saw Christmas items on the shelf of a local store. September Sixth. Well over a quarter of a year before Christmas.

And yes, I have now been banned from still another store for still another anti-early Christmas tirade, but the jokes on them: They had to clean up after my head exploded.