Smash Up Derby

Brigid wrote about all those toys from way back when. It brought back memories (go read). Here is one of my favorites....



Who else wanted to be a demoltion demon in a beat up Chevrolet?

Lantern Light

It was late when I finally managed to go shoot. As a result, I did not shoot much, but afterwards an old friend and I got to brainstorming. Such activity can be fraught with peril.

If we do night practice, what is to stop us from using floodlights to illuminate the area downrange? Obviously, we would be using a berm, and we would use regular target frames. The floodlights, however, could be used as a visual signal for short durations of illumination to have the same effect of pepper poppers while dealing with with constricting pupils. The problem, of course, is how to make absolutely certain the area down range is closed.

I decided to research it a bit further. We traded a few more stories, and it was time to go. As I drove through the night, I remembered some of my boyhood camping trips. We would sleep out under a sky as black as a coal mine, with stars twinkling overhead. We would use the same type kerosene lanterns to cast light through a forest of pines and dancing shadows. Dark spectres were seen among the shadows as ghost stories were swapped about. All I wanted to be was a hobo back then. Ah the aspirations of a twelve year old boy.

Later, as a college student, I went on a float camping trip with a buddy from North Carolina. The gates were open at the dam of the spillway we launched at, but we had come too far to turn back. Everything downstream was inundated with water, and dry ground was scarce. After paddling through an afternoon of never ending treetops, we finally found a patch of dry land to make camp. We would have to share with raccoons, 'possums and armadillos. As we sat drinking Coors in the lantern light, I told Carl that D'arbonne Creek used to be called something else. He fell into the trap. "What's that?" he asked innocently.

"Boggy Creek," I replied. The movie had been released few years previously, and along with The Town that Dreaded Sundown, a huge impact was still in the mind of youth unaccustomed to Blair Witch type movies. Carl, hearing the local creatures rustling through the leaves on the soggy ground could not take it any longer. I had a hammock. He had a sleeping bag. He took his sleeping bag, climbed into the aluminum john boat and cast off to tie up among the tree tops for the night.

When I awoke Carl was surrounded by what appeared through the morning mist to be bicycle tubes hanging in the branches. As my crusty eyes adjusted, I realized they were snakes. "Carl! Don't move! No! Move slowly! Don't shake the branches!" I yelled. It took a lot to get Carl to go camping again.

The world seems so different now. Or maybe it's me. Age will do that, I suppose, but by the light of kerosene, in a black tar night, it seems very similar.

Memories

Some stories are so incredible that a person is hesitant to relate them. Such is a story of one woman I taught to shoot.

"Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one."
Luke 22:36

Everyone has a God given right to self defense. The Lord helps those who help themselves.

Barfines and Baboons

Like any good sailor, he always asked if she had her own place before he paid a barfine. She did. Barfine paid, they set out along a dirt path into the jungle. Her place turned out to be made of cardboard underneath a canopy of banana trees. She had extension cords run up through the jungle for a clock radio, an oscillating fan, and a string of Christmas lights. Even though the night was hot and sticky, the humble abode was agreeable.

They played cards well into the night, and in the morning he put on his scivies and "Philippino safety shoes" (flip flop sandals) and headed down the jungle trail for a beer and breakfast at Pinky's bar. Half way down the trail, they converged on him. Hordes of enraged baboons.

He lost both of his safety shoes in a mad dash through the jungle, across the hiway, and into the front of Pinky's. He hurdled straight through the saloon doors in the back of the bar, across the beach, under the volleyball net and swam out into Subic Bay. As he treaded water in Subic Bay, the sounds of a donnybrook arose from the bamboo structure ashore. When the noise subsided, Papa San emerged onto the beach with a baseball bat in his hand and waved the sailor ashore.

"You, Joe. You go get me more monkeys," requested Papa San. Across the pool table were the carcasses of ten or twelve slain primates. Eating was good at Pinky's and the sailor drank for half price thereafter.

There are stories that we are disinclined to share. Sometimes they are not stories at all, only wet, visceral pin point splatters in our memory. They are not chonological, and they are hard to give description to. Still, they are points of heightened humanity that makes us who we are.

Tsavo

Tsavo was one of the most alive places I've ever experienced. The very land breathes. It's brutal, primitive, elemental. One views their existence underneath a lens in Tsavo. Where once we saw ourselves as significant, in Tsavo, where the thorns reach gargantuan proportions, we come to realize that we are human, and what humans really are.

I've never felt more alive than the nights spent among the grass in Tsavo, knowing that I was on the food chain. Not just prey for men, but for predators that would devour me and gnaw on my scattered bones. My guide wore a pink shower cap to keep the dust from his hair, and he spoke only a small smattering of English. As I sat around the fire with him at night, gazing into the flames but not speaking, I knew that the means to keep myself from being sold as a hostage was the payment waiting for him in Nairobi. That, and my .38 revolver.

As our old battered Land Rover clattered to life in a burst of cantankerous smoke the next morning, my nostrils flared. I saw the grass divide and come back together as those who had been watching us departed. I never knew if they were man or beast.

There are stories that we are disinclined to share. Sometimes they are not stories at all, only wet, visceral pin point splatters in our memory. They are not chonological, and they are hard to give description to. Still, they are points of heightened humanity that makes us who we are.