The ghost of Christmas yet to come

Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

Duty on Christmas is reliably mellow. You make a few rounds, munch candy canes with fellow watchstanders, energize the Christmas lights, dial up the holiday tunes, and settle down for a long winter's night of catching up on your undone work while nobody’s around to bother you. While you eat leftover Christmas cookies dropped off by sympathetic shipmates, who are now at home, bundled up by the tree.

There's usually a nice Christmas dinner spread put on by the cooks (or in this case, the contracted galley staff). There's no competition for the weights or cardio room, it's easy to find a parking spot, and often the CO calls or stops by to dole out some non-alcoholic holiday cheer. At OCS, my first Coast Guard Christmas on duty, I think they sent us the Chief of Staff and his pleasantly cordial family to raise our spirits as we sat around drinking forbidden soda, eating forbidden sweets, and watching forbidden football (when we weren't sneaking off to find forbidden pay phones). I swear, that'll be me some day: all the other flags are home popping Christmas crackers and re-gifting fruitcakes, and I'll be the schmuck out awkwardly celebrating Christmas with the troops. Every year. I'll volunteer.

Christmas is quiet. Excepting the odd officer or chief who calls to share holiday greetings, nobody calls. Nobody emails. Nobody arrives. Even the message traffic slows to a crawl.

What you don’t expect is to hear from the detailer.

Christmas Eve morning, sure, you're supposed to be at work unless you're taking leave. So maybe the detailer was trying to wrap things up before he headed out for the holidays. But Christmas is a holiday, and this year Dec. 26th was a federal holiday too, and then it's the weekend. I figured the detailer'd maybe get back to me sometime next week, by which time I'd hopefully be safely aboard BOUTWELL somewhere in the Pacific, making it that much harder for him to extract me and stick me elsewhere.

I woke up relatively early Christmas morning, not for Santa or stockings but to arm up and make a security round. I checked message traffic, eyeballed the logs for any overnight issues, and as an afterthought, glanced at my email. Maybe somebody'd wished me a Merry Christmas.

There was only one email, a quick message sent from the detailer's Treo. Does he sit texting while his kids rip open presents? I wondered. Just what I needed on Christmas - another "great idea" to yank me off the deployment. I wasn't sure I wanted to open it.

The two COs have been negotiating, he began, and they've worked out a plan that'll get you off the BOUTWELL a little early so you can still get to JARVIS. This is sort of a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. If you still want to go to JARVIS, let me know and we'll work out the details later.

Did I ever! Aloha Hawaii! Now that was a Christmas present. I didn't stop to wonder how the detailer knew I'd be at work on Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day. Except that I always seem to be.

Again the ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea – on, on – until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch: dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

The ghost of Christmas present

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds – born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the water – rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself.

This was my fifth out of six Coast Guard Christmases I've spent on duty. (I was scheduled for duty my second year in, too, but squeaked out of it after I covered for someone who skipped out on watch a couple weeks earlier.)

I don’t mind holiday duty. I volunteer for it. Let someone else rack up family time. The essence of American Christmas – Santa, presents, reindeer, lights, cheesy pop music, succulent ham, and unbridled consumption – fails to impress me. And, my family doesn’t have any great Christmas traditions (half my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, to begin with), at least not any I’d want to replicate with warm nostalgia. (Dragging out the withered Christmas tree in April to the tree graveyard out back? Being tasked to wrap your own presents? Christmas music blaring at 5 am when you were up performing for three Christmas Eve services, the last stretching past midnight? Ripping open a gaily wrapped package of...Sears underwear?)

I’ll go for a quiet candlelight carol service and charitable gifts in honor of friends and relatives; I enjoy writing Christmas cards. But that’s about it. My one Christmas off, I spent the 24th and 25th cooking meals in a soup kitchen. So give me duty, really...I don’t mind.

This year, it was unexpected. Whether due to my supervisory responsibilities, my changing duty status, my rank, or the transitory nature of my non-billet, I’d escaped the duty rotation and thus dodged the specter of holiday duty. Until a week ago, when one of my petty officers fractured his shoulder in a particularly spirited Morale game of Ultimate Frisbee, and there I was a couple days later, shooting lead downrange to re-qualify and stand his duty.

My roommate, meanwhile, was heading home to Turkey for three weeks. She had me wake her up at oh-dark-thirty to say goodbye – by the time she returned, I’d be sailing in the Pacific somewhere. “I’ll see you in the summer,” she blinked drowsily.

Christmas Eve flew past faster than the NORAD-tracked reindeer. Morning staff meeting, a long passdown as my supervisor disappeared for 15 days of leave, and then a busy procession of cars to check through the front gate, everyone rushing to squeeze in last-minute Christmas shopping at the exchange. I’d saved up a fair amount of paperwork to slog through, too, so it wasn’t until late afternoon when I noticed the light blinking on my work voicemail. Blink. Blink. Blink. Who would call me on Christmas Eve at work? Who knew I was here? It was, to my astonishment, the detailer. Uh oh. Wasn't my future set? “Call me. I have an idea I’d like to run by you.”

Of course, by then, it was evening on the East Coast; and assuming he was busy envisioning the dancing of sugar plums with his family, I left him a quick message and then put it out of my mind, searching out my watchstanders to go spread Christmas cheer. No more ideas! I thought. I thought I was all set to deploy. Don’t change that now. Don't ruin my Christmas.

A dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Don't get me wrong. Despite the expostulations of my well-meaning roommate, there was no bad choice, no rock, no hard place, no Scylla, no Charybdis. Only two amazingly good strokes of luck, sandwiching a providential determination of good health.

Still, it was bittersweetly that I released one dream in order to embrace another. The cheap plastic lei I'd draped on my CYPRESS stateroom door when I'd first received those improbable "OPS on RUSH" orders last year still beckoned, hopeful, dusty but unforgotten, on a closet door in my San Francisco apartment. The dream still flickered in the dusty depths of my mind, only set aside by chemo and radiation and temporary distractions, never abandoned, never boxed up, never tossed out.

Lightning never strikes twice. One or the other. Half-hearted ideas I tossed up to the detailer sank like rocks. The ship wasn't willing to waive the schools I'd miss, didn't want to wait, needed me now or never. So, no. My roommate reassured me, "Hawaii isn't going anywhere," and my great white visions slowly faded to black, to thoughts of perhaps a buoy tender out there, something else, the dream still not released, just set aside, just deferred, in stasis, waiting.

As thrilled as I was about the deployment, I still had to keep explaining to everyone why I'd chosen the improbable over the unlikely. An exhausting day aboard BOUTWELL, driving the ship from drydock back to homeport, unpredictably stirred up the spirits again - ear to the wind, the news was that BOUTWELL's CO had been advocating for me with JARVIS's CO. Why two captains, one who never met me and the other who'd seen me in action for all of two weeks and a day, would negotiate over me like choice chattel, was beyond me.

So I started to pack my seabag, and to plan for my return this summer, and to wrap up things in the office; but I couldn't help but cast a few last longing glances at that cheap plastic lei, considering packing it away. On second thought, I left it hanging where it was, garish plastic flowers against a drab white closet, reminding me, a dream deferred.

The ghost of Christmas past

He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

He could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been much more conducive to that end.

It was a year ago, just before Christmas. This time, last year, I was partying in Key West, fresh off an astonishingly successful and exciting TAD trip on board THETIS, leading a dozen merchant vessels in an depressingly fruitless man overboard search, weaving at high speed through a fleet of fishing vessels to chase down go-fasts, carefully choreographing intelligence and helicopter flights and small boats and international agreement and ship navigation to catch drug runners, threading back and forth through rough seas in pitch blackness to pick out and retrieve jettisoned, camouflaged drug bales, deftly bobbing the ship just in sync with the surging sea to squeak just inside the pitch/roll limits for helo ops, frolicking during sun-baked port call days in Grand Cayman, and above all, reveling in the respect and confidence, invaluable shiphandling opportunities, and the deep, newfound confirmation that I really was, and would be, and wanted to be, a cutterman.

So here I was in Key West, squeezing out a few more days of paradise while my permanently assigned ship, the CYPRESS, was underway working buoys. The sun-drenched time passed quickly, filled with delicious food, apple pie-baking, Christmas church services, jogs around the island, a small-boat trip out to a lazy inlet, and daily JO get-togethers. Even a day trip I arranged to JIATF-South was more adventure and reconnecting with an old friend than work.

It seemed anything was possible. I'd met my goal, earning a 270' OOD qualification in just 10 days of watch. What took me 13 months and two boards to achieve on CYPRESS, I'd somehow knocked out in just a week and a half, the best birthday present of all, as the timing had it. The ship's CO had passed along a glowing recommendation. And at last, I had a whole group of JOs to hang with, and we were having a blast. I'd fallen in love with white hull life. But I was living on borrowed time.

One afternoon, as I was putting on a necklace, preparing to go out with my newfound friends, I felt a funny lump tucked under my collarbone. Tiny. Barely noticeable. Didn't belong there. I put it out of my mind until late that night, curled up on the couch, trying to focus on a few paragraphs from Jeremiah, everyone else asleep, the house heavy with humid, warm December air. I kept fingering that little lump in the hollow of my neck, my heart sinking. I knew. Somehow I knew.

I didn't tell anyone, not then and not for a couple of weeks, not until the holidays were over and I was back at work, at last. We were getting ready to go into drydock. I was nervous with expectation over my impending orders, wondering anxiously if all the ammunition I'd gathered during the 270' patrol would be enough to influence the detailer into taking a tremendous chance and granting me a white hull OPS billet somewhere. Frustrated, because for three glorious weeks I had tasted freedom, challenge, and respect, underway; and now here I was, nobody again, loving my job but bristling against a structure that kept me a big fish in a small pond, heavy on responsibilities but completely stripped of any authority to accomplish anything, feeling unrespected and harassed for all I did. Disappointed we'd be going into local drydock instead of undertaking a much more interesting voyage around the Keys and up the East Coast to the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore.

It was time. I went to see the ship's HS1. "Doc, I've got this weird lump in my neck. It's probably nothing, but I'd like to get it looked at." He asked me a ton of questions, carefully massaged my neck, and flipped through several diagnostic books. He wrote everything down and sent me away, and later that afternoon he brought me back. "I'm going to send you over to the clinic for some bloodwork," he said. "It looks like you have a swollen lymph node. There are a lot of things that can cause that." I don't remember the laundry list of possible, probable causes he rattled off, but at the end, as almost an afterthought, he pulled out one of those thick diagnostic books and slowly turned the pages until he found what he wanted. "Now, this is highly unlikely, but you should know that there's also a very remote possibility that you have either Hodgkins or non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But I wouldn't be worried about it right now."

I wasn't worried. But I knew.

Right vs. Right

Our class schedule at OCS (Officer Candidate School) incorporated an inordinate amount of time studying ethics. We defined ethical dilemmas, classified the different flavors of ethical dilemmas, analyzed ethical dilemmas with a variety of specific methods, and eventually, learned the processes for resolving ethical dilemmas. We then spent countless class hours debating actual ethical dilemmas from "Ethics for the Junior Officer".

While certainly a welcome break from (and infinitely more engaging than) the multitude of other topics of our tutelage during training, I found this obsession with ethics befuddling. Mainly, I worried that the sample scenarios we debated seemed so cut-and-dried to me, even the ones which were clearly dilemmas: "right vs. right" and not a deftly disguised "right vs. wrong". Sure, there were gray areas, patches of shoal water, endless reflections of "ifs" - but my decisions were swift, my supporting arguments clear-cut and without regret.

At first, I chalked it up to a perhaps overly developed sense of right and wrong, until I discovered that classmates with unbending views on any topic found it nigh impossible to choose between competing virtues. Experience, loyalty, integrity, wisdom, and compassion did much to weed out non-dilemmas, but only muddied the waters for the true tough choices.

Now, more jaded after five years in, I venture to guess that my classmates' indecision (prophetically foreshadowing, for me, astonishing moments I later encountered of senior officers' indecision or complete refusal to decide) stemmed not from intellectual or moral uncertainty, but from a fear of being judged wrong in the final analysis, the "command review", or most strikingly, on the OER. In the heat of battle, often any decision is better than no decision, particularly in a dilemma. I like to think I'm immune to brown-nosing and wardroom politics, but most of the toughest dilemmas I've faced thus far have been decisions between what is best, or right, and what the command directs. I've learned diplomacy.

These past few weeks, I've faced a different sort of dilemma entirely, completely unexpected on my part. Early rotation to (and thus guaranteed placement in) my most-desired job, or a crazy, high-intensity deployment. Sounds like a no-brainer, and I could tell most of the people I asked for advice saw it as a short-term vs. long-term dilemma, with the long-term career benefits easily weighing out the short-term adventure. (I daresay they also saw it as individual vs. community - pleasing the detailer and the Hawaii ship's command, or indulging in a personal, irreplaceable adventure.)

But it wasn't that simple. While my decision was swift, I didn't trust myself at first, and it was only as the intervening days played out that my reasoning became clear-cut. After the medical argument - that my doctor needed to see me once more in six months' time to complete my care - it turned out that my next strongest point was actually a rebuttal to concerns of the Hawaii ship's XO - that I didn't have enough "white hull" experience. As I explained to the XO in my carefully worded "Dear John" letter yesterday, this deployment provides me the opportunity to gain much of the white hull experience I lack, and makes me a much stronger candidate to walk into a 270'/378' OPS job this summer.

I followed my heart on this one, and it was only after much consideration that my head came around to see the wisdom of the snap judgment. It turns out, in hindsight, that there really was no second choice for me, though I'm still astonished at the detailer's willingness to accomodate my desires, even at the expense of his.

I won't let them down.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you

It's our unit Christmas party tonight, so I'll post later, but I wanted to pass that I talked to the detailer today, and after congratulating me on my healthy scan, he said, "So, I am ready to support whatever decision you make."

I'm deploying on the OOH.

And now, I'm out celebrating!!!

Good news!

The scan was negative! More later.

Wanted

I just found out late yesterday that BOUTWELL and MLCPAC selected me to fill the TAO billet. I'm on my way to see the doctor now, to find out the results of my scan and make sure it's OK to deploy.

How I'll handle JARVIS and the detailer has yet to be determined...

I'm barely containing my excitement! I couldn't sleep at all last night. I kept waking up every 15 minutes - is it 6am yet and time to start the day?

I know the plans I have for you

While I await the results of this week's PET/CT scan and doctor consult, I find myself subject once again to the shifting vicissitudes of assignment season...

I'd worried about next summer, about getting back into the mix, trying to get back underway again, wondering if the same miraculous alignment-of-the-stars that brought me my unlikely number one pick last year would somehow weigh ever so gently on the new detailer this year. Just keep me off the beach. This year counts as a staff job, right?

The summertime conversations with the detailer went well, but when the "shopping list" appeared in August, I found, uneasily, only three 378' OPS jobs open.

Since I knew my doctors wanted to check up on me a few more times, and since the detailer kept saying I was transferring next summer...and since I was fit for full duty, and had a replacement to take over my job, and a very supportive command...and most of all, since I was eager to reclaim my life, I started planning underway trips, even before I'd finished radiation.

My goal was to log a couple weeks aboard a 378' in the fall, in time to influence the detailer's decision in my favor - much like that fortuitous trip aboard THETIS last fall. Additional underway hours beckoned in the spring, six months of "open slate" outside of eight weeks for pipeline training. I called the ship schedulers (ah, the convenience of working on an island with well over a dozen different commands - easier to cut red tape) and found out who was going where, when. One trip in particular intrigued me.

I was already discussing possibilities with my command and playing with patrol dates when a request came out for a JG or LT to fill a TAO billet for that out-of-hemisphere (OOH) deployment. Bingo. An actual billet I could fill, instead of just shipriding for my own professional development. Negotiations ensued, and resulted in my getting underway with the ship for a couple weeks in November, just a day after I returned from South Africa, as a sort of trial balloon. Would they like me? Would I learn things quickly enough? Would I really want to deploy with them?

The singular answer to all those questions was a resounding "yes!", but the ship couldn't give me a straight "up or down" answer until they got the results of the solicitation. After all...I didn't yet have all the qualifications they wanted - underway 378' OOD letter, TAO qualification, the requisite experience. I could make the entire deployment, though, so the command was willing to qualify me en route. I allowed myself to get excited.

I should know by now that hope is dangerous. It wasn't long after I returned from San Diego, high with anticipation, that the detailer called. I'd known he wanted to get me off my medical support billet, but I'd assumed, naively, that it was for administrative reasons.

I had been counting on having the spring to recover my physical strength and mental sanity and get "back in the groove", log a final checkup with my doctors in the summer, and only then PCS to a new assignment, but the detailer was mulling other plans for me. Now that I was fit for full duty, I became a viable pawn on his chessboard. So, the offer: rotate six months early to backfill for two officers on a 378' who were leaving early. I'd fill the empty Weapons Officer billet until the summer, when I'd fleet up into the OPS position. And the kicker: the ship in question...was my top pick.

So why wasn't I more excited? Even the detailer was confused. How to explain? The dynamic nature of the 6-month OOH deployment, all that underway time, so much to learn, unique foreign port calls, daily challenges of a sort perhaps never to be repeated...in a word, Excitement!...what if I never have this chance again? I could argue that sending me on the OOH might more sense for the ship, or for my career, or even medically, but the truth is it will be an adventure, and how can I pass that up to sit in drydock?

The XO of the"top pick" ship started calling me, and it was mildly awkward. I didn't want to commit, but I also didn't want to turn him down outright - what if I was sent there? I found out there were no other volunteers for the deployment, but with two sister ships on the East Coast standing by, there were certainly a few qualified folks sitting there, potentially under-utilized and available for deployment. I counter-offered to the temporary assignment folks that perhaps they could cross-deck a couple people from the East Coast ships to Hawaii for the spring - they'd already be qualified and knowledgeable - and send me on deployment as a very willing volunteer and someone the ship already knew.

I asked for advice from friends, family, colleagues, supervisors, and mentors. The only consensus was that there was no bad choice. I kept encountering folks from the OOH ship on the Island; they greeted me enthusiastically, assuming I was sailing with them. To my great dismay, I had to be noncommittal in my replies. Their command cadre couldn't give a straight answer, because they were all overseas preparing for the deployment. My emotions were all over the map. The scheming side of my brain kicked into full gear, only barely restrained by the calm, carpe diem, "yes, sir" side that told me to quit looking a gift horse in the mouth. Was I wasting political capital and valuable time trying to fight this one?

It all rests, ultimately of course, on my PET/CT scan and doctor's visit this week, the first since I finished radiation back in September. I was supposed to check in with the doctor before I went to South Africa, but they botched the sequence of appointments and I was out of the country before they had time for me. The doctor, no doubt, will be taken aback that he might lose me permanently from follow-up care so soon. Forty percent of Hodgkins patients who relapse will do so in the first 12-18 months following the start of treatment (it drops off precipitously after that). So it is no stretch to state that checking in one last time after the OOH would ease his mind and be the most sensible, medical. Perhaps even if I go to Hawaii, I could check in with these same doctors during the drydock period, just for continuity of care.

But it is a dangerous card to play: I don't want to remove myself from being FFFD - concurrent with being available for worldwide assignment - and it is tricky to argue that I am safe to deploy short-term, but not to end up in Hawaii, with its excellent military medical facilities, for two and a half years.

I can't plan for packing, moving, renting out my apartment, finding a new place, visiting friends and family for the holidays (either the last chance before the OOH or the last chance for a couple years), or even buying tickets for holiday events, not knowing when I might ship out. Even as my friends, family, and colleagues become more invested in the career plans, ultimately, the decision is not mine to make. So I fill my time with relief processes and laps in the pool and studying systems and defenses of 378s. I try to trust that there is a master plan and prevent getting too excited, just in case the scan finds something. You can never be too certain.

Lean on me

I really haven't sought out any cancer support groups or networks over the past several months. Perhaps it's just that I prefer to identify as a well person than a sick one. I was happy to raise money for cancer groups pre-diagnosis, but now I just want to fly under the radar and be done with it all.

A very nice, if over-eager, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society lady approached me in the hospital one day, and not to discount the terrific work this group does, but I really had no need for it and tried valiantly to slink away. In particular, she kept pushing me to take the group's money, and I couldn't convey strongly enough to her that I had no need for the cash. My medical costs were fully funded, I was still drawing a full salary and housing allowance, and I couldn't bear the thought that somebody's well-meaning donations were going to a place of little need. I give to groups like this; I shouldn't take.

Out of curiosity the other night, though, I stumbled across a social-networking site for Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma survivors. I'd scanned a few cancer blogs early on, before treatment began, because I was uncomfortably unaware of what lay ahead and wanted to steel myself. That was months ago, though. This group had a few interesting sub-section topics: Long-Term Survivors, Lingering Side Effects, and Remission or Relapse? grabbed my attention. I read how several people had lived with (or without) the disease for 5, 10, 20 years, usually after being diagnosed and treated as a teenager.

The Side Effects section was more sobering - survivors described infertility, memory loss, hypothyroidism, weight issues, heart and lung problems, secondary cancers, fibromyalgia - the litany seemed endless. Several posted that they dealt bravely with this horrible quality of life from all the side effects because they were just grateful they weren't dead from the cancer. I felt more than a little guilty, because my lasting side effects (as yet) are so limited and unobtrusive. In fact, in many ways, I feel much, much healthier than I have for a couple of years. I suppose a good chemo prophylaxis does that.

Even reading the Side Effects section, I began to wonder if the sort of people who joined these groups - and, even more so, the sort who would post their personal experiences to an anonymous "support group" of "survivors" - were self-selecting for the worse. I certainly hoped this was the case, once I dove into the ominously named Remission or Relapse?

A precious few proudly stood behind a decade or two of remission; some even declared confidently that their cancer was "completely gone" and they were "cured". But they were in the quiet minority. Many wrote of deflating experiences of finding new lumps, positive PET/CT scans, and repeat chemo, usually accompanied by stem-cell transfers and other more aggressive treatments. There was the unsubstantiated claim that over 80% of relapses occur within 12 months after the first round of treatment, which now I'm intrigued to research.

And then, most uncomforting of all, there was post after post describing the overwhelming anxiety building in advance of PET/CT scans. Scans are a fact of life, a frequent fact, for lymphoma survivors. Every few months (eventually, annually and then maybe once every couple years) for the rest of your life, you take the radioactive glucose and the vein-burning dye so the doctors can scour for any sign of relapse. So be it.

Not for these folks. Most of their posts ran something like this: "About a week before my scan, I start feeling lumps and bumps everywhere. My blood pressure skyrockets and I can't eat anything, I'm so nervous. After the scan is over and I get the results, everything goes back to normal...until the next time.

I just can't get worked up like that. My job, the assignment tug-of-war, now that I'm stressed about. But a scan? Either I'm sick or I'm not - there's nothing I can do about it. And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?

Appearances

I have hair again. Well, mostly. There are still a couple balder patches at the nape of my neck, from the radiation; but other than that, my hair's grown back. It came in fine and downy and thinly at first, like baby hair, eventually thickening back to normal both in quantity and quality. I've already cut it a couple times, and it was strange to see the cut hair, one end of it was wispy, never sliced.

I'm keeping the hair short for a while, at least. I've wanted hair this short for a long time and couldn't have it: my supervisor during OCS famously turned down my request to shave my head of its pesky, time-consuming, freeze-to-my-head-in-the-New-England-winter-hair because, and I quote, he "wanted his female officer candidates to look like young ladies". After I cut my hair as short as I could get away with, fellow OCs wondered what my boyfriend would say or worried how I'd be perceived at my first unit; and more than a couple started wondering aloud if I was actually a butch lesbian. (Don't ask; don't tell...)

When I cut my hair this summer - first right before I started chemo, and then again (a completely bald shave) three weeks later, when the hair fell out in clumps and patches - I didn't ask permission. I figured I had an iron-clad excuse. And now that it's short, it's hard for anyone to argue that I'm being "radical" in my hairstyle or making a "statement" by it...after all, they've known me with that hair, or lack thereof, for quite some time now.

One of the great things of a short haircut, and there are many, is that you can get your hair cut quickly and cheaply on the "guys' side". Or you can buy a "home cut" kit, like I did a few weeks ago, and go at it yourself. Hair washes, dries, and styles much easier as well, a feature particularly practical during my recent stint underway.

So the downside? Well, I don't know if it's strictly that, but I've been called "sir" ever since the hair made its disappearance. I always figured it was an easy mistake and ignored it most of the time, just returning the greeting and moving on. We have so many people on our base, I figured if they didn't already know me, what was the point of correcting a stranger? I fell victim to the same trap of ignore-and-condone on the ship, though, and one of the other officers was quick to jump all over the unwitting offender. It reminded me of training, except without the pushups to emphasize the point. "That's ma'am. Good morning ma'am. Does she look like a sir to you??" followed with a glare at me, How could you excuse such behavior?

I've had one stranger tell me I was "brave" for having my hair guy-short, and a couple others ask if I'd had cancer. But the real eye-openers have come when I've worn wigs, which I've only done a couple of times. Once was in Texas, during my road trip, when I sported an obviously fake, shoulder-length, bleach-blond wig as part of my "costume" and a statement on the nature of the state I was visiting. Nobody said anything or even looked at me funny, which I found more than mildly amusing.

The first time was just before that, before I left on my road trip, when I met up with my former SF roommate and some of her friends (all of whom I hadn't seen in maybe a month) at a bar. Again it was like donning a costume for one of the many plays or musicals I've been in over the years. This time, my wig was short, brown, heavily styled, and expensive (=relativey realistic). I paired this sassy number with an equally bright, classy outfit and headed out on the town. Not a single person in the group recognized me, not even the roommate I'd seen daily for three months straight. "Wow, you look so good! So much...better...I mean..." was frequent.

This awkward moment was later duplicated, on Halloween. For Halloween, my one-day "mid-patrol break" in between South Africa and 378' life, I reprised a 70s outfit I'd worn to a summer theme wedding, except this time, I had the accompanying Farrah Fawcett wig that hadn't arrived in time for the summer event. Longer than shoulder-length, strawberry blond, big fat curly bangs and side-bangs and soft and long in the back...I thought it topped off my costume perfectly.

It was the first time anyone at work had seen me with any length of hair, and again, few people recognized me, even after the obligatory double-take, which I guess was only to be expected: after all, I run around all day in ODUs, safety boots, and a high-and-tight, and here I was in a long, flowing white dress topped by cheesy makeup and a fluffy wig. (The wig didn't quite have the desired 70s effect, due largely to the appearance on the political scene of one Sarah Palin, whom I, with glasses and wig, apparently resembled, at least to drunk partygoers steeped in pre-election frenzy.) The wig, or maybe its Sarah Palin connotation, worked its magic all night though - guys couldn't stop trying to introduce themselves. I knew they wouldn't have given me a first glance (let alone a second thought) if I'd been wigless, sporting my normal cut.

Top comment definitely goes to an older civilian man who works in my building. He stopped by my office the morning of Halloween, saw a girl with long, strawberry-blonde hair and a white dress sitting on the couch, smiled, and stepped in ready to flirt. (Believe me, I saw the eyes widen in happy surprise and the attitude change - the straighter posture, the slight tip to the head - gradually wash over him.) When he realized whom he was talking to, he stopped suddenly. "Wow," he finally got out. "You look really great! It's the hair, the dress...wow...you know what they say, 'clothes make the woman'. I mean...you just look really different today, so attractive!"

Just one of the crew

Back a month or so ago, I was able to get underway for a couple of weeks on a 378', a trip I'd started laying groundwork for back in September.

This relatively short excursion was preparatory to my desire to deploy with the ship in the spring for five months: an opportunity to get some experience onboard, meet the crew, familiarize myself with the ship, and start working on my qualifications both on the bridge and in combat.

The command cadre knew of my background: an inescapable explanation for why I was available, what my background was, and just how I'd managed to take only 1/3 of an important "pipeline training" school. It was accepted as part of my package, and otherwise ignored.

The crew, on the other hand, knew nothing other than that I was a restless seafarer uneasily anchored to a land desk, desperate for that one prolonged blast. I crossed the brow, then, with no baggage but a hastily packed seabag.

The two weeks were relentless. I flew out to meet the ship less than two days after I'd returned from South Africa. We had barely reached the sea buoy when a fireball blew out of the stacks; and that was only the first main space fire: at midnight that night, we had another; and the next evening, the threat of a third (though it turned out to be only billowing smoke). Drill followed drill, non-stop, from daybreak to taps, preceeded and followed by training team briefs and debriefs. Almost every morning and evening, we were either pulling into or out of San Diego, anchoring for brief moments (for "score"), or exchanging crew members and shipriders via small boat. At last, the TACT drills took a brief hiatus, so we could squeeze in a 48-hour battle exercises with a Navy strike group. I volunteered for the morning 4 - 8 break-in watch: sure, it meant days lasting from 0230 to 2200, but it was the only chance I could carve out to stand a watch uninterrupted by drills.

Nor were my watches uneventful. I conned away from one pier and took the deck inport homeport, maneuvered the ship to protect a "high value asset" during a Navy exercise, coached for recovery of a deflated gunnery target, and tracked down and assisted a sinking sailboat before dark one windy morning. We even beat the helo to the scene. Down in combat, I observed a multiplicity of drills before filling in, somewhat uncertainly at first, as the Watch Supervisor. Eventually I took a turn as TAO (tactical action officer) to practice identifying and defending the ship against inbound missiles. I loved every minute of it.

The best part, though, other than finally casting away the lines (OK, shouting rudder commands from the bridge wing and "wardroom movie night" featuring Sink the Bismarck! were also pretty cool), was that I was simply one of the crew: a landlubber with a bit of sea time trying to make the cut for a high-stakes deployment. It was not that I neither asked for nor received any special favors; it was that they weren't even under consideration. Held to the same standards, and subject to the same expectations, as any of my shipmates, I at last felt free from the stigma of sickness. (Even seasickness: 378s ride well, and the weather was mostly calm.)


I was just one of the crew.

Because against all odds, we're still here

"No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy." --Abraham Lincoln, 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation

It was a game I couldn't lose - taking multiple turns around the table to give thanks, I wasn't about to run short of ideas. The little things, like being able to taste food again; the job- and career-oriented - a supervisor who encouraged me to go where I wanted for treatment, other supervisors who supported me taking leave to go to South Africa and to get underway with a ship, the opportunity to "write my own ticket" this year, a whole network of colleagues who supported me at every turn; the friend-related: living in the same city as my best friend for the first time since high school, seeing more of my family in five months than in the previous five years, friends who knew and judged me for who I was, not what I suffered from; the move: two amazing roommates, a great apartment, unbelievably amazing renters, a safe home for my car over the summer; the symptoms: no lasting heart or lung damage, no lasting damage to my fingers (the symptom I most dreaded), no more drugs; the side benefits of taking a few months off: a two-week cross-country road trip, shelves of books read, a symphony and several other pieces composed, a newfound love for the local library; finances: a completely paid-for course of treatment (with some of the best civilian providers available) - I didn't pay a penny for anything, not for transportation, not for medication, not for anything, for treatment that's cost at least $100K and counting; opportunities: long deployments or top assignment picks; and most of all, that I'm still here. It wasn't that long ago that someone in my position a year ago wouldn't have made it this long, let alone be driving ships and hiking mountains and cooking Thanksgiving dinners.

Not to discount the hard work and distinguished support of so many, but this is the work of no mortal hand.

"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."

Confounding expectations

If you know me much, you probably know that I’m not good at fitting into stereotypical boxes or under conventional labels. Having grown up attending a small school in a very insular community, where pre-kindergarten follies are doomed to dog you through high school, I’ve made it a mission of mine to confound expectations, to leave people guessing.

I certainly don’t match the picture of conventional young-womanhood. Ok, so I’ve followed the 18th-century playbook in a few ways: I can cook, clean, and sew; play a civilized musical instrument and sing light songs; speak a smattering of foreign languages (including the de rigueur French); sprinkle my polite conversation with literary and Biblical allusions; entertain small children; throw fancy parties; and sure, I’ve been known to paint a watercolor or two, or needlepoint by the fire.

But that’s about where it ends. I also fix my own car, curse like a sailor, would much rather spend a day at the range than the mall, and have been known to out-drink more than one male companion. I take about 5 minutes to get ready (10 if I have to polish my boots), detest women’s magazines, watch SportsCenter, not soap operas, and detest chick flicks (sappy love stories are only marginally permissible if bloody battles outweigh romantic longings by at least a 3:1 ratio). So I’m not about to be on the cover of Vogue any time soon.

The South African relatives I met, most of whom are solidly in the sit-and-genteely-drink-tea generation, weren’t quite sure what to make of me, this fearless Coast Guard chick traipsing about a country halfway around the world, alone but for a 12-page list of relatives’ names, cold-calling folks in the phone book, making up her itinerary as she went. One elderly relative in particular was most politely appalled. She did her best to shield her pointed questions, but the barbs became unmistakable.

“So, tell me about your family,” meaning not my parents and siblings, but a sidelong shot at my apparent lack of husband and children. Why hadn’t I “settled down”? Where were my traveling companions? The military…sailing around in foreign seas…driving ships: “Isn’t that a man’s job?”

Finally, she wound up to her final zinger, delivered with withering disdain: “Your hair…do they make you keep it that short for the military?”

“Oh, no,” I replied cheerfully. (How could I say the military wouldn’t let me cut it this short - I'd tried, and failed!) “I went through chemo and radiation this summer, and it’s just now starting to grow back.” “Excuse me?” “I went through chemo and radiation a few months ago and lost all my hair – it’s just now growing back. It’s coming in nicely, don’t you think?”

It silenced her for the duration.

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free

I've done a fair amount of traveling outside the country, and while I'm a confirmed quest-a-holic who could easily spend 9 out of every 10 days on the road; without fail, I always ended each trip deeply longing to return to the good ol' U. S. of A.

It wasn't just the conveniences of living in the richest (and most expensive) country in the world. The privileges - and responsibilities - of being the world's only remaining superpower. The conveniences and commodities and the enormous well-stocked grocery stores. The big cars and the cheap gas. Those are all double-edged swords.

No, it was the pervasive, if dying, truth that even in the darkest days of discrimination, slavery, war, depression, and fear, that no matter who you were born, with hard work, prudence, good stewardship, determination, and the indomitable American spirit, you could grow up to Be Someone. Or in the worst of circumstances, at least your kids would have it better than you. Even in other First-World European countries, I found this to be devastatingly untrue, which made me always long for home, America, where the homeless and tempest-tossed could make good someday.

This changed with my trip to South Africa. I have never seen a country so resilient and determined. I thought the brutal, dirty stain of apartheid would have irretrievably polluted the national spirit, but I found nothing of the sort. Instead, I saw an entire country of first-generation American immigrants. Working in mediocre jobs, living in shacks, eating minimally, surviving with the least of frills, sacrificing everything to send their children to the best private schools possible, hiring tutors, ensuring their kids studied every spare moment, irrepressible in their determination, convinced beyond doubt that they might die penniless and broken, but their children, dammit their children would be successful, success was within their kids' reach as it was never open to them. A whole country full of welcoming, friendly, helpful people, who, far from being taken aback from calls from foreign strangers claiming kinship and wanting to meet, scolded me for not staying longer and eating more of the extensive spreads they laid out for me.

South Africa has a tarnished reputation for widespread and violent crime, but I've felt more afraid in the streets of Chicago and New York. In fact, all the locals went out of their way to warn me away from the bad streets and sketchy characters. It was a country under construction on all three coasts and everywhere in between, frantically trying to rebuild and expand infrastructure in advance of World Cup 2010. A country of hope, of promise, of unfailing hospitality.

I was sorry to go, but even more so as I found myself confronted by materialistic, selfish, cold American society. On the plane into Washington DC, an elderly woman (seated with her husband, on a flight of mostly older couples who had been flying for the past 17+ hours) spent the final 20 minutes prior to landing carefully applying eye makeup and anxiously checking her reflection in a compact mirror. Even at the remotest bush airport in South Africa, the planes flew on time, the stewardesses were young, polite, and attractive, and traveling was a refined experience that left you refreshed at arrival. In DC, our plane was delayed due to striking pilots and a half-full flight, the stewardesses were middle-aged and rude, and the airport filled with angry, frustrated, snappy passengers. The stores teemed with expensive, processed, packaged, useless goods and to get a basic snack cost upwards of $8. The bathrooms were dirty and the people handling our luggage, careless. The line for American citizens at Customs was twice as long and moved half as slowly as that for all the foreign nationals. The CBP agents eyed all of us Americans suspiciously. What was this country to which I returned?

Ubi sunt indeed. I daresay the golden door yet exists, beckoning like a beacon in the night; but the lamp lifted beside it, is it still lit?

Fear itself

I used to think that after staring down the barrel of a loaded gun held by a crazy person wanting to kill you, there's not much left to fear. But the truth was, the whole surreal episode made me cling a little more desperately to life, to realize what I'd nearly given up, to weigh more dearly what still hung in the balance.

Sure, there wasn't much they could do to scare me into shape at OCS (Officer Candidate School) after that - yell all they wanted, I knew they couldn't (and had no desire to) kill me. But my career-planning, my life-living, became ever-so-much-more determined, steely-eyed not to forfeit what I'd almost never seen, iron-gripped on a future I swore I'd never again let out of my grasp.

It worked, brilliantly for my career, though to the inevitable detriment of most everything else. Four years of determination and sacrifice finally, astonishingly, paid off in an incredible career opportunity, my top pick, a real leap of faith from the detailers (what with my paper-thin resume), an open door into a limitless future. All blown to bits in just weeks with a cancer diagnosis that dominoed into cancelled orders within the hour. My XO at the time was quite taken aback that I cared more about losing my dream job than I did about dying.

But dying is final. What can be frightening about a fixed endpoint? Jobs are fluid, so many variables: they scare me in a way that facing death never could. Showing up in a new position, with new responsibilities and expectations, new boss, new crew, new unit...always worried that somehow I'll fail, I'll come up short, I'll let someone down. I don't like the learning process. I want to be expert upon arrival. I'm untrusting of my skills, talent, guts, intuition, and experience. Worried about first impressions. But I've been lucky; or perhaps my caution has simply served me well, because no job has ever been as bad as the worry preceding it. I study hard, I watch others, I listen, I step lightly at first, I trust and empower, I speak with confidence, I admit mistakes, I force patience upon myself, I'm eager to learn, and somehow...somehow it all comes out okay.

But Death is different: either you are or you aren't; there's no middle ground. And I guess I've always felt there's so little you can do to control Death (the wages of sin, after all, and have we not all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?), although I suppose that's not really true at all. I feel in some karmic way, I was supposed to be gone by now. Cancer should have done me in. It was my time, was it not? Somehow I cheated Death, for the time being at least, and though he'll come for me eventually, maybe I've carved out a few decades of "bonus round", of "overtime". It's finite. We like to think, us corruptible humans, that we live forever, but there's a horizon in my future and it's not limitless.

And in its strange way, these extra innings have made me even more fearless, if that's possible. Fearless in a different way, I suppose - prudent enough to plan for tomorrow, but improvident enough to enjoy today, to carpe diem, to go for broke. Unwilling to wait for company; unafraid to strike out alone. Hungry to seize at every opportunity, not just for career, but for family, for friends, for myself - to strike all that stuff off my list of things to do before I die. Fearless, because the fear comes from the waiting, the worrying, the unknown. Strike out and seize the moment and clammy fear will evaporate in the sweat of action.

For tomorrow we may die.

A long and winding road

Flight time from San Francisco to South Africa is about 30 hours. I went by way of Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Singapore; and immediately upon arrival in Johannesburg, hopped on a train down to the coast, to Port Elizabeth. I left San Francisco on Wednesday morning and arrived halfway around the world at my final destination on Saturday at noon, local time. It was a long journey.


My grandfather on my dad's side was one of 11 siblings, and the only one to leave South Africa. Since, of course, many of the younger generations have left, for Australia and New Zealand, for Dubai and Saudi Arabia, for England, for Canada, for the United States; but for the most part, there is a whole branch of the family still resident in South Africa. My father's parents died long before I was born, so I had little connection to, or knowledge of, this part of my heritage.

It is a rite of passage for us melting-pot Americans to go off in search of our roots. More than an excuse to travel, more than a unique opportunity for an inside look at a foreign culture, I hoped to find, in that stereotypical questing way, some reflection of myself among these distant cousins. After all, I don't look much like either of my parents. I'm the starched-collar goy among my mom's family, and too liberal and open-minded for my dad's conservative Christian relatives. Everyone on all sides collectively gasped when I abandoned a safe and lucrative intellectual life to (consecutively) scoop ice cream, live on a farm, work in a small-town dental office, and eventually join the military. Pacifists on one side and anarchists on the other, nobody quite knew what to make of me swearing to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Why wasn't I teaching, going to grad school, studying law or medicine, pursuing a musical career, living in the city, dating a suit, settled down and busy raising rugrats?

I hoped rather fleetingly that perhaps I'd find some actual relations, some resemblances, on this trip. And I was not disappointed, though the source took me by surprise. The second- and third- and once-removed cousins I discovered across the country were all incredibly warm, welcoming, and refreshingly full of stories of my grandfather and grandmother; but the best story I heard was that of my great-great-great grandfather, one of the 1820 British settlers sent to South Africa to establish a human barrier between the British and the native black population (rather peeved about their land being stolen away).

Thomas, my great³ grandfather, was what you might call a rogue. Growing up, he lived with a wealthy merchant family in London, but for unknown reasons, out of the blue he enlisted in England's Merchant Navy. After a few Napoleonic sea battles, he was captured by the French, perhaps even fought back against the English on a captured English ship, languished several years in a French prison, got in with the Freemasons, then successfully leveraged his Masonic connections to escape France - one of just a handful of English POWs who did so. Returning to England, my illustrious ancestor found he wasn't too popular, so after futzing around a bit (and fathering an illegitimate child), he signed up for the dubious 1820 excursion with his wife and three young children. Against all odds, he scratched out a decent farmer's life amid the chaos and privations of white South Africa, frequently haggling with the government for damage and loss reimbursement from the "frontier wars" against the various black tribes. In his later years, though, he spent most of his days chasing after a married-but-separated woman (helping raise her kids) and getting "stupid drunk", perhaps as a way to cope with having to be taken in and supported by his least favorite son, who despised him. Restless, even in his retirement he tutored children, mended shoes, and kept a daily diary, peppered with odd recipes and remedies and regular weather observations ("It was windy." "It was windy." "Today it was windy.") For decades, landlocked far inland, this illustrious forebear kept among his small library a number of books on navigation and seamanship, deeply prized and sorely missed when they burned along with his farm during one of the frontier wars.

Some of my ancestor's colorful nature must have trickled down the bloodline, I suspect.

FFFD

Fit For Full Duty. Available for Worldwide Assignment.

Such were the words on my latest chit from medical. I’m cleared.

That’s cleared, not cured. But I’ll take it. After all, curing isn’t in my future: remission, if I’m lucky.

I’ve been busy checking items off my list for getting underway. Rules of the Road re-test...aced it. Official passport application, done. Upgrade to my clearance package, submitted. I'm scheduled to get underway for a couple weeks in early November with a 378' and possibly do some buoy tender time over the holidays...then gearing up for spring 378' time as well.

My doctors at UCSF are happy with my progress also. When the Coast Guard doc asked how I was feeling, any long-term side effects, he asked me what the most activity was that I'd done recently. "Well, I hiked El Capitan in a day," I replied. "Ah," he said. "You're all better then."

Today I fly to South Africa by way of Singapore. I am tremendously excited to go, and to hopefully track down a whole branch of my father's family. I may be off the grid for a couple weeks...so don't worry if I'm not posting frequently.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

On composing

I’ve heard music in my head as far back as I can remember. I can remember all the car rides as a kid, lights streaming by dark nights on endless California freeways, staring out the window at the reflected lights off the dash, hearing whole symphonies, movement by movement, plenty of time to work out all the development sections.

If you sit and listen and concentrate, you realize, gradually, the hums of all the electronics, all the machines, the refrigerator, the computer, the fans, the cars outside, the planes overhead, and the more you listen, the more you hear, the louder it gets, until even when you focus, it is difficult to dial it down. That’s how it is for me with the music in my head.

In the presence of live music, recorded music, I hear a rainbow of harmonies, cross-rhythms, counterpoint. It’s hard for me to sing melody in a group with all the thirds and fifths and sixths echoing in my head. In orchestras, I’m happiest in the center, second violin, fourth chair or so, where I sit amid woodwinds and brass and percussion and lower voices and place my harmonies amidst it all.

With great care and practice, I learned to translate the music in my head out my fingers, improvising on violin. It took years until I was comfortable. The music kept playing in my head, but my fingers only cooperated with painstaking practice. And it has been like that learning to write the music, also.

My father, at my request, tried long and hard to imprint music theory on my untaught mind. I resisted both consciously and unwillingly. I wanted to try new things, to break the rules; the music in my head didn’t fit the patterns I was learning. The formality of the notes on the page, carefully placed in their time-honored patterns, mocked me. I was intractable.

Somewhere, somehow, it must have sunk in, somewhat at least. And yet this writing process these last few weeks has been an exercise in mental exhaustion. I force myself to translate shapes and colors and things from my head into dots and lines on their several staves, to filter out voicings, to hear both the long phrase and to work out the single measure’s rhythm, to impose formal structures on the sweeps and swirls; to make the head-music reproducible by others than me.

And I research like I’m writing a novel: how to write for harp, for banjo; not only how to notate, but how to play the instruments – what sounds good and what does not; the playable and the simply awkward.

I fit it in here and there – on the train, during a quick lunch break, on the bus, at home before my roommate arrives each night. If I work too long all at once though, my head literally starts to ache from all the concerted effort. But if I try to take a break, the unwritten music pounds incessantly in my head in an unceasing loop, until I cave, until I write it down, until it’s in a final, revised & edited form; only then does the music in my head quiet down to manageable levels.

The only way

I love being back home. Bills to pay, floors to scrub, trash to take out, disposals to fix, clothes to wash, bags to unpack, cars to repair, letters to open, email to answer.

And work, of course; couldn't forget that. Meetings, paperwork, bureaucracy, red tape, egos. All in a day's sweat. Negotiations: it seems I spend my entire day negotiating middle ground between parties who speak slanted at each other, never revealing their true intent or subjective prejudices.

I'll be honest: I'm working my own angles, too. The guise of "recovery" has opened many rare doors thus far this year, in a line of work where stopping to breathe is a joke at best, and at worst, anathema. But this angling is a delicate dance on the sharp lip of a double-edged sword. Am I well enough to work? Then I'm well enough to reassign. Am I fully healed? Then no need to spend so much time with family. Feeling good? Then stand duty and quit taking leave. Think you can handle the rigors of underway life? Then surely you should work longer days, take on more responsibilities, and focus more on the job you've got rather than jobs you like, jobs you want, jobs you might someday get.

I've been angling for underway time on the locally homeported cutters (one of which, after all, I might well find myself assigned to next summer). Manpower, particularly at-least-slightly-experienced-manpower, is always at a premium in the perpetually-strapped Coast Guard; so as long as their berthing arrangements allow, cutters are usually glad to fatten their watch rotations. Of course it's mainly to benefit me, to gain experience and earn a qualification letter, but if I can pitch the time as useful to the ship - so much the better.


And such an opportunity has opened up, with one of our cutters headed for an out-of-hemisphere deployment all spring. They asked for help standing watches, and I was quick to pull the volunteer trigger. But this requires some, well, negotiations. Clearance level, weapons quals, passport, country clearances, arrival and departure coordination with port calls; these all will follow in due time. The sticking (or perhaps just sticky) point is school attendance. I need a certain school to stand the watches; but typically the Coast Guard won't pay for you to attend these six weeks of school until you have permanent orders to a job that needs it. I'd almost certainly be attending the school this spring, once I've received orders for next year, but here I'm asking to attend early, so I can sail for more of the ship's deployment. The detailer's not going to sign off blindly. So negotiations proceed.

Meanwhile, the music of the road hums demandingly in my head, and I'm pressing out time everywhere to capture it on paper (or on disk, as it were): lunch breaks, commuter trains, late nights, public plazas, sequestered with laptop and noise-canceling headphones. A dual-track race to the finish.

Farther up and further in

Ah, a road trip. Good for the soul - or at least, good for my soul.

It certainly wasn't the 3500+ miles of driving, the lasting effect of which lingers in a sore left shoulder and screaming right hamstring.

Maybe, then, it was the variety of lodging - everything from guesting in my own house to sleeping in a concrete wigwam and bedding down in a haunted balcony room of a ghost-town Nevada hotel.

Maybe, instead, it was fleeing a hurricane inland, or being feted by complete-stranger evacuees afterward, attending mariachi mass, or sipping a prickly-pear margarita 75 stories up above a steamy San Antonio.

Maybe it was floating past the Paseo del Rio late into the night, or sailing on Lake Tahoe, or wafting a thousand feet above Albuquerque in a hot air balloon.


Maybe it was haggling for Native American jewelry in the depths of Canyon de Chelly, picking up a bottle of local wine in Colorado, sifting through hills of Navajo rugs in Chinle, or receiving the completely unexpected, yet surprisingly appropriate gift of two WWII-era Filipino island paintings.

Maybe it was meeting my renters, or long-lost, never-seen friends (at last), reconnecting with good friends and former shipmates, or maybe it was the host of new, welcoming folks I met along the road, from an ex-pat Londoner forced out of New Orleans by this summer's storms, to a live-to-ski rock climber, rambling for a month in the California Sierras.

I like to think I'm not materialistic, but I was so excited to see my car again that maybe it was the getting back of my slightly worse-for-wear, Gustav-battered Beetle, or after five months apart, laying hands at long last on my long-missed and carefully-kept "real" violin.

I was down to a meal or two each long-driven day, but maybe it was the food: the burritos and brick-oven pizza on the Gulf, the fry bread in Four Corners, the homemade granola in Cortez, the tea bar at the Whole Foods headquarters in Austin.

Maybe it was the massage in a tiny town in Artesia, New Mexico, the live music at a dive bar in Austin, the grandiosity of Temple Square or the surprising diminution of the Alamo. Maybe, after all that, it was the UFO museum in Roswell.


Or maybe...maybe it was the Willa Cather desert southwest, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, the grandeur of Canyon de Chelly and Moab, the sparkling valley at Yosemite.


It certainly felt good to taste what I ate, to push without tiring, to hike some 20 miles up and back rocky switchbacks without my heart & lungs wilting within me, clutching at my chest. And there's the inevitable allure of abandoning all responsibilities but the air in your tires and the fuel in your tank.

Whatever it was...the music started to flow. This only happened to me once before, after rafting the length of the Grand Canyon's Colorado, when in the weeks that followed poured out dozens of songs, lyrics, chords, fully formed on the page. This time it's a piano rag, and a symphony in four movements, and more yet to come. I can't explain it.

But I know this much: I'm back. And it feels good.

Something soft and wild and free

Is it not ironic that the two places I feel most at home are so widely divergent? - on a ship, underway; and here, roaming in the expansive desert Southwest.

This is Willa Cather country, at last: Willa Cather, probably the least-studied famous American author, and, far and away, my favorite. I wrote my college thesis on her, much to the shock of my English-equals-born-in-England professors.

Willa Cather wrote of many things, but she hit her stride with North American pioneers, and in the desert Southwest. Both underlay "Death Comes for the Archbishop", my favorite work of hers.

Most evident in this book is Cather's belief that a person's identity rises from and is forged by the land itself. Her writing is as expansive and many-hued as the high desert setting.

Colors are so washed out, so muted elsewhere, compared to this desert brightness. The violets of far-off mountains and late-afternoon skies; the reds and pinks of the rock, rising in towers and dropping away in canyons; the shrubs and cacti and cottonwood in deep olives and bright apple-greens; the wildflowers in bright yellows and reds and purples; the brilliant turquoise sky peppered with towering white clouds; the sun blazing sunsets into oranges, pinks, bronzes...there is a sharpness as well, each color contrasting brightly with the next, each angling for a bigger piece of the reflected sun.

You can smell the rain coming, the shift in the air from a dry hotness to a whispered breeze to a frantic downpour, kicking up the dust and drowning the web of arroyos cutting across the mesas. And then it's over before you've hardly gotten wet, the hot sun quickly baking the damp away, the rain forgotten but for the flooded washes and ill-drained roads.

I want to leave my car behind, ride a horse off into the sunset, explore the endless sandstone canyons and scrubby mesas, sleep in a simple hut or abandoned cave, build a fire, listen to the echoes of long-ago ancestors whispering endless truths.

It is the land. It calls.

For tomorrow we die

San Antonio and Austin were both choked with Ike evacuees on "forced vacations", as I heard often. And nobody's more ready for a good time than someone whose house is flattened. No, really.

This wasn't the two months' exhaustion of blank-eyed relief workers, washed out by weeks of devastation at every turn. Nor the emptiness of an evacuated city, still blinking neon lights forlornly at those who dared to return to a broken town.

These were the people who had the finances and the flexibility to choose their cities of refuge. And their pace was frenzied.

Most of the scheduled tourists were gone: the big UT - UA (University of Texas/University of Arkansas) football game was cancelled, along with several professional sports games. I found a luxury hotel at rock-bottom prices because all the high-end visitors pulled out at the last minute. But that didn't mean there was a shortage of middle-class folks ready to spend anything to forget their problems back home.

Sixth Street in Austin collected all the college-age (and the wannabe past-their-primers) out for a good time. The Paseo del Rio in San Antonio was likewise overflowing with revelers. Any question yelled by bartenders or river guides about evacuees was answered with a deafening roar. The evacuees kept the rounds coming as we blinked, bleary-eyed, at weathermen blown off the screen on enormous plasma TVs.

I didn't even have to pull the "I'm a Coast Guard hero" line to get free drinks. The evacuees were all too willing to treat everyone in sight. Nor were they in any hurry to get home - schools and businesses were closed and power outages (read: no air conditioning) were widespread. And for all the drinking, the two church services I attended this weekend (including an amazing mariachi mass in San Antonio) were overflowing, with prayers for hurricane victims frequent.

PS. For a state that repeatedly reminds you of how large everything is ("Texas-sized Ike")...the Alamo really is quite small.

One trick ahead of disaster

I've driven across Louisiana and parts of Texas before too. Also in very different circumstances.

Three years ago, after the female counterparts of Gustav and Ike hit Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi; after the evacuation crew, the rescue crew, and the cleanup crew had all moved through, we came: the salvage crew.

That was my inaugural journey to the South. Well, I'd lived in southeastern Virginia, which yes, Mabel, is most definitely the South, just not the Deep South.

I'd driven the Natchez Trace Parkway from Nashville to Alexandria (LA), and eventually set off on a three-week, 2000-mile odyssey across four states to locate and return all manner of large equipment bought, borrowed, or rented for hurricane support.

The endless devastation and despair are burned in my mind. But there were other novelties. Like arriving in Sabine Pass on a stiflingly hot November morning to get dive-bombed by what looked like small birds, but turned out to be enormous mosquitoes leaving three-inch welts. Or pulling into Alexandria (an empty shell of a town) for the first time in a torrential tropical rainstorm, staying in a smelly hotel with cockroaches aplenty, billed as "Alexandria's best lodging". Or driving for miles and miles and miles along I-10 (Hwy 90 was closed for much of its length) and seeing not a single billboard or road sign; they were all blown down. Or the hour-long drive of devastation out to Venice, just days after the road was finally dry and open, three months after the storms; dead horses and 18-wheelers suspended eerily from trees.

In a former life, I pre-positioned all manner of hurricane support and response forces prior to the storms. Out of harm's way but close enough to respond quickly, adjusting their placement as the storm's track changed. Ready to swoop in once the storm passed and I gave the word.

This time I was also dodging a storm, but now I was the mouse on the run. I cancelled my side-trips to Beaumont and Houston and stayed well inland from Shreveport to Austin, one step ahead of Ike. I watched the winds shift and the clouds circle overhead on a preternaturally calm and sunny day, and listened all 400 miles to nonstop local coverage of the storm, simulcast on satellite radio. I watched as gas prices rose over 30 cents per gallon in a single day; in fact, many stations were adjusting their advertised prices as I drove by. I passed any number of evacuees, many towing travel trailers, as they fled town going the opposite direction, but they were mainly radiating like spokes of a wheel from Gulf towns, while I cut cross-country.

I also passed relief & recovery traffic - a stake-bed filled with fuel drums and the rectangular fuel containers I remembered so well from Katrina - a large semi-truck loaded with a large cooler, an enormous generator, a backhoe, orange plastic-lattice fencing, and any number of hand tools. And every so often, I'd pass a convoy of utility vehicles; destined, I am sure, to wait out the storm and then move in quickly.

I felt like a pawn (or, perhaps more accurately, a bishop) on a board I'd once controlled.

If there are lovebugs, it must be September

I had forgotten that you mark the seasons in Alabama by the type and quantity of flying insect.

Forget stopping for fuel (my car goes some 600 miles between fill-ups), bathrooms, food, drinks, or stretching of legs (I can wait 'til I get there)...on the first leg of this trip, Mobile to Shreveport, what kept me pulling over was a pressing need to clean the windshield of bugs, just so I could see out. Bugs hit faster than raindrops could fall.

My route took me out Hwy 98 through rural northern Mississippi. I've made a road trip out that way once before, Mobile to Cleveland, MS, and back, to rescue a wayward crewmember. It was an eye-opening journey. In addition to some rather odd sights en route our destination (an amusement park in the swamps, a man seated calmly in the driver's seat of his car while flames leapt from his open hood), taking an extremely circuitous route, eating at a hole-in-the-wall, completely deserted restaurant, and staying at a hotel in a construction zone, the arrival and return trip were even more entertaining. A whole town of trailer-park dwellers who did their best to exceed stereotypes; unapologetic racists who pimped out their pickup trucks to race down the main drag every Friday night; a "gourmet" country buffet restaurant in a warehouse featuring table after table of fried who-knows-what's-under-the-breading; and a hundred miles of highway past an endless string of catfish farms out both sides. And Doc & I meanwhile busy trying to talk our unrepentant shipmate out of her endless wild ideas for escaping the Coast Guard.

This trip was nowhere near as dramatic. The weather was sunny, the traffic light, and the folks in a population-300 gas station quick with helpful directions despite my Oregon plates and "Obama '08" bumper sticker. Hell, I was worried people'd run me off the road with a car like that. Plenty of "Heritage not Hate" signs but I think I only counted two or three Confederate flags (there's a higher concentration in rural Oregon).

Oh yeah, and there is really a place called Dixie. It's in Mississippi.

Don't know when I'll be back again

So after a red-eye from San Francisco to Charlotte next to an extremely fidgety man (I slept anyway, as best one can in an Arctically cold airplane with rationed blankets), and a three-hour layover in Charlotte at the USO (God bless the USO! although their breakfast, big leather recliner, and soft blanket were so comfortable, I sank into a deep sleep and almost missed my onward flight!), the fields and trees and little houses of southern Alabama slowly started to crystallize out of the buggy, humid, puffy-white-clouds-in-a-blue-sky day as we neared the Mobile airport.

And I was excited. That I wasn't prepared for. Excited to squint out the window to pick out the freeways and lay of the land and look for recognizable landmarks. Excited to be back. To see friends. To see my car, and my house. Excited for Alabama??

It was a fun day, jam-packed as I'm sure these all will be. I spent quite a while at the ship, runnign about and talking to everyone about their adventures, well at least, all the folks I knew who are still on the ship. I picked up my car, which thankfully bore only a few scratches and bruises from the Gulf's slew of summer storms. Met my amazing renters who offered me the guest room at my house for the night. The house looks fantastic - the renters have really taken care of it, and they're such friendly and fun people as well. We stayed up way too late talking.

Somewhere in the middle of that I carved out an hour or so to handle paperwork for work...yes, in my overworked eagerness, I sat on an OCS (Officer Candidate School) board the last few hours Tuesday before I left work, so there was paperwork to complete and exchange.

And now I am off, north and west. I'll be doing a bit of storm-dodging...the outer rain bands of Ike started walloping us last night. The past day's been much more enjoyable than I'd imagined a day in Alabama could be - largely due to the people, of course, not any innate wonder of the state. But return is uncertain.

And now...to the road!

(Oh and by the way, I'm done)

Departures are always hectic, crammed with the undone. Today, Tuesday, was no different. Particularly with the unplanned-for wrench-in-the-schedule of radiation yesterday morning. I had hoped (and planned) to put in two full days of work this week; compressing my work hours was not entirely successful.

Also in this last, frantic few days, I wanted to spend time with my best friend before I left town; and another very close friend - whom I hadn't seen for two or three years - happened to be in the Bay Area, with Monday the only day our logistics meshed to meet.

Somewhere amidst all that, I had also to do laundry, iron, pack, clean the apartment, return library books, extract cash, contact a good dozen people I'm hoping to connect with on my road trip, confirming details and solidifying dates...oh, and sleep. Adrenaline only lasts so long.

And somewhere in the middle of all this I finished radiation. Finished treatment. Concluded the battle. I'm all better now, right? It is a strangely muted denouement. I got to take my netted radiation mask home, and hug the lab tech goodbye, and stop trekking weekly to the clinic for the ritual drawing of blood. But it is more an absence of activity than a presence of relief or celebration. No peace treaties on the Missouri. (I'd planned to celebrate with my roommate and others this past weekend, but the festivities were necessarily shelved when my radiation treatments weren't over Friday, after all.)

Now, in the middle of the night, still unwinding from a brim-filled, pressed, down, and overflowing day, I rocket off to the airport to catch a red-eye back south, and east. Has it really been five months since I left?

Checking it twice

The AY09 LT shopping list is on the streets.

(To translate: the list of available jobs for lieutenants up for transfer this coming summer has now been published.)

It's a bit sparse. Last year's list was replete with OPS jobs, particularly 378' OPS jobs (the job I want most; the job I so surprisingly received orders for but had to give up once diagnosed). It really does reasonably follow, then, since they're all two-year billets, that this year's list would be rather truncated.

This coming year, there are are only two 378' OPS jobs open- one ship in Hawaii and one right across the pier here in the Bay Area. Those will of course go #1 and #2 on my list; the question is what comes next.

There are several choices. There are a few 270' OPS jobs, a number of 225' XO jobs, and Weapons Officer for one of the new 418's. There's even XO on a Great Lakes icebreaking tug. Many of these jobs are in locations I'd like, or at least places I'd be interested in checking off my "lived there, done that" list. Each holds its particular appeal, both personally and professionally.

So I know what's on my list - this time I'm not going to list any land jobs, not even as "backups" - but not yet in what order I'll request them. What's best for my career long-term (wide variety of afloat experiences - variety of location, mission, platform/ship type, responsibilities, etc.) and short-term (setting me up for command afloat)?

There's also the detailer (=assignment officer) game to play. Not listing enough jobs gives detailers carte blanche to assign you at will to any available job where they need your skills and experience. Listing a great many jobs definitely increases the chances that you'll be assigned to a "chosen job" over another open position - but on the flip side, listing too many jobs can convey waffly career intentions. As the detailers say, "Put it in your comments!" - but how decisive can I sound without being pushy or demanding? And you never quite know how detailers will react - does already possessing a ship's qualification mean you're more likely to get assigned to that type of ship (to put your expertise to use), or conversely, that you'd be better served on a different platform (to broaden your experience)?

I definitely have some thinking and listening to do. What this list does emphasize is that earning a 378' qualification this fall, after the "e-resumes" (=list of desired jobs) are submitted but before assignments are made, is key. Hence my TAD (temporary duty) afloat plans for the next 8 months...which are, at present, percolating promisingly in the "command discussion" phase.

One more morning

There was a piece of unwelcome news this morning. Well, relatively unwelcome - no cause for panic.

I had confirmed with the techs several times that today would be my last day of radiation. In fact, they started to jump the gun a couple times this week, thinking that Thursday was my last day.

Well, this morning I found out that I have to come back Monday to finish my course of treatment. It really will be cutting it close - I fly out Tuesday night to Alabama.

I was visibly disappointed when the tech told me, and after asking why, she simply couldn't understand why I was frustrated I couldn't put in a full day of work Monday like I'd planned. While it's nice to avoid endless meetings, boring conferences, and piles of deskwork, I still bristle at putting in half-days, particularly when there's plenty of work to be done. Much happens before 0900 and I feel like I'm coming in at lunch time, though I've really only missed a couple of hours.

"We can write you a note," said the tech. "You don't have to be going to work."

Sigh.