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.

A breath of fresh air

This one goes out to the guy a few days back who was flirting with me, ever so gently.

Thanks that the first words out of your mouth didn't reference (or try to skirt around) my illness.

Thanks for the honest surprise when I, bare-headed with downy Chia-pet-hair, told you I'd had cancer. (Thinking the haircut was concomitant with my "sporty look" and G.I. Jane lifestyle gains you bonus points - in fact, truly believing I was some sort of athlete, after a summer of hardly working out due to treatments and side effects, gains you super-bonus-points.)

Thanks for being interested but not prurient; respectful but not embarrassed. You shook my hand without wringing it, looked me in the eye without staring, and never found yourself saying, "I'm so glad you're...still with us..." and lapsing off into uncomfortable silences.

Thanks for using the word "strong" to talk about my body, not my constitution, attitude, or person. Thanks that the "cancer reference story" you used to qualify your concern and interest didn't end in "it was a hard battle for him, but eventually he died".

Thanks for assuming I'd be going to work throughout, and not putting my personal and career goals on hold, or replacing them with a simple wish for survival.

Thanks for neither ignoring nor indulging news of my illness: you simply acknowledged it and moved on. Thanks for conducting several different interesting conversations, none of which centered around cancer - or even mentioned it much.

I don't know your last name, we live in different cities, and I'm sure I'll never see you again, but thanks. You made me feel like a real, ordinary person - attractive besides - and it was refreshing.