Going Outdoors

A few day ago I disposed of some of my 50-year-old camping gear (all still in excellent condition, if well-worn) as a gift to a friend. While we were sorting through the gear he asked, “When did you start camping?”

The answer depends on what you call “camping.”

His definition was “Sleeping outside, overnight, in a tent or on the ground.”

That would be my answer, too, but that puts my solo camping age at about 13. My parents were fairly fundamentalist Methodists and insisted that their motley hoard of kids and step-kids to go church every Sunday for a minimum of 3 painful, pointless, irrational hours. I was functionally an atheist from about 9 on, after my mother died painfully and terribly from liver cancer at 34. I particularly disliked my parents’ church because the members were absolutely cynical about the contradiction between the “money-changers in the temple” and the cars, appliances, houses, and other crap that was being bought-and-sold before,during, and after the services. Kansas Christians are, at best, a confusing lot.

Not long after my family moved to a new development in the north end of town (the far north at the time), I discovered that the two “adults” in our family were what I would later learn are “classic Republicans.” They had, literally, no sense of proportion; especially when it came to punishment. From being beaten to being grounded to losing various privileges (of which there were few-to-none), the punishment was pretty much uniform relative to the crime. Leave a sock on the laundry room floor, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Skip school for a day, get smacked, screamed at, and banished to your room. Run away to Kansas City for a long weekend to watch jazz bands on 13th Street until the cops caught me, called my parents, and put me on a bus back home,get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. I learned fairly early, might as well go big if I’m going at all.

There were a collection of the remnants of abandoned and demolished buildings, from the Saint Mary of the Plains College that was destroyed by a tornado in 1942, across the highway from our development. One side of the highway was a bunch of middle class houses and the other was a field with some scrubby cottonwoods and lots of weeds and a scattering of exposed basements from whatever building was there before a tornado ripped it down to ground level. Once I discovered those hiding places, it was only a matter of time before I decided to risk the uniform-punishment-treatment for a peaceful evening and a day without religious nonsense. My room was in the basement and I could easily scramble out my bedroom window late Saturday night, shut the window from the outside, sneak into the garage and snag my Boy Scout sleeping bag, my binoculars, a flashlight, and a canvas tarp/ground cloth, and run down the street and across the highway where I hopped the fence and headed for one of the basements that I’d previously made ready for habitation. Earlier in the week, I’d scavenged a short wooden ladder and an end table from a neighbor’s trash and a bunch of candles from our garage and had set out a pile of comic books for entertainment.

I’d spend the night reading comics until I fell asleep in my bag. The sun or cold would wake me up in the morning and I’d watch the street in front of our house until the family station wagon rolled out of the driveway and headed south to church. After a safe margin of time, I’d sneak back home, put away my gear, have breakfast, mess around for a couple of hours, and go to bed and pretend to be asleep when the crowd came home. When one of the “adults” wandered down to look in my room, I’d get smacked, screamed at, and banished to my room. Sometimes there would be an additional chore added to my long list of tasks. No matter what the punishment, it was never as bad as going to church would have been. Over the years it turned into a game, but I could usually outwait my father; and my step-mother didn’t really care if I ever came back. Eventually, they gave up, allowing me to stay home if I cooked Sunday dinner; usually fried chicken.

The summer I turned 15, I had found a farm job that gave me a whole summer’s cover and a place to stay for the first few weeks of spring. I’d be at the farm for winter wheat harvest and spring planting and guys from the band I was in could come by around mid-May and pick me up for the summer’s tour. During my senior high school year, I stayed in a collection of places from my step-grandparents’ basement to the 20’ trailer I rented when I was working road construction, to a lean-to I built about 5 miles west of Dodge on the Arkansas River. Being underage, I was occasionally hauled back to my father’s home by the cops, but I wandered off fairly quickly and found a new place to hide out during the brief hours the cops would bother looking for me. After my senior year, everyone quit worrying about me and I was on my own from then on.

Missin’ This?

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

 “You think I’ll miss all this?” He pointed out the window of his Fitzsimons General Hospital room. It wasn’t much of a window, but it wasn’t much of a room, either: white tiled, white ceiling tiles, even a white metal door and just enough space for his hospital bed, some medical equipment and two friends to sit in folding chairs near the bed. His window looked over a parking lot across miles of Denver rooftops to the west, but most days the view of the mountains was right there, filling the window through the Denver haze. We were, all three of us, young and from western Kansas and the mountains were a rare sight. Any kind of variation in the earth’s topology was rare, for us. I wasn’t sure the mountains were what he meant, though. For the purposes of this story our hospitalized friend’s name will be “David,” for several reasons.

It had been a rare spontaneous trip across the Kansas desert into the Colorado foothills and a blizzard just a few miles outside of Denver for Don and I. We had been in a band together, but the Vietnam War was winding that down for us. Don, the band’s drummer, and Ed, our lead singer, guitarist, and my songwriting conspirator were both going into the Army in a few months. I’d flunked the Navy physical exam, due to asthma, early that spring. So, I was “free” from military service, but that meant I had to grow up on my own without any of the social guardrails some of my friends would meet in the Army. There were a few gigs booked, but not for me, it would turn out. I was registered to start classes at a fly-by-night computer school in Texas in a few months.

The reason Don and I were in Denver was Don had heard that a kid who had been a neighbor of mine a few years earlier and who was a Catholic school classmate and friend of Don’s was back from Vietnam, struck in a hospital room in Denver, but who would soon be released from both the hospital and the Army with full disability veteran’s benefits. Neither Don or I understood the implications of the full disability designation, but we knew it must be something serious.

My memory of the seriousness of our friend’s illness is sketchy, more than 50 years later. Other than being extremely thin and pale, he looked pretty much as I remembered him. For a more perceptive kid, that should have been an obvious clue since I hadn’t seen him since we were both 13 years old. He was upbeat, smiled a lot, was anxious to “get back home,” and seemed glad to see us. We thought he had it made, a few months in the Army, a trip overseas, a plane ride back to Denver, and he was financially set for life. That’s what we, especially me, thought.

A few years later, Don and I would be in a band again. Me back from a hippy urban-survivalist adventure in Dallas and him back from a tour of Vietnam, a mental breakdown, and a general discharge from the Army for not being able to hold up his end of terrorizing a third world country as an in-country sniper and, later, a CID spy in Germany. Don would definitely not have it made with his general discharge. In getting reacquainted after three years of mutual absence from our “home” town, Don was back in school, in a community college electronics technician program and trying to be a good citizen. The stigma of his general discharge would follow him for the rest of his short life. While I occasionally took some heat as a “draft dodger,” that slowly went into the background as the nation quietly tried to forget about Vietnam and our unimpressive showing as “the most powerful nation in the world.” But Don’s general discharge stuck to him until he died. In one more act of kindness, Don convinced me to join him in the electronics program which kickstarted the rest of my life.

Back in ‘67, the three-hundred-and-fifty mile drive from Dodge to Denver and the hospital had been an adventure. Just barely after we made it to I70 a few miles outside of Aurora, Don’s ‘57 Chevy died on the side of the freeway in a white sheet of a late spring blizzard. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, so he knew what to look for first; the fuel pump. We’d left Dodge on a seventy-degree early summer day, dressed accordingly for poor kids in 1966, and landed in the plains of Colorado, freezing temperatures, snow falling practically in clumps, traffic blasting by us while we soaked ourselves taking turns trying to get the fuel pump off of that godawful car. There was a filling station, still open, about a half mile back east of where our transportation had become a mediocre shelter from the storm and we hiked back for a telephone and heat. The station was going to close for the night at 11PM, but the guy running the place let us pile a bunch of pallets and other flammables at the end of the driveway, near a fifty-five gallon steel barrel, and Don called a relative in Denver for help. We were almost penniless, so it wasn’t like the station attendant was refusing us service, we couldn’t afford anything he could offer. We set the trashcan on fire both for warmth and as a signal fire for Don’s rescue vehicle. For what seems like several hours today, we took turns warming up and stoking the fire and hiking back to the car to keep at the fuel pump service.

I don’t remember how the vehicle rescue happened. From that flaming trash barrel to a night on a couch to sitting in that hospital room envying David’s financial situation, it’s all a blink and a blur. We made the fuel pump repair, in a warm dry garage, drove to the hospital, and negotiated the usual hospital maze in a series of flashback photos in my memory. But, now, I am back in that room, admiring the view, wondering about my future, David’s medical situation, and thinking about the drive back home and the odds of ending up frozen to death in another blizzard. And I said, “Miss what?”

David grinned at me, “All of this. Us, the hospital, the mountains, the blue sky, this crap in my body the docs say they can’t figure out and can’t kill, being alive. Do you think I’ll miss it?”

My mother died when I was nine-years-old. The next couple of years of having bullshit like “God works in mysterious ways” and “everything happens for a reason” securely pounded the atheist nail into my personality. 

Don was a lapsed Catholic, partially because when playing basketball for a Catholic college he injured his knee and the college voided his scholarship and booted him out, not because he was a poor student but because they recruited him to play basketball and he couldn’t. Later, after returning from Vietnam one of Don’s career phases was as an evangelical “minister” in a small Kansas town. Between being an evangelical minister and an Army sniper, Don had been a carpenter, a cabinet maker, and a drug dealer who spent some time in prison. At one time, he answered his phone with "Praise the Lord this is . . . " I don't know what Don believed, but I think he desperately wanted to imagine there was some kind of point to his journey.

Don’s response to David's question was, “Anytime you want you can relive any part of your life.” I think he was serious, too.

I tried to skate the question, but several times David asked, “What about you?” Meaning me.

“Nope. You won’t miss it or anything else. None of us will”

About six months later, David died at home from some kind of untreatable bacterial or chemical infestation he’d received in Vietnam. “Set for life” took on a new meaning for me. Ten years later, Don died of a drug overdose, alone in a shabby rental unit in a small central Kansas ghost town.

All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day

My Father's House

Xmas is approaching. It's a season I've disliked all of my adult life. Of course, I love the break from work, in the few years that break occurred, but for most of my life Xmas meant suffering awful commercial music and phony sentiment and propaganda from the most unsentimental and least spiritual institutions in the history of humanity; American corporations. Outside of the togetherness and joy my family receives from Xmas, I'd rather skip the whole thing and hide out in a Montana hermit's cave for the whole second half of December. I am an atheist and if it weren't for Tom Jefferson's precious "separation of church and state" and that beautifully worded opening statement in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), I suspect most of my love for the United State's Constitution would have been sorely tempered. Xmas is when most of the country ignores the First Amendment and we all pretend to be religious and loving. All of us except for those Americans who go on bombing and killing throughout the world in the interests of our favorite international corporations. It's a time full of contradictions, oxymorons, cynicism, and greed. It can't end quickly enough for me.

Part of the Xmas ritual for the last 35 years of my life has been an semi-annual trip to western Kansas to visit my parents. "Semi-annual" because of weather, distance, and the constant tension between my father's fundamentalist family and my secular nuclear family. Two years ago, my step-mother died. Last spring, my father died. Kansas is forever in my rear-view mirror. I still have a brother who lives in Kansas, but we've agreed to meet anywhere but Kansas from here out. Today's rant is the view from that driver's seat:

This is the Google View of my father's house, in Dodge City, KS. The home where he lived for the last 15 years of his life. Dodge City, KS is where he spent almost all of his adult life. Feel free to examine everything about that place. It's currently occupied by a free-loading minister who has convinced my step-sister he is improving the place by squatting there indefinitely. The housing market in Dodge has dried up so completely that this modern, well-cared-for home will probably sell for less than 50% of what it might have brought four years ago. Dodge is a wonderful example of the damage pseudo-conservative values have brought to the Midwest.

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My father was a high school math teacher for more than 40 years. Making a rough guess, based on his class sizes and typical course load, he taught 10,750 kids Trigonometry, Algebra I & II, Business Math, and, finally, Consumer Math (idiot math). Those years he was confined to teaching idiot math were supposed to be a punishment, incentive for him to quit, but when he lost his sight he was cared for and appreciated so much by "his kids" that he looked back on those classes as some of his best in a long career.

His last few years as an educator were doubly cursed by near-blindness brought on by chemotherapy, which he suffered in an attempt to suppress thyroid cancer, and a hostile school administration, which was endured because the new administration was hostile to older teachers. The cancer wasn't as malignant as the mismanagement, in the long run. My father loved teaching. He retired, reluctantly, at 73, and that pretty much marked the end of his life; although he survived almost 20 more years.

I think he would have enjoyed part-time assistant teaching, in a more enlightened community, or tutoring, but his last years teaching in the Dodge City School system were so miserable that he left the profession completely. He looked back often. In all of the conversations I had with him about his last 5 years, he had nothing but good things to say about the kids he taught (and those who taught him) and nothing but bad things to say about the spoiled brats in administratiion who mangled his city's public school system and squeezed all of the inspiration out of his career. I have no names to name, but I hope they know who they are. After spending more than half of his life in the same school, he left with about as much honor as if he'd been caught dipping into the school's petty cash.

My father's career was almost entirely in a small, rural area. He was a devastatingly conservative man in a completely conservative area. They were made for each other. Since nearly half of the city passed through his classes, you might say they were made of each other. Because of his perception of the Pendergast Democratic machine in Kansas City (mostly from the right wing editorials of Emporia's William Allen White) and his life-long dislike of Harry Truman, my father was a consistent Republican, regardless of how rarely Republicans lived up to his moral and philosophical values. It was a constant source of disagreement between us until the year he died. When I read Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, I saw my father in every page. When I hear any version of Pat Metheny and David Bowie's This Is Not America, my father's logic and his patriotism and his unwavering loyalty and the constant Republican betrayal of all of those things are my mental videography to that soundtrack.

At different periods in his teaching career, he was a basketball coach, a football coach, and a tennis coach. He coached a state championship runner-up basketball team in 1955 and '56. Several of his tennis students had successful college careers and a couple became college tennis coaches. At times, my father was a famous man in Dodge City. At times, he was almost an outcast; as when he publicly and loudly opposed the installation of the teacher's union in Dodge's public schools. For most of his life, like most 1950's K-12 teachers, he held several part-time and summer jobs to make ends meet; manufacturing company and department store accountant, farm laborer, filling station attendant, newspaper delivery, and various Amway-style (including Amway) pyramid marketing scams. In fact, when I looked at Wikipedia's list of "multi-level marketing companies," I saw more familiar names, from boxes and literature in my parents garage and basement, than unfamiliar. When my father was 60, he was working a 7-day work week, putting in an 18-hour workday five-days-a-week, with a 5-hour weekend break. When he retired, his teacher's pension, Social Security, Medicare, and some veteran's benefits provide him with the only security he'd enjoyed in his life. He had, practically speaking, next-to-no money in the bank, although his home was paid for and he had no debt. The fact that two decades disconnected from an active life was all that it took for my father to fall from a valued member of this small society to someone who's death was barely noticed is evidence that if you want to be remembered, die young.

He was a WWII Navy veteran, although he believed that FDR had unnecessarily involved (possibly through conspiracy) the United States in an Old World war. He had been an LST officer in three European Theater invasions (North Africa, Italy, and Normandy) and, later, became a gunnery officer on assorted aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Colonel S. L. A. Marshall's "military efficiency" book, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War, that described how our military could "improve" training so that new recruits are willing to kill on first contact at a much higher rate. Marshall complained that only 15% of WWII soldiers were willing to shoot to kill on first contact. Tyler Boudreau describes the resulting campaign of "improvement" in his column, To Kill or Not to Kill. My father was one of the 85%. In fact, he hoped to stay in that group throughout the war. When he accepted his Navy officer bars, he promised that he would never return fire if he was in a "kill or be killed" situation. Fortunately, he didn't have to. He sort of managed living by that promise by not having to directly fire a gun, although he targeted his aircraft carrier and LST gunnery crews. He told me about this promise in the 1990's, two-and-a-half decades after our Vietnam War battles that had seemed to place us in opposite camps regarding war and organized murder.

After the war, he returned to college, finished his teaching degree, got a job as a business teacher and football coach, started a family, and tried to put everything about war behind him. Eight years later, the love of his life, my mother, was diagnosed with liver cancer and one year later she died at age 34. I don't think he ever recovered, although he remarried four years later and added three more children to his responsibilities.

Our relationship was always a war zone, mostly over religion but also politics. We, honestly, loved to argue. We wanted to understand and "convert" each other, especially during a particularly verbal and intellectual period during his late sixties and through his seventies. I learned more about this complex, reserved, intelligent man in that decade than I imagined there was to know.

My father's (and my mother's) collection of 78 rpm Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Spike Jones, Duke Ellington, and big band and dixieland records introduced me to music and jazz. His 1950's appreciation for the Everly Brothers (in the midst of his general dislike for R&R and country music) taught me that music is mostly about pleasure and humor rather than some serious concern. That attitude has helped preserve my love of music through some pretty difficult times. It also allowed me to make a generally cantankerous character, Stephen Temmer, into a friend instead of someone who was convinced I was a musical idiot.

His mathematical approach to analysis, eventually, found its way into my career when that mutated into electrical engineering. His willingness to debate philosophical and political issues (a trait that came late in life to him) without fouling personal relationships became one of my life's ideals. His idealism, honor courage, work habits, loyalty, pursuit of knowledge and career goals all set standards for my life that are beyond my capabilities.

He was a small town farm-boy who lost countless friends who poured out of his LST into WWII enemy fire, left the career he loved, unrecognized and unappreciated, buried two wives, and suffered the loss of his incredible vitality and lived another 30 years practically as an invalid. Partially out of self-protection and more out of practicality, he absorbed those injuries and kept going. My father was my connection to Kansas and now that he is no longer there and there are so many things wrong with that place I happily relinquish and sever that connection. On this first anniversary without an obligation to ask me to consider that 1,000 mile trip to a place that is as foreign to me as any European country, I acknowledge that my ability to let that place fade into my life's rear-view mirror is a gift from my father.

How to Fix Kansas

The subtitle for this rant ought to be "And Why Kansas will Never be Fixed."

Kansas, like most of the Midwest, is and has been in economic depression since Jerry Ford and the end of the Vietnam War. Outside of federal welfare, the state's economic base has been steadily shrinking since the end of the industrial period in the 70's. The population is aging, the replacements are unskilled, uneducated immigrant minimum wage labor (when they aren't illegal). The school system, which was never particularly good, is now reduced to the blind leading the blind. The quality of life is so pitiful that the state resorts to generating its own standards for QoL measurements to avoid the obvious conclusion that only someone who is desperate and out of options would life in the state.

So, what are the state and local community solutions for this catastrophic situation? The usual culprits: hillbilly recreation and gambling. In my hometown, Dodge City, the city has proudly built a "$33.7 million multi-purpose events center" that is supposed to attract pro hockey, rodeo, and music acts to the city. Supposedly, Dodge has a population of 33,000, but most of that population is barely surviving, with next-to-no income available for high-priced recreation. A substantial portion of the population is retired or approaching retirement.

Dodge City has a long history of being conned into idiot development by city mismanagers and crooked city council members, only to find that the mismanagers skip town leaving the city with the smell of rendering and packing plants and feedlots surrounding the city and a continuing decline in average incomes and quality of life. This new "events center" has the stench of déjà vu.

Another proposed "solution" to the city's economic woes is gambling. Supposedly, the reason Dodge's tourist business is in decline is because the city hasn't properly hyped it's quarter decade of historic importance into a commodity. The fact that the freeway bypasses the city b y almost 200 miles and the railroad is all but dead and the city has no meaningful air transportation is, apparently, unimportant. Some folks imagine that the incredibly opportunity for poor people to gamble will be a big draw to the city. "Just hold your nose and ignore the nasty taste of our air and water and yank on that one-armed bandit." Catchy, don't you think?

The obvious real solution is so far out of the grasp of this kind of community that it might as well be described as "impossible." The solution for Dodge is the solution for the rest of the country, too. The taxpaying, self-supporting states and cities of the nation all have one trait in common: they are tolerant and liberal. Innovation and creativity and tolerance are all part of the same package. The code name for this is the "‘technology, talent and tolerance formula" and it's not only well-documented, but it's obvious. The places where tolerance is at what Midwesterners would call "extreme" are the places where talent and technology thrive. Call me crazy, but it just seems obvious that a culture of tolerance would attract talented people and talented people tend to drive technology.

A place like Dodge City, Kansas would be near the far end of intolerant locations. Being gay, non-white, hip, non-conformist, or unusual in any way is a guaranteed path to discrimination and, possibly, violence in Dodge. This is the kind of community that actively hunts down "the green monkey" and exterminates him with prejudice. Dodge is exactly the kind of "real American" city that Sarah Palin extols and it is also a dead zone, creatively. The school system produces mediocrity; when it produces anything at all, since the drop-out rate is above average. (Kansas' overall dropout rate is 25%, but the Hispanic dropout rate is 45% and that is the fastest growing population in the state and overwhelmingly the fastest growing population in Dodge.)

To become an economic center, the city and state would have to reverse decades of Republican-directed discrimination and intolerance. I can not see any way that would happen. Without that reversal, however, the place is doomed to become a 3rd world, dysfunctional poverty zone and a drag on the economies of the productive parts of the country.