Monday, February 2, 2015

Things I Don’t Tell Mother When I’m Traveling


Back in the Dark Ages, I was returning to Arizona from South Carolina.  My mother insisted I call collect (I did tell you this was a while ago) every night I was on the road, so she’d know I was safe.  I didn’t mind; it’s comforting to know alarms will go off somewhere if I drop off the radar.
My car, no surprise, had Arizona plates.  I’m driving down Interstate 20 between Columbia and Atlanta, carefree, going home, when just over the Georgia border, a car blinks its lights behind me.  Assuming it was a warning about a tire or some auto related issue, I check my gauges, make sure my tires are tracking smoothly.  Nothing seems wrong, so I trundle on down the road.
Again, the lights.  Again, I check.  Nothing.
Again, the lights.  I slow to let him pass.  He slows.  I speed up.  He speeds up.
It finally dawns on me that the bastard was trying to pick me up….on the interstate!!!!  I was dumfounded…and angry…and scared.
For miles, he played his little games, coming up next to me, moving ahead, dropping behind.
I got his license number, pulled into a rest area, and called the Georgia State Police, who told me that a trooper station was just up the road, and to pull in there if he follwed me.  He’d watched me from the other side of the parking lot, but had left before I did. 
And guess who was waiting for me just beyond the turnoff to the trooper station?  Now I was both genuinely enraged and truly frightened.  Frightened because it was obvious he would follow me until I stopped for the night.  Enraged that he thought I was so stupid as to let that happen.  And, the troopers knew his name and the make of his car from the license number.
Way back then, few people carried guns.  I knew that if I’d had a gun, I might have shot him.  I would have rolled down the window of my car while barrelling down Interstate 20….and shot him....from irrational fear.
Instead, at the next exit with lots of activity, I pulled into a gas station, got gas, and called the troopers, who told me to stay put.  The harrasser pulled in just down the way.
Eventually, a blond gorilla wearing a trooper uniform drove up, asked me where the man was, then told me to hit the road.  I never saw the harrasser again.
Nor did I tell my mother when I checked in that evening.
 So now, many, many years later, when checking in is via email, what did I not tell Mother? 

The high speed camper tire blowout just over the Texas border.  It didn’t take me more than a few seconds to realize that the noise I was hearing wasn’t merely from rough road, so I gently pulled over to the side of I-20.  And yes, the right rear tire of the camper was shredded.   
Soometimes, Mother, ignorance is bliss.

An Ordinary Fanatic


I met him as we were both checking in to the Big Bend Resort and Adventures campground.  He was coming out of dry camping in Big Bend National Park, in a small pop-up, and I was going to dip my toes into the park the next day.
He was presentable, for someone who’d been without a shower for a few days.  White beard, gray hair in need of a comb, blues eyes, nice grin, well-spoken.
No, this isn't the "real" ordinary fanatic, whose name is Eric, but you get the idea.
 Turns out he’s a retired Cal State system college professor, Ph.D in geography, now living in Colorado.  I teased him that we’d fall madly in love and run off into the West Texas sunset.
He’s a banjo picker and had tracked down a Sunday gathering at the High Sierra Saloon in the El Dorado hotel over in Terlingua Ghost Town, and later that afternoon I wandered over, sat down at the bar, ordered a Lone Star, and listened to the music. 
The next day, we met for dinner, along with Ed, a recent widower from Vermont, and that’s where the ordinary person began to ooze into another dimension.  Ed’s wife, a Pentacostal Christian, had died this past summer, and tears still came to his eyes when he spoke of her.  Without much faith himself, he began to attend his wife’s church, and returned to a Christianity which he’d probably never really left, though he did not become Pentacostal.  Faith became the focus of our dinner conversation.
The ordinary man, Eric, had had a long faith journey, born into a Unitarian family, moving into Buddhism, and now Catholicism.   And he’d come to Catholicism, he said, because, from his extensive reading, it was apparent that only the Catholic Church was able and willing to fight the attempts of the UN and the New World Order which were, at the behest of the Jews, attempting to install the religion of Satanism so the Jews could take over the world.  The ordinary guy was morphing into 
If you’re confused, so was I. 
The ordinary fanatic and I  had breakfast together the next morning, and I kept quiet as he expounded his beliefs, all of which could be reduced to the very simple notion that Jews were behind everything bad:  WWII, because Roosevelt was Jewish; the global warming hoax.  Jews use music to indoctrinate; after all Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary is Jewish; Pete Seeger was Jewish. 
As I drank my coffee and ate my eggs and toast, he became animated; his eyes shone, his teeth almost bared as his once-charming smile morphed into a smirk.  Leaning back in his chair, his chest expanded as he kept moving into the slime of hatred.  He knew, he told me, the truth, and now that he knew the truth, he knew what to do:  to talk to people, write, be on the radio…get the word out about what was really happening in the world.
A scientist, well-educated, with PhD parents and two brothers who are professors at respected universities.  A Unitarian, an environmentalist, a Buddhist.
And now…ugly, irrational, an ordinary fanatic. It was sad. 

 From ordinary guy to someone espousing evil, ugly, ugly evil.

Paper or Plastic?



The medians of Interstate 10 in West Texas sparkle and glisten…. Gems, perhaps?  The last of the snow?  
No:  plastic.  Plastic bags, plastic sheeting, plastic bottles.  Shredded, torn, tattered, confetti.   Plastic dancing over the desert.  Plastic caught in the sharp tines of cacti.
How did this happen?  The Don’t Mess with Texas Texans leave a mess.  Bigger than life Texans leave a bigger than life mess.  Have they no shame?
Apparently some do.  Even the bigger than life west-Texas Texans, at least the citizens of Ft. Stockton, Texas, have taken the almost unamurican step of banning plastic bags in stores.
I’ve learned from hard experience that when camping with the canines, I need to stash my trash in a plastic bag (Sorry Diana) and hang it inside the camper where the dogs can’t reach it.   When I stopped at Wally World in Ft. Stockton (I needed a few things other than food), I left my own bags in the car, and, though seeing paper bags where mine own Wise County, Virginia, Wally World  stored the plastic, I asked for plastic.  Not to be had, so, with my own bags in the car, I accepted paper.
Why has Texas allowed such a mess?  They can’t blame it all on those of us who pass through.  They can’t blame it all on the prickly vegetation which snags it and shreds it.  They can’t blame it all on the wind, catching the bags and blowing them around like kites.
No, Texas has only itself to blame for the mess.
Bring your own bag to Texas. 

They won’t thank you, but the environment will.