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Happy 40 and 30: Celebrating the old, the older and the odd.

This year marks my 40th anniversary for graduating from high school. I could say the same for marking 40 years ago that I joined the Navy. On the other hand, I received my bachelor of arts in communication 30 years ago this year. That’s a lot of anniversaries for one year.

In a year that saw physical difficulty with a ba for a major portion of 2014, it sadly also saw two of my four brothers pass away within two months of each other. That is the way it goes sometimes, triumph and tragedy, or vice versa. The last time I saw my Dad was at my college graduation. I suppose that if there is a time when it is right for someone to last see one another, perhaps that time should be on the upswing.

But I sit here not to sound a melancholy note. Nor do I write here to praise one milestone as opposed to another.

The fact is I have been a bit more involved in the planning for my high school reunion than for that of my college reunion. The reasons include simple arithmetic. There were between 80-to-100 students in my high school graduating class. I wouldn’t venture a guess for the numbers who graduated with my college class. I do know that that during the spring semester of 1984, when I graduated from college, saw a record enrollment that has since been broken once or twice. About 11,800 enrolled during that semester at Stephen F. Austin State University. The college is tucked away among the “pine curtain” of East Texas. “Home of virgin pines and tall women,” we would joke.

I have a fairly simple role in my high school reunion next month. It is our entry in the parade. Yes, parade. Survivors of my class get to ride on a trailer of some sort pulled by some mean machine. My friends involved in the locomotion aspects are in the forest products industry and so the ride itself doesn’t seem like a difficult part to pull off. The hard part is to find out where we should meet our chariot and how should it be decorated. Oh well, it’s a small town. We will likely figure that all out by the time the parade actually takes place.

As for my college reunion, I have no immediate plans. The reasons for that is that my college friends seldom were in the same graduating classes. Most of these friends were younger than I was. I doubt many of my friends will attend festivities at SFA. There are varying reasons for that as well including wives, kids, and/or living in far away places like Tokyo.

My college days were not what you called traditional, to be honest. The fact that I was in the Navy for four years before going to college is a big factor. It wasn’t so much I was “an older guy.” I also got a job before starting school as a firefighter. All but two of my final semesters were spent working. I also didn’t worry much, if any, about finances. That was fairly odd for most of my college friends. Tuition was cheap back then. I received a stipend of around $200 a month from the GI Bill for those semesters I was enrolled. I didn’t do much in the way of summer semesters. It would have been too difficult to manage working and going to school every day, which basically entailed one’s day in summer school all five days of the week. I wasn’t a typical firefighter either, for that matter. Most guys got off work and would go to a second or perhaps even a third job. I worked one summer off-duty, before school had even started. It involved moving mobile homes and getting dirty, not exactly in that order. When I decided to take a week’s vacation, I recruited my best friend, Waldo. I finally left this part-time mess. Waldo, who wasn’t exactly working in his master’s in speech field, stayed on for a little while.

Even the days moving mobile homes was something to look back upon with, while not exactly fondness, amused memories.

All in all, I could not have asked for a better college experience. Oh, my final semester was sheer hedonism. I wasn’t working and we, as was the saying back then, partied like the proverbial big dog! There are lots of differences between looking backward at high school and taking the same long look at college. Especially when you come from a small town, school is literally growing up. It’s tribal. Although I haven’t seen some of my high school friends since we graduated 40 years ago, we are bonded by years, age and place.

But for college, it will always be about walking out into the field on a hazy, warm December morning and hearing Canned Tuna playing on the gigantic Klipsch stereo speakers a friend brought over for the weekend-long party. Or that girl who, no matter what happened between us, will always be your friend. And of course, throw in a couple of fires some that were to be celebrated and others to be extinguished …

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The telecom boom doesn’t solve all of society’s woes

We are closing in on the 120th year of flight. That is rather amazing in its own right. Flying made the world closer, in certain respects. One needs to look at the good with the bad and flying has had plenty of both in those century-plus years.

The tele-communication boom will be the “turn of the century” bookmark of social history. One only has to go on social media to find more than enough of the good and the bad.

I keep a semi-running commentary on politics and society with my college friend, Paul, who lives in Tokyo. It is rather amazing that we both can communicate with one another at such speed and such a distance. It’s easy. Just look at your phone and view the clock you set for Tokyo. Then, if you are super bored, take a picture of yourself — known in today’s lingo as a “selfie”– and just for the hell of it you can take a look at the compass on your phone to find what direction is Tokyo. Or what direction your life is taking. All of this with a phone and more.

My iPhone is probably the best digital camera I have had to date. I’ve used some professional digital cameras, the big suckers real “shooters” for the media use. Or at least used to use. It’s been some 10 years since I have used one. The iPhone is better than my Fujifilm XP. It is time to upgrade to a better digital camera, if I can find one that is better than my iPhone and is as affordable.

I didn’t come here to talk about cameras, you might be surprised to hear. I just wanted to make a notation about life before cell phones. It wasn’t all that long ago, if you don’t call 30 years or so long ago. Maybe a 30-year-old does.

My pick of three decades is arbitrary. That dates back to the year I graduated from college, which was 10 years after I graduated from high school, joined the Navy, was discharged honorably and became a professional firefighter. Actually, I want to pick the days I worked as a firefighter and just afterwards when for two whole semesters I was nothing but a bearded college student. Then as well include that time right after I graduated and moved to a new town. That is when I dated Liz. More on her later.

The first apartment I rented in college was adjoined by two and then later about four other apartments. I had two different neighbors living — one after another — in the apartment in the back of the building. Both were girls. Both were very cute girls. I dated one later on, during the time I worked at my first job out of college. I imagine I should have dated the other one instead.

I had my first very own landline phone in my apartment. So did Liz, the girl who was literally, as the Cars song went, “my best friend’s girl.” The late, great Waldo and Liz been long split by the time she and I dated.

But awhile before that short “bliss,” I remember Liz calling me one morning after I came home from my shift at the fire station. She asked me if I could turn my music down.

“Sure. Happy to.”

The girl who moved in after Liz moved out worked with my sometimes girlfriend back then, Karen. I can’t remember if Debbie, my neighbor had a phone. If she did, she never called me. That’s because she could just walk next door. If my car was home Debbie would knock. We didn’t really need a phone to communicate. For instance, Debbie came outside one morning as I was about to go for a jog. She asked how far I was going. I said about two miles. So she asked if she could go.

“Sure. Damn straight!”

In ran Debbie who quickly pulled on a pair of sweats. Man, if only more women could wear a set of sweats like Debbie! I wouldn’t call running enjoyable but along with some weights and jumping rope, and racquetball, it helped keep me in shape for fighting fires. I would call it enjoyable running with Debbie.

I remember Debbie telling me after I moved to the shotgun shack, that Karen said she would have to work somewhere else if Debbie and I went out, or whatever one would call it back then. I don’t think it would have bothered Debbie. Or Karen either. Things could get complicated.

My friends rarely bothered calling to tell me they were coming to visit back then. When I moved out to the farm, some might call just to make sure I was there. But even if I wasn’t there, some would still park at the locked gate and hang out. Others who knew the location of the spare gate key would “come on in!” It was a nice place, the country.

Now it seems one has to let others know when you have to take a crap. Not that I tell anyone, that’s a metaphor, or a simile or personification or whatever the hell it is.

Perhaps the communication revolution doesn’t answer the big social questions, like why  did I date Liz and not Debbie? I guess it just wasn’t to be, damn it to hell! It is an outcome that can’t be solved with an iPhone and a You Tube video of a dancing monkey.

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Boomtown SE Texas: Let it rain

We had a hell of a rain on Friday. The thunder started booming about 4 a.m. and didn’t seem to stop until nearly 8 a.m. Normally, I can sleep and sleep well through thunder and a heavy rain, but this stuff just kept on rolling. The rain did likewise, falling and falling some more. Some areas in Jefferson County were hit with 4 inches to 6 inches from only several hours of rain. Consequently, some of the same old underpasses went under water.

The city of Beaumont has spent millions to install better conduits for flood water to flow off into the Neches River. The river, which is the Beaumont-Mid Jefferson County-Northern Orange County portion of the Sabine-Neches Waterway, is located on the eastern side of Beaumont. Still the area floods when we get a lot of water in a short period of time. And people still drive their cars into the flooded underpasses. I think I saw a figure of like 36 cars had to be pulled from underwater. Fortunately, no one was killed. Such is the price you pay when you live in an area that is at most about 20 feet above sea level. But, I guess the river can always use some refreshing.

I see different figures but the Port of Beaumont — on the Neches end of the waterway — usually runs from about the 4th largest port in the country to the 7th. I used to like to go down to the port and take a look at the big ships in port. Now they have a more restricted are around the port due to maritime security, a.k.a. MARSEC.

 “The Coast Guard employs a three-tiered system of Maritime Security (MARSEC) Levels designed to easily communicate to the Coast Guard and our maritime industry partners pre-planned scalable responses for credible threats,” says the Coasties.

A liquid natural gas tanker is assisted by tugs on the Sabine-Neches Waterway on the Upper Texas Coast.
A liquid natural gas tanker is assisted by tugs on the Sabine-Neches Waterway on the Upper Texas Coast.

President Obama signed a bill last month that is meant to boost water projects across the country. Southeast Texas is to get the largest bucks from that legislation, the Sabine-Neches Navigation District said last week. The district said there are 71,000 vessel transits — meaning in and out  each year — in the entire Sabine-Neches complex. Those group of ports are located in Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange and Sabine Pass. And since the modern petroleum industry began “right cheer,” as our Cajun Texans say, I suppose it is only logical that most of the cargo sailing around the area’s ports consist of crude oil and it’s byproducts.

 “We produce about 13% of the nation’s gasoline daily,” said Clayton Henderson, assistant general manager of the Sabine-Neches Navigation District 

Oh, and I forgot to mention there are big ol’ liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals at either side of where the Sabine-Neches and its bay, Sabine Lake, empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

If the remainder of the Keystone Pipeline gets allowed and built, it will end up right cheer in Jefferson County. And for something kind of completely different, some of the stockpiles of chemical weapons being taken from Syria for destruction — where do they go? Want to take a guess? Those nasty “weapons of mass destruction” are being sent to Port Arthur.

Now one may ask, why did he start with heavy thunder and rain, and end up with tons of petroleum products and weapons of mass destruction?

To look at it one way there is certainly a lot of stuff to go boom were the wrong people to get hold of all those dangerous product made and transported to and from our area. We would probably need a lot of foam if something caught fire, but we have plenty of water or so it seems.

Texas is a huge state and not even the biggest in the U.S. It is second in size to Alaska. But one gets a feel for its size when it looks at average rainfall from the nearly 60 inches per year we average here in Jefferson County to the 9-something inches received some 800 miles away in El Paso County.

I have to say that the LP terminals at the terminus of Sabine Lake bother me the most. But what can one do? Boosters of the project to deepen the Sabine-Neches channel by 8 feet say this will “promise” 78,000 new jobs in the area. It’s all about the jobs isn’t it? Or at the very least, the promise of jobs.

It seems as if someone needs to use the existing channel to transport to us a big ol’ “paradigm shifter.” Get that sucker rigged up like snappy, and working. Then, we should ask our Native-American friends who live about an hour away to the north on the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation if they might be so nice to come down here somewhere and do some rain dancing. Because even with all the rain we already receive if things get rough we might need even more liquid gold.

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Watch for those fiery tornadoes

This story in NatGeo online oddly attracted me. The viral You Tube video is what the story is about, the subject being a “fire tornado.”

These fiery whirling dervishes of nature are more akin to dust devils than to real tornadoes which can cause nine kinds of hell in practically every part of the United States. This partial explanation from Wikipedia comes pretty close to explaining these whirlwinds:

 “Dust devils form when hot air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler, low- pressure air above it. If conditions are just right, the air may begin to rotate. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect … “

Most dust devils that form here in Southeast Texas are generally small in size. The same applies, though not always, for tornadoes. I would guess that the size has to do with the humid air we normally have here on the coast. I did see some larger whirlwinds when I have visited Colorado, where this fire tornado takes place. I have never seen a fire tornado although I have seen and been through a few tornadoes. I have seen firestorms as well. Or rather, I have seen at least one firestorm. This is a phenomenon which takes place when a fire is so large that it sustains its own wind system. This can occur naturally, as in a large wildfire, or in other instances such as happened most notably in the massive fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II.

The fire storm I witnessed happened during a fire that destroyed a plywood mill. It was what you would call a “massive” blaze. I could see the currents inside the heat and fire that drifted across the street and caught a wood yard on fire. A few hours later I went home, about 10 miles in the country from the fire. I found ashes up to a foot long and nearly as wide in the cow pasture. Had it not been spring and the area fair with rain, half the countryside could have been burned.

Nature can play all kinds of tricks with you and your surroundings. When that happens. You need to be elsewhere.

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There is no free lunch (at McDonald’s)

Read this story.

If the facts are 100 percent correct as alleged by this McDonald’s worker then it would be enough for me to say: “I’m not ever going to McDonald’s again.”

What the hell. I hardly ever go to McDonald’s anyway.

Basically this girl alleges she was fired from her job at McDonald’s after paying for some firefighters’ meal after they returned from a house fire. Then another group came in and she felt they should get a comp as well. She texted her boss to ask. That was the straw that broke Ronald’s back, allegedly. McDonald’s say there is more to the story of her firing than was stated. Oh, but they can’t say anything because of privacy laws. How freaking convenient.

I guess this rubs me the wrong way in more than one way. The biggest irritant is that the fast food joint doesn’t make cops pay but apparently not other public service types. This has been and, apparently still is, a practice at more than just the golden arches. A bit more than 30 years ago when I was a firefighter that was the widespread practice in the town in which I lived. Not that you work for the perks, but hell, sometimes people do appreciate the job you do. You are risking your life when you roll out of the station.

People seem to have more of an appreciation of public safety people now, more so than they did before 9/11. Still, I guess some of the restaurant people figure they can only give out free food only to so many. Okay, when that grease trap you didn’t ever clean catches fire and puts the place into an inferno, go call your hero coppers to put it out. Sorry.

I do remember some girls bringing cookies to our station one time. It was a couple of days after we helped get them back inside their house after they locked themselves out.

Once, I do recall eating at a McDonald’s after a fire. It was an early Sunday morning, must have been early January because the college still was out and there was zero traffic. I was riding in the open jump seat with someone. Can’t recall who. Mike was driving and Mason was lieutenant. I don’t remember who all was on the other pumper either. I guess I remember those two guys because they are gone after relatively early deaths. I remember it was sleeting or snowing that day. A car with a guy, his wife and kids, passed by and looked at me and my fellow firefighter riding the jump seat like, “These guys must be freezing.”

This was back when I was still young. Really pretty young. I guess I was about 23. Man, I had fun back in those days.

We ate breakfast, a Mickey D’s Big Breakfast as I recall. And I remember Mason paid for it. I don’t recollect if Mason paid for those of us on both trucks but he did pick up Engine 309’s tab. That’s more than I can say for Mickey D.