Eight Feet Deep

We’re taking a timeout from hurricane coverage to talk about something that is really important — high school football. Yes, it’s that time of year already. Jock straps are off the locker room shelves and nary a cliché is safe from overuse.

Now I happen to like high school football. It sure beats the hell out of watching tennis. And I like to follow the fortune of my hometown Eagles who are the top-ranked Class 2A team in Texas and they’ve yet to play. Why high school football is a religion in Texas. So much is it a religion, that it is about the only entity that the Holy Rollers don’t get worked up over because you call it a religion. Can I hear an Amen? That is because the Holy Rollers are down with the rest of us heathens watching the game from the stands. You also don’t hear them use a lot of words like “smite” when they are watching the glorious battle on field. More commonly you hear them screaming the same four-letter words used by the rest of us sinners.

What I like almost as much as watching high school football is hearing the after-game interviews with the coaches on the local TV stations. Many of these coaches are grand wizards — oops I don’t guess I should call them that around these parts where a few Kluxers remain — at the mastery of the cliché . Here is my all-time favorite:

“They beat us like a rented mule.”

I don’t know if a practice existed at one time where people beat rented mules. For that matter, I don’t even know for sure if mules were routinely rented. I would think the only thing worse than renting a mule was renting a pimped-out ’76 Ford Pinto. Believe me on that one. Why if mules were rented and beaten nowadays, I’m sure you would soon have a nekkid girl from PETA show up outside your business. And rightfully so.

Then there is always is this jewel:

“We gave it 110 percent.”

Why just 110? Why not 2.2 million percent? Were the team to give it 111 percent, would the coach get kicked out of his state coaching association?

And this tried but true chestnut:

“We are going to take the season one game at a time.”

So that means you have no clue whatsoever as to what you will do if the team appears it might lose all of its games? You’re not even going to send out resumes to other schools in the very possible event that you may be without a job at the end of the season? No, no, no. One game at a time. Boys you don’t need to practice! We’re taking it one game at a time.

I don’t mean to insult football or other coaches. They do have a tough job. And they are a great source of entertainment on the late Friday night sports shows. Especially if your side lost because some jackass coach decided his team wouldn’t have any master plan to win and instead decided to take it one game at a time.

It is probably safe to say that the Mississippi Gulf Coast is taking the worst beating from Hurricane Katrina. The Sun Herald newspaper has excellent coverage of what is going on right now through a staff-written blog. Although it has been 28 years since I lived in Gulfport it is nonetheless chilling to hear about some of the places I recognize being underwater.

Here on the eastern edge of the Texas coast we are getting some cloud bands from Katrina and the storm is causing winds generally about 15 mph. But that’s it. It doesn’t help the heat or humidity much. The heat index is already 97 degrees. It’s kind of like a fan from a blast furnace.

That is one monster storm. It’s being compared with Hurricane Camille in 1969 which completely wrecked the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I remember when I was stationed in the Navy in Gulfport about five years later how people spoke in almost reverent tones about Camille. After all, it killed more than 130 people. I don’t know if it’s still there, but there used to be a tug boat or some kind of boat that got blown ashore across U.S. 90 onto the beach in Gulfport from Camille. It ended up becoming a gift shop and kind of a reminder about what these storms can do. I still have friends in Gulfport and I have friends in New Orleans. Of course, I don’t want it to hit here either. So I just wish the best for everyone.

I’m a bit sore today as a result from bowling with friends last night. I think it had been two years since I had last bowled a game. Your dormant muscles must get a little pissed off when you wake them up and demand that they perform for you like a chimp playing a xylophone.

Definitely our playing resulted in few highlights. One of our party made a strike on her very last time up. I think I picked up one spare. The three of us had a combined score of something like 223. That means the pros won’t be calling anytime soon. But it was fun and even though I’m a little sore, I can be grateful I didn’t meet the fate of a young bowling alley employee I read about in an Oklahoma Department of Health report.

“A 17-year old bowling facility worker died from injuries received on October 13, 2001, when he was caught in a pinsetter machine. Although he was employed by the bowling facility, he was not working at the time of the incident, but was bowling with friends.”

This employee had only worked at the alley for three weeks and he apparently tried to manually re-set a pin in the 45-year-old machine.

“He tossed the pin toward the back of the machine where it struck the pincushion, thereby causing the machine to automatically cycle. The rake lowered from its resting position and then swept backward toward the rear of the machine, performing its normal operative function by sweeping the bowling pins to the back of the machine to be automatically sorted and framed. The arm of the rake caught the worker, crushing his head against the machine’s frame when it struck him,” the report said.

Talk about your freak accidents! If that bowling alley has not been sued out of existence, I bet that story gets told and retold among those bowling its lanes.

Hurricane Katrina is a little more than 663 miles away from me right now, which is a comfortable distance. The National Weather Service keeps insisting they know which way the storm is going to track and the general vicinity in which it will hit (the northern Gulf of Mexico). But their estimates keep getting moved westward. First, the Florida Panhandle was the likely target. Then Mobile Bay or Biloxi. Now the best guestimates put it somewhere in the central to southeast Louisiana coast. If it keeps moving westward, it will not be a good thing for us on the upper Texas coast.

I don’t find any fault with the weather service. Although it seems that forecasting hurricanes would be easier than predicting winter storms in this part of the country, these tropical badboys and badgirls sometime don’t go exactly as planned. Thus, we will just have to wait and see whether Katrina takes that northward turn that would put it somewhere in Louisiana. Right now there are hurricane watches for the New Orleans areas and tropical storm warnings back east to the Dry Tortugas. That is an odd name isn’t it? It sounds like some kind of ugly intestinal virus.

The photo is of some hurricane taken from the WC-130 aircraft of the Hurricane Hunters out of Keesler AFB, Miss. During the summers when I was stationed down the road in Gulfport, I used to see these big birds slowly make their way out into the Gulf. These folks who fly into the eye of the storms are heroes as far as I am concerned. Heroes and probably a little nuts. But the information they gather helps us have a better clue where these storms are going. Better them than me.