Eight Feet Deep

A day doesn’t go by that I don’t hear some type of siren. It is something that is a fact of city life and especially understandable living two blocks from one of the area’s trauma centers.

But it has been some time since I have been as up close and personal to a siren, or sirens I should say, as when I went for a walk this morning. I was walking down Ashley Avenue when an EMS supervisor came ripping down the street behind me and zipped on past me. He went a couple of blocks and turned off his siren. But as the vehicle and its siren was going by I thought my ears would bleed.

When I walked down a street and started back in the opposite direction on Long Avenue a couple of minutes later history repeated itself. Only this time, the EMS supervisor was going in the opposite direction (the same direction as I was walking) and he was followed by a fire department supervisor. Both had their sirens blazing.

Now, I certainly am not complaining. I used to be a firefighter and EMT, and I have used probably more than my share of siren warnings. It is one of the things you have in your tool kit to maybe keep oncoming traffic from running you over and leaving you for roadkill.

But a lot of debate exists over just how effective sirens and emergency lights are. I had a Texas state trooper who taught emergency driving in my EMT class who said he never used warning lights nor sirens when responding to an emergency. His rationale was no one paid attention to them anyway.

I remember emergency driving experiences in which I used a siren, an air horn and warning lights on my fire truck. And still I would have people in front of me who were totally clueless that I was behind them. Sometimes I would take the big spotlight mounted just forward of the door and flash it quickly in their rearview mirror. That usually got their attention.

Once you get away from riding in vehicles using sirens though they eventually become part of the background. That is until today. I forgot just how loud those things are.

I also don’t know if I suffered any hearing loss from my days in emergency vehicles. Sirens put out upwards of 120 decibels and anything over 80-85 decibels for sustained periods can cause hearing loss, from what I have read. Add to that being on a warship that would shoot its cannons, along with all the loud music I have listened to over the years and I guess it’s amazing I can hear at all.

But I wouldn’t trade an absence of all that noise for the experiences I got with it. Besides, some of that music just doesn’t sound very good unless it is LOUD!!!

Bigfoot uncovered?

This afternoon I am off to the backwoods and river bottoms of the very eastern fringe of Texas to find Bigfoot. Of course, if I am going to see Sasquatch then he/she/it is going to have to appear somewhere that is convenient for me. That is because I surely am not going to go trouncing through the Sabine River swamps on a humid late July afternoon. I may be a fool, but I am not an idiot.

Apparently a great many people think Bigfoot resides in certain areas such as the East Texas pineywoods. An organization calling itself the Texas Bigfoot Research Center provides a database listing Bigfoot sightings in various Texas counties. Two sightings are listed in Newton County, where I was raised, and although I profess to having seen many strange things there I don’t think I ever saw Sasquatch. Nonetheless, here is a description of one such sighting near the Bon Wier community in 1999 from the database:

“My dad was bowfishing when he saw something on the bank. It was about the size of a man with raggy fur and entangled with twigs and leaves, it also had bright yellow eyes. My dad smacked the water with the paddle. It immediately turned and screamed.”

A sissy Sasquatch perhaps. Now I have known people in those parts who kind of fit that description. But I never knew any of them to tuck tail and run, much less scream.

A follow-up investigation of another Bigfoot report in 2004 near the Sabine River uncovered an apparent hot zone for Sasquatch:

“‘People around here say they see ’em [bigfoots] all the time.’ (Her) family lives within two miles of the Sabine River, an area that generates many bigfoot sighting reports. The mother said she wasn’t sure what she and her kids saw, but she was ‘definitely freaked out’ by it,” according to the report of Bigfoot investigator Daryl G. Colyer, a former Air Force intelligence “Airborne Russian Linguist.”

Hmm. Okay. Maybe you find Russian-speaking Sasquatches aerially. I wonder if Bigfoot drinks vodka?

Well, I expect to find out those answers this afternoon when I go into deepest, darkest East Texas. I’ve got a camera so if I happen to see Bigfoot, I’ll snap a quick pic of it and share it with you when I get back.

When we were being strafed last night by the mosquito bomber I thought about a strange experience I had as a child. I have written about this in a column somewhere before though it was never widely distributed. If you are one of these hand-wringers who is ethically opposed to plagiarizing oneself, then, too bad.

I was a little cowlicked-headed small-town boy like Opie Taylor though never quite as insightful. Nonetheless, I learned one day about facing up to difficulties and then executing a course of action. It was the day the balloon fell from the sky.

My uncle was doing some kind of work on our henhouse one Sunday afternoon when we noticed what appeared to be a large weather balloon slowly descending toward relatively nearby ground. This had to be sometime in the mid-1960s and I can’t be certain that it really was a weather balloon. I say that because it was being chased by two large, twin-rotored Air Force helicopters and a rather large plane circling our little town. I don’t know if the Air Force would make such a fuss over a weather balloon. I always liked to think it was some kind of top secret experiment but it might just have been a weather balloon.

Being the town’s volunteer fire chief, my uncle told me he was going to go see where the balloon went down and asked me to come along. I am always glad that I went along that day. But I also kind of wished I had stuck around home.

We had a nice-sized pasture on our property. Kind of a large pasture for being in even a small town. My parents said that after my uncle and I left, the two helicopters landed in our pasture for a few minutes. It only took moments for townspeople to start lining the road around our pasture, my folks told me. It was if the aliens had set down and were about to invade the local Lion’s Club. To be fair, I would say most people back then had seen few if any helicopters. But it was definitely a sight to see that Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, my uncle and I had traced the massive balloon to a clearing for a high-voltage power line. Other officials and unofficials arrived on the scene as well. Shortly, some Air Force officers came out of the woods in their flight suits, having taken off in their choppers from our little spectacle of an air park back at the house.

The balloon rested among trees and brush for quite a ways. A box that was the balloon’s gondola hung precariously over the edge of the high-tension electric lines. This wasn’t going to be easy, the serious looks upon the military men seemed to indicate.

While the Air Force talked the situation over with the local yokels, a drunken but otherwise okay yahoo who had a missing hand on one arm quietly retrieved a shotgun from his pickup truck. He steadied the gun on top of his handless arm, which was in turn rested on the roof of the truck. Then he cut loose on the gondola/box which rapidly fell to the ground like heads in a French guillotine party.

Were this to happen today I’m sure the drunken, one-handed yahoo would probably have gone to jail. But I think everyone was too stunned to do anything that day.

Somehow, they got the remaining portion of the balloon off the highline and all those assembled including young Opie helped roll up what was left of the balloon for the Air Force.

Though that was a long time ago, I retained some very valuable lessons from that day. I learned that sometimes you’ve got to make tough decisions no matter how short-sighted, ignorant or liquor-addled they might be. I also learned that it pays to be a good shot.

Today marks the 3-month anniversary of “eight feet deep.” What was started as a means for an unemployed journalist to keep his writing skills somewhat in tact has turned into some sort of labor of love. I haven’t developed a large readership. But that’s okay with me. I have some loyal readers and others who check in from time-to-time. Mostly those reading are my friends.

I didn’t know if I would be able to stick with the blog. But so far, I have and we’ll see what happens in the future. With that said, I came across a great piece of news early this morning during yet another bout with insomnia. I found out that Tom Robbins has a new book coming out next month called “Wild Ducks Flying Backwards.” It is a combination of previously published journalistic pieces he wrote for a number of magazines along with some short stories and unpublished poetry. (Note: I can’t link directly to the page about the new book but you can get there through searching for Tom Robbins on the above link. Sorry.)

Although “Ducks” will not be a new novel, I still look forward to it because a new Robbins book is cause for celebration. He only comes out with one every few years and those books he has written offer wonderfully humorous expositions of this life and others through the eyes of someone who writes as if he invented language.

I eagerly await the new Robbins work.

It is apparent that the four blasts on the subway system and a bus in London today were minor. Although reports are sketchy the only injury reported so far may have been one of the people responsible for the detonations, the BBC says. Hopefully the British police will catch this or others involved.

What seems kind of bizarre is the lack of cell phone reports/video/photos in the wake of today’s incidents that were so evident after the attacks two weeks ago. I’m sure some perfectly good explanation exists for that. Or maybe not.

PM Tony Blair was supposed to speak almost 40 minutes ago but has yet to do so. I was going to listen to his speech but have to go out for awhile. I don’t know if anyone in the U.K. will see this blog from Beaumont, Texas, but my thoughts and best wishes are with the English people.