Water

I guess in thinking of the past some of my most vivid memories center around water. Now water obviously is very necessary for all living creatures to survive, and it covers over 75% of the earth's surface, as well as around 75% of the human body is composed of liquid.I know some acquaintances are more than 80% alcohol, at least on weekends, but those people anomalies, and at least are mainly beer -laced h20. From my earliest childhood we would virtually live at the little creek that partially formed the headwaters of the Green River. There we would see who was wily enough to capture the fish from the deeper green pools or out from under the slate rocks in the shallows. Those slate rock adventures were like Forrest Gump's observation, as you never knew what you'd drag out with your bare hands as you groped under the black, slippery rocks. Sometimes it was a black goggle-eye fish, just fat and ripe for the frying pan. Other times the luck of the draw wasn't on your side as you could pull out an irritable, pissed- to- the- core water snake that no sense of humor, as it snapped viciously at anything in reach , sometimes our skinny scarred up youthful legs. Later on in life I would have flashbacks as we would be diving amongst reef sharks in the Bahamas, their cat eyes sizing us up as they leisurely swam amongst the pale intruders. They were shopping for lunch and we were shopping for thrills. It seemed like the sharks were calling out to me,"Hey fatass!! I'm going to get you sooner or later!" Or I've swam up to scuttled ships and come nearly eye to eye with vivid ,green moray eels as they poke their toothy heads out from their favorite lair , hoping to get a handout. Their open mouths filled with backslanted white, needle teeth. I silently pray"Oh Lord , if that thing wants to come out , Let it take a liking for Tim. I don't want to become eel food in Aruba!!"The water in the Caribbean and the southern islands is impossibly clear as you glide under the surface , maybe amongst reefs like Gulden Cay in the Bahamas, or over an incredibly deep wall in the Caymans. Either way the human mind cannot comprehend the beauty and wilderness of the ocean. The silence is only broken by your bubbles as they drift toward the surface. There is a condition called nitrogen narcosis that suddenly can overtake a diver at maybe 85 feet or so that is like an immediate euphoria and drunk. Divers have been known to think they don't need their air supply and carelessly toss their regulators aside. People have drowned this way. I was somewhat used to narcosis as I previously exhibited the same euphoria and giddiness when in the presence of well-endowed young blonds with the smell of cocoa-butter. I think Tim takes some kind of mind altering drugs to combat the condition as I've never seen him giddy unless that wild plane ride from Atlanta one night when he sat next to a mermaid and the Stewardess kept giving them free drinks. I anxiously kept looking over my shoulder , thinking I might have to help him with the tall, cool brunette, but they obviously were feeling no pain, and didn't ask for assistance. Back to reality all water is not equal. Diving in Cumberland Lake is like diving in your Uncle's Septic tank. On occasion I would dive at the dock where my old boat was moored, but that was when someone asked if I could find something they dropped overboard, or help put a prop on a boat. The water was maybe 80 degrees at the top and dropped to the 60's on the muddy bottom at 30 feet. Imagine dropping on your knees in slimy mud maybe 2 feet deep in utter pitch blackness with only your air bubbles as companionship. You then feel around in the mud for what- ever object someone has dropped from above. It's not for the claustophobic, or the easily freightened. As you feel in the darkness and slimy mud your hands run across alien and sometimes scary objects. You know rumors abound that there are man eating catfish in Cumberland, but those don't scare me. What scares me is 30 years of monofiliment fishing line and sharp hooks waiting to ensnare me before I can reach the warm ,green waters above. I fear this more than sharks or barracuda. In all the tropic waters I have ever dived in , there is one common element, and that is schools of evil ,little yellow tailed snapper fish that will sneak up behind you and painfully nip any exposed body parts. There was a monster Jew Fish named Elvis that lived in a sunken barge off Key West that startled Tim and I on a dive. A member of the grouper family, I think Elvis was bigger than both of us. Elvis looked at us through plate sized,blood-shot eyes and seemed to open his mouth occasionally to belch. A huge mouth, and once again ,"Please Lord, Here's Tim..." We lived to tell the tale.Most females don't really like or trust water at any level over pool depth or the jacuzzi. Now there are some exceptions to the rules, and I've had the pleasure of meeting some mermaids, but like their land-dwelling sisters, all mermaids are not created equal. There was one little sea nymph in the Cayman Islands that I gave my lunch on the dive boat. She was a deck hand on the dive boat and was from South Africa. Had I been single , 20 years younger, and a little smoother I would have stayed with her. Tim ate his lunch himself. This rambling is my gnashing of teeth and wailing for warm water and mermaids. I see those Corona Commercials on tv and want to cry. Every time I walk by my scuba equipment, one of the filled tanks looks up and say" Hey Fatass, We haven't been under in a long time!!". I have to agree, but any mermaid would have to be pretty chunky and slow for my old knees to kick the fins along.As it is in my own life , I'm surrounded by far more dangerous sharks than I've ever met under the deep blue. These sharks wear Gucci loafers and make swishing sounds as they swing their big berthas on the green fairways. The little Izod jackets go "Swish, Swish" as they move their arms, seeking that perfect shot, maybe toward Pebble Beach.Lord keep those capped tooth wonders at a distance . All I want is a tall ship and a star to steer her by( well maybe a mermaid sighting occasionally)

It depends on your perspective

As I was cruising through Wolf County today on the Mountain Parkway I thought of how many strange and wonderful ways we as humans have found to decorate and personalize our cars and trucks. I started thinking along these lines as I was waiting behind an old black Ford Explorer at a particularly long red light. In his back window this country gentleman had prominently displayed the number"3" with a halo above, and wings sprouting from the number. Now being the quick study that I have become, I determined the reference to be for the Dearly Departed Intimidator himself, Dale Earnhardt. It intrigues me that a whole class of people, all below the Mason-Dixon Line, have deified maybe one of the most dirty and dangerous racers in Nascar history. Dale didn't just win the name"Intimidator " on the schoolgrounds of North Carolina; he earned it every time he banged around a fast racetrack. I wonder if you asked Darrell Waldrip or Rusty Wallace about Saint Dale and what the response would be. I doubt if even Dale Junior has a sacred "3" on the back of any of his exotic fleet of automobiles.I only know that there seems to be a lot of believers in the Church of Dale in rural Kentucky. You can usually spot the blue ,oil burning smoke coming out the back of the car before you see the Sacred Three. Running a close second in popularity is the number "20" of Mr. Home Depot Tony Stewart , probably as talented a driver as any on the circuit whose skills are only surpassed by his whining and antagonistic driving. Usually Tony's fans will be young, chubby(did I say that?) females who usually drive S-10 pickups and wear size 14 jeans on size 18 bodies. They usually have feathers and roach clips hanging from their rearview mirrors. Even more annoying are those endless stupid magnetic ribbons on the trunks and sides of red- neck cars. There seems to be a huge industry in China making those things for the cause du jour. There are red ones , yellow ones, camo ones, and pink ones. I've seen cars with 5 or 6 carefully lined and placed in a row. I want to stop them and say, "Good God man, you need help!"They're always buying these stickers at the country gas stations as they are buying cigarettes and lottery tickets, speaking of which!! Did you know that most of Eastern Kentucky East of I-75 lives entirely on beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets? I don't know the exact calorie or fat content of the average peel-off ticket but it can't be much. The average male east of Richmond consumes 3 packs of generic cigarettes a day and drinks a couple of six packs a night during the week nights; more on holidays and during the weekend. He lists lottery player as occupation on his income tax papers. If he has any change left over he will buy a Dale 3 number or a magnetic ribbon for his car , just to blend in with the others , you know?I neglected to say that you can identify this character by the fact that he weighs 85 pounds and has the body fat of a black snake. Like I said cigarettes, beer , and lottery tickets don't have much fat content. This guy looks like one of the earth dwellers that kidnapped Rip Van Winkle in the Washington Irving tale.Or more to today's standards he looks like a Keebler Elf that outgrew the tree. I work with some of these.I don't have the energy to even start on the city dwellers as they drive back and forth to work everyday, reading their papers, shaving, putting on make-up, talking on the cell, or just looking for a place to wreck.Show me a John Kerry bumper sticker and I try to keep my distance. Volvos and Beemers have "my child is an honor student at......", or I love my Golden Retriever.Or a soccer ball with a number on the back of the Grand Caravan, metallic gold if you please. You know I think I'm heading back East. Maybe the Intimidator isn't so bad after all. I'm still afraid of middle aged women with cat-eye glasses and bee hive hairdos regardless of where they might be. As for me, I'm content to just drive and observe, but I can't make myself like those Ford boys with the little boy on the back window peeing on the Chevy emblem. Maybe I need to buy some of those balls and a cowbell to hang from under my truck. Can't hurt.

Flying under the radar

Being continually on the road travelling from job to job often allows me to see sights that are sometimes different, but always entertaining. This past week was no exception as I left Stanford on a rainy spring day headed to Hazard. Now I always take 150 East through Crab Orchard on my way eventually to I-75. Crab Orchard has always been of an historic nature as it is smack dab on the Wilderness Road that the Longhunters and Daniel Boone blazed as they came across the mountains and through Cumberland Gap to Kain-tu -Wa. Over the years covered wagons would wait out the winter and stay in Crab Orchard until the wild crab trees bloomed as the signal that spring was here and the time to travel westward had arrived. The very name Crab Orchard came from these fragrant flowering trees. The famous Calloway family eventually settled near Crab Orchard from Boonesboro after the infamous capture of two Calloway sisters and Jemimiah Boone by the Shawnee Indians near the Kentucky River. All ended well as Danial Boone and the settlers hotly pursued the girls and reclaimed them from the savages. Later on Crab Orchard was a strategic settlement on a military road used by both the North and South during the four years of the Civil War. As a matter of fact John Hunt Morgan and his calvary often camped out at Crab Orchard and nearby Stanford on their frequent raids into Yankee territory. Crab Orchard then became nationally famous as the location of Springs with reputed healing powers to those who bathed in the water. A large hotel and other related business sprang up around the springs, and often elite social groups would meet ther to socialize and enjoy the therapy. All too soon however hard times fell on the pastoral little village and it just became a speed zone before the Wilderness Road headed on to Stanford and Danville. This laborious monologue only serves to give background on this quaint little hamlet as it finds itself adrift on the sea of past historical significance,and about to be washed ashore on the slippery slopes of relative obscurity. As I was passing through I recalled that the present mayor and council were working on some sort of Veterans Park, and I turned down the little lane by city hall to suddenly turn left and come face to face with Crab Orchard's vision of reclaiming the past! In front of my eyes was this honest to goodness, ass kicking Cobra helicopter gunship! Some brilliant bureaucrat had impaled a stout steel pipe into the fuselage and had suspended the whole thing above a monsterous concrete cube, much like a surreal steel and titanium popcicle!Here we are in the middle of serene little Crab Orchard and the Veterans are paying homage to a killing machine that rained death upon Mr. and Mrs. Victor Charles in the rice paddies of nearly 40 years and half across the world ago. Never mind that nearby Stanford has a gaudy red caboose that drinks gallons of bright fire engine paint every couple of years, or that other towns have artillery pieces. Crab Orchard has trumped the historic game with something so alien and bizarre to its past that it is almost comical. The Cobra, officially called the AH-1G was developed as a fast, efficient way to protect American troops in Vietnam, and really did an impressive job as it could literally turn large bodies of enemy troops into body parts. Armed with a deadly gatling gun in the nose, as well as 20mm cannon and 40mm grenade launchers, the Cobra became quite the legend among the Viet Cong and NVAs. Often painted with fearsome white fangs much like the Flying Tigers, the Cobra could readily provide support to beseiged GIs as they slugged it out in the jungles below.The Crab Orchard Cobra is a remarkable picture of streamlined sleekness as it is only wide enough for the pilot to sit up front like a jet pilot with his gunner behind and slightly above him. I think of how old Daniel Boone could have used the Cobra in his pursuit of those red skinned savage Shawnees over 200 years ago, or how John Hunt Morgan would have struck fear in the hearts of the Yankee aggressors. I can just see General Burnside's troops cowering in fear as the Cobra came screaming over Camp Nelson, its mini guns ablaze and rockets raining on the boys in blue. Realistically I guess its commendable that Crab Orchard has the thing, but it already needs painting , and I can't wait to see the color scheme that the Garden Club and the DARs will come up with! As a matter of fact those in power are already covering the concrete base with what look like brown geodes. The Cobra will perpetually hover over a pile of brown rocks, quite the stirring picture.There will be somewhat of a cultural clash as the numerous Amish use the park to hitch their horses and buggies. What a picture of contrasts!! Do you suppose the Amish, peaceniks that they are, realize the devastation and death this helicopter has rained upon the earth?? Talk about beating the swords into plowshares! I figure some of the Amish brethren are already figuring on how to turn the rotor into some kind of wind mill. I can only hope that the town drunks don't figure out how to arm the mini guns because they're aimed right at city hall and the police station . The one policeman wouldn't have a chance. I guess in conclusion that everything has dreams , even little towns, and that the Cobra gives Crab Orchard some feeling of wholeness. I just hope that Stanford's Mayor doesn't hear about the helicopter. Who knows what we could end up with here in Stanford?? Maybe a decommisioned nuclear sub on the banks of St. Asaphs Creek. Why don't we just steal the rotor from the Cobra and put it on our red, red caboose??Think about Radar Love. "I've been flyin all night with my hands on the wheel........