A CAMPING TALE


JB and I went backpacking up in the Olympics.

Hike four miles up the road past Staircase at Lake Cushman to the trailhead. Another six or so miles to the Flapjack Lakes, which are right at the tree line.

Although it was July, there was still a lot of snow around the lakes. There was a shelter at the lake, active word being WAS. A sizeable tree had fallen on it the previous winter, and it was pretty much destroyed.

However, a good piece of the roof was still intact, and it had a hole in it just big enough for us to crawl through. It made for a tight but serviceable place to sleep. Saved us the trouble of setting up a tent.

One of the reasons for coming was to do a little fly fishing. Therre is nothing quite like floating a dry fly on a crystal clear high country lake and watching the trout come up from about 20 feet deep in a silver flash to take the fly on the surface.

The first couple of times I am always so hyped up that I jerk the fly right out of his mouth. It isn't until I settle down a little that I can wait long enough to let the fish get it all the way in his mouth.

Right next to the crushed shelter was a snowbank, which we used as a freezer. When we had cleaned the fish, we would use a stick to make a hole in the snowbank and shove a fish in head first, cover the hole over, and then mark it with a pine cone so we wouldn't lose the spot.

When it came time to eat, we would just go get a couple of fish out of the "refrigerator", roll them in corn meal with a little salt and pepper and saute' them in butter. When backpacking I always instisted on bringing along butter. Almost everything tastes better when saute'd in butter with a little salt.

After dinner and a while sitting around the fire, we turned in for the night. Even in July it was pretty damn cold when you were up that high.

Just as I was laying on my back about to fall asleep, something ran across my face. Something small and furry with VERY cold feet. It startled the hell out of me, so I sat up very abruptly and hit my forehead VERY squarely on a pine log holding up the roof of out impromptu shelter. I saw stars, rebounded while watching the stars inside my head pulse on and off, and crashed back down on my back, semi-conscious.

Something small and furry with VERY cold feet ran back over my face in the other direction.

Startled, I sat up very abruptly and once again hit my head.

Since it was so cold, I had climbed in my sleeping bag fully dressed. The only things I had removed were my boots and belt knife.

I grabbed at my belt knife, and started stabbing the ground to my left, but of course there was nothing there.

When I lay back down, I kept my knife in my hand. A while later the perp ran across my face again. I started stabbing off to my right. Unfortunately JB was over there. I didn't stab him or anything, but he woke up with me stabbing the ground close to me.

"Albert! WHat the HELL are you doing?"

Panting and slathering, I explained to him about being attacked in the dark by vicous furry ANIMALS. I don't think he believed me until I lit a match and showed him the big knot on my forehead.

Our packs were in between us in the shelter, so we went through them to see what the ravening beast was after. We found a pack of Pilot Crackers had been gnawed open.

We took the Pilot Crackers out of the shelter and set them on a nearby stump, and went back to sleep, although I had a hard time falling back to sleep, with my head throbbing from hitting the log twice, and being all keyed up waiting for another vicous attach by rabid animals.

I got up the next morning, and there, sitting on the stump, grinning his hideous grin and mocking me, was a chipmunk.

The Airplane Flight From Hell

I was a consciencious objector from the late stupidity in Vietnam.

I was a part of a class action lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

At the time there were a very limited number of reasons you could apply for CO status. They were all based on religious affiliation. If you were a Quaker or a Seventh Day Adventist it was OK. Philosophical objections were not allowed.

The case went to the Supreme Court, and they found that people could object to war without cloaking in it religion.

We had all been on hold by the draft board until the case was settled. The Court made it's decision, and the following week we were all drafted. I have a couple of interresting story's about all of that, but I went to basic training and AIT (Anvanced Individual Training) at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

When I was about ready ot graduate from AIT, the called me out of class. My grandmother had passed on, and they were letting me leave early so I could go home for the funeral.

I had a ticket, but I had to go back to the barracks and pack and grab a cab to the airport.

As I pulled up to the airport, I saw my flight taking off. Shit, shit shit.

I went in to the terminal and started exploring my opportunities. How could I trade in my ticket and still get home in time for the funeral. I went to every ticket terminal.

Finally I found a redeye flight out of San Ontonio which would connect with another flight in L.A.. and take me to Portland where I would connect up for Seattle.

Way Cool.

Podunct Airlines. I didn't care.

We took off, and headed for the coast. When we got in the air and were cruising along I looked out the window. I was located just behind the wing. I looked out and saw a lot of smoke coming out of the inboard engine.

I stopped a stewardess and pointed out the window and said I didn't think it should have flames coming out of that particular area of the engine. The Stew looked and turned a couple of shades of pale. She ran off towards the cockpit.

Shortly after that the Captain came on the announcer system and said "Some of you may have noticed an unusual condition in engine number 2. We will be makeing an unscheduled stop in El Paso to address this problem. There is no reason to be alarmed."

We came out of the clouds into El Paso, and every emergency truck and the foam vehicles and all of the emergency equipment were all deployed along the runway.

I remember thinking "Oh shit, this must be worse that I thought."

We landed without incident, and the pilot came on the public announce system and said "Passengers may now disenbark to the terminal while we fix this minor problem" He was so much in control that we just disembarkes to the termminal.

We saw various vehicles come and tend the plane. Other than being a little pissed that we were sitting when we were supposed to be flying, there wasn't a whole lot of concern.

After about 20 minutes, the terminal announce systen came on to tell us that we were OK to go back on board.

We started to reboard the aricraft, when the pilot came over the announce system and YELLED "EVERYBODY GET OUT OF THE AIRCRAFT NOW!!!!"

We all ran for the terminal.

The refueling panel in the wing had dripped some fuel on the tarmac, and somehow it had caught on fire. Fire right below fuel tanks.

Not a good thing.

After another half an hour or so, the pilot came into the terminal and announced, "If the passengers of flight 5678 will follow me into the lounge, cocktails are on the company."

Although I was underage, I was in uniform, so nobody was going to refuse me service, so I had several coctails at the expense of the airline. And duly fortified, we all got back on the same aircraft and went into the air.

Every time we hit an airpocket or cloud formation. we all went "Oh shit" but we made it to L.A. As I Left the plane and transversed the terminal "Sounds Of Silence" was playing.

I made my connecting flight, and made it home in time for the funeral.

But as the Greatful Dead put it "What a strange long trip it's been."

My Life as a Chicken Hypnotizer.



When R. was small, I decided that she could use a little experience in the feeding and care of farm animals, but since we live in a more-or-less urban area, although it is unincorporated, there are some restrictions on what you can do, not to mention the restrictions on space (I only have 1/4 acre).

I was tearing an old dilapidated deck off of the house, so I used the pieces to build a chicken coop in the back yard. Then we went down to the feed and seed store, and bought a couple of Banty chicks that became Rusty and Dusty, our two laying hens.

R was fascinated that without benefit of a male chicken for inspiration, they would produce eggs on a regular basis. Not only that, they weren't white or brown like normal store bought eggs, they were a grey-green and smaller. She used to like to take hard boiled Banty eggs to school because most people had never seen anything but regular eggs.

One day she had a couple of friends over, and she was showing them the chickens, and I asked them "Do you know it is possible to hypnotize a chicken"

"NO WAY! Could show us?"

So I did.

Later R. asked me "Dad, where did you learn to hypnotize chickens?"

As I have mentioned ad nauseum, we had a farm, and raised all kinds of things. We always had two batches of chickens, One batch of laying hens, one batch of fryers. One of the kids jobs was to go out to the hen house in the morning and gather the eggs and feed the chickens. It was always a little like a treasure hunt, because you never knew what you were going to find. Taking the eggs away from the hens could be an adventure too, as some of them took objection to us removing their eggs. After all it wasn't easy producing them.

The fryers life was short and pretty good. They were fed and watered and didn't have to produce anything to earn their keep, just put on weight. The down side was that before things froze up in the fall, would come slaughter day.

Everyone hates slaughter day. It is nasty, smelly work, but it puts food in the freezer for all winter.

The little kids were chicken catchers. Grandfather was the headsman. Uncle Fred and Dad were the gutting crew, and everyone else were Chicken Pluckers. It was our own little assembly line.

My job was Chicken Hypnotizer.

After the little kids caught a chicken, they would bring it to me. I would stick it's head underneath it's wing and then pump it (the whole bird) up and down for about 30 seconds. Then you could set it down on the ground and it would stay where you set it. Eventually it would sort of shudder, pull it's head out and look around like "Where the hell am I?", but on slaughter day, they generally never came around. If they started to, I would just grab them before they got any ideas about running off, and rehypnotize them.

It always caused me to wonder "How did someone figure this out? It would seem logical that it would be someone who wanted to transport chickens quietly and easily. Like maybe a Chicken Thief? How did my grandfather, who was from the hills of Kentucky and taught me the fine art of chicken hypnotizing happen to be in possession of this particular bit of information?"

It wasn't until many years later that I learned that this is a tecnique used by bird hunters to train their bird dogs. They will hypnotize a chicken and set it down in the brush, then get the dog and lead it around close to where the chicken is, then reward the dog when it finds the bird.

I have always wanted to put this on my resume'. Chicken Hypnotizer. That alone should be good for a first interview, and once you get your foot in the door anything is possible.

I have never found a use for this very rare skill in the modern world. I mean you can't exactly pick up a newspaper, and there on page 13 of the classified ads you find "Wanted: Chicken Hypnotizer. Full time. Full benefits. Must be experienced. Top Wages."

Any one need a perfectly good barely used Chicken Hypnotizer?

The Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch

When I dropped out of college, I went to work for Automix Keyboards in Bellevue, Wa. They manufactured information feed keyboards for phototypesetters.

They were one of the first in the US to use computer-in-a-chip technology.

I ran a flow solder machine and did general machine repair and maintenance for a printed circuit board assembly area. The firm was very high tech for it's time. They had a Dee System 8 flow solder machine that was so advanced it wasn't even on the market yet. They had bought it as a prototype off the floor of a trade fair. It was a very well designed and efficient machine.

The keyboards were all Reed Switch actuated, and very robust, but pretty expensive. They were combined with the interface machine that allowed a single person to produce a multiple font, multi-color document, like a small newspaper, from a single terminal. Basically you can do the same thing from any computer now, but at the time it was innovative.

Our product was expensive. The same technology that is included in every computer available for desktop publishing cost about $20,ooo.oo at the time.

The consoles we made produced tape, Magnetic tape or paper punch tape similar to Telex tape, which was then fed into the actual phototypesetter.

I was staying late, repairing the pump in a Freon cleaning system that had a bearing go bad, and ran into one of the head Engineers.

I asked him what he was doing there so late. He was literally pacing the floor and muttering to himself. "Waiting for the @#$%^&* punches to come in."

"What punches are those?" I asked."The Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch" he replied.

"What the heck do they have to do with Phototypesetters?"

"You know how the Keyboards and consoles work?"

"Sure, they use magnetic or paper tape to feed instructions to the Phototypesetters."

"When you are making a paper tape, each letter of the alphabet is represented by a combination of holes in the tape .Little pins feeding through holes in the paper tape to read the combinations. If you make a mistake, you have to correct the tape by manually punching out the line on the tape, creating a null. When we designed the machine, we had to have a unique size and shape of punch to null out the holes in the paper tape. On of the guys had a punch that he had laying around the garage, so we used that. We started up the business with that one punch, and we found someone to produce additional punches. When we went to Patent out system, they found that the punch we were using was already patented. That particular size and shape of punch was patented by the Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch Co. and we were infringing on their patent."

The only address for the Perkins Co. was a P.O. box in rural Georgia. No phone, no address.

The company sent a representative to Georgia to meet with Mr. Perkins. He lived in a modest shack out in the swamps. The punch was used to make a small hole between the tendon and bone in a chicken's leg so that they could be hung upside down for processing at the chicken processing plant. It had been invented by his dad as a young man, and every chicken processing plant had to have several. Replacement kept him as busy as he wanted to be, and he could work at his own pace.

He made punches according to his own whim and time table.If he wanted to buy a new pair of shoes, he could make up a couple of punches and mail them out to whoever was on the top of the order list, buy whatever he wanted, and stop until he needed something else.

Was he willing to sell the patent?

Absolutely not, he had regular customers who depended on his product.

Would he allow us to manufacture the punches and pay him royalties?

Absolutely not. He didn't trust us to maintain the quality control he infused in each and every Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch. What if inferior examples found their way on to the market place? What would people think? How could he trust us to faithfully report how many we produced?

So we were stuck with Mr Perkins. He produces the Punches at his leisure, and mails them out when he feels like it.

Here we were, sitting there with 10 completed units on the loading dock, waiting for the punches to come in. We had no way of contacting Mr. Perkins except through his P.O. box, and no way to lean on him to step up his production.

I have always wanted to invent something like the Perkins Perfect Pocket Poultry Punch that would give me the independence to thumb my nose at the world, live off the grid, and have just enough to meet my needs as long as I didn't need too much.

At The volcano.

When Mrs A. and I first got married we took three weeks for our honeymoon, and went to Morelia, Mexico and stayed with my Uncle Ben and Aunt Pat. It was a wonderful time. Uncle Ben is a Professor of History at the College of Michoacan in Morelia. Since both my wife and I are History buffs, it was a magical time, as we had our own bilingual driver and tour guide. When we got there there was an international conference of Humboldt scholars at the college. We were invited to the closing ceremonies, and got invited along on a trip the next day.

Wilhelm Humboldt is the guy that the Humboldt current is named after as well as the Humboldt Valley in California. He was an internationally known explorer and diarist. 200 years previously, he had come through Mexico with the intent of visiting an active volcano. After the conference, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his explorations, the people from the conference were going to take a trip and climb that same volcano.

We took the air conditioned Department of Agriculture bus as far as the town of La Huacana, where we stopped for lunch and changed vehicles. That's Uncle Ben in front of the bus. The bus was a trip. As Mrs A. put it, "All we need is a chicken and a pig, and it would be the bus from "Romancing the Stone" . We took off out into the jungle and went to the end of the road, where we left the bus. Some of us hires horses from the locals for the trip. That again is uncle Ben on the horse.


The University had payed the local villagers to feed us dinner, so we set up right in the middle of the road and they brought out a big old tin washtub full of the best Chicken Mole' I have ever eaten.

I was wandering around eating baked corn meal wrapped in banana leaves when I heard a noise coming out of the jungle. Now we were at the end of the formal road, but I heard a vehicle coming. A truck came out of the jungle, and it was loaded with people in black fatigues and carrying AK47s. I had visions of the headline back at home "LOCAL MAN SLAIN BY BANDITOS IN MEXICO"

I tried to fade back into the crowd, but when you are approaching 6", and the crowd is 5' 6", fading is difficult. The truck came roaring up and the armed men jumped out. They seem agitated that we were blocking the road. There was a very heated discussion, but I finally figured out that they had been invited to join us for dinner.

They put their guns in the back of the truck, and pulled up chairs and chowed down.

It turns out that they were Federales who had been patrolling for Banditos out in the jungle and were on their way home. So we ate Chicken Mole' and drank a little Mescal and had a good time.

Turkeytale

We raised all kinds of things on the farm. It was primarily a dairy farm, but we raised chickens for the eggs and also for meat, pigs for the meat, cats to keep the rodent population down, dogs and horses for amusement.
One year we decided to try raising turkeys, just for the heck of it. At that time I believed domesticated laying hens were the stupidest creatures on the face of the Earth. I was wrong. Turkeys have to be the holder of that dubious honor. A creature could not be stupider and still live.
We ordered a dozen turkeys from the supplier when we made our spring order for chickens, and they arrived at about the same time. When they ship the chicks, they throw in an extra, because they figure that one will die from shipping and handling. In this case all 13 arrived sound and healthy. The instructions told us we had to teach the turkeys how to drink from whatever water dispenser we were using, because otherwise they would drown. You were to hold their head in the water until they swallowed and then take it out. Repeat once, and they got the idea. One of the persistent folk tales is that turkeys will look up at the sky with their mouths open during a thunderstorm and die. I cannot attest to the truth of this, as we never lost any turkeys that way, but it strikes me as likely, seeing how dumb they are.

My little sisters decided that they would make a pet out of the extra turkey. Of course the named him "Lucky" and he had the run of the yard. Come slaughter time in the fall, Lucky got passed over. He grew to be huge. And mean. The side yard was his territory, and he defended it fiercely. One of his major sources of amusement was to terrorize the dog. The dog at the time (Tschindi) was a half border collie, half coyote, and was the best mouser we ever had on the place. The turkey ambushed him almost daily. Seeing as the turkey outweighed the dog by about 20 pounds, it was a pretty one sided battle. The turkey also ambushed anyone who wasn't paying attention. After getting ambushed a couple of times myself, every once in a while I would amble casually out into the side yard, and when Lucky was about ready to pounce, I would turn around and give him a good swift kick, and then run away before he could recover.

Down at the end of the driveway we had a power drop which ran the welder and a 120 volt outlet for an old beat up refrigerator. We kept fresh eggs in the refrigerator, which were for sale for 50 cents a dozen. My mother raised the laying hens, fed us all the eggs we needed and kept the "egg money" for little extras for her and the girls. There was a box next to the refrigerator to deposit the money, so anyone could come by at any time to get eggs even if we weren't there. We trusted people to leave the money, and to the best of my knowledge no one ever stiffed us. If we were home, they would usually come by the house and have a glass of milk or a beer and visit a spell.

We were off at church on Sunday when someone came by to get a dozen eggs, and when we got home we noticed that the turkey was moving mighty slow. We went off on a berry picking expedition up Pack River, and picked several gallons of huckleberries.

When we got home we were greeted with a gruesome site. There were feathers guts and blood all over the side yard, and in the middle of them, chewing on a bone was the dog. He had figured out that Lucky was hurt and couldn't defend himself. He not only killed the turkey, he mutilated him, There was no piece left bigger than a pack of cigarettes. He had paid that turkey back for every peck and every wing slap he had ever gotten, and looked mighty please with himself.

My family ran a dairy farm for about 50 years until progress and modern agribusiness caught up with it. Don't get me stated on how Corporate America has squeezed the life out of the small dairyman.
Being around cows all those years has not endeared the bovine species to me. When you have spent some years at the aft end of hay processing plants, you begin to think of the animal as not much more than a means of producing fertilizer. In the words of a famous Japanese industrialist "Whether you are building rocket ships or taking a dump the basic process is the same. Raw materials go in one end, and the end product comes out the other."
Cows are one of the stupidest animals on the face of the Earth., which leads to


COWTALE I

Spook was a weird cow. Skittish as heck. She liked to sneak up and peer around corners or through windows. It could be startling as heck in mid winter to be out in the milking parlor and catch movement out of the corner of your eye and look up at the window to see this huge eye rolling and peering in at you. She didn't just look, she PEERED and rolled her eye. It was pretty unnerving.
Somewhere in the family is a 22 Winchester pump rifle, 1920's vintage. A sweet gun that has had a lot of ammunition put through it over the years. It has a home made stock, made out of Birch. Spook is part of the reason it has that stock.
One winter we had a porcupine that decided to pay us a visit. Problem one was that it had come to the barnyard in search of salt. There was a plentiful supply of salt on the handles of the barnyard implements, like the pitchforks and the manure shovel. We tried to discourage this by taking the juice from a bottle of canned Chilis Torridos and painting the handles to the tools. It was pretty effective, and is a remedy I have used over the years to keep dogs from chewing on things. The porky no longer was chewing on the handles, but he was still coming around the barn. The way we found out was when we were awakened in the middle of the night by a cow bellowing in pain. It was spook, and at her most curious, she had investigated the porky. She must have irked him, because she ended up with a nose full of quills. We had to take her into the milking parlor and get her head in the stanchion and get all the quills out. Porcupine quills are barbed so that they will not pull back. Most of them we pushed through her lips, but some we had to take a very sharp knife and run it along side the quill and free the quill. Spook was a little more than displeased with the proceedings, but we did manage to get it done, and escape with no more than some bruising. That was the first time.
When it happened to Spook the second time, it was worse. In fact she had a couple of quills in her tongue. I was in favor of shooting her, as a critter that downright dumb should not be allowed to live, but calmer spirits prevailed and we went through the procedure again.
The conclusion we came to was that the porcupine needed to go away. Permanently. With prejudice.
So we staked ourselves out in the barn and waited. Along came Mr. Porcupine. Uncle Fred Shot him, and he turned around and ambled away. Shop him again. He kept on going. Shot him again, and again. In fact emptied the 15 shot tube into him, and he was still ambling along. Finally Uncle Fred hit him over the head with the stock of the rifle. The stock broke, but it did the job.
We salvaged the quills, because they make nice decorations and can be used in tying trout flies. Left with the carcass, we wondered how Porcupine tasted, so we skinned him out and cooked up a haunch.
That was the foulest tasting piece of meat I have ever tasted. Old Mr. Porky had been eating the inner bark of pine trees for some time, and the taste had been infused into the meat. Sorta like eating meat marinated in Pine Sol. While it didn't make up sick, it will never make it on to the main menu.

COWTALE II

Most dairy cows do not have a real strong mothering instinct. When they give birth, the next day you take the calf away and put it in the calf pen and raise it separate from the mother. She will be a little confused and irritable for a day or so, but quickly forgets.
Not so with Angie. Angie had real strong mothering instincts, and when we took her calf away, she was not just irritable, she was downright pissed. If you had to go out in the barnyard for any reason, you double-checked to make sure where she was. She had chased people around a couple of times.
My older brother Larry and I were going to go down to the creek in back of the barn and do a little fishing. I think he was nine and I was eight. We checked out back of the barn, and Angie was not in site, so we headed across the barnyard. When we were out in the middle, we hear this bellow behind us, turn around, and here she comes. Angie had never been dehorned, so there was a very real possibility we could get hurt bad. Larry ran one direction and I ran the other. He ran for the gate, and I ran for the hay wagon. There was a piece of barbed wire across the open gate, and it hit Larry neck high, and took the feet right out from under him. It cut his heck pretty bad, so he was bleeding and screaming his lungs out. I made it safely to the hay wagon. Everyone came running at the sound of the screaming, and they bundled Larry up and ran him in to the Doc.
Which left me stranded on the hay wagon. All afternoon.
Angie would go inside the barn, and after I waited a couple of minutes, I edged to the ground, I got about four steps away from the wagon, and here she came, chasing me back. This happened a couple of times before I figured out that she was going in and peering out through the slats in the barn so she could catch me when I tried to get down. So I gave up for a while. She got tired of waiting for me to get down, so she went out into the pasture a little was, and started feeding, but she was keeping one eye on me. She managed to rush in and chase me back on to the hay wagon a couple of times. The afternoon was warm, and I got almighty thirst up there on the hay wagon.
It wasn't until close to dinner time that someone wondered "Has anyone seen Al?"