Country Girls and Hunting Trips

Today, I passed a field on the way home where a Combine moved up and down long rows, cutting hay or perhaps barley; it’s too early for wheat I think. It made me recall a childhood memory.

I was 7 or 8 and down at my Aunt Millie’s house swimming in her pond. Uncle Jonas was outside with some of the farm hands preparing for a weekend hunting trek. Uncle Jonas and Aunt Millie owned over a 1,000 acres of rich east Texas farmland. They had all the latest farm equipment—plows and combines and plenty of workers.

The men—and the boys who were old enough—were preparing for a hunting trip that night. With an air of adventure and purpose, they loaded their pickup trucks with food and gear. They usually hunted in the deepest parts of the woods, an area they called Foggy Bottoms, guaranteed to be overrun with snakes and ticks.

Over fifty hound dogs danced around in the moonlight in an excited ballet they always did before any such endeavor. The noise and commotion was deafening and I watched on curiously from a pond across the road wondering at the strange ritual.

What could make a man leave the comfort of his warm living room and traipse out into dark, dangerous woods with over a dozen men and boys and 50 hound dogs just to shoot a few raccoons and coyotes?

I still live in a small rural town where young girls wear Levi’s fastened with nickel-plated belt buckles in the shape of Texas. The boys are tall and lanky from years of pitching hay. Boys that grew up taking midnight journeys with their uncles and fathers into deep woods on dark nights accompanied by a legion of hounds, howling at the moon and coyotes.

You shun being thought of as ‘country’ when you’re a teen. You hate being associated with these simple folks, but the older I get, the more I realize how much a part of me these sights and sounds are. Maybe it’s time to embrace my roots and stop running from them. Once we acknowledge where we came from, we begin to really see who we are. The world comes into perfect view.

Old Dogs New Tricks

Old dogs and new tricks. That's how it feels. I took this new job last January and it looked overwhelming at first. They use tools I'd never heard of before like Slack, Jira and Consensus. But my bottom line is paying the rent. I’m just too old to be living under a bridge so I had to figure it out and it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve learned the stuff, made some friends and had some laughs along the way.

My Project Manager is always saying that I’m doing a great job. Thanks Steve! It helps to hear that you aren’t failing miserably at something.

When it was time to head out to New Orleans after Katrina, I wrestled with those same doubts and fears and there were very real threats to my survival daily. Again, my bottom line was the money. With no investment portfolio, wealthy husband or big savings account, I must always be hustling to pay the bills. In all fairness though, that’s not a bad thing. It has given my life direction.

I really want to be the best at everything I do, but I guess we all look around at our lives from time to time and think: “Damn! You sure screwed this up!”

I think it’s easy to lose your perspective. We get so focused on the elements that make up our lives and then we forget to step back sometimes and take in the whole view.

I’m alone in the world. But on the other hand, I don’t have lots of noise and confusion to deal with. If the kitchen’s messy, I can leave it that way for days and no one complains.

Next week I will celebrate another birthday, but I don’t feel so old that I can’t learn new things. I try to learn new things every day. Sometimes these are common sense lessons and sometimes the knowledge is specialized. Sometimes its personal stuff and sometimes, I learn things that make me a better human.

Once on Star Trek, one of the aliens called humans, “Ugly bags of mostly water”. I think that’s fairly accurate. But we’re so much more complex than that. We can be brilliant and inspiring and we can be dumb as dirt. We can invent amazing machines but we can also invent things like the “Beer Hat”.

The coolest thing about us is that once we all get united and work together on a project, we can crank out some pretty incredible stuff. Unfortunately, we get too easily side-tracked by nonsense like skin color, religion, sexual preference and the like.

In my religion, Christianity, we’re all created equal by one great God and we all have a purpose and a destiny. What so often happens is that we forget this or no one tells us to begin with and then we just drift aimlessly, which leads down dark paths sometimes. When you get several million humans in that predicament, it’s a mess!

So let’s take a step back from where we are today and start over. Let’s agree to love and forgive each other, even the wierdoes. Let’s stop killing each other and find something we can agree on. At the end of the day, we all love our families and we want to get home to them safely each day. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

True Confessions

Years ago, there was a cheesy magazine called "True Confessions". People would give the reporters their true-life stories of awful things they had done. These days, that's so common that we hardly turn our heads anymore for unmarried women having babies out of wedlock and that sort of thing.

Still, I believe there's a market for that concept. The guy who created "Post Secret" had the right idea. He asked people to write their most embarrassing secret on one side of a postcard and mail it to him. It was a novel way of confessing your innermost secrets without anyone actually knowing it was you.

I remember one time when me and 4 other girls from church went out to eat after Saturday night services. We were all sitting around a big table at Applebees eating our salads. We were having a great time laughing and talking, but somehow we got on the topic of secrets.

Everyone said they were very open books and had no real deep dark secrets. I told the truth though. I said:

“I was born into a world of Secrets. I’ve held some secrets in my heart for many years.”

I went through all those 12 steps and 16-week programs where you get totally healed of addictions and co-dependency etc.

I got a lot of healing there and at other times in my life, but I still don’t see the good in revealing my secrets. All those people are now dead. I’m the last surviving member of my family that I grew up with. I managed – somehow – to outlive them.

My autobiography will be finished this year and published on Amazon. In it, I share my life’s story…the good, the bad, the ugly.  It’s called “The Woman With Two Birthdays” and in it, I share the story of being born into a world where you were NOT wanted. How it feels to be kicked around most of your life. There are too many people like this in our world.

What do you do if no one likes you the way you are? Do you just lay down and die? Or do you kick the shit out of those people and tell them AND LIFE that you ain’t goin' nowhere! You’re here and even though you're not perfect, you’re still a worthwhile human being. Get on board with that or get the hell outta my way!

That’s the thing about life. It either breaks you or it builds you into a real live human being made of flesh.

I’ll end with this: One of my “secrets” is that I’m a loner. I know God wants us humans to interact: hug, kiss, love on each other…we need to interact. But I’ve got such a commitment phobia that it paralyzes me. I can’t get even get a dog or a cat.

I prefer to stay to myself. When you love somebody, you give them power over you. Been there, did that…didn’t work out too well. I thought it all over and decided to grow old alone. Much safer. I am gradually trying to be more outgoing and friendly though.

I thought that developing a few friendships might be a good start for me. The thing is, that once you move into your own little web that basically has NO HUMANS in it, you forget how to socially interact.

That has kind of surprised me…my lack of social interaction skills. I feel like a pimply-faced teenager sometimes…awkward, like I don’t know what to say to people or how to act around them. I think I have pretty good “Cover-up” skills though.

I generally play it off so people don’t find out the truth: I just don’t have strong personal interaction skills!!!

That’s my True Confession for the day. What’s yours?

My Time on Board the USS Comfort – Katrina 2005

I’ve worked for FEMA for 7 years now and I seem to have a psychic connection to US disasters. Also, I’m usually drawn to unusual things, like I’ll show up at the gas station at the very moment it catches on fire. Or I’ll arrive at the mall while its being robbed. I think of these things as “adventures” and even during big disasters, I seem to work the most dangerous areas.

Such was the case in 2005 during the Katrina disaster. I could have been assigned to many areas to work…the entire Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama was affected…but NO! I got assigned to a coastal area of New Orleans….a little town called Chalmette, St. Bernards Parish.

You’ll probably recall this town from the news. There was a big oil spill there. Besides all the regular dangers of excessive debris, structures that were unsound, the breakdown of all law enforcement, we also had the added concern of poisonous snakes (there were marshes and wetlands there) and toxic mud.

The Murphy oil spill dumped tons of benzene, cyanide, oil and other chemicals into the water, soil and air. The EPA tests were rumored to be coming back 300,000 times the acceptable levels in St. Bernards Parish.

Trust me…I went to my superiors and said, “Are you sure it's safe for us to be out there 7 days a week, 12 hours a day?” And of course, they reassured me that the govt would NEVER send people into an unsafe area.

Okay, I’ll give everyone a few moments to roll in the floor laughing!

I was inspecting a broken-down mobile home one day. One of the things we have to do during our inspection is get interior and exterior photos. But the little porch was mostly collapsed. It looked dangerous but I whispered a prayer and tried to make my way up on it anyhow so I could get my pics. I had laid my Panasonic Toughbook down on the ground away from the porch. Even though they are said to be indestructible, they cost $1,700, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

I carefully climbed the steps and almost got to the top. This guy had a metal gate across the top of the stairs. I tugged at it gently and then a little more firmly. In a split second, the gate came loose and flew to the right landing right on top of my computer. The whole screen cracked. Our IT people said they’d never seen one break before so they thought it was pretty cool.

I flew off the porch as well and landed on the ground amidst tree limbs and wet furniture. When I got up, I checked for blood and didn’t find any. But my right wrist was aching. I fractured it.

The high school in Chalmette, which had been mostly destroyed, had been turned into a Red Cross Clinic where anyone could be treated. All the hospitals in New Orleans had been destroyed. I drove myself up there and they checked it out for me and said it needed to be X-rayed. Cool! Whatever!

The problem was that the only X-ray equipment within a hundred miles was on board the USS Comfort, which is a medical naval vessel out of Maryland which had come to help with the Katrina disaster. I told them, “nevermind, I didn’t think it was that bad”…and wanted to just leave and get back to work. But they insisted. They also insisted that an ambulance take me out there.

The ambulance drivers had never been on board a medical naval vessel either so they were very hyped about getting to drive me out there. I was the only one who didn’t really want to go.

It was a long drive. Many roads had been severely damaged by the storm and some others had been cordoned off by the army and we were not allowed to use them.

But we finally arrived and they wheeled me on a stretcher (how embarrassing!) into the ship. The ambulance drivers hung around and got a tour of the huge ship and seemed really excited. I got seen by a doctor right away. They X-rayed my wrist and said it was sure enough fractured.

An orderly came over soon and put a cast on it. Then they sent me down to the infirmary where I got not one, but THREE prescriptions for painkillers. These really helped a lot over the next few weeks. My body was worn out and aching most days from the 100 hours of hard labor each week.

It was around 5 pm by the time I was all done and they came and said, “You can spend the night on the ship for free if you like. There’s really not any way to get you back to your car this late in the day.” (There was a strictly enforced curfew.)

I said, “Thanks for the offer but I left all my equipment and my car at the high school in Chalmette.” They said, “Don’t worry! The most highly skilled security force on the planet, Blackwater, is guarding that school.”

I said, “Yeah, I know. They’re guarding our compound up in Jensenville, La. I know a few of those guys personally, but I’d still love to get back to my car tonight if at all possible.”

They were so nice! They started calling around and finally found one guy who was operating an independent taxi service in the New Orleans area. They called him for me and I explained to him that I needed him to pick me up at the Port of New Orleans and take me to Chalmette as soon as possible.

He said, “I ain’t going to Chalmette. There was an oil spill out there. The whole area has been cordoned off by the EPA because it’s toxic.”

I said, “I know that! But my car is there. I work out there every day and so far I haven’t turned purple or anything.”

He said, “There’s an army checkpoint going into the city. They won’t let me in there.”

I said, “They will let us in. I’ve got a federal badge.”

Finally, I was able to talk him into helping me. He really didn’t want to at all but I promised I’d pay him well for the trip. It cost me a hundred bucks to get back to my car that day and I barely made it out of the city before dark and back to the compound north of New Orleans. But I was soooo grateful to get back to my car and my stuff.

Here’s the link to the USS Comfort website in case you’d like to check it out. It’s a beautiful ship whose mission is to help people in times of major disaster.

http://www.med.navy.mil/sites/usnscomfort/Pages/default.aspx