10. Back Home

1150 3374.4 leave 67F, John wants to drive.

We had decided to go on home today. There was something like a week left and we could stay on the coastal road if we wanted. We could go on to San Diego and look at the southeastern most corner of the U.S. too, but all those things could be day trips from home, and had been in some cases, so we were just going to get on the freeway and buzz on home, five or six hours.

But, glancing at the map, there was one more thing to try to see, Vandenburg Air Force Base. I thought we’d take an hour or two out of the way and see what we could see there.

Everything was loaded up; I went to turn in the key. I came back out to the car and found John in the driver’s seat, buckled with his key in the ignition ready to go. He wanted to drive. Of course, he could not drive. He had no license and no training and, like most young, pre-drivers, thought it was easy. Well, it was easy once you had been trained in the subtleties of staying alive.

Viann had suggested finding someplace empty and letting him drive a little on this trip. I had thought about it, but on the winding coastal highway, there hadn’t been such opportunities.

This was a sign that he was ready to learn though. We’d have to work on that. I coaxed him back to his seat and drove myself.

1200 mailbox 3376.8

First I wanted to find a mailbox for mother’s letter. We drove up into town looking for an area that might have a Post Office in it. Found three incompatible churches right together, a Kingdom Hall, a Mormon meeting hall, and a Methodist (or something like that). We’d had the talk about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

We found many interesting houses. The road ended at the local school. No Post Office.

Back down on the main drag, there was a mailbox. That was good enough.

1206 3377.7 Chevron 091138 63F

$3.359 X 13.606 = $45.70

John wants to drive.

We drove back south on the road and filled up at the Chevron we’d walked to last night. John still wanted to drive.

On down the road we saw the entrance to Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo. Jan Tarsala had gone there in the 70s. Robyn Chevalier went there now. She might be there now. Well, probably not, it was summer break.

In Grover City, Highway 1 split off the freeway again and proceeded closer to the beach through a Recreational Vehicle district.

This was pretty country here. Rolling hills, the dry, dead golden grass of California.

I started into the “full story of 1980” related below.

We passed the state penitentiary at Lompoc. I stopped for a picture.

“Dad, why did you take a picture of the penitentiary?”

“Because we saw it.”

1326 3441.2 Vandenburg AFB. “No.”

It was only a few more miles to the main gate into Vandenburg Air Force Base. We parked in the visitor lot and I went in to get in line for a pass. After standing in line for a long time, repeatedly studying the pictures of the commanders and other brass on the wall, it was my turn.

“Is it possible for a tourist to go in and drive around?”

“No.”

“Not even certain areas?”

“No.”

Well. I purloined a base map and we were on our way. John wondered what the deal was. In an unnecessary face-saving measure, I commented that I could get in with my JPL badge if I had business here but that my (honest) story today hadn’t been good enough.

I studied the map. Vandenburg was huge. There was a way to drive around some of the outside and get to some potentially scenic places. There was a NASA Building and a “Coastal Gate” down on Highway 246. We went down to look at that. The drive was over flat farmland planted with strawberries. It reminded me of some of the land east of Oxnard.

Interesting, none of this, neither the penitentiary nor any feature of the air force base appeared in the DeLorme Atlas.

John was having trouble staying awake. I spotted the NASA Building. There was no way to get very close to it. I took a picture from the road. Further down, the road took a broad left curve above the south bank of the Santa Inez River. It looked like a recreation area. In the background were rocket launch pads. I zoomed in as far as I could and got a picture of one, very far away.

1406 3457.9 Surf Beach Amtrak Station

Right around the bend the road ended at an access gate. This was the coastal road, but it was off limits, at least today. A left turn into a parking lot revealed that we were at the Surf Beach Amtrak Station. An unattended platform there surrounded two shiny sets of rails. One crossed the tracks to proceed to the beachfront. There were people down there picnicking. No swimmers.

I took some more pictures of the tracks and the launch sites down the forbidden road to the south. These were quite distant in the haze too.

Driving out, I turned right up toward the closed gate and took another shot or two. There was some kind of hazardous materials processing facility nearer, no lights or sirens right now though. A light pole with solar panels was laying in the gutter. John wanted to take the solar panels home but I didn’t. It was bad enough that you could nearly read, “U.S. Government Installation, Photography Prohibited” in the last picture I had taken. I wouldn’t be publishing that anywhere in public.

I wasn’t sure what I could see out here that was a threat to the country. Most of this facility was extensively photographed in public releases (at least what could be seen from here) or from … space, anyway, by space powers foreign and domestic.

Well, anyway….

1447 Andersen’s Buellton 3485.3

$3.50 + $23.00 + $0.51

I’m doing all the stories because I’m 50 and have them all.

John and 4 friends tried to carry a classmate to the school nurse – age 8. Didn’t work

Viann had encouraged us to go to the split pea soup place in Buellton if it wasn’t too far out of the way. John didn’t care either way but it was plenty late for a late lunch now so we needed to eat somewhere soon.

Sightseeing done for this trip, we cruised through Lompoc, another flat town in hilly country. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like it might largely cater to military personnel and families.

You stayed on 246 to go to Buellton. This meant missing ten or fifteen more miles of Highway 1. But, as we said, the sightseeing was over. Finally found Jalama Road on the map. It was tough because it went over four maps in the large-format book. Jalama campground, where we had stayed by lottery on a busy holiday weekend years ago, was not shown. Interesting.

Highway 246 went right up to Andersen’s, where it also joined 101. The building had a big picture of a couple of guys splitting peas with sledge hammer and chisel. John didn’t get it. I explained. This was an old fashioned tourist trap and was set up that way. Next door was a museum; upstairs was a local art gallery.

Despite being the middle of the afternoon, far from any mealtimes, there were many customers in the restaurant. I had the “bottomless bowl” of split pea soup, of course. John had a cheeseburger. The menu was … realistic.

I apologized for doing all the talking on the trip. I told John the story of driving Viannah home from her freshman year at college on the east coast. The day I arrived to pick her up, she had broken up with her first boyfriend, Nate. Yet, I met Nate, and Viannah’s roommate Daylin, there. Took their picture, took everybody to ice cream. All looked and seemed happy. Well, it was a little strained, but I thought it was just the addition of the old guy (me) to the crowd.

It had taken four days to drive home. I had done most of the talking. Viannah had done a lot of the driving. Neither did I learn about the breakup with Nate, nor did I learn that Viannah was nervous about driving, while on the trip, or for some months thereafter.

John said, “Well dad, you do most of the talking because you have most of the stories, being oldest.”

“Hmmmm.”

He told me a story of his own. It was sadly short.

If he was going to be a professional storyteller he would need some work. Maybe he would grow into it as I had. I could remember long ago when my dad did most of the talking.

Smashed one final penny on the way out of Andersen’s

1542 continue – the full story of 1980

There was nothing left but four or five hours of freeway now. I continued with the

Full Story of 1980.

1980 was a pivotal year in our marriage and in our lives. It started in 1979.

Viann’s father had a recurrence of cancer. As a veteran he could get treatments with the Veteran’s Administration, including stays at their hospitals. He had been doing this. The cancer was esophageal. He had been a smoker years ago, before a first bout with lung cancer while Viann was in high school.

The situation had gotten bad enough that the three children were taking turns going to the home place to help out.

Meanwhile, Viann’s mother continued not to be in good psychiatric condition. She had been in and out of mental hospitals all of Viann’s life. Sometimes she was OK. Sometimes when she was on her medicine she was OK. Sometimes she was not. They did not have the good designer psych medicines that we have today back then. There had been times when she had been suicidal in various ways, verbally or through actions. She had done crazy things, like smash all of the Christmas lights. Once when Viann and I were dating, she had called the sheriff in Freestone County. Dad had taken the late night phone call and talked them out of coming out and doing anything. This had been on a visit to Wortham.

At the time I was working at the Christian Broadcasting Network affiliate, KXTX Channel 39, in Dallas, first at the Cedar Hill transmitter site, then later at the studio as a video tape editor and operator. I’d been brought in on trainee wages, $5.11 an hour, but had natural talent, musical training, and technical aptitude too and was doing OK. They would give me a raise if they ever had money for such a thing. (This all depended on how well “Pat did in the upcoming fund drive.”)

At the Christmas party in 1979 we’d all been given bonuses, a $100 bill each. One guy joked that his was only a $10. Recall that by now we’d missed the 1979 window (March or April) to start out for Alaska, and the 1980 one was beginning to look problematic. Maybe 1981, I was already thinking….

I gave Viann the $100 to make a trip to Tomball after the first of the year. She flew down on January 8^th (my dad’s 54^th birthday). [editing note: Today is my 54^th birthday. 2/26/10, cbd] It was the sixth or the eighth, I didn’t really remember. I was working evenings typically so was still at home that morning when the phone rang. It was Elizabeth, my sister-in-law. Their mother had killed herself in the night. Michael (brother-in-law) was there and had discovered her, hung from the rafters with the rope of a quilting frame. Viann was on the plane. They paged her at the airport and she went straight to the VA hospital with the news.

When someone’s spouse dies, someone close has to go tell them in person. You can’t just call on the phone. When Viann walked into the hospital room, her dad was happy to see her. On the news, his countenance dropped. This had been incredibly hard on eveyone. He had been looking forward to getting out soon and going home for a while.

Of course, I went down right away. I probably drove down that very day, or the next. Viann had things she wanted me to bring her since her stay would be longer and different than planned.

At visitation, Viann was shocked that her mother’s body was so cold. They had worked around a crease in her neck, but hadn’t been able to completely remove it. Mr. Owens asked that the casket be shut when he came in. He wanted to remember her as he’d seen her that last morning before he went into the hospital. Elizabeth had a baby, Jennifer. This kept everyone a little busy. “Scooter Scamp Skemp”, her grandfather called her. He had names planned for our kids too but did not live to relate them to us. I thought he might have needed to know the kids first.

The funeral was in the funeral home. My dad came down to meet us all in Thompsonville Cemetery and conduct the graveside service. Mr. Owens was too sick to go. (Thompsonville is in Gonzalez County near Mr. Owen’s birthplace near Highway 90.)

Soon, somehow, it was decided that Mr. Owens needed help and that Viann and I would move to the farm to live there with him and help out, both medically and with the myriad chores that came with living in the country and keeping animals and all. Viann never really returned to Dallas. She visited a time or two to pack some things up and get some more clothes and she was there to close out the apartment and move out, but she spent most of her time in Tomball after that. I would go down every week or so.

On one such trip I was supposed to be back at the studio for Sunday Night Live but just couldn’t make it. I called to tell them I wasn’t coming. I don’t know if I had ever done that on a job before. Once I was returning (it might have been the next day) to get there for the evening shift, running late, and was stopped by my former Balch Springs Police Department colleague Roby (or was it Rudy, or Rory). Couldn’t remember his name anymore, and I was confusing it with someone at KXTX, or Houston Cable. He recognized me, told me to slow down, and let me off. He was the one who had substituted for me when I was on my two and a half day honeymoon. That evening, my Heathkit 2036, the radio I’d built from a kit myself, was stolen out of the car. I called the police and checked the Heathkit store and pawn shops locally but nothing ever turned up. People would steal things like that thinking they were CBs. Losing something I’d spent fifty hours building and tinkering with was a loss.

My last day at KXTX was my 24^th birthday, February 26. [editing note: That is, thirty years ago today. 2/26/10.] Shortly after that I was living in Tomball myself. It appeared that Mr. Owens was going to live for a while and we decided to put in our own house. We borrowed money from my parents and bought a nice 60-foot mobile home. I put in all the wiring, plumbed the water, and dug and installed a septic tank myself with hand tools. Mr. Owens wouldn’t let me do the low-pressure gas hookup, he stood at the butane tank and spliced it in himself. This was probably his last plumbing job.

The mobile home was driven in across the back pasture from Buvinghausen’s place and set down behind the tool shed. We moved in. Mr. Owens saw in the paper that Warner was putting in a Cable TV business under the name Houston Cable locally and thought I should go to work there. Sometime in April I went and applied and was hired as an installer, for $5.11 an hour. Back on the place I started putting up antennas. The first AMSAT Phase III satellite was due to be launched soon. I was building little kit projects (receivers, transmitters) to get my amateur station ready for it.

The launch day came on May 23, the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend. Many AMSAT people took a four-day weekend for the occasion, but I had no vacation or sick time with Houston Cable yet so I worked. I would not know until I got home that night what had happened but I told some of the guys at work about this great new thing that was suppose to be launched today: amateur radio’s biggest satellite ever! Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio; it was to be OSCAR-9

I came home, plugged in the soldering iron, turned on the radio to the 75-meter Launch Information Network and started looking for the next parts to install in one of my kits. Then the announcement was made for what that day was probably the fortieth time, but the first time that I’d heard it. There was no new OSCAR Satellite and there was not going to be. The first stage of the new Arianne IV rocket had failed and all the payloads had gone into the ocean somewhere near Devil’s Island. I unplugged the soldering iron.

That day had been known as Black Friday around AMSAT ever since.

Mr. Owen’s condition deteriorated. He went back to the hospital where he had a roommate, one Mr. Anderson from somewhere up further north than Tomball. Mr. Anderson told us that he had guineas and that he would bring us some eggs to hatch. Mr. Owens had an incubator. We took two-dozen eggs and I started religiously turning them every eight hours and monitoring their progress in the thermostat-controlled incubator. About two days before they were to hatch the thermostat broke, the heater ran non-stop, and all the eggs cooked. I was furious. I stomped around, unable to contain my anger and disappointment. Mr. Owens told a visitor that it had been like a wedding and a funeral all at once.

I repaired the stupid incubator, recalibrated it, and Mr. Anderson donated some more eggs, about 30. These hatched after the prescribed 28 days (21 for chickens). We put the guinea chicks in a box with a light bulb. There were 25-26 survivors. People started wondering what we would do with so many guineas.

After a few days they were big enough to move out to the pen in the yard. One evening while we were inside eating, the dog Liberty nosed his way into the bottom of the pen and gobbled up guinea chicks as they fell out the hole. When we discovered this there were only about three of them left. I was furious! Again! I was ready to punt that dog across the highway!

Mr. Owen’s esophagus problems continued to get worse. The tissue was weak and in danger of rupturing which would lead to choking or asphyxiation. The doctors and technicians put a tube down his throat to prevent this from happening. He started adjusting to this appliance.

One day in early June, I didn’t remember which one anymore, maybe the sixth, we were eating chicken for dinner. We were all finished and Mr. Owens went to sit down in front of the TV for the news but something was wrong. Something was out of place with the tube or the esophagus or something, we couldn’t tell. He didn’t seem to be having trouble breathing but was very concerned and beginning to sweat. We called an ambulance immediately. They came in about ten minutes and hustled us all around to take him away. Viann rode with the ambulance. I stayed at the house and called people and told them to pray. He had gone into cardiac arrest soon after arriving at the hospital. I drove up. A professional team was doing CPR. After half an hour they gave up. He was gone. Viann went over and held his still hand.

Family came. Arrangements were made. He was buried in a wood casket. Everyone liked that. I didn’t remember the service in Tomball or if there even was one. I did remember that my dad had come to Thompsonville again to conduct the graveside service.

Viann’s Aunt Katherine from San Marcos, who we had met at both funerals, died suddenly about a month later. She was in her mid 50s.

We came home to an empty house with a superfluous mobile home in the back yard. I continued working at Houston Cable. There were more than 60 days in a row over 100 F that summer, then in the fall Hurricane Alan blew in. The submersible pump in the well quit, we were without water.

Mr. Owens had anticipated this; there was already an A-Frame over the well-head with a block and tackle that we would need to pull it. His boss, Mr. McGehee came and helped us do this and took the pump, Serial Number Two, to a shop to have it serviced. There wasn’t much water on that last section of pipe so we put in an additional 20-foot section when we reinstalled it. Mr. McGeehee himself died suddenly not long after that, of a heart attack at age 61. His wife said he had always stayed too busy helping people, like us.

Someone found out I could play piano. I was invited to accompany a community choir for a Thanksgiving performance. The rehearsals went so well that, instead of using a brass choir for the actual performance, I played it on a piano, but in a stadium. This did not work, it was like playing a piano in a stadium It did lead to other gigs, however, such as weddings, accompanying high school students with competition pieces, and such. It would also eventually lead to Rose Hill United Methodist Church.

In November, I took my first two paid days off from the Houston Cable job and flew, at my own expense, to Washington, DC (Baltimore) where I spent the weekend with Jan King, W3GEY, who had led the team that built the lost AMSAT satellite (called “Phase Three A” in memoriam). Jan was the leader of the team to replace it. I was trying to get an intern-like job. After they learned that I had been a music major, they were cordial and showed me around and I learned a lot, but there seemed no possibility of me doing useful work with them.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened. A ham had invited me over to his company to look around, but I wasn’t qualified to work there. I had applied at Texas Instruments while living in Dallas but had failed their technical test. Or at the phone company (well, there they were only hiring salesmen, so, no, that didn’t count.). When taking an FCC exam once I had talked to the engineer in charge at that office about what it would take to work there. Assuming I had some engineering degree, he said it would be easy. Just apply, he said, I’d start at GS-9, he thought.

I started thinking about going back to college.

That spring I applied to Texas A & M and University of Houston and was accepted at both. Mostly because it was half as far and an easier commute on public transportation, I started attending U of H. At first I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I could attend class part time. I first took a computer programming course (Fortran on punch (Hollerieth) cards!) and Calculus III. They tried to talk me out of the latter. “How long has it been since you had Calculus II? Do you remember anything?

“Are you kidding?”

I had aced both courses, the computer course as an honors section, and decided to continue. How to work this around my job was decided at Field Day 1981. Robby and I decided to set up out in our back pasture. We prepared cheap antennas made of thermostat wire supported by cheap PVC pipe and worked on feed line and tuner and other issues. Friday, Rob arrived by bus and we started getting ready.

I had always hated being “on call” at Houston Cable. You had this pager and, just when you were sitting down to eat it would go off. Some customer 20 miles away needed their TV fine tuned. Their TV was junk anyway, nothing would help it, but they always thought it was the Cable’s fault. “It had always worked fine until you hooked up that evil cable.” Or, a backhoe had been putting in new services in a utility trench and cut the cable and fifteen neighborhoods were off. Beep beep beep beep, I truly hated this.

Moreover, you only got straight time when on call. None of this $50 for taking call and time and a half when you worked, a policy that was legendary with some of the experienced guys, just straight time.

I hated call.

So, when the boss asked me to take call that weekend and I already had these other plans that I’d been working on for nine months, I quit on the spot and turned in my truck. That was it.

Field Day ’81 went fine. The antenna went up. We nearly got some benefit from using the “late set up” rule (which allowed 27 hours operation rather than 24 if you didn’t do any setup before the contest started). We made something like 2300 points, me on CW and Rob on phone. A middle of the night shift change mis-cue only left the station unattended for a couple of hours. We said we’d sure do this again and he left for the bus on Sunday afternoon, telling me to leave that antenna up! Not that it would do any good. The feedline led to a tree in the back of the pasture.

After the Thanksgiving performance of 1980, I had been asked to come direct music at Rosehill Methodist. We had been looking for a church. I was considering being immersed so we could join a Christian church over on Kuykendal near Spring Cypress road. Rosehill seemed a better answer. We joined one Sunday and I was directing choir and music the next. By summer 1981 this had turned into a $100 a month job and was now my only employment. I volunteered to help out in the church office by being secretary too, but they wouldn’t hear of it, that was woman’s work.

So, Viann worked at the high school as a school nurse and that fall I dove back into school with a vengeance. Always underestimating, I formally joined the Honors Program and took just about all the same courses (the hard Honors sections) that I would have if I was just starting college for the first time. I figured that I had been to college, I knew how it worked, I wanted to know all of this material, and could make straight As. I nearly did too. By 1986, I graduated Summa Cum Laude (one of two in the engineering school) with Honors, honors thesis done, and a new baby on the way.

But I was getting ahead of myself. Back to 1981. We sold the mobile home to one of the dairy operators at church, recovering our money, and moved into the house. As the three children had inherited the place, this was the beginning of what I called “Owen’s Incorporated.” We started having family meetings to deal with estate issues. This is where we learned about “personal space” from Michael, who liked meetings and ran them interminably. After years of this, Doug (brother-in-law) took me to lunch one day and suggested that it was time to move along, so we could finish closing out the estate and get on with life.

There was another trigger for this. I was working on the Alaska trip again, and the plan was to go on bigger and bigger touring rides until we thought we were experienced and equipped enough to attempt it. Viann’s mother, hearing this when we were first married, thought that what we really wanted was to take a week long holiday to New Orleans. Doubtless, this was what she wanted to do!

I had gone to Austin once, it seemed like it had been spring break of 1982, and had attempted to ride my bike back, a trip of 150-200 miles. In the last 50 miles I ran out of time and energy and had Viann come get me. Still, I missed my spring break reading assignment in Honors English and failed the pop quiz the following Monday morning.

On another occasion, Viann and I had ridden from Tomball to Austin in three days and two nights. It had poured both nights. On the first we were in a hotel, on the second we were camped in Buscher State Park. On the third we made it into Austin where our car was stashed, spent the night with Rob and drove home. That was a mid-winter ride. The days were short, very unlike the long summer bicycling days that I had used as the basis for planning.

Still, we were making progress in the right direction. Then, in the Christmas season of 1983, I had planned a ride around Houston in a big circle. I envisioned it being about 200 miles in all. We’d go around the west side to Sugarland, down to Galveston, cross the mouth of the bay on the ferry, up to High Point and complete the loop maybe on 1960 or set of roads less traveled. This would take several days.

I thought that first we’d drive the route to scope it out. It was a warm December day, highs in the 70s. Preparations were going smoothly. We got as far as Galveston and started across to Pt. Bolivar on the ferry. In the middle of the 20-minute ferry ride, a norther blew in. By the time we were home it was in the 30s. It froze that night and did not get above 28 during the day for a week. People who had lived in the area for 80 years had their pipes freeze. This was because, in this part of the country you’d turn the water off at night and drain the house if you could so that it wouldn’t freeze, but during the day you’d turn it back on so you could have water, because the high was nearly always above freezing. That didn’t happen this time. The high for the entire week was 28 F. People who had turned their water back on during the day had had their pipes freeze during the day.

And we did too. A pipe under the house burst and we had to shut all the water off. We carried water in from the well and boiled it on the stove. I had a plumber come out and make repairs, but this was the last straw.

I thought about talking about how Viann got the bump on her forehead but decided I couldn’t.

I did mention Hurricane Aletia in 1983, which , unlike Alan in 1980 which had stalled off the coast, had blown in and nearly collapsed the old garage on our new car. We had missed the whole thing, being up with my parents at Rio Vista that week, but had driven through the tail end, high winds and cold rain, coming back from dinner in Ft. Worth one evening.

So, I quit my job at Rosehill Methodist, my going away party was on my 28^th birthday, February 26^th again, and we moved into an apartment near the Astrodome from which I rode my bike to school for my last year at U of H.

And a month after graduation, we brought our new baby Viannah home to that apartment. I went up and regaled our neighbor Marc Boin (medical student) about this for an hour. Three weeks later I drove his living room touch-light crazy operating Field Day from the apartment with 30 gauge wire strung along the roof. 107 contacts in all; not bad.

I had forgotten to mention AMS-81, the $100 computer satellite tracking program that I wrote for AMSAT, building on what I’d learned doing the same thing for the TI-59 calculator. Ralph and I had collaborated on AMS-81. I coded; he managed.

The computer had 16K of memory and it took about 7 minutes to write it out to cassette tape at 110 baud. Can you imagine that? 16K and 7 minutes to do a write. I’d be working at four in the morning and bump the computer and the memory module would bounce and it would crash and I’d lose three hours work and have to do it all over and then, at five in the morning, carefully save, twice.

I had worked as a Coop at Johnson Space Center during the Spring and Fall semesters of 1983, going to school in the summer. I was going to be an astronaut, or an entrepreneur. I went in and told the Coop director about this. How would one go about going for astronaut? Or, I was working with Ed Moers, a guy from church, and we had a technical product idea going that could develop into real money, we thought. The Coop director looked at me and said, “Why are both your choices impossible?”

Astronaut politics being over my head, I left NASA and worked with Ed for a while, and worked for myself for a while at the same time. After graduation we took money from sale of the Tomball place and bought a house in Prestonwood, half way between Ed and our new church.

We had been in Bible Study Fellowship and knew some people there who had been in the Covenant. The Covenant was planting churches in the Houston area (we joked, because there weren’t enough churches in the Bible Belt yet) and we had joined in starting one. This was an improvement over visiting a new church every week, as we had done for six months.

I had gone to work at JSC on Columbus Day that year and found nobody there. It was a little-known Federal holiday. From my office phone I called Ed and went out to work with him instead. Later I’d gotten mad about the way he was always needing to finish a project (in order to deliver and get paid) just when I thought it was getting technically interesting. After the recession of ’86 had tanked all the customers for our product, I stopped working with Ed and continued on my own, producing little except a music arrangement once a week.

Then, tired of this, I went and got some advice one day. I visited the library at U of H and looked up everything that looked interesting in books and journals. Half of the bylines were from JPL. I went and talked to the Dean of the Astronomy Department at Rice. He advised that if I was interested in astronomy I shouldn’t go to Rice. His latest PhD student was in meteorology (yes, weather), but, yes, if I wanted to work on state-of-the-art spacecraft, JPL would be a good place.

I applied, but had not heard anything before getting spooked by our financial situation. We were due a payment on the land, but due to the real estate downturn, it was not certain that it would come through. So, I reconnected with Dean Cubley, my old boss from NASA JSC and went to work for his small company MicroLink where I wrote software for paging transmitters. I got so familiar with the paging formats that the joke was I could speak the modulated sound into a transmitter microphone and have the pager go off.

And right after we bought the house we learned about KICY, the Covenant Radio Station in Nome. Their team had flown down to make a presentation at our church about their work in western Alaska. They were tickled to land at Houston International with all the big planes, though it might have made more sense to land at the largest private airport in the world, David Wayne Hooks, about five miles up the road from the church.

Was this where I should go? I talked to them seriously and thought about it. It was Alaska; it was radio. Alaska had been a long time part of “the plan” and I had experience with in radio. I’d just bought a house. I had a new baby. I had no idea what it was like to live anyplace cold, or how we might deal with it all. We did end up being monthly supporters of the ministry.

And, now I was getting confused. There were more and more spinoff stories coming out of this and I was amazed that I couldn’t remember which year I took a certain class or quit a particular job or whatever. When had that KICY talk been, 1985 or 1986? It was all running together here, what, twenty years later. Well, we were out of 1980 now. The point was that all this, from the surprise move to Tomball, to the departure, to the projects I had undertaken, formal and informal, the distracting, the unexpected, the blind alleys and the successes, the things that counted for my culture and the things that counted just for me: all these were part of our story. They had led us to where we were and made us who we were, and they had led to the place where Viannah, then Katherine, then John would join us on the journey….

Thus the story of 1980, (1979 – 1987) from my point of view had spilled out, stream-of-consciousness. John listened, absorbed, dozed.

Worries: batteries, tires

What had been my vehicular worries on this trip? There was a cut in the right rear tire. Every time I looked at it it looked the same. A driver should always be prepared for a blowout anyway.

I worried about running down the battery with my equipment. It shouldn’t with engine on or conservative engine off use, but I had been stranded before, another part of the history. And I’d had flats before, but not blowouts, and would prefer not to on this vehicle.

No problems with either one this trip, in any case.

We were caught in something like rush hour traffic around Santa Barbara. John recognized some of the places we’d passed on our Casitas and other trips, then fell asleep.

From there the rest of the route was the 23 north at Westlake Village, the 18 east at the Ronald Reagan library, across to the 210, and home. As I pulled off on the Ocean View exit, John woke up and slowly recognized where he was. I drove on past Waltonia.

“Dad! You missed our turn.”

I was going to the gas station for the final mileage for the record.

1848 home 76 3634.6 91395 75F

$41.10 = 12.690 X $3.239

This was by no means a record. Katy still held it for a van fill up, nearly $70.00

1857 house 3635.7 91396

That was the final mileage for the trip, 3635.7.

These were the final van computer readings

73 23

19.8 11.9 mpg – l / km*100

459 784 range

168 637 used

41.6 66.4 mph

That’s 73 F which is 23 C.

19.8 miles per gallon is 11.9 liters per hundred kilometers. This agreed closely with my own by-the-pump calculations.

459 miles is 784 kilometers, the distance it thinks we can go on the gas currently in the tank.

168 gallons is 637 liters, the amount of gas used since I reset the statistics in Sperry, California. 3339.4 miles from there (which is what counts on these statistics since I forgot to clear the computer right when we started).

41.6 miles per hour is 66.4 kilometers per hour, our average speed over that same distance. Typically this stayed around 30 miles per hour in normal use.

Cleared the computer again.

2116 van empty, seats back in

laundry running

everything in house or garage.

John wanted to ditch the van and the clean up until at least tomorrow. Oh no, we have to clean it out right now. Katy and Viann weren’t home yet anyway.

2200 Katy cooked both cans of stew for the four of us. We all told some stories. John wouldn’t order pizza – doesn’t know how, he said.

With everyone coming home late, Viann called to suggest ordering pizza. Busy myself, I told John to do it, but he wouldn’t. “I don’t know how to order pizza over the phone,” he told me an hour later when this was discovered. He was trained on a later date.

In addition to the ceremonial trip Oreos, we had managed to carry the camp stew all over the country without eating it. Katy cooked up both cans for the four of us to eat for a very late supper. In retrospect she could have cooked just one.

2407 – in bed

Unpacking debris. Two weeks of mail. Klamath and other ice.

2006 August 17

08087 got up – wrote mom for the last time on this trip.

0903 Time to start into the mail –

Actually…

The laundry just finished and this reminds me of something I wanted to do before “diving in.”

I made a long journal entry, trying to capture the lessons and resolutions from the relaxation of the trip. Christmas and New Years were usually too busy for such reflection and, like Will Shortz, the Puzzle Master, I was in the habit of just “improving myself” whenever I thought of a way to do it, not waiting for some arbitrary date on the calendar. But, seldom was there the repose to do the thinking necessary behind such resolutions. That was the real problem.

Well, there was Sunday afternoon. When permitted, I’d often do similar journaling then, Sunday being for “other things,” but the normal week with a busy Saturday and a hectic Sunday morning was rarely conducive deep thought either.

I was not looking forward to the return to overload. The need to get the first draft of this very material down while I could still remember it guaranteed that there was no escape, however. After a slow start Thursday and Friday, I finally got into the groove of documenting the trip days from my notes. Every day possible I did one or two or more, always running two and a half to three weeks behind the actual events. I’m finishing this right now (first draft) on September 5. We got home three weeks ago tomorrow.

There were a couple of Alcoholics Anonymous type things I wanted to do.

2006 July 28: Last day of inappropriate use of government resources.

July 28 had been my last day at work and I hadn’t done much of it that day, but we’d talked about the e-mail trap on the trip and I wasn’t going to do anything like personal correspondence from work anymore, brief or lengthy. As for having more e-mail presence, John checked his e-mail over the Labor Day weekend, so he’s onboard too.

2006 August 7: Last coffee addiction.

It had been hard to get off coffee. I didn’t want to go back. I could be like an AA member, “Four years, two months, seventeen days, and eight hours off of caffeine.”

[Editing note: three years six months, nineteen days. Last April there was one exception to the coffee, when I flew to the east coast and had to get going early in the morning, but that was exceptional and reasonable and worked. 2/26/10, cbd]

I had a plan to phase my getting up time back from 9:00 to 6:00 for the coming Sunday and Monday when I had commitments, and ignored it.

I made a new diet. Make my own sandwich lunch (we’d learned this on the trip, John being in charge of the food and the lunch meat). Apple and banana for breakfast. Whatever was set before me for dinner. This lasted several months.

I had this tune running through my head all yesterday afternoon. Something told me to take an hour or three and write it down, maybe arrange it with variations. No. This was one of those “feel fine like there’s time for everything in the world” traps. The tune was probably just a jingle, not original, anyway.