Chapter 14.
Transitions
As people proceed through life transitions occur, large and small. Each transition represents loss and gain. Each changes the world and requires adjustment. With the end of the trip with Katy it was time to finish up the episode by completing Katy’s book and it was time to move on to the project with her little brother John.
In the months immediately following the adventure with Katy, several additional transitions took place. Life was suddenly rough for a time. The first shock an event that my dad had always referred to as The Transition.
Bailey Duncan, 1926-2000
On September 6, the phone rang. It was dad! He had called by accident but would call back in just a minute after completing the call he had really intended to make. He had news that might be of interest to us. The news was that he had been suffering for some time with symptoms that would lead to medical tests.
Soon, he received a diagnosis of rectal cancer. The protocol for this in the year 2000 was to treat with radiation and chemotherapy for six weeks to try to reduce the size of the tumor then to schedule surgery. This surgery would result in a permanent colostomy.
These treatments ended the week before Thanksgiving. With an unprecedented full week of school holiday at Thanksgiving, all five of us flew out to see him and to have Thanksgiving in Texas once again. Two weeks after we had returned home that Saturday, dad passed away suddenly on Saturday, December 9. Sepsis and denial.
My sister Wilda and I flew back home the next morning, Sunday, and the rest of the family followed by car the following Wednesday. Dad was buried in Panhandle, Texas Thursday and we all went our separate ways into a new and, what for me was a very different, world.
The draft of Katy’s book sat idle for six months. Only when I gave up TV for Lent in March of 2001 did I get back to it.
Around January 8th, the day that would have been dad’s 75th birthday, Wilda was back from a long planned overseas visit, things were calming down and I was thinking I might slow down the phone calls to mother from daily to a few times per week.
Before I could say anything about it to her, mother announced a result from her own doctor: a lump in her breast that she had known about since September needed to be biopsied. The results of the biopsy indicated surgery and the results of the surgery indicated the need for chemotherapy. Mother wanted to have nothing to do with this, having been through it with dad so recently, but her doctors all advised it.
Viann’s Aunt Gwen, for whom she was named, died in late January after a lengthy decline. Viann flew to Houston for the funeral then went to help mother during and after her surgery, including an emergency second surgery only one week after the first. Viann was in Texas for 3-1/2 weeks. The dynamics at home shifted. Unable to get people to do their homework or anything else important on time, I despaired of ever finishing up the optional ham license lessons and put all of the materials away in the attic.
Some times, some years it was just too hard to make elective progress. Life itself is a window of opportunity. I understood better what Jesus had meant when he said, “The days are evil.”
Mother’s sister Narcidel and her husband, John Hoppe came out to help mother through the first chemotherapy treatment. It was the worst because they needed to calibrate the anti-side-effect medications. Mother had no appetite and was nauseated much of the time. Her hair fell out as predicted.
Wilda came out on “Heart Duty” (A Navy institution for family related leave) for the second treatment and but had to go back to her command the day after it was administered.
I flew out one-way at the end of April for the third treatment. We spent our days taking care of business, doing yard work, and cleaning and rearranging the garage and dad’s desk area in the house. I went with her to the treatment, they administered it in her hand and the medicine became infiltrated, causing her trouble with that arm for many months.
At the end of my ten-day visit, I loaded up dad’s desk and tools, a lawnmower and boxes of memorabilia that mother would otherwise have thrown away, and the Clipper, a balsa free flight model airplane that dad had built from scratch from his own design in 1954. It was the only one left of the series and even it had seen many years of neglect. All this was loaded into dad’s truck, which I was going to keep, and I drove off towards home late on May 2. There had been a plan for me to visit Marysville on the way towards home that day but this was shot by a follow-up doctor’s appointment running overtime that afternoon and other matters coming up at the last minute.
Something unusual happened as I drove through Wichita Falls shortly after dark. At the time, the freeway slowed down to two one-way streets a block apart that went through the mid-town area. At each intersection there was a stoplight and the lights were supposedly timed so that, if you kept it right at thirty miles per hour, you could go all the way through without ever having to actually stop. It had been this way for years and, extended family living up that way; we had driven through here many times without ever managing to achieve this stop-less pass through town. On one trip we wouldn't hit the beginning of the series at the right time. On another trip, one of the lights would be broken, turning red at an inappropriate time to preserve the sequence with the others. On other trips we would have to stop for gas or food, or would be in non-cooperative traffic. Once dad and I had been caravanning through in two cars. One had gotten caught so the other had had to slow, messing up the arrangement for him as well.
This pass through, I was hardly thinking about any of this history while driving dad's truck loaded with his stuff through Wichita Falls in the dark. As I got into the downtown area, however, I realized that I had already been through several of the stoplights without stopping. Up ahead, the ones I could see were all green. I glanced at the dash in front of me; the speedometer said "30". Not only did I not stop once passing through Wichita Falls that evening, I didn't even see one of the lights showing any color but green. It was all green all the way through town.
(This was the last time I passed through town on that route. Now the freeway is an overpass over the area with only a few exits.)
Back out on the open road with thoughts of the ten-day visit with mother still fresh in mind, I said softly, but out loud, "You know dad, mom is pretty mad at you."
He knew this.
As I motored up Highway 287 towards Amarillo, I could see lightening flashes ahead. The rain started while I was stopped for gas at the Texaco in Quanah and continued all the way from there to Claude. There wasn’t much I could do. The load wasn't waterproofed. The makeshift tarp hadn’t worked well; in fact, it had damaged my radio antennas, itself, and the cargo load and necessitated about a dozen stops by the side of the road earlier in the afternoon during the first two hours underway. I arrived at the Double N in Panhandle quite late, once again.
The next morning I found the streets of Panhandle and the truck with its load all steaming in the early morning sun. I stopped in at Lane’s Hardware, looked at dad’s military grave marker, and made arrangements for it to be set at the foot of his grave. We planned head stones for sometime later. After that, it was a long, lonely drive to Kingman, Arizona the following day, then home the next, accompanied only by the voices of ham radio colleagues, old friends and new acquaintances, on the short wave from time to time.
So far, it had been a long year with many shocks.
The Dominator, A Whole Family
Reprise
After dad died, I had thought we would do “Commemorative” events during the next year. Some of these would be the same sorts of outings that we nominally did as family or with kids, things dad did or would have done had he been able.
Viannah and I had first gone on the hike that features the wreck of the Dominator (McKinney, LA-3) as training for her adventure, and I had also been there with Katy. Now we were going as a whole family to share the past and present. Except that Viannah didn’t want to go. She had other things she wanted to be doing, had made other arrangements and, anyway, had already been to this site. We had tried taking her forcefully on family outings before and had decided that it wasn’t worth the struggle. She was getting old enough to be independent sometimes. After much discussion, I reluctantly agreed to leave her behind. This struggle was recognized as another transition.
Katy, John, and Viann were still willing, however, and we set off about ten in the morning on March 17, 2001 on a trip that would be very much like the previous two, with one important exception.
We bought lunch at Blimpies and carried it down on the hike in our backpacks as before.
I tried not to over or under sell the difficulties we were about to tackle. It was a couple of miles of walking on rocks like broken bowling balls. Everyone found this difficult, Viann most of all, in part because she didn’t have very good shoes. She was wearing worn out tennis shoes with broken soles. We parked so as to skip the first half-mile of this sort of beach front and started down access trails, sharing with other hikers, dog walkers, picnickers, and surfers.
As with the prior two hikes, we reached the wreck itself after a long slow walk in the rocks. While we sat there studying the rusting remains and snacking, we saw a boy and girl hike up a crack in the cliff. I thought at first that they were just going up to be alone but when they disappeared and later re-appeared on top I thought we might be seeing a shortcut out of here. On our return, we tried the narrow trail, kids first followed by Viann and finally me and my hiking boots down in the rear. Only a few places were uncomfortably precipitous. We rested in a slot of dirt nearly at the top, enjoying the view of waves and geological strata that we had walked on earlier extending out into the water. The end of the climb was steep but contained and came out in the grassy top area to the west of a residential road.
We started back toward the van, deciding to split up so as to save the slower ones some walking. Katy wanted me to go faster ahead with John since this was kind of the beginning of his Big Adventure, but, knowing our paces, I said she should go with me. Katy and I would go half again faster than John and his mother could and we could get back to them with the van before they got to the point of having to walk along the shoulder of a busy road. Of course, we stayed in touch on our radios.
That was the way the day had gone, but there was one feature of this particular outing that made it different. Inasmuch as this was one of those places dad would have wanted to go if he had been able and had the opportunity, it had been declared a Commemorative and at lunch on the way down something unusual happened which underscored this.
We were about half way from where we had parked the van to the wreck. This was the middle of the rocky trail or flat embankment all of the way from one to the other. Here in the middle, near an erosion outlet, a bench had been placed. We sat on this bench to eat our lunch.
As we ate, facing out to sea, a vintage biplane flew by near the beach line and at a lower altitude than the cliff top. We waved just for fun. Apparently the pilot saw us, he turned on smoke for a second and rolled his wings back and forth, waving back. Then he turned and went out over the water, going out about a mile and circling upwards to maybe a thousand feet altitude. I was about to open my mouth and say, “he’s a more conservative flyer than dad was” when he turned on his smoke again and started diving into a top-down loop, drawing a large circle in the air right out in front of us! This demonstration finished, he flew straight towards us, waving his wings again as he passed directly overhead, heading inland.
On the bottom of the wings it said “U.S. Army.” To my uneducated eye it looked like WW I vintage. Presumably he was out on a skywriting job or a test flight.
Or maybe it was dad making a commemorative gesture, I fantasized. Of course, I didn’t believe it was really dad, but in spirit, well, I didn’t know what was possible or permissible. It was just the sort of thing dad would do, and this pilot had proven more not more conservative but less!
We later saw a formation of three WW II vintage airplanes flying south down the beach. Dad would have known what they were by manufacturer, model number, and year but I could only estimate their age. Also, the Goodyear Blimp wandered around off to the south throughout the afternoon as well.
Back home, we learned in a web search that the sinking of the Dominator had occurred nearly exactly 40 years ago that date: Tuesday March 13, 1961. That made it another commemorative of another transition.
Five Hams
On a different day in March, John (by delegation) came to me trying to act innocent and asked what had happened to Now You’re Talking, the book we had been reading together in preparation for ham licensing tests. I told him I had put it all away in the attic and he went off without further inquiry. This in itself was strange enough. Over the coming months something even stranger happened, all three of the kids started disappearing for hours at a time into Viannah’s room. They were working on “A Project,” they said.
After a while I began to get suspicious but didn’t press the issue. Finally, I was told to set aside the Saturday before Father’s Day, I was going to go do something with them all that I couldn’t be told about. We got in the van early that morning and drove to what turned out to be a Volunteer Examiner Testing Session at the Red Cross building on the Veteran’s Administration grounds somewhere in west Los Angeles. I had guessed enough about this “Project” by that time not to be really surprised, but tried to act surprised anyway. The goal was for all of them to get their licenses for Father’s Day.
I paid their fees, helped them with their paperwork, and went to donate blood up the hall while they took their tests. Viannah passed but John and Katy failed, though not by much. Now that I knew what The Project was, I was back in on the scheme and worked with Katy and John some more. I took them down to another testing session at the TRW Swapmeet on the last Saturday in June. While John’s friend Eric and I milled around the electronic and other junque sales, John passed his test, but Katy failed again. I assured her we would keep trying.
She was mostly resistant, but now that it was just she, the tutoring and drilling could be tailored to her individual learning style. In retrospect, I wished that I had dealt with them all individually like that from the beginning.
Until we left on vacation at the end of July and a couple of times during vacation we studied specific areas where she wasn’t yet really getting it. She took practice tests online and kept failing by varying amounts, passing only once, the very first try after returning from Texas. Trying not to get too anxious, I wondered if we should waste our morning on the last Saturday in August to even go to the testing session at another TRW Swapmeet or should we use the time to study. It seemed to me either way that we would be studying through September toward another exam on its last Saturday.
Viann suggested, optimistically and without much other basis for hope that we just go do it as a way to do something together. It would be more experience if nothing else. Katy was agreeable.
“OK, let’s go.”
We drove down, drilling questions about antennas and radio block diagrams and frequency allocations, the ones she missed most consistently. We drove around Redondo Beach trying to find the place again. I always used the waypoint in my GPS receiver and never really knew the streets themselves in the TRW area. This time was worse than usual, but we finally found TRW and the Swapmeet, parked in the same place as we had when John and Eric had been with us two months earlier, and went in for a real test.
“Just don’t carelessly miss any of the ones you know,” was the only advice that was really left to give at this point.
We went in, paid the fees, filled out the forms, and I left her with her Element 2 exam and went off to browse the junque sales again, this time on my own. We were a little later than we had been in June and the Swapmeet ended, precisely at 11:30 after I was only about two-thirds through my survey. I talked to Viann on the radio. We’d check in again when we started back. I went back toward the cafeteria that served as the test center.
Someone would come out of the building every two or three minutes and you could tell by watching how they walked or by the look on their face, or the actions of the people who were with them, whether they had passed or failed whatever element they were taking that day. Katy was not out yet. I went in and saw her standing at the paperwork-processing table with a big smile on her face. She had only missed five! (On this particular test of 35 multiple-choice questions, one could pass having missed as many as nine.)
“Five?” I said, initially thinking she meant ‘five too many,’ which would be about par.
No, it was just five! Not only had she passed, she had made the highest score of any of the kids. The examiner looked at me in playful puzzlement, “Don’t look so surprised, dad!”
She squealed over the radio to her mother when we got back to the truck. Dad would have been proud too. It was still his truck, to me. Although Viann was ordering her own callsign license plates for the truck, it still had a sticker on the back, “My Daughter is in the U.S. Navy” (referring to my sister) and the dashboard still sported dad’s oil change date and odometer stickers. And mine too, carefully made and placed to look just like his.
We went home and had pizza for a celebration lunch. When Katy’s callsign was issued, we could all talk to each other on the radio, we could all answer in the night when someone was on the way home, we could all speak to each other without a parental “control operator.” I could mark this off my list.
Right after school started, Katy’s call showed up on the FCC database website. Now we were:
KG6HUI, Katy;
KG6HCO, John;
KG6GXW, Viannah
WD5EHM, Viann
N5BF, Courtney
Viannah Drives
Having a teenager begin driving marks an end-of-innocence stage in the life of any family. This transition, too, is something to be mourned.
Viannah began working on this in the fall by arranging to attend Delta Driving School during the Christmas break. This accomplished, she had a Learner’s Permit and we began lessons. Most of the roughness was worked out through instruction and experience in the first few hours. Much of the care and wisdom (or, as Warren would say, "common sense") it takes to survive regular driving takes additional years to develop.
In July she took her test and passed and was licensed to drive by herself or with siblings. She had developed into a careful driver, except when running late. She had been stopped for not remembering to turn on her lights one night. I took her to traffic court in downtown Glendale where we watched people deal with their citations, lack of insurance, and other related problems. We visited and were counseled by our insurance agent and
Viannah was added to our policy, initially at a cost of around $30 per month. This lasted until our 1996 Chevy Astro broke down east of Kingman, Arizona on the first day of our 2001 summer vacation and we replaced it on the spot with a 2001 GMC Safari (same van, different label). When the dust had settled, Viannah’s part of the insurance was more like $70 per month, due to the higher value of the newer vehicle. I made the "driving age" adjustment to her allowance and started billing her for her part.
The struggle over where, when, with who, and how far she could go ramped up. The pulling away was underway in earnest.
And with all this in process, the thought kept coming up, “Katy is next….”
One day, out of nowhere, Viannah exclaimed, “Dad, I want to go through the Grand Canyon again, this time with everybody except this time we’ll do it right.” She then quoted from memory the “lessons learned” from her own Adventure with dad.
I looked on in disbelief. “You realize this means training everybody.” More to the point: “You realize this means getting on your calendar… a lot.”
That was fine with her. Maybe we could do this some summer while she was in college. Maybe this was just a gesture of good will.
The End
These transitions were the backdrop of Katy’s Adventure. These events marked the time when she was growing out of childhood.
As the drafting of this book came to a close, an enormous worldwide transition of inestimable proportions occurred. Terrorists, initially anonymous, destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan and part of the Pentagon by hijacking domestic airline flights and crashing them into the buildings. A fourth hijacked flight crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, some heroic passengers having regained control. In just a few hours politics and policy were changed forever along with the New York City skyline and the lives of thousands upon thousands of people in scores of countries.
In fact, it could be easily argued that everyone’s life on earth had been changed dramatically and permanently. We awaited the fallout.
The following Saturday morning a barge struck the Queen Isabella Causeway connecting Port Isabel to South Padre Island, the longest bridge in Texas, knocking out several 80-foot sections over the channel in the middle. It turned out not to be another terrorist act, but over a dozen lives were lost and the island was cut off from the mainland for months. We had just crossed that bridge exactly a month before on our vacation to the popular resort, a visit that had been, in part, another commemorative of dad’s life.
Katy’s Aunt Wilda, beginning her 12th year in the Navy, was deployed to the Middle East aboard the carrier Theodore Roosevelt on September 19th. This would not be just another site-seeing-make-our-presence-known-in-the-world cruises; this one would be serious military business. On that deployment, the TR spent 159 days out of sight of land, a post World War II record.
And so there were more transitions to yet more versions of the world to which we all were required to adapt, conform, and survive. It was in this new world that the Grand Project with the next, and likely last of my own children, John Courtney Duncan, would get under way. Well, there might be grandchildren one day, in a world different still.
The year following the Grand Adventure with Katy was a kaleidoscope of new worlds and new perspectives. An important adulthood was beginning with Viannah with Katy not far behind. An important life closed with dad, and the course of world history changed dramatically and irrevocably on the date that would become an icon “nine eleven.”
With these transitions, the book closes on the Big Adventure with Katy, but not on the Grander Adventure of our lives together. Though the end of our project was sad it had been a good adventure, one we could always remember.