Chapter 3.
Training Events
School began for 1998-1999. Katy was going into Sixth Grade, Viannah into Eighth, and John into Third. Another hectic year had begun.
Chuck Lahmeyer, a colleague at work, had been pestering me for some time to hike up to the old cable car station and hotel on Echo Mountain up above the top of Lake Ave. in Pasadena. This seemed like the sort of thing Katy and I should be doing together so I invited her along. In fact, I wasn’t interested in going if she wasn’t, but she agreed to go, so the arrangements were made.
Wednesday September 9, we all met at the top of Lake Ave., parked our cars, and started up the trail. It was 5:45 p.m. The trail was like most single-track mountain trails in the area and it had been graded recently. The whole round trip was to be about five miles distance and several hundred feet vertical. I wondered what it would be like to live under circumstances where walking a path like this was required daily. At least one’s cardio-vascular health would be good.
People hike differently; our party of five spread out into groups. Katy and I stayed together, just a few yards apart.
We reached the summit just after 7 p.m. and watched the sunset. Chuck came up behind us shortly and we viewed the various sites. Nobody had seen the other two guys, Chai and Tom. Perhaps they had missed the turn and gone on up the trail into the mountains.
All that was left of the hotel resort was the foundation. All that was left of the cable car equipment was the big wheels and the wheelhouse. Automotive economic forces had killed off such institutions in the early 60s. Now there was no way to get up here except to walk the trail.
I used the radio to call Viann on the phone patch and suggested that this might be a site for a church get-together sometime, for the hardy hikers among us anyway. It was starting to get dark; we started down at 7:20, walking fast. As we neared the bottom we could barely distinguish the trail from the rest of the landscape. This was particularly true crossing a dry streambed in a wooded area near the end.
At 8:25 we came out where we were parked at Lake. Chuck was waiting there but the other two guys still hadn’t been seen. We sat and talked for a while. He was going to go to a nearby house shortly and call for help if they didn’t show up. This was going to be more useful than my radio, I feared. As expedition leader, he felt responsible and was going to stay. As a parent of a pre-teenager, I thought we should go on home. We were saying our goodbyes when Tom and Chai strolled out. They had hiked all the way to a campground in the mountains and back, twice as far as we had!
Friday, Katy had a friend Sarah over, but I had planned for her to go with me to go pick up the canoe. The La Canada Sport’s Chalet canoe was already committed for the weekend so we went to the Burbank store, where you have to drive down to a dock in the basement in the middle of the mall to perform such pick ups. Katy and Sarah helped size and lift, but I did all the tying. About a mile up the road, I stopped to do some retying.
The next morning I had a rehearsal at church and took Katy and the van and the canoe there on the way to our new adventure. We had called Sport’s Chalet about fishing licenses and decided not to try to deal with licenses or fishing equipment on this trip. Both were expensive and I didn’t know how much use we would make of them.
At Castaic we had lunch at Carl’s Junior while I told Katy the story of where Viannah’s name had come from. This extended itself into the whole saga of the year 1980, the deaths of Viann’s parents and the formation of relationships in the Tomball/Rosehill community.
Katy was reading the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis. We had read these to the kids when they were small and now she was reading them for herself. She related to me the current adventures in that reading.
Instead of using the freeway, we went up the mountainous Lake Hughes road and arrived at Elizabeth Lake about 1:30. Within twenty minutes we had the canoe down and launched at the boat ramp, Katy in front, me in back. A bystander took our picture. We were wobbly and cramped at first. I couldn’t get my seat or pants right. Heading east we started around the lake to see how well we could do. Out in the middle it was lightly windy. Rowing upwind, we passed some fisherman and came to a flooded stand of trees.
There were a few other boats out including a Sunfish sailboat, a couple of wind surfers and other fishermen. Somebody at the launch even had a Hobie Cat, but we didn’t actually see it on the water. This was a much better venue for low time canoe pilots than lake Castaic with all its powerboats and skiers would have been.
Staying fifty or a hundred yards from shore, we continued around the south side, back through the tree line, being careful not to impact any branches. Jumping slightly in my seat, I could see the bottom of the green fiberglass boat give and take. The thin fiberglass looked like it would be easier to puncture than aluminum.
The lake level was apparently higher than usual. There was a campground, but some of the grills were in the water. Some people were standing calf deep in the water to use them. We pulled out at the boat ramp, emptied the water from the canoe, rested briefly and visited the vault toilets. We had been out over an hour on our first round and decided we were up to putting back in for another trip.
This time we directly crossed the lake, heading for a sign on the other side that said “No Trespassing.” Rather than going ashore in such a place, we played around, maneuvering the vessel in and out of shallows and stands of reeds along the bank. This was a new point of view for me. I was more accustomed to being somewhere on the shore looking at such places as a quagmire rather than in the water, free to move about , perceiving the shore itself as inaccessible.
Free that is, except when we got stuck in the reeds once and had to push off the sandy bottom to get loose. We used our dual oars (which were longer than we were tall) to measure depth. Everywhere outside of the reed stands was deeper than the 8 feet we could reach when making a depth measurement with the oars.
About half way around, Katy said, “Dad, we’re practicing boating, we should practice swimming too.”
“We’ll do that when we fall in.” I replied. “If,” I meant.
We did develop skill at paddling. I got to where I didn’t bruise my hands, Katy got to where she didn’t splash or impede progress too much. With the right stroke, she had a strong pull.
We passed within a few feet of a heron or stork before it flew away, low across the water.
The second outing ended and we decided to bring the canoe out and head home. A bystander asking questions about the lake helped us get it on top of the van. Katy tied the back and I cinched down the front. She did such a good job that I was afraid we’d have trouble with it at the next unload.
We drove off to Lancaster. A sign said, “Road Flooded.” Katy asked why you couldn’t just tell. Signs warned of ice on the roads in the mountains. Maybe so, the temperature was down in the 90s today. The screw heads on the boat were gouging holes in the paint on top of the van. At Taco Bell in Palmdale, we put towels under those spots, trying to secure them. One of the towels got lost later on the road home. None of the towels ultimately made any difference.
I played a tape of the song we had been rehearsing at church. Katy said she wanted to play drums or keyboards. I recommended keyboards and she asked if I would teach her. I said I’d think about it. I’m not much of a teacher….
The Sport’s Chalet rental policy allows for pickup on the day before charges start and drop off on the day after, so long as this is all done during regular business hours. We had picked up on Friday and would have to turn in before 7 p.m. on Sunday and would then only pay $35 for Saturday (plus a $200 deposit on my credit card!).
In order to maximize use of our rental, we decided to go back to the lake Sunday after church, taking the whole family this time. This made for a rushed day all around. We took the freeway rather than mountain roads to save time but Highway 14 was crowded on Sunday afternoon, nearly like rush hour, all the way up, and the canoe kept slipping further into my line of vision. I could see ahead ok but not far up as we sped down the freeway surrounded by other impatient vehicles.
In the final analysis, either route would have taken about an hour.
We had to stop for lunch somewhere and doing so at a conveniently located Taco Ball in Lancaster just off the freeway put us down at Elizabeth Lake about 3:00 p.m. I hadn’t slept well Saturday night and Katy and I were both cranky. More people were at the lake this Sunday afternoon than had been there the prior day. We took turns using the canoe in pairs. I took John out once and got pretty wet with all his unskillful splashing. We tried to retrieve a beer bottle floating in the middle of the lake and were surprised how hard it was to do fine maneuvering alongside.
Several power boaters had obvious capabilities in excess of the posted 10 horsepower limit. I wasn’t yet to the point of enjoying their wakes as we bobbed along on the water.
Viann and John and I sat on shore while Viannah and Katy went out one time. Other people in two canoes went by and commented to each other that, with my hat, I looked like that guy in the opening of Pirates of Penzance. I don’t think they realized how well sound traveled over the water and that we could hear them from the shore. I was not familiar with the movie that I could identify with their observation.
Katy and I went on the fifth and final sortie, just across to a tree at the far side and back to our launching spot. We took the canoe out, cleaned it, and loaded it for the trip back.
Just after 5:00 p.m. we drove up the rift to 138 then down Interstate 5 back to Burbank, low on gas. This trip had been long, maybe a hundred miles all told. To our relief, we got to Sport’s Chalet and unloaded at a quarter of the 7:00 p.m. closing time. By 7:15 we were home.
Katy was proud of our dual effort with the canoe and was trying hard to enjoy herself and please me. Viann said she wasn’t going on any more Sunday afternoon outings like that one. What to do then? Form something like this into a weekend camping trip? And miss church?
A tree down the hill on our property at our home was too near the retaining wall by the street and had grown so large that it was breaking the wall out towards the street. By inspection, I feared that just the right gust in a windstorm would blow it right over onto the neighbor’s garage across the street. If that weren’t bad enough, such a catastrophe would block the only road out of our little development until the debris could be cleaned up.
We took bids from commercial companies who wanted amounts like $675 to remove it so I decided we would do it ourselves and keep track in order to see if we would break even.
Every other Saturday, interleaved with Katy adventures, we would go out and work on the tree for a while. The first sessions were fairly easy, I would climb up high and cut the top out of the tree still above me with a hand saw, then on the ground we would cut it up into firewood and bundles of green trash. As the bi-weeks went by, what I had to cut at the start went first out of range of my hand-saw then out of range of my 14” electric chain saw. We had to cross the street and beg help from Rob Glasset. He had a larger, gas powered chain saws with sharp chains, and he knew how to use them.
After many pairs of weeks we finally reached the stump, all five of us and Rob scurrying around in the street trying to keep a driving path clear most of the time. We paid the kids a little to help us and I kept track of costs (replacement parts for the chainsaw, wages, payments to Rob, etc.) and hours spent. It looked like we would more than break even until one day, loading big logs into the trunk of the car to carry back up to the house for the woodpile; I managed to break out the rear window. That accident ended up costing about $200. Drat!
Partly because I suspected that individual boats might work out better and partly for the experimental variety, we decided on kayaks for the next adventure.
Nearly on impulse, we went to Sport’s Chalet Friday evening October 22, 1998 and found that “sit on top” “ocean going” kayaks rented the same as canoes, $35 per day and $200 deposit. Checking out on Friday and turning in on Sunday, we paid $70 for two such boats and left $400 in deposit (on the same credit card). At least we already had rope for the van tie down left from the prior canoeing trip.
The closest place I thought we could go for kayaking was Santa Fe dam, on the other side of Monrovia. We slept in Saturday morning then got up and drove down, arriving at 10:30 only to find that they charged entrance fees of $6 per vehicle. For us the total was $18, $6 for the van and $6 each for each of the two boats! This was clearly a case where better research and planning could have helped. With the van parked maybe 100 yards from a boat ramp, we untied and took down the kayaks, attaching the seats as instructed. We carried them down to the boat ramp, not really knowing what we were doing, waded in and launched ourselves out onto the "deep."
The lake was small, perhaps fifteen acres total. People were fishing along one shore. There were three small islands, all copiously marked with “No Trespassing, Wildlife Refuge” signs.
We started by rowing across the short width, beaching on the other side, and exploring around the shoreline. Back in the kayaks, we proceeded clockwise around what seemed like the northwest end, staying far enough off to avoid numerous fishing lines.
All of the shorelines, including that of the islands, were concrete ramp. It seemed that water level here must be controlled very closely within a foot of this nominal level.
No one was swimming in the public swimming area.
This end, near the dam, was the broadest. We came alongside and bumped all the buoys scattered around the surface (on purpose), and then headed back upwind. Katy began developing blisters.
It was lunchtime when we got back into the vicinity of the van and the ramp. Although we had planned to go to Wendy’s (as there were no Wendy's near where we lived) on the way to another local lake, we decided to spend our $10 here and had fresh made hamburgers at the local concession. There weren’t many other customers. The building and its surrounding yards housed rental boats. This is the sort of place we had been looking for on our first outing several weeks back. Rowboats and paddleboats were available for $8 - $10 per hour.
After lunch, we got back in the boats and went down to the end that I judged was west. Some sort of official volleyball tournament seemed to be in progress among the improvements along the park shore. Further down, beyond a couple of fishing boats, we found the spillway. This, too, was curbed off with concrete just at the current water level. We paddled back up to just downwind from one of the islands, on the opposite side from the boat ramp and paused for a boats-top catnap. This lasted until we gently drifted into the weeds on the downwind shore. We decided to make a last pass at the island for wildlife viewing, then load up and go on to that other lake.
We scared many various ducks in our progress. Some kind of animal would pop its head out of the water for a split second then dive again. Fish or fowl? There were geese on the shore and in the water. On the opposite shore we saw several ducks that were slate gray with night black heads and chalk white bills. Passing the island we flushed out a bird that could have been a heron. I suggested to Katy that we might be collecting wildlife sightings as part of our adventure. Maybe there was a local reference book where we could check and identify what we were seeing.
As we approached the boat ramp, we noted a lifeguard in his boat talking to a park policeman in his car. When we got close, the water patrolman revved up to go out on his own cruise.
We beached and carefully loaded the boats and headed further east to Bonnelli Park near the Raging Waters amusement park. This lake and its users were more urban. Pretty sailboats drifted past pretty developments and their lawns around the shores. The park worker at the gate wanted another $18 more to let us and our two boats into this new park. The pass we had for Santa Fe Dam was not transferable, though it was the same service that ran both parks. We made a U-Turn and went for a drive instead.
North from Glendora, the map showed two big lakes as Highway 39 snaked up into the mountains. This was the road that had been closed through to Wrightwood by a landslide near Crystal Lake in the 1987 Whittier Earthquake. We drove up this 39 to the first dam and found an empty gorge behind it. Clearly a lake had been there recently, the river floor was all silt and no plants. Fences and “No Trespassing” signs were everywhere. We went on up to San Gabriel earthen dam which held a beautiful green lake stretching miles up canyon just like it might if there were a major dam at Paul Little Campground on the Gabriellino Trail. The lake sported no boats, no boat ramps, and no concessions of any kind, but it seemed like every third vehicle on the road was a police car or park ranger. Was somebody selling drugs up here or were they just busy keeping people like us off the posted water? We found a bridge where a fire road led down near the shore. People obviously came here to picnic or fish in the absence of public improvements but it would be too much work, probably too dangerous and probably illegal for us to try to use the boats.
So we headed home.
At home, the kids went for the TV and I went to turn in the boats. Viann cut my hair, I set the clocks to Standard Time and we went to bed.
We had gotten half or a third as much use out of the kayaks as we had out of the canoe, for twice the money. Viann said this was OK; the idea here was to be doing something together. This was a lot less hiking, a lot more driving, and a lot more money than I remembered with Viannah. Maybe that was OK. This was supposed to be different. Our weekend had seemed expensive. “Live and Learn,” said Katy.
Indeed, I could have spent the whole weekend at work testing GPS flight hardware and, in fact, it had been expected that I should do just that. This was part of the reason my after hours project planning hadn’t been tighter.
We decided that if I needed more focus on this project, I could just do it. Perhaps the Big Deal would be going to one of the Channel Islands for three to five days and two to four nights then, while there, kayak around it or near it. We hadn’t talked in this kind of detail yet, but I was missing that big goal to be working towards.
I reviewed the planned schedule for the next few weekends. Next was another bout with The Tree, then after that the Girl Scouts were going rock climbing, but I was going to miss it for the amateur radio November Sweepstakes contest. In three weeks we might do our next adventure, maybe hike to the wreck of the Dominator. Also, Viann’s birthday was around then. In five weeks it was Thanksgiving when we might go to the Aquatic Center. Right after that was the American Radio Relay League Top Band contest weekend that always fell on the same day as the church’s Lucia Festival that marked the beginning of Christmas season.
Events and priorities competing in this way as always, the next training event did not actually happen until New Year’s Eve.
But before that, there would be December 14, events of which would lead me to go out and purchase the book What Color is Your Parachute? (a text on job hunting) within a few days.
The boss called me into a private conference mid morning. Our progress with software had been so poor and the deadline for delivery so close that I was to be relieved of direct responsibility. Who would take over? The very person whose non-cooperation and non-performance on the project had contributed most to the crises. He wasn’t productive in his technical work, he spent all his time building new business that he would eventually direct, but he was good at spin, and his reporting skills would comfort our management.
My first response was to say, “Good, maybe this will get <that person> involved.” My final word was, “There will be consequences.” I started an internal and external job search at once. It looked like this might be a good opportunity to return to Texas but first I would have to see the job I was on through to completion, spin, fluff, and all.
I didn’t take vacation during the workdays at the end-of-year holiday weeks. Somebody had to stay at the office to continue our routine reports to management while all the new leaders were out of town on vacation trips. I didn’t work on the actual holiday days, however. Even management wasn't there on the official days off.
On one of those days, Katy wanted to build a tree house. In September 1997, I had planned to build a fancy ham radio operating shelf, a portable affair with doors and wheels that would house all the unsightly wiring and junk and could be “easily” moved about from one place to another. I went right out and bought wood but when, several months later when preparing to start construction, my plans were nowhere to be found, no matter where or how hard I looked. Perhaps they had been lost in a cleanup. Perhaps they had been palmed. Angry, I moved all the wood and miscellaneous supplies for the project into the attic.
One of my doors and a few miscellaneous two by four sections were just what Katy needed for her tree house. In order for it to be mechanically “safe,” I participated in construction of the floor and supports (my lumber) and rope-rung ladder. This is just what Katy was wanting and it looked to me like the proper compromise between the complexity she envisioned and the simplicity that we could support without an additional trip to the store. There had been a use for my lumber after all. Meanwhile, the ham station continued to live on a card table.
That was Friday and Saturday. The next Thursday, New Year’s Eve (1998/1999) we went off on another adventure, this time to the Wreck of the Dominator. This hike of a couple of miles across rocks like “broken bowling balls” to a shipwreck that was decades old was something I had done with Viannah and wanted to make part of the Big Event tradition.
We took the car and left about 10:30 a.m. I thought of the car, a 1983 Honda Accord, old and as wrecked looking as it was, as dependable but not much of a target for criminals. It was ideal for going to work and places like this where it would be parked alone in public for long periods of time. Arriving in the beach cities under an hour later, we stopped at a Blimpies to pick up lunch to go, and arrived at the bluff where the hike would begin just before noon.
This was the one and only site where GPS had been helpful in hikes with Viannah and I had it along today too. Once our parking place was pinpointed, it declared the distance from the car to the wreck at 3.3 kilometers, a little over two miles. For today's version of the walk, because we had started late, I had cut out the first mile of broken bowling balls in order to save time and wear. (Some people would have gotten up in the middle of the night so as to arrive at the hike-out point around sunrise. Such people might not be so worried about “saving time.”)
After the hike out we ate our lunch at the wreck but did no return-route exploring as I had with Viannah. We hiked instead directly back to the drainage ditch she and I had used before and proceeded to climb it similarly. This time, we came to the top and found the fence broken down, the gate standing open, askew, and the “No Trespassing Sign” from before, informing the street of our criminal trespass, washed out and unreadable. Katy climbed the few hundred yards of slanted concrete with a little nervousness but otherwise confident in the hiking shoes borrowed from Viannah. I came up behind, as before, with more anxiety, as before.
As we hiked along the top of the bluff back towards the car we had a view of the semi-cove below, populated today by many surfers. They weren’t surfing near the shore where it was rocky, they two or three hundred yards out where the sea bottom presumably sloped just right to make 4-6 foot waves. Occasionally one of them would ride one for a little ways, breaking off before reaching the rocks, but there weren’t many takers today. The surfers on their boards were mainly socializing out in the light swell.
Back at the car, we made an autopatch (on the JPL club’s 224.70 MHz repeater) to home and talked only to John. Extending tradition, we drove away south instead of returning the way we had come, passed the Vincennes Lighthouse and went around the back of Palos Verdes before stopping at Jack in the Box, San Pedro, for a snack of potato wedges. We were still home in time for dinner, about 5:30.
But, steady training progress was stalled again. The overdue delivery of GPS receivers with working software to the SRTM mission staggered forward from one “drop dead” date to the next, the new job search progressed through the “self knowledge” phases forward to some online research. A dozen leads would eventually develop and be narrowed down to three.
Both of these processes were interleaved with other activities throughout 1999, but let’s dispense with them both now in order not to further disturb the otherwise pleasant narrative of father-daughter adventures.
We had strong reasons to want to go home to Texas. All of Viann’s family and my parents lived there. A few of my relatives had lived nearby in California but had left the area after the Northridge Earthquake. We had never intended to stay here forever, I was worried that the kids would never know anything but the big city, and I always had the perennial itch to just up and move away from my problems which I had learned by moving every few years while growing up.
I contacted my psychotherapist and Viann and I went to see him together. He gave us some tips on big-decision-making as a couple that we went off and tried to use but without much success. I decided that we should make the decision to move independently from any actual job offers or other circumstances that I might develop. We should decide for our own reasons, I thought, not let market situations dictate our course. But we talked as if we were moving and I pursued the Texas job leads more aggressively than the JPL in-house ones which were, conversely, much easier to follow. There were the Johnson Space Center (again), various universities, optical and radio observatories, the National Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, and an institution that looked a lot like JPL on paper, but which was located in San Antonio, the Southwest Research Institute, SwRI. Viann’s sister Elizabeth and Sam Wilson, a friend from Baylor days, got me leads toward a job interview at Raytheon in Dallas as well.
Many places were non-PhD need not apply, and I spent time once again wondering if I should do something about that matter. Some wouldn’t talk relocation. Some didn't respond at all.
Since I wanted the decision first which would incidentally have the effect of cutting the job-hunting effort needed in half, I projected a date when I thought we could be ready for the discussion, Sunday February 28. I would just have turned 43.
The weeks and days leading up to this were filled with anxiety. People at church found out what we were considering and made various pleas or offers. The kids were, surprisingly to me, dead set against any change. Viannah insisted that we wouldn’t move while she was living at home. She was about to start High School. Katy was interested in new possibilities. John sided with Viannah out of loyalty. One Sunday there was a sermon on fasting. Somehow and uncharacteristically, we sat in the middle right in front of the preacher. He might have skipped this in his series, the preacher said, but he knew that people did fasting in circumstances like ours, I was right now for example, and so he had decided to preach on it after all.
The day February 28 didn’t go well. Viannah took a nap late in the afternoon and we had to delay the start of the family meeting and begin with her groggy. There had been a pre-meeting in which we had covered the parameters of the upcoming discussion. Katy had drawn pictures and maps of what our new life and home might be like.
We started with prayer and a summary then had a time when God was supposed to speak to us. I could only see a dark yellow-brown or magenta background with a hazy gray region in the middle. I was impressed that we should not move. I polled the room. Viann felt the same. All three kids thought we should move. It was as if we were all led to do what we didn’t want to, a very Protestant attitude toward such a problem. Viann was mad; in fact, she was mad at God and furious with me for putting us through all this anxiety and then having it turn out like this. I was unprepared for this possibility and felt faint, in fact nauseated. Everyone was in tears. The meeting broke off; everyone stormed away. It wasn’t a democracy so we would be staying put in California.
I tried to help by saying that I would follow up on the Texas opportunities anyway. Thus, even the possibility of minimizing the job work of the job search was gone.
Viann didn’t speak to me except functionally for days. She said things would eventually get better and that we would be friends again but it would take some time. Deciding on a move in advance of an actual job offer had been a disaster.
The interview at Raytheon, Dallas was in June, right in the middle of an SRTM crisis. From my hotel room and between interviews, I called in to a conference call to participate in a quality control meeting. The highlight of the long weekend was an all expense paid trip to the Mesquite Rodeo. It was flashier than the Rodeos at Henrietta and Taylor that I had attended as a kid, and was even conducted under an air-conditioned dome, but it was still a rodeo, and I could just see Viannah riding that fast horse to present the colors at the opening ceremonies. It would be worth the sacrifices of moving back here just for her to be able to do that.
Despite $1400 in new wardrobe, my heart wasn’t in the interview, I couldn’t be told in any way and we couldn’t talk about the real issues of the potential job since they were all classified by the government. I didn’t have a high enough clearance for this job and it would take a long time, months or even years, to get one. In a few weeks a cordial letter came in the mail, “You will not be receiving an offer at this time.”
This left SwRI. I spent the spring and summer trying to find someone there to even talk to but they were always too busy or out of town. This was a bad sign from the outset. There was interest on their part, but a position would have to be created for me. Finally, in September one of the high level managers of the department I would work in, James Cravens, was in Pasadena on JPL contract business. I met him at his hotel, the Pasadena Hilton.
We chatted for a couple of hours and sized each other up. Cravens was a big man, full of confidence and drive. Outside of work and the maintenance of his mistress, he had no life and he expected people working for him to behave similarly. The way the department worked was that they would bid engineering jobs as if nothing would ever go wrong, then would work 14 hour days for months to make their sacred commitments. I knew people like this at JPL and in industry and knew how to work with them, but I was not going to be one and I was not going to work in a department headed by one. He made it clear that people who worked 40 hour weeks were slackers and had been fired from SwRI.
I went home and told Viann that I wouldn’t work for that man, not while I had children at home anyway. The last embers of hope for going home to Texas went out; the related arguments mutated into other forms.
Indeed, the prior Spring Break, just a few weeks after the fateful February 28, Viann said, “Well! I’m going back a lot more often then!” packed up the kids in the van and went to Dallas, leaving me, the cats, and SRTM on our own for nine days. But it wasn’t really nine days because my GPS receivers were finally ready to deliver to SRTM and I would have to hand carry them to Florida.
Because SRTM had already been shipped to the Kennedy Space Center for integration with the Space Shuttle in preparation for a flight during the fall, Riley Duren, my subsystem engineer and I made the trip to Orlando, Cocoa Beach, and the Kennedy Space Center with my precious receivers as carry-on luggage. I decided that this delivery might end up involving considerable additional travel and signed up for the United Airlines frequent flier program. We flew out on the morning of April 8, went through badging and hazardous materials training, installed the receivers, put up GPS re-radiation equipment in the work facility, watched a Titan III launch from the roof, tested our receivers, and pronounced them working. I quit at 5 p.m. Thursday, used my KSC access to tour old launch pads in my rental car, then, back at the hotel went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. I returned to California on the Friday evening flight, passing over my wife and kids in Texas about 9 p.m. local time.
In further testing, one of the receivers failed to start. We ultimately diagnosed the problem as an open trace in the computer wiring due to an electronic board manufacturing flaw. The receivers were hand carried back to California. We made jumpers and other repairs, retested, and I took them back to Florida June 3 – 6, missing Viannah’s 14th birthday in the process.
When the results from failure analysis came back, we decided after much discussion that we needed to replace the whole computer board in at least one of the receivers. A local JPL workaholic, Sam Zingales was put in charge of the tiger team and, dragging me along, and got six weeks worth of fabrication and assembly work done in about ten days. Day and night we tested for reliability and in vacuum chambers. Finally, I delivered the repaired receiver to the next-step processing facility at KSC on July 14. I left soak testing with an hour to go in order to make my return flight which ended up being delayed until after midnight by airplane equipment problems, but the receivers passed that day, no more testing of any subsystem was scheduled before closeout, so my Project Element Manager, Ed Litty, declared it done and I returned home to pursue new job prospects in earnest.
All of these intertwined episodes were so painful and in so many respects that even this retelling, recorded two years later from notes has been depressing and has contributed to a sick day from work.
My first roommate at JPL, Tom Lockhart, was recruiting software people for the Space Interferometry Mission. Amidst bonuses and a promotion for exemplary service on SRTM, I moved south at JPL to work on a new set of problems with a new set of people. The divorce was a little messy. The GPS Systems Group still needed some things from me before I could leave for good. By November, it was all over except for the oft-delayed Shuttle flight itself. In February 2000, that flight took place, STS-99, and I performed my consulting duties in support rooms at JPL for the eleven-day earth-mapping mission. It was heralded as a snapshot of the earth at the dawn of the new millennium. In 2001, I received a NASA Exceptional Service Medal for this work.
With all this going on, it was hard for Katy to get on my calendar for anything. It was also hard for me to get on hers. For example, on April 18, I wrote in my journal that it was as hard to get on Katy’s calendar as it had been with Viannah. She had a birthday slumber party, a weekend trip with Girl Scouts to Lazy J Ranch, and a church youth retreat all in April. Nonetheless, we made and kept a date for May 1.
As the Pacific Coast Highway (California Highway One) leaves Los Angeles and Malibu to the north, it proceeds west along the east-west coastline, joining the Highway 101 Freeway at Oxnard and Camarillo. Just before getting there but just after the turnoff that begins the infamous Mulholland Highway, a valley is preserved as a state park, actually a “Wilderness Area,” La Jolla. This (like the Wreck of the Dominator) was one of the listings in the California Coastal Trails book Paul Lessard had given us upon hearing that we were moving to California in 1987. All the "La Jolla" I had seen before this had been in the San Diego area.
Katy and I left home after nine, went the urban route, via Santa Monica, and, finding Highway 1 busy with some sort of “memorial run” (about twelve runners accompanied by three or four police cars), we stopped for an early lunch at Jack In The Box in Malibu then drove the rest of the way up to the wilderness. As we passed Point Magu Park, Katy wanted to get out and try to climb the big sand dune beside the road. It was a fixture, perhaps 200-300 feet high up against a cliff. You nearly always saw people on it when passing. I said, “Let’s see if we feel like it when we go back by on the way home.” Katy was agreeable. At La Jolla Park, automated machines charged $2 to park “until sunset.” The machine even knew when “sunset” was. For today, for example, it said 7:45 p.m.
A clear trail passed rest rooms then went up the canyon to a waterfall. It wasn’t really climbing, but there was tricky hiking through the waterfall area and around its top, through a lightly wooded path and up to a lake surrounded by reeds. All the ducks on the lake were hidden as we passed. Just beyond this was a campground on a rise. As with most local campgrounds, one had to have a permit to camp here. This one was hike-in only. We were maybe two miles from any routine car access.
Though it was on a rise, all of the picnic tables in the campground were cleverly hidden from direct view. There had once been a water system. We found pipes along a road down below, but they were out of service now. It wasn’t clear whether this was permanent or temporary, but either way, right now it was not only “hike-in” it was also “bring all your own water.”
And, as always, “carry out all your own trash.”
There were choices of what to do from here. We could just go back down the trail to the car, or there were a couple of loops. One was in the valley, four miles, and another went up to an ocean overlook, eight miles. Getting more realistic as time went on, I was open to Katy’s suggestion of going just the four miles today.
We headed east through the grassy meadow. Scat was all over the trail. This reminded me of the joke of how to name dogs: Get, Scat, and Scram. Then you could say things like “Get Scat! Scram Get! Scat Scram!” Anyway, Katy was an expert on Scat, having just dissected an owl pellet in 6th grade, reconstructing some of the rodent that had been inside. The scat along this trail was mostly composed of gray hair, probably rodents ingested by predators: foxes or coyotes.
Technology was visible straight ahead across the valley. To our west, a large communications dish was parked, as they often are, pointed straight up. It was probably 60 or 80 feet in diameter, fairly large, and was surrounded by appropriate looking outbuildings. As we walked toward it, the dish moved! It pointed towards the northern horizon and over a period of ten or fifteen minutes, tracked across the sky, ending up to the south, just as if it were tracking a low-earth-orbit satellite on a descending node pass. When it was done, it went back up to its “parked” position and stayed there.
The further we went the less well-kept the trail became. I began to wonder if we would have to open gates to get back, in other words, if we had missed a turn and were straying into unintended properties.
As usual, I mused about how we should bring everyone on this hike. This land was very similar to the land where Viann grew up, except much cooler, at least today. The trail turned south near a boundary fence and joined a creek. Soon we faced the actual four-mile versus eight-mile choice, a fork in the road. Katy voted again for four miles, we turned left and down. This was a good choice, we were tired, out of shape, sore, and I (at least) was getting a blister. Our loop rejoined the campground trail above the waterfall and we were back at the car shortly after 4 p.m.
Final counts: lizards, more than three dozen; snakes, two; squirrel, one; birds, a bunch; tics, two. One jumped on my hand from an overhanging tree branch and I knocked him right off. Katy found the other on her ankle while bathing.
Driving away, we didn’t feel like tackling the sand dune after all. I had kind of expected this. It did look like fun, however. We should try it sometime.
Katy slept for several miles while I drove around the Oxnard end of the road and on up towards Lake Casitas and Ojai. I woke Katy up at the lake. We thought we might come camp here sometime and canoe while we were there. That would be good use of a rented canoe. Katy slept some more, through Ojai and down to Santa Paula where we finally found a McDonald’s for a pick-me-up. Was this the Santa Clara Valley that was "SCV" in radio jargon? The land was all in citrus and resorts, a beautiful valley along a river between mountain slopes.
Continuing east, we came to a surprise, the big orange observation tower at Six Flags Magic Mountain with only the very top visible above the hill ahead. The route followed a narrow, more winding part of the road but once at Magic Mountain, we were back out on the freeway and roaring back to the house where we arrived just before 7:00 p.m.
My SRTM receiver had been returned the evening before and, as before, a “loyal” employee would have gone in to work on it Saturday, but I wasn’t a make-work type, there wasn’t much to be done without requesting overtime from other people. In short, I was glad I had gone to La Jolla Valley with Katy this Saturday rather than spinning more wheels. It would be depressing enough on Monday, and indeed was on Sunday when I went in for the initial inspection.
Partly due to the competing priorities, this hike, like several others, hadn’t been planned well. We came back composing another list, mostly redundant with prior lists: Hat, Stick, Camera, and, in parentheses, because we had remembered this time but didn’t want to forget next time: Water, GPS, Map.
La Jolla Canyon with the Family
The trip with the whole family happened next, but not without trouble and not until July 18. Viannah, trying out her ability to obstruct activities she didn’t want to go on, put up resistance to the planned, pleasant Sunday afternoon stroll. We didn’t drive away from the house until after 2 p.m. and didn’t get to the $2 parking spots until about four.
This trip was most remarkable because Viannah wore her brand new steel-toed shoes and developed very painful blisters within about a quarter mile. Thinking it was just more adolescent resistance, Viannah and I stood at a small climb across the stream but before the waterfall and discussed going on or going back. Other hikers went by and minded their own business knowingly. I sent Viann, Katy and John on ahead. We finally reached a compromise where she waited there for us while we went on ahead to the campground. This left Viannah in that spot alone for about an hour, which made her mother nervous but she was fine. When we got back, she took off the brand new shoes and we saw the severe blisters and chafing. No wonder she had been so obstinate!
We drove away from the parking lot around 6:30 and, as before, had no energy for the big sand dune up the road. Instead, we went into Oxnard and had dinner at Henri’s, arriving back home after ten.
In the midst of the troubles at work, there wasn’t time for even a one-week vacation. We spent three days (Sunday afternoon through Wednesday mid-day, August 8-11) near the sea at Oceanside. We swam in the surf, went out in the little harbor on kayaks, visited the San Diego Zoo, had take-out pizza, and stayed up until all hours playing cards in our family-sized room. Meanwhile, back at JPL, a talk was being given holding my work on SRTM up as an example of how not to do things.
Can’t turn your back for a minute!
And, the inevitable happened. Roland Tabell, the Pasadena Covenant Church’s music minister of thirty-eight years (twelve for us) reached retirement age and retired August 29. It was at once inevitable and unthinkable. A huge musical party was held. Joan Reeve-Owens and Susan Smith coordinated. I played with the band. The coordinators all burned out on the preparations and had to take time off in the aftermath. The adjustments with the new interim leader were difficult for several months. We had known this was inevitable; still it was an additional dimension of the pain.
Only one more training event was held in 1999, a hike from home up to the picnic table along Luken’s Connection above La Canada, and back down to the High School. We left the house about 1:00 p.m. September 6.
The first part of the hike was quite familiar to me, down Ahlin and Oak to our access street, La Granada; up La Granada to Foothill where we were stopped by some people of oriental heritage looking for directions to recreational springs up in the mountains; then east on Foothill for two blocks then up the Edison easement. We rested at Olive and at the next street north, enjoying our apples, then started into the hills behind a flood control basin. No floods right now, we hiked a few miles through fine powdered dirt. Before the grade started into serious switchbacks, there was a short length of flat road paralleling the basin fence. The fence was broken at the back; anybody could walk right in to the posted area from behind. We passed this point, talking about the history of slavery, a discussion that ranged from the Greeks and Romans through Babylonians and Israelis, Kings, Lordship, Ownership, and the partial American Revolution that had to be completed, in some ways under the leadership of Lincoln. This led to further detail on the role of Texas in the Civil War, Andrew Johnson, Reconstruction, and the effects into our own times. Viann and I had both been in school systems during the times when they were being racially integrated, a hundred years after Lincoln.
Suddenly, a large bird, probably a hawk, lifted out of the tree arched over the road just ahead and something plopped to the ground like a large branch but with a wet thud. We came closer and it turned out to be a dead squirrel with the left front leg already eaten off! We had interrupted somebody’s meal!
The climb to the picnic table is long and steep. As always, Katy tired but did not slow. We took a long rest at the top of our route and started down the other side. She immediately noticed how much easier it was going down rather than up. The path was quite steep in places, horses would probably do best going up this route rather than coming down. In a while, we passed a civic water tank and dumped out into a hillside development. We excited the dog Misti guarding her yard near the top of the paved road. The owner had trouble preventing her from following us. It looked to Misti like we were having great adventures.
After several blocks, we came to a horse staging area; which is the top of a bridle trail that goes all the way down to Hahamongna Watershed Park across from the High School, which was our pick-up point for today. Once on this trail, we were back in territory very familiar to me since this was part of the North Hiking Route from work to home. We followed the stream on single trail; crossing back and forth in a few damp places, then came to another flood control basin, fenced again from the front but not the back. Following the trail to the right, we had soon crossed the latitude of Green Street and were on the gravel service road for the concrete drainage ditch. This first crossed a road at a corner of the block containing Paradise Canyon Elementary School where we stopped for another long rest. Katy went off looking for a public restroom. Little kids wandered by. I repacked my backpack, including a wrench we found on the ground here, and some cans for recycling.
For three or four years centered on this time, we played a game in the family “Slug Bug” picked up from the High School. Every time one of us would see a Volkswagen Beetle ("Bug"), we would make a fist and slug the arm of the person nearest. “Slug Bug!” The trick was to be the first to see them. Of course, there were ties, and special rules made up on the spot and certain bugs parked regularly in well traveled spots that were ruled off limits, but my advantage on this stretch was that I had been here before and knew where some hidden bugs were parked. I’d been waiting months for this opportunity.
The trail crossed the street again and paralled the drainage ditch down to a cul de sac where it went behind a row of houses, crossed another busy street, and after a block, started up a steep hill. At the top of the hill was the JPL perimeter fence where the trail separated JPL from a residential neighborhood for half a mile before the JPL west parking lot gave way to the Flintridge Riding Club (from which said parking lot was leased). Along there on the right, there was a house being remodeled and its yard re-landscaped. It had a bug parked in its back yard. Katy never saw this one coming, “Slug Bug!” Or the one at the riding club that had been parked there and used for storage for years, “Slug Bug!”
“OK, dad, that’s enough!”
As we reached the perimeter, we called home on the radio and arranged to be picked up where the trail comes out just by the Child Education Center adjacent to the High School. Viann took us back up into the neighborhood we’d just gone behind in order pick up John from Jeremy’s house. Jeremy used to live in our neighborhood but had moved here, across town. More slug bugs, and now John was in play too.
“Dad!” “Dad!”
We were home just after five, pretty beat. We showered and had a cookout.
It wasn’t just me having a rough professional year. Fall of 1999 was when two Mars missions were lost by JPL in close succession. Due to a navigation error caused by inattention attributed to under-funding, Mars Climate Orbiter entered the atmosphere on approach and was lost in September. This made a successful landing of its sister, Mars Polar Lander (south polar region) very important for JPL. December 3 was landing day, a Friday. We were given the opportunity to work four ten-hour days that week so we wouldn’t have to come in that day and fight media traffic. Some people wanted to go to Planetfest held by the Planetary Society over in Pasadena, but my friends and I wanted to be at JPL for this event. Where else could anybody possibly want to be but Ground Zero, we reasoned?
I wanted to be at JPL, but I wasn’t working on MPL, so I planned to come in for half a day, then hike home along the Arroyo past Gould Campground, up to the Gould power substation, across and up along a different trail to join Luken’s Connection up in the mountains and proceed to the same picnic table that Katy and I had just traversed going the other way. I had wanted to take this route for some time but, suspecting it might take over three hours, had waited for a suitable occasion like this.
Leaving the lab at 2:30, I hiked along, listening to mission audio on our amateur repeater. The lander had last been heard around lunchtime when it turned away to begin its entry sequence. Nothing was expected for a while. It gets dark early in December, and as I crossed the switchbacks of the trail nearing the top, I could see the Christmas lights and hear the holiday sounds coming up from below. Progress across the longitude of Highway 2, which went straight down through town, was agonizingly slow due to the back and forth nature of the switchbacks. About five years before, I had attempted another version of this hike, but had gotten lost and didn’t get home until nearly 9 p.m. This time I knew most of where I was going although I did get lost in an adjacent subdivision trying to follow posted directions when crossing Highway 2 at the Gould Substation. I also tended to take the wrong fork for a few hundred yards at every choice in the trail
It was totally dark except for a little stray light as I came down the back path in the fine dust, passing under the tree where the hawk and squirrel had been three months before. I could make out nearly no detail and was quite tired. It looked like I might be home by seven. Viann was upset that I wasn’t yet there to drive people around to various events that evening but didn’t call me on the radio.
Nothing was heard from the surface of Mars at the appropriate time, but it was said to be no big deal. Backup opportunities were expected. We would certainly hear something soon.
Soon never came. In late January, they essentially gave up. Two total losses. NASA would reel for years.
1-1-0
Be There!
Viann’s brother Michael had had many relationships in the twenty years I had known him, but most people don’t try to have children without some sort of more permanent commitment. His current, Mary Korman, had talked him into a civil marriage and the date was set for January 1, 2000 at their country home near Red Rock, Texas. This was advertised (incorrectly, as with most of the rest of the culture) as the beginning of the new century. While it was only the beginning of the end of the old century, the rollover from 1999 to 2000 was going to upset computers everywhere. People all over were stockpiling water, food, guns…. Some thought it would be foolish to travel, but I was working on music for and making plans to be at the wedding. I’d already said that I wasn’t missing any more Christmases due to work.
We loaded the car, put in radios, made last minute arrangements for the house and cats just in case, unplugged what was left, and headed for Texas. Viann’s sister Elizabeth gave her socks with “1-1-0, Be There!” written on them for Christmas. We made the usual side trips to Houston and Hillsboro. On the night of the new moon, December 22, a big fire started around Cerro Negro, part of my southern hiking route. It looked like our very house might be in danger for a while. La Canada was on CNN International! I called Maggie Smith across the street and found out that we hadn’t really been in danger. We learned later that the area was saved by a fortuitous confluence of the full moon for visibility and good helicopter flying weather that night. Helicopters, bulldozers, and fire trucks from all over the region beat the flames back and kept most structures in the area (across the freeway from us) safe.
Meanwhile, events progressed towards Michael’s wedding. It was to be formal only in the sense of signing county papers signifying that they would be acting married in the future. This was an expedient from the early days of Texas when ministers, judges and others authorized to perform weddings didn’t come through one's neighborhood very often. As the calendar advanced, we drove closer to Red Rock and the events planned for the day. We arrived Thursday and moved into our guest quarters. On New Year’s Eve, we got up early and went in to Bastrop to do laundry. Driving back and forth and, while parked on the farm outside of Red Rock, I listened on short wave to the NASA emergency net coordinated in part by my ham friends back at JPL. They worked Australia first where the year 2000 started up without a hitch early in our New Year’s Eve morning, then mid-day relayed through a station at Goddard Spaceflight Center to Spain with similar results. In the evening, I tuned around the ham bands to hear the various local nets, all prepared for disaster, none with much business. I made a few Straight Key Night contacts, making a rare use of my 80-meter band mobile whip. We were all going to stay up until local midnight to celebrate locally, but I wasn’t going to stay up until 2 a.m. to see what would happen at JPL. We had an important wedding the next morning.
That afternoon we sent Viannah and her cousin Andrew off to the store for some Dr. Peppers. Michael and Mary, vegan all, would not have such things on the place themselves. Coming back, Andrew was driving too fast on the dirt roads, met another truck at the top of the hill, swerved, and rolled his folk’s Suburban into a ditch. It was truly a miracle that he and Viannah got out essentially uninjured. Doug, Andrew’s dad, and I went out to look at the wreck. It was adjacent to Michael’s property, but we had heard nothing until Viannah and Andrew had walked up without the car. The roof of the Suburban was mashed in; the kids had climbed out the windows. We salvaged a few things, but there wasn’t much to be done. “It was nearly paid off,” Doug kept saying. He took care of the reports and salvage through the rest of the day. The Skemps were without a car. Michael loaned (and later sold) them his Saturn.
The wedding festivities of the next day all went off without any additional serious trouble. Visitors came out, mostly from Austin. One rode his bicycle. Rob Aanstoos thought it was a long drive, but mused that it was nothing compared to the trip we had made.
Darn right!
We traveled the long road back home on January 2 and 3 and began life in the new era, the one in which years would never again start with “19.”
The wreck threw social stresses onto the rest of
the events
of that trip and made an indelible mark on this narrative, but I was
truly
grateful just to enter the year 2000 still having two daughters.