Category: random

It’s very difficult to sit at the news desk, hundreds of mile away and witness at a distance, events that effect friends and former neighbors in a place that is all too familiar to me. I don’t keep my love for all things Del Norte County, California, a secret — preferring instead to wear my upbringing like a heart on my sleeve.

To that end, and wishing to somehow emulate the late George Merriman, who spent much of his journalistic life writing of the county on a first-hand basis, I’ve pulled together as much information as I could on the recent tsunami to strike the coast of Del Norte. All I can do is imagine — for I’m feeling disconnected from the land and sea that I love as much as I do the high desert in which I now live.

Fishermen who had purposely put-out to sea before a tsunami hit Crescent City’s harbor, landed small loads of crab as the curious came to survey the damage and cleanup crews readied their gear.  And while those cleanup crews assembled, divers could not go into the water and work boats could not maneuver until the  surges were completely done.

The damage came as a series of powerful surges pounded the harbor throughout the day and into the night.  Those waves funneled into the harbor, creating fast-moving currents that shattered docks, wrested boats from their moorings and brought possible ruin to an already struggling economy. 

And as gawker’s looked on and fishermen plied their trade, California’s Governor Jerry Brown issued a state of emergency for Del Norte, Humboldt, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties due to the tsunami. State officials conferring with the U.S. Coast Guard say the damage is estimated to be at least $50 million along the entire coast of California.

About 80 percent of  Crescent City’s docks once sheltering 140 boats, are gone. At least eight vessels sunk, and one damaged while an unmanned sailboat sucked out of the harbor ran aground, first on the north jetty, then later further down the coast.

University of Nevada-Reno seismologists say the swells that swept into Crescent City were the highest to hit the U.S., at jus’ over eight-feet. Furthermore experts with the U.S. Geological Survey say the huge shake, caused by a shift in the tectonic plates deep underwater, has thrown the earth off its axis point by at least 10 centimeters, or 4 inches, shortening our days by about 1.26 millionths of a second.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency says it has upgraded the magnitude of the catastrophic earthquake to 9.0, up from an 8.8. However the U.S.G.S. measures the quake at magnitude 8.9, a number that has remained unchanged.

In 1964, a massive tsunami with waves estimated to be more than 20 feet in height, swept over Crescent City, taking with it 11 lives, the only people reported to have ever died directly due to a tsunami in the 48 continuous states. Unfortunately, history has a sad way of repeating itself.

Three people were swept out to sea while trying to take photos of the tsunami at the mouth of the Klamath River. Two were able to swim back to shore, however  25-year-old Dustin Weber, formerly of Bend, Oregon, remains missing and is presumed drown. Weber had jus’ moved to Klamath.

Meanwhile across the sea in Japan, the government has doubled the number of soldiers deployed in that country’s earthquake aid effort to 100,000 as it tries to help millions of survivors left without drinking water and electricity. One official says the death toll will likely exceed 10,000 in one state alone along the pulverized northeastern coast.

Finally, the threat of multiple meltdowns fuels a growing nuclear crisis in the earthquake and tsunami-devastated region in northeast Japan. A top official says one partial meltdown is probably already happening and operators are frantically trying to keep temperatures down at the power plant’s other units and prevent the disaster from growing even worse.

Clark County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Min Chang and Keon Park, indicted in January on one count each of murder with use of a deadly weapon, armed robbery, first-degree kidnapping with use of a deadly weapon and two counts of conspiracy in the death of Young Park. Keon Park is not related to the victim.

Young Park’s body was discovered by hikers December 23 near Kingman Wash, about a mile from the O’Callaghan-Tillman Memorial Bridge. Authorities say the two men strangled and beat her with a wrench and then burned her body on the Arizona side of the Hoover Dam.

Young Park ran an escort business and brothel out of a home near Rainbow Boulevard and Desert Inn Road in Las Vegas. She reportedly owed Chang about $6,000 and Keon Park around $3,000.

Chang and Keon Park have confessed to their roles in the slaying.

We were attending the high school graduation of one of my cousins when I saw a person I knew – but never expected to see again. The ceremony had jus’ concluded and people were milling about both inside and outside the gym.

My folks were standing on the grass in front of the building talking with my aunt and uncle. I was standing, looking into the building through the large window of the gym’s foyer, people watching.

Suddenly, a girl steps up to other side of the window and smiles at me. I recognized her immediately as Barbara Billy, somebody I had gone to Margaret Keating School with earlier in the year. She had suddenly moved and no one was certain where too.

I smiled back as I placed my right hand on the window in front of me.

Barbara placed her right hand directly where my hand was located. I said, “Hi,” even though I knew she couldn’t hear me and I saw her lips move saying “Hi,” back.

Then her mom appeared from the crowd of people, took her by the hand and pulled her back into the gym. She waved at me as she vanished from sight.

Barbara would return to Margaret Keating School when we were both in 7^th grade. And while we never spoke of seeing one another that evening, I never forgot how touching that moment felt to me.

Colonel Robert “Bud” Laux and Dad served in France together while in the U.S. Air Force. My parents liked and trusted Bud so much that they asked him to be one of my God-parents.

Bud, as I knew him, flew a number of bombing missions in Europe during World War II. He was shot down by the Luftwaffe and survived with the help of the French Résistance.

He also served with famed Air Force General, Curtis LeMay, who would eventually also be asked to act as god-father to me. This happen shortly after we returned from France in 1962.

As things went, I never had a relationship with General LeMay. And other than a couple of photographs of me sitting on his knee while living at Mather AFB, I didn’t have contact with the man as I grew into adulthood.

However I had a lot of contact with Bud. We wrote each other yearly, sent Christmas cards and he’d send me a birthday card each July.

One year I asked him to tell me about being shot down over occupied France. He wrote back, sending me an autographed 8 x 10 glossy black and white picture of the type of aircraft he was flying at the time.

After I joined the Air Force, Bud dropped in for a visit at Brooks AFB, where I was stationed for tech-school. He had jus’ flown in, helping piggy-back the space shuttle Columbia to Kelly AFB. Later he would surprise my commanding officer at Warren AFB, by asking for me and taking me to lunch at the Officers Club, a treat for most any enlisted man or woman.

Unfortunately, only one letter remains from the notes and cards he sent me over the years. But as fortune would have it – that’s the one letter I’ve managed to keep safe, that and the picture he sent.

Bud died in December 1980.

“You’d best take a look at the obituary,” my bride said as she held out the section of the Reno Gazette-Journal for me to read.

I looked up from sharpening my knife with a half smirk on my face and asked, “Why is my name in it?”

The look in my brides face told me she was serious. I reached up and took the extended newspaper in hand and quickly scanned each name on the page.

Suddenly my eyes stopped searching. I had discovered the recognizable name of my friend.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a ..,” my voice trailed off as I read the obituary.

“When’s the last time you spoke with Sam?” my bride asked.

I fumbled with the paper for a moment in an attempt to buy time to regain my composure.

“It’s been a couple of years,” I answered, adding, “Jus’ before he headed for Europe. I didn’t think he’d follow through with it though.”

*******

Again my voice trailed off as I re-read the obituary and faded into a memory of  KOZZ’s receptionist’s voice coming over the intercom to the always busy promotions office, “You have a call on-line seven.”

I pushed back from my computer dreading another interruption as the deadline for the proposal I was working on loomed closer and picked up the receiver and pushed the button next to the red flashing light.

“Hey, hey,” came a voice over the line.

I respond as I had hundreds of times before, “Hey.”

It was my friend Sam.

“How’re you doing?” I asked Sam.

“I’m fine,” he answered, “I’m going to go to Europe to bum around.”

“Say what?” I asked with surprise.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m going to Europe,”

There was momentary pause.

“Are you still there?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” I responded, “I’m jus’ surprised is all.”

Then I thought to ask, “How are you going to get there?”

Sam laughed, answering “I’m going fly.”

I knew that I had asked a dumb question or had at the very least phrased it incorrectly.

“No,” I shot back, “I mean how are you going to pay for it?”

I knew Sam always had money difficulties.

Sam answered, “I’ve got my income tax check and I’ll buy myself a one way ticket.”

“A one way ticket?” I asked.

“Yeah, I don’t plan on coming back,” Sam continued.

I thought this over for a few seconds before asking “How’ll you live?”

Sam had a smile in his voice as he replied, “I’ll be a day laborer.”

There was a long pause between the two of us.

Then Sam added; “Besides I still have a problem with junk,” he paused, “I can’t quit fixing.”

I just sat there and listened as Sam laid out his plans for his two-year European vacation as he was calling it.

“And finally,” Sam concluded, “when I’ve seen and done it all — I’ll pull a Jim Morrison.”

I recalled how Jim Morrison had died.

He was the lead singer of the group, “The Doors.” He had money and plenty of women, yet he died from a heroin overdose.

I sighed heavily as I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Sam won’t go through with it,” I remembered thinking. After a few more minutes of conversation we said good-bye to each other and I hung up the telephone and returned to the proposal waiting for me on my computer.

*******

“That was two years ago,” I said as I continued to reflect.

“What was?” my bride asked.

“It was two years ago that he said he was going to pull a Jim Morrison,” I answered.

She frowned, “So?”

“The obituary says Sam died in his sleep while on vacation in Paris, France,” I replied as I picked up the paper again.

She shook her head, “I still don’t get it.”

“That’s how Jim Morrison of the Doors died — in Paris — in his sleep,” I said.

“I didn’t know that, “she replied.

As I got up from the table as I picked up my coffee mug and stepped outside through the sliding glass door. I looked southward towards the remnants of Wedekind City and felt the hot tears start to flow.

There’s nothing worse than having a good message, but garbling it up due to poor wording and bad facts. Case in point: the ongoing federal budget battle and the war of words between Senator Harry Reid and conservative commentators.

It started with Reid, who bragged, “The National Endowment for the Humanities is the reason we in Northern Nevada have, every January, the cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year, would not exist.”

Huh? They must have evaporated into thin air according to Harry.

Of course, that isn’t really what Reid meant when he was defending the Democrat’s funding of NEH. He was attempting to say — he made Elko’s National Cowboy Festival possible by getting organizers the needed money.

Reid failed to take into consideration those tens of thousands of people would have attended the festival, regardless of federal funding. Cowboy poetry is a very big deal to Nevadans, and I’ve had the pleasure of rubbing elbows with Nevada cowboy poet’s and the people who attend gatherings from all over the state.

The situation would probably gone unnoticed in Nevada — as much of what Harry says goes unnoticed — had it not been for the bombastic voicing of ridicule Mark Levin laid on the subject. His comments during his nightly radio rantings ticked a good many Northern Nevadan’s off and quickly.

“Is there a Broke Mountain up there?” Levin asked. “What kind of mountain range do they have up there, Mr. Producer? Brokeback Mountain — is that the name of the mountain in Northern Nevada there, where they have the cowboy poetry festival?”

Brokeback Mountain? Mark was referring to the 2005 movie and assuming everyone in Northern Nevada who enjoys the tradition of cowboy poetry is homosexual.

Not really — Levin was trying to make the point that the federal government shouldn’t be paying for the Elko festival. He later did manage to say exactly that, but the damage was already done.

From my point of view, they both screwed up. And while I’m used to the Senator’s mouthful of goofy words, I cannot condone Mr. Levin’s generalization of cowboy poets and the life-style that is springs from.

Besides it’s worth noting — the movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” is set in Wyoming — not Nevada.

Later afternoon, March 4, I was there when they called it off, stood on the lip of that old mine shaft, peering down into the darkness where a man still breathed but couldn’t be saved. The wind came in low, whispering through the sage, and the sun had that dull afternoon glare, turning everything the color of old bones.

The call came from an abandoned shaft from the Murphy’s Mine Complex, forgotten but still waiting. It had been there since 1895, a wound cut deep into the rock, left to fester under the desert sky.

That day, it took another. His name was Devin Westenskow.

A driller by trade. A young man with his whole life ahead of him.

He’d been out there with a couple of friends, looking for adventure, maybe just killing time. One step too far, the ground gave way beneath him, a straight drop—one hundred and ninety feet.

We sent a camera down first. The image flickered, grainy and unsteady, but it showed us enough.

He was alive. Barely.

Pinned under something, his breath slow, his body broken. He moved a hand once, like a man reaching out from a dream, but that was all.

The first team went down slowly and carefully. The walls crumbled around them like old bread, and it didn’t take much for the whole thing to begin collapsing.

One of our guys took a rock to the helmet, splitting it clean. Another few inches, and we’d have been pulling him up dead instead of just rattled.

We tried again.

But the mountain had decided, and there was no arguing with it. Every attempt brought more rock crashing down.

The risk was too high. One more try, and we wouldn’t just be leaving one man down there.

I was there when they made the call, heard it over the radio, and felt it settle in my gut.

We weren’t getting him out. Not alive.

A priest came. Said the words while we stood above, helpless.

Down there, in the dark, his breathing slowed. Then it stopped.

At 12:30 p.m., the coroner called it. That was it.

His family was there. They took it hard but took it well. The one saving grace in all of it was Devin’s family.

His grandmother said, “The family feels that if Jesus Christ was buried in a tomb, it’s good enough for Devin.”

I don’t know if that was faith talking or just a family trying to find some peace in the worst of it. That kind of grace is rare and deserves consideration.

We sealed the shaft not long after. Poured concrete over it like a gravestone no one would ever visit.

But there are others out there—hundreds, maybe more. Waiting.

I think about that day, the dust settling after we left, the silence that stretched long into the afternoon. About the man we couldn’t save.

The land is old out here, older than the bones buried beneath it. And sometimes it keeps the dead.

That was rough land and unforgiving, and men who wandered too far off the beaten path sometimes paid the price for it. The high desert of Nevada had seen its share of lost souls, men who strayed too deep into the hills or had the bad luck to take a wrong step where the old-timers had long quit walking.

That was how it went for Devin Westenskow. Out in the backcountry with friends, looking over the bones of the past, he stepped into the wrong place—a vent shaft to an abandoned mine—and fell nearly two hundred feet. He survived the fall but took a hard knock to the head. He lingered a while, then died before the sun had set.

What happened next was a damn shame, not because men didn’t try to help, but because no one seemed too keen on telling the truth about it.
Don’t fault the rescuers.

They went down the shaft and took a chance, but rock and debris started falling, making it impossible to reach him. Hard men, willing men, but no fool ever lived long in the desert, and they knew when to call it quits.

That’s not where the blame falls. The real trouble started when the powers that be—Pershing County and the Bureau of Land Management—failed to say as much.

Instead, what made the news was a nightmare: a man left to die while others stood by. That wasn’t true, but once a story like that gets rolling, it’s like a rockslide—you’re not stopping it.

The world heard only the worst of it, and before long, Nevada had the reputation of a place where men weren’t worth saving. That wasn’t the case.

If only the authorities had spoken up sooner. If they had made it clear that rescue tried and Devin had passed before the first story hit the newswire, the tale might have been different. Instead, they let the silence stretch too long, and the world filled in the gaps on its own.

Maybe the men in charge will learn something from this. Perhaps they won’t.

But out in the Nevada backcountry, where the land is old, mines run deep, and the truth has a way of getting buried, too.

As I recall, I was playing in the large field across the street from our home. That’s when I saw the dark blue sedan with the yellow print on its doors pull in to the drive way.

At first I simply stood still, watching the car back out of the drive and alongside the curb. I knew in an instant why the car was there.

Without hesitation, I took off running as fast as I could towards the house. I hit the sidewalk still sprinting, but somehow managed to lose my footing.

I slammed into the asphalt on my knees and elbows, rolling head-over-heel and back up onto my feet to continue running.

Though I was suffering from road rash now, I didn’t let my pain stop me. I wasn’t going to allow a few little scratches keep me from meeting that car.

In my excitement I leaped up and wrapped my gangly legs around Dad’s waist, who was finally returning home from another tour in Vietnam. Seconds later, Adam, Deirdre and Marcy raced from the house, followed by Mom.

“Okay,” Mom said loudly, “Let your dad go and let him get in the door before you hug and kiss him to death,” as she pried us kid’s off our father and led him towards the front door.

A bill requiring garages to check the tire pressures on vehicles that come into the shop for repair has cleared the Nevada Senate. SB144 was approved along mostly party lines, with Republican Senator Joe Hardy of Boulder City voting with Democrats for passage.

Under the bill, repair shops would need to fill tires according to manufacturer guidelines. Failure to comply would be a misdemeanor. The bill now goes to the Assembly.

And I thought Nevada lawmakers vowed to create more jobs — instead they find ways to add more fees to small businesses.

The passing of my old man fairly well wrecked me for half-a-year. At the time I felt as if I were the only one in my immediate family that cared about his death.

And worse still, I had not yet learned how to talk about what it was I was feeling. Many nights and early mornings I found myself awake thinking about Dad.

Writing was my only outlet.

Jolted awake, I laid there in the stillness of the moon glow soaked room and listened to my bride breath. As I listened and she breathed, I reflected on the dream that caused me wake up.

It left me bewildered at the very least. Why had Dad had returned to me?

 I could see his shadow and then the outline of his body as he stood partly hidden from sight.

“Damn it,” I had said in my dream.

The storage shed was a mess and it had caused me anger. And I knew I would have to clean it up.

Then I looked up from the mess.

At first I didn’t notice the old man standing some twenty feet from me. I was too busy reacting in disgust to the precarious and disorderly stacking of filing boxes that seemed haphazardly strewn about the floor and along the wall.

At first he was just a silhouette, looming in back of the shed, saying nothing — doing nothing.  Dad jus’ stood there and I couldn’t speak; the surprise was so over whelming.

Mary rolled over onto her right side facing away from me. And continued to I lay there — quietly listening to her breathing as it grew ever increasingly rhythmic.

I reflected back on the dream and how it’s reality work me from a sound sleep, all the while wondering, “What does it mean?”

Laying there, a tear silently traced a salty line from the corner of my eye to the pillow that cradled my head. I realized Dad was still dead and it was only a dream.

I closed my eyes and slowly drifted back into sleep all the while thinking, “I sure do miss you, Dad.”