Ernie and the Pilot

      Missing.

     It made the radio headlines for a day or two, probably some television news stories, maybe a newspaper or two.  A private pilot in the Colorado Springs area took off from a small airport popular with small plane owners, Meadow Lake Airport or something similar. His destination was somewhere in Nebraska.  He was flying a small experimental plane, probably one he built himself.  He failed to arrive at his destination.

     The story had a brief follow up three or four weeks later.  A rancher found plane and pilot in his pasture some forty or fifty miles east of his departure airport.  The rancher had been on a routine cattle check when he came upon the wreckage.  The FAA or NTSB was investigating.

      The story would have crawled under the rocks and yucca plants of my memory and composted into the landscape, but for a turn of events.

      The Lutheran churches in our small communities are served usually by “supply” pastors (euphemism for guys who aren’t too good at their job, maybe down on their luck, maybe looking for a short-term job to get them to the point they can retire) or young folks fresh out of seminary.  The small churches can count on a different pastor every two or three years. 

      The old guys go on to retire or find another interim job somewhere.  The enthusiastic young guys and gals who are good at their job get gobbled up by the big churches somewhere who can afford to pay a decent salary.  The not-so-good ones may stay around for up to three years before the congregational bell-cow (or surly bull so as not to be sexist) and followers raise enough hell with synod authorities to get them sent on their way.

      Thus, Ernie came to town, fresh out of college, young, energetic, friendly, engaging, popular, with a young wife to match.  She taught music in a neighboring school district.  They had no children at that time.

      They both were from somewhere north and east.  We said they had a Wisconsin accent.  They said words like “soary” (“sorry” that rhymed with “soar”) instead of “sarey” (to rhyme with “are), the correct way to say it (in our Eastern Colorado opinion).  They almost said “aboot”, meaning “about”, but not bad enough for us to accuse them of being Canadian.  It didn’t really matter.  We loved them anyway.

       They could have been from North Dakota, too, but they were probably from Minnesota.  That was fine.  After all, we have roots in Minnesota, too, “ya know.”

      Mom or probably the Goodwife decided it would be a good idea to invite Ernie and Wife out to the farm on a weekday evening for a barbecue.  I think the menu was Japanese, including teriyaki. 

      This time, chicken accompanied thin-sliced beef on the charcoal grill.  I was young in deed and not experienced in grilling chicken.  I knew it had to be done well to insure no one suffered from salmonella.  Not a chance.  These bite-sized pieces could have been substituted for the ball on the rubber string on a paddleball toy.  It would have bounced as well or better.

     Pastor Ernie was of good Scandinavian extract and didn’t allow his occupation to interfere with sipping a beer or two before and during supper, so it was a pleasant evening, vulcanized chicken notwithstanding.  The beef, fried rice, and cucumber salad were palatable.          

      A good storyteller, Ernie got started on telling us of a very recent experience he had had.  Among his flock was an undertaker. His father was a competent ambitious man who bought a small funeral home in a neighboring town.  He purchased the Limon facility and relocated.  He also bought a few other homes down I-70, as far as Burlington.  He closed them all except the ones in Limon and Burlington.  He was the only funeral facility in much of Eastern Colorado, Brush being the closest one to the north and Lajunta or somewhere to the south.

     The funeral director was a stalwart member of our Lutheran church, as was his son, who took over for his father. The son became a good friend and supporter of Pastor Ernie.  The day came when the son had two or three funerals on the same afternoon, all out somewhere in the big outback.  His staff was stretched thin.  He needed someone to answer the phone at the main headquarters in Limon.  He prevailed upon friend Ernie.

     Ernie could sit in the funeral home office and work on his sermon or do whatever pastors do when not visiting or counseling parishioners, while maintaining church office hours.  The telephone would probably not even ring.  Sometimes, three or four days go by without a call, the mortician assured Ernie.  Somebody would be back in the office in three or four hours.  Shouldn’t be any problem.

     Ernie acquiesced.  He hadn’t sat in the funeral home office chair long enough to warm the seat cushion when the phone really did ring.  The El Paso Sheriff’s Office was on the line.  They needed the coroner or his representative at an airplane crash site as soon as possible.  (In rural areas, the mortician often doubles as the coroner.)  Ernie tried to explain the situation.  He had no experience, was only the answering service, couldn’t do any investigation.  The Sheriff insisted.  There wasn’t much investigating involved, but there was a body to be removed.  You are the representative.  Get out here, now.

      What to do?  Ernie turned to another parishioner and friend, Tom.  Tom came to town as the manager of the local Co-op Grain Elevator.  When it folded, he opened his own grain brokerage.  Later, he would run a used car business and oversee a successful mechanic shop associated with the car business.

     A young lady came to town to teach grade school.  She was a lifelong Lutheran.  She joined the local congregation soon after moving to town.  When she and Tom met and hit it off, he joined the church, too.  They became pillars of the institution.

     Tom, like Ernie, tried to find a way out, but friendship and duty overrode his protestations.  Together they dug out a spare hearse.  They equipped themselves as well as they could in their inexperience, taking gowns, gloves, masks, body bag, anything they could think of they might need.  This was the days before cell phones.  No way to call the mortician and ask for advice.

     It was also the time before GPS.  Following the Sheriff’s instructions, they headed west on 24 until they came to the deputy’s car.  He directed them down a county road to another deputy, who opened a gate and pointed the general direction to follow.  Ernie and Tom bounced the hearse across the prairie into endless grass and sky.  Dodging creeks and soapweed, eventually they saw yet a third police car, sitting on a hill upwind of the crash site. Lights flashing, the deputy and his car kept bovine and avian gawkers from the wreckage.

     As they approached, the deputy got out of the running air-conditioned car.  Tom and Ernie approached the deputy to find out what the deal was.  He pointed and said the body was in the mangled airplane downwind below.

     “What do we do?”

     “Get the body out of there.”

      “Can you help us out here?  Neither of us has any experience in this sort of thing, being a pastor and a businessman.”

     “Your problem.”  Just like the hard-boiled New York cop on television.  The doughnut eating one.

     As they approached the wreckage, they understood the deputy’s upwind distance from the site.  Donning robes, gloves, masks, preparing the body bag, they procrastinated as long as they could.  Nobody came to their rescue.  The deputy braved the hot day, standing outside of his air-conditioned car as he watched from a scent-free distance.

       The face masks may have protected them from infestation, but did nothing to reduce the stench.  Eventually they set about maneuvering the decomposed remains out of openings in the mangled metal.  They knew nothing of odor reducing sprays.  They brought no tools.  With whatever pieces they could find in the wreckage they managed to get the remains out of the wreckage and into the body bag and the bag loaded into the hearse.  The body bag contained the odor fairly well.

      Ernie spared us the details.  We were after all enjoying a meal and its aftermath.  One of the things that made him a good preacher was his ability to tell a story.  Our horrified imaginations supplied the missing details.

      The boys retraced their route across pasture, down county road, along Highway 24 and back to the funeral home.  Sure enough, a staff member was there to hear their story and take over from there.  Our boys returned home to strip, throw their clothes in the laundry, jump into the shower to try to wash away the day’s events from their memories as well as their bodies.  Supper didn’t really beckon to either man.

      All this Ernie told with a glint of humor and amusement, but it was apparent that both qualities came after the event, certainly not during it.  We had listened attentively, our imaginations titillated by those missing details.   The story wasn’t quite done.

      About a week or two later, the mortician called Ernie with an invitation:   “Care to ride along to Brush with me?  Your pilot friend has an appointment with the crematorium.”

     Ernie had decided during the gruesome part of the adventure that if the funeral director ever called again, he was busy, couldn’t possibly get away. He stuck to his guns and declined the invitation.  The coroner / funeral director supplied a bit more information.  An autopsy revealed that the deceased pilot had suffered a heart attack, was probably dead at the time the plane impacted the ground.  At most, the crash administered the coup de grace, but was not the main cause of death.  Case closed.  No need for the FAA to investigate further.

    The story over, we went on to other subjects. Our pleasant evening came to an end.  Ernie stuck around another year.  The school where his wife taught closed its doors for good.  Ernie got an offer for a much better job.  Time marched on.  We got a Christmas card or two.

    Now, we remember Ernie not as that young Lutheran preacher, but as the man whom fortune crowned Coroner-for-a-Day.”

    

    

                    

        

Weather

      Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.  

      Perhaps we don’t do anything about it.  But we do lots because of it. 

     I put in 30 Colorado Blue Spruce trees this past week, all replacements for last year’s failures.  It seemed a good time to do it in light of the predicted weekend blizzard. 

       I scattered some grass seed on a couple of bare spots in the yard.  I covered the seed with a light covering of composted soil to keep the seed in place until it could get covered up with snow.

      I put out a couple of rows of radish / carrot seed mix in hopes that the forecasted snow would sprout them and have me crunching a radish or two come June.  In other years, I would have buried some pea seeds, too, but other projects demanded my time and my diminished supply of energy. 

     The asparagus patch beckoned.  It had a good mowing a couple of weeks ago.  The last of the snow bank had only just melted off the first of the week. A few clod eruptions here and there signaled its intent to burst forth.  Just in time to get nailed by the incoming weather.

    Wait!  Here and there was a spear sticking out of the ground.  My inability to tell green from brown made it a difficult task, distinguishing a fresh new spear from the stub of a stalk from last year’s crop, but I grabbed a pan and knife and gathered enough for a small batch.  I cut anything I could see sticking above the surface, even the smallest heads, knowing the cold temperatures would turn the crisp green spears to black jelly and set the crop back to day one.  My lunch was a reward for my labor.  

     If the weather reports were right, I had to choose whether to leave Friday afternoon, or wait until Monday to return to my home near the front range.  Saturday and Sunday travel would be difficult to impossible.

      Parts for my broken down tractor have yet to arrive.  I couldn’t hole up in the shop and work on the tractor during the blizzard.   I had an appointment or two scheduled for Monday.  I left Friday afternoon.

     The Goodwife was expected in Denver Saturday morning to help make corsages or some other creative flower thing.  I told her she should call her friend and tell her she wasn’t coming.  Heeding my advice as usual, she set off about 8:30.  It was raining, not snowing.

     About 45 minutes later, she called saying she was turning around.  The further south she went, the worse the weather got, some snow accumulating and slush on the roads. 

     A few hours later, we still had no accumulation, but apparently Denver had quite a little, causing airport cancellations and delays.

      My good farm neighbor called in the afternoon to report an overnight rain of maybe as much as an inch followed by about ten inches of heavy wet snow through the day, with little wind.  The moisture didn’t turn to snow till after daybreak, he said.  The trees were threatening to break under the weight of the snow that no wind blew off.  

     

      There’s probably a reason no one tries to do anything about the weather.  I remember a dry spell in the mid-sixties.  There was a guy called himself Doctor Crick, or something similar.  He was trying to drum up support from the farmers, promising he could make it rain.  He shot cannons of something, silver iodide maybe, into the clouds.

     He put on a few demonstrations, I think, though I never attended one.  Then came May or June of 1965.  Heavy rains fell.  Floods wreaked havoc.  Highways and roads washed away on mountain and plain.  Cabin Creek all but disappeared.  Deer Trail silted in.  Concrete pillars set up to support I-70 across creeks and other roads and railroad tracks east of Denver washed away.  Rumors of motorists and their cars vanishing in the deluge persisted.

     Doctor Crick must have washed away, too.  I never heard of him again.  I always suspected he vamoosed in fear of being held liable for the flood damage.  Maybe he realized nobody needed his services and left the country.

    More recently, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, some government body or other was conducting “weather modification" experiments.  They were flying specially equipped aircraft  around thunderstorms that threatened to become severe.  They had, or thought they had, evidence that silver iodide reduced the severity of a storm and maybe prevented tornadoes and hail from forming all the while inducing kinder, gentler rain.

      It also was a dry time on the plains.  Far from seeing cloud seeding as a beneficial rainmaker, some of the local farmers (Western Kansas farmers that is) were sure the cloud seeding was having the opposite effect.  The proof was watching a thunderhead approach from the west and either blow over in a dry dusty blast of wind or skip around to the north or south while dropping nary a drop of moisture.

     That never happened before silver iodide treatments began, they implied.  They got mad, held meetings, made demands.  Farm Bureau got involved.  Other insurers were quite interested in the experiment, hoping the treatments would reduce hail losses.  Farm Bureau sided with its members.

     Initially, the scientists tried to explain what they were trying to do, but ultimately the airplanes quietly withdrew, going west and south to friendlier territory.  Mother Nature returned to unrestrained flinging of wind gusts and lightning bolts.  If there were results of the weather modification, I never heard what they were.  Interest waned with the airplanes’ departure.

    There was one interesting tangent from the furor.  In the wake of the cloud seeding brouhaha, many of the locals signed on to the “chemtrail” conspiracy theory.  The theory claimed that high altitude aircraft were spraying the country with dangerous chemicals.  The proof was the contrails left by the high-flying jets.  They are not passenger or military aircraft but tankers spraying deadly chemicals over the populace. 

     Who is behind the poison sprayers?  Some theorists insist it is our very own government, while one local family insists China is behind it all in an attempt to do irreparable harm to our country.  Local gossip says the family stays indoors as much as possible on days when contrails are abundant.            

     The movement reached its peak (maybe) when a small group rented a film and hired the local theater to show it.  Ads and letters to the editor in the local paper urged us all to attend.  I didn’t attend.

      Living in a small community, I have learned, or tried to learn, to keep a closed mouth when such controversial subjects arise.  (Never discuss religion or politics with your friends, or they won’t be your friends for very long.)  Many of my rural friends did attend the movie and subsequent meetings. One of them was a Certified Flight Instructor who gave me a couple of flight lessons when I was learning to fly.

      Mark Twain or Charles Dudley Warner or whoever came up with the observation that folks complain but never do anything about the weather, correctly characterized human nature.  Sometimes, there is a good reason for such human behavior.

      It’s probably not a good idea to try to do something about the weather, unless you like being the cause of controversy.    

     

     

By the Time We Got to Phoenix

     Fickle.

     Baseball fans.

    By the time they disposed of Tulo in mid-season 2015, the Rockies were already out of it.  Their traditional July slump had been preceded by a May-June slump.  They had a better chance of buying the winning lottery ticket than they did of making the playoffs.  My interest waned.

     The Tulo deal was greeted with tears, cheers, and jeers.  I indulged in the latter.  Did I want to go see a ballgame?  Not just no. . . .

     I had put up with enough from the Monforts.  After all, I had gone to school in Greeley for four years.  (If you are not familiar with Greeley, the Monforts had feedlots just beyond the city’s northern border in the 1960’s.  Any northerly breeze left the city smelling like a feedlot, cow poop scented with rotted corn, now and then with a strong ammoniac tinge, usually with a healthy dose of sulfur.  When confronted about their responsibility for Greeley’s trademark stench, Mrs. Monfort famously said it smelled like money to her.)

      That’s what the Tulo deal was all about, money.  Go to a ballgame?  I refused to contribute one red cent to something that might end up in a Monfort pocket.

     The whole deal smacked of the old Kansas City A’s owned by Charlie Finley, a team many called the Yankees’ quadruple-A club, since the top stars inevitably got traded to the Yankees for cash.  The Rockies are much more free and easy with their favors, helping Milwaukee, then Cleveland, now Toronto with their disposal of stars for cash program.

     Wouldn’t this nonsense stop when we finally got rid of Dealin’ Dan O’Dowd, I asked?  Apparently not.  When and where would Cargo go? I asked.

      The truth is, my interest began to wane in the 2014 season, the Rockies slumping yet again, but the Royals showing not just a spark of life, but a roaring blaze burning through anything that got in their way.  It’s always nice to have a dog in the fight at the end.

     Fight the Royals did.  The 2014 World Series came down to the final pitch of the ninth inning.  Royals on base would have scored with a base hit, for sure tying the final game, maybe even sending them ahead and into the bottom of the ninth with a chance to win it.

     A very good defensive play resulted in an out, ending the game, the series, and the season, but I don’t think there was a really sad heart in any Royals fan anywhere.  They had come from last place in 2013 to second place, not just in their division but in the world, only by a whisker in 2014.  From cellar to stellar, they came.

      In 2015, it was easy to abandon the Rockies to their horrid fate and keep an eye on the Royals, until the Tulo deal.  To me, the deal confirmed that management was not in to win, only to string the fans along, make them believe they are trying to win, and milk them for whatever they can.

    Many people saw Tulo as a distraction, an ego, a self-centered nova about to burn out.  I saw a guy who played when he shouldn’t, trying his best to get his team going in the right direction, injuring himself further and delaying his return, an error in  judgment but his heart in the right place.  I saw a guy with the experience to help bring along the young guys.

     Most of all, I liked watching Tulo and Arenado working together like a super machine on the left side of the infield.  No more of that.  Go to a Rockies game?  Perhaps, if the only alternative was a prostate exam.

       Twenty sixteen found us making plans to take a March trip to Phoenix.  We would go to a Rockies game.  Alexander Pope time, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast. / [The fan] never is, but always to be blest.”  Or Abe Lincoln time, “You can fool some of the people all the time.” Time for an attitude change for me, anyway.

      I listened to three or four games on the radio, hoping to be able to remember some new names to look for when we got down there.  I managed to hang on to two names.  Adames played shortstop against the Diamondbacks, the first game we watched.  Para, the new rich-guy outfielder, made two great catches in left field. 

     Chuck Nasty played center field, not too far from where we sat on the hillside lawn in right-center.  Pretty easy to pick out with his beard and all.  Outfield lawn tickets were $11 (which really cost $13 no matter whether you bought them directly from the ticket window or from one of the dairies such as Ticketmaster who are always milking you).  So that was fairly cheap.  Nine-dollar beer isn’t cheap.  Can you imagine paying $9 for a Bud Light?  The vendors charge $7, but you need to give them a tip.     

      It was a good game even after the big guys gathered their bat bags, jackets, and gloves and headed for the showers after the fifth inning.  The “scrubs” kept things interesting.  Arenado hit two long home runs to left field before he departed. Had he hit the longest one to right center instead of left-center, we would have had a good chance to capture the ball where we sat close to the concourse, it was that long.  The Rockies won.

     The second game we went to was the next-to-last “home” game.  It was against Milwaukee.  Only two of us went to it, so we bought into the cheap seats down the right field line.  We were just six rows back, so we saw the big guys up close and personal when they headed to the dressing room.  We didn’t get a chance at any foul balls, but one of us garnered a T-shirt that Dinger cast to the wind.  Those seats were $23, I think.

     The Rockies were behind 4 to 1 for most of the game.  Paulsen played first base for both games we watched.  Jorge did his usual erratic job for a couple of innings, being lights-out for several pitches, then having trouble finding the plate with Googlemaps or anything else.  A kid named Trevor Story played shortstop.  I said he was probably trying to make it on the roster as a utility infielder.   

      Story struck out his first two times up.  I said that wasn’t a very good showing for somebody trying for a spot on the team.  I didn’t know that he had already been named the starting shortstop.

       If you have followed baseball at all this year, you know that Trevor Story now breaks a major league record every time he steps on the field, with his homerun on his first plate appearance, his six homeruns in his first four games.  He has displaced Jose Reyes, the highly-paid Tulo replacement who is on probation for domestic violence.  Story has probably guaranteed that Tulowitzki will be a quickly fading, pleasant memory.  If he continues as hot as he has started, we will wonder why we ever needed Tulo in the first place.

      There’s still the pitching.  The Rockies gave up 30 runs in the first two games of their home-opening series.

     I have listened to four of their first six games.  It’s still early yet.  If our spring trip is an omen, it could be another long year for the Rockies.  (The swimming pool at the condo we rented closed for maintenance after we were there two days.  It didn’t matter.  The weather was too cold to go swimming anyway.) 

     Ah, baseball fans!  Here’s to the fickle among us.  Sure glad I’m not one of them!

     

Officer Down

   “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” Said by Mark Twain or Clare Boothe Luce or Somebody. 

     It started with a good deed.  The Goodwife’s club held a rummage sale twice a year.  Like a dog in the pasture, she always managed to drag home an antler or a bone or some other treasure discovered among the junk at the sale.

     This treasure was an email-only computer.  This time, the treasure wasn’t headed for burial in our over-crowded store room.  It was headed for a friend’s friend’s 80-year-old mother who wanted to email, but didn’t feel up to tackling a computer. 

     Perfect, and the price was right, one dollar.  It was brand new, had never been out of the box, donateded to the rummage sale by an indignant woman whose daughter-in-law had the temerity to suggest she learn to use email by giving her the machine as a Christmas present.        

     We set out one cold evening in March, headed to Denver to engage in a musical performance of some kind. We could deliver the cheap computer on our way. We left Kansas after school was out, wanted to get to Denver at a reasonable hour, and didn’t really have time to make a side trip to Hugo where the friend’s friend lived. 

     The Goodwife tried to contact the friend’s friend throughout the day to arrange a place to meet along the way.  Contact was not made until we were well on the way.  No, they couldn’t meet us anywhere, as it being Friday evening, they had other obligations.  But yes, she really wanted the machine.  Could we leave it in Limon with a good friend of hers?  Great!

     It turned out that the friend’s friend’s friend in Limon was the Chief of Police.  We pulled into the driveway, but no one was home.  After another call, we were instructed to “just leave it in the front door.  I’ll call and let them know it’s there.”  Also good enough for us.

     The Goodwife made a second trip to the front door, opened the storm door, propped the computer against the inside door and closed the storm door.  Back to the warm car she hurried.  Out of the driveway we backed and headed down the street. 

     We hadn’t gone a half a block before this car obviously in a hurry pulled right up behind us and followed too closely for another two blocks.  I turned right and the obnoxious headlights turned right behind me, still following much too close.  When I got to the road that would take us to the interstate, I determined to get out of his way.  I turned right and went clear over to the left lane, leaving the other car a clear path in to get around me in the right lane.

     The obnoxious one followed my exact trail, and then the red and blue lights flashed in my mirror.  I knew I was in for a lane violation, so rather than violate again by pulling back across the right lane, I signaled a left and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station convenience store.  The lights followed and parked right behind me.  I rolled down the window, but before the officer could get to my window, a guy across the lot came toward us and shouted, “When you get done there, can I talk to you?”  That request wouldn’t get me off the hook.

     The uniformed young man leaned down to the open window and explained that I had violated the lane changing procedure.  I had enough sense not to tell him why I had crossed lanes illegally.  He asked for my license, went back to his car for about five minutes, during which I began to figure out that the real reason I got stopped was because the cop saw me back out of the chief’s driveway.

    The officer returned handed me my license, said, “You know we have the same birthday?”  I said, “You were born on June 18?”

      “Sure was.  You play the guitar?” he asked as he flashed his flashlight beam across the bass leaning at an angle in the back seat. 

      “Well, that’s an upright electric bass, but yes, I can play the guitar, too.  You play?”

      “No, no,” he said.  “I wish I could but I can’t.  I guess I better go see what this guy wants.”  He turned his head and glanced in the direction of the person who had accosted him as he approached my car the first time.  He pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to me. “Here’s my card.  You have a good evening.” He was gone before I could ask if he saw me pull out of the chief’s yard.

       That would be the end of the story, and it would only be a small blip in my chronology, a forgotten incident, which it nearly was, until one morning I turned on the radio and heard that a Limon policeman had been killed in the line of duty.

      Some days later, when the Limon paper arrived, I read all about it.  According to the newspaper story, three officers attempted to serve papers on a guy in a trailer house.  The subject of the warrant shot and killed Officer Jay Sheridan before killing himself.

     The officer’s obituary appeared in the same issue of the paper.  I saw that his birthdate was June 18.

     The memory of the cold March night came back.  What had been a sensational news story with local color became a little more personal.  I didn’t know the man, but I had met him, I knew of him.

    I struggle to explain to myself why a chance encounter should make any difference in my reaction to the tragic story.  But it does, somehow make a difference.  I’m not allowed to forget.

      Reminders of the tragedy appear yearly as the anniversary date of the crime comes around.  Recently, a flag that flies at the funerals of policemen and fire fighters killed in action made its way up I-70 on its way to a funeral in Denver.  It received a special escort through town in memory of Officer Sheridan.

      Strange how a forgettable incident evolved into a rather pointless story that I’m not allowed to forget.  All because the Goodwife did a good deed.