Home Again

In the summer of 1973 I completed the Basic Electronics portion of my training (self-paced - with honors) at Keesler AFB... My radar maintenance classes didn't start immediately so I applied for (and was granted) a week of leave. That meant I could visit home for the first since reporting to the military induction center in Portland Oregon 5 months earlier.

It was a short notice thing, so by the time I made travel arrangements anything that was even remotely close to a direct flight was booked. I ended up flying out of New Orleans at zero dark thirty, with changes in Houston, Kansas City, Denver, Boise and Portland, finally arriving in Eugene in the late afternoon. And in order to make the New Orleans departure time I had to catch a shuttle van leaving Biloxi sometime around 2:45 A.M.

Which leads to yet another story I probably shouldn't tell:
In an earlier post I mentioned the ready availability of a certain "smokable substance" in the Keesler triangle... Now - most of the us didn't partake with any regularity (studying electronics requires a certain level of mental clarity) but there were a number of die-hard stoners amongst us. And it was common knowledge to everyone (except the Training Instructors) that "party central" was the C shift bays on the 3rd floor between 2AM and 4AM.
Yeah - for some reason the TI (training instructor) shift rotation only covered 22 hours of the day leaving the squadron unmanned during the wee hours of the morning. The C shift students got back from school after midnight, and by the time they ate chow and got cleaned up the last TIs were on their way out the door... That's when the party started. Airmen from all over the dorm would toss in a buck or two to cover the beer and "ganj", and get totally wasted :-)

Which reminds me: Back in the 70s the nozzle off a deodorant can would fit on a shaving cream can, turning it into a weapon that would shoot a thin stream at least 15 feet. (It was a lot like "silly string" only messier.) Yes - shaving cream wars were a mainstay of the C shift parties...
It was also the only way I found to get rid of those big-ass Gulf Coast roaches. They were too fast to kill with insecticide and trying to squish them only seemed to annoy them. Then one day I discovered (by chance) that if you hit them with a stream of shaving cream they got so freaked out they froze in place. That gave you time to pry them off the cinder block wall and toss them outside (not as easy as you would think - they fought back)... But I digress :-)

Airman Juneau decided to hang out with me until it was time to catch the shuttle (we were roomies at the time and I was pretty stressed about the trip). I'm not sure which one of us came up with the idea of going up to the 3rd floor prior to my departure, but since I was going to be spending the day traveling I figured I might as well be "relaxed"... Yes - I did inhale. (Note to future generations: that's a Bill Clinton reference.)

There not much to say about the first part the trip (other than it was really dark and I was really tired). It was pretty uneventful until we began our descent into Houston - and that leads to another one of my favorite stories:
I was sitting by the window on the right side of the plane (just behind the wing - my dad always told me that was the safest place to be) listening to Top 40 on the headphones (once upon a time the airlines actually provided free music)... The sun was just rising and there were pockets of mist along the ground, and in the early morning light it was indescribably beautiful (and not just because of the "state" I was in)... As we started our final approach, the song Hummingbird (by Seals and Croft) was playing, and just when it got to the final verse ("Don't fly away" repeated in different keys) the plane crossed the threshold and entered a patch of thin mist and - I swear I am not making this up: There were rainbows flowing over the wings...

Yeah - it was one of those moments when a bunch of things came together to create an event so incredible (and implausible) it remained forever etched in my memory. There is really no way to accurately describe it :-)
BTW: The topic of being on my way home at sunrise will come up again later... I never really "connected the dots" before, but there is apparently some deeper significance there. (New beginnings?)

There's not much left to tell:

Mom was still mom... She had moved (yet again) - to a nice little rental house in Coburg (just north of Eugene). One of the first things she wanted was an upright freezer (don't really recall why) so I sent her the money to buy one... (It was a "Signature" unit - Montgomery Ward store brand. I inherited it after she passed away and it lasted until the mid 1990s.)
I don't recall how much I saw of Karina, but I don't think she was still with Bernie... At some point during 1973 he moved to Redding California to work in a music store (which he ended up buying a couple of years later) and they never saw each other again...

And I ran into a couple of people I used to hang out with and they didn't seem to have any grasp of what I had been through or how much I had changed... They were like "I haven't seen you for a while... Oh - you're in the military now? That's nice"... I mean - I knew life would go on without me but their level of indifference was still a bit of a shock :-)

Finally: Unbeknownst to me, my future wife (having graduated from high school in Sandy) was at that very time preparing to attend the University or Oregon (in Eugene), thus putting into motion a chain of events that would result in us meeting a bit more than a year later...

But my main "takeaway" was that mom was getting along fine without me. That had been my deepest concern when I enlisted, but by the end of the visit I was finally at ease with the decision I had made.