BLITHERING, BUMBLING, AND RAMBLING #23
THE RETURN
I had just gotten out of bed and was making my morning espresso. I was sitting at the kitchen counter and out of the corner of my eye I saw movement outside. As I walked over to the sliding glass door I saw it was a deer, some distance away, on the other side of the pond. It’s head was down, chewing on something on the ground. A fairly frequent sight in the morning.
I turned to go back and it raised its head. Ooooooh, could it be? A full rack of antlers were on display. Sure, I’ve seen the female deer and the young fawn, almost every week behind the back yard. But , not since last year had a full grown male been seen around the neighborhood. Could this be him?
I stared and tried to decide if that was the same guy. I only got two seconds, because suddenly he jerked his head to the left and made a plunge forward behind an oak tree. Uh oh, something startled him, and he’s gone. Nuts. Couldn’t really tell, but I thought maybe it had been him. The deer I had nicknamed “Bucky” last November.
I waited. A few minutes passed. Nothing. I waited some more. Nah, not happening. I went over and got my espresso and sat at the kitchen counter, searching for Bucky. I saw movement on the right side of my neighbor’s yard, realizing it was a deer and that it was headed towards my side of the creek. Well, all right. I took my espresso and quietly waited outside the back door to see if it was Bucky coming round. Yes, you always have espresso with you when you go deer watching, everybody knows that.
I stood still, seeing the approach of it and crossing my fingers. He appeared. A bit larger than I remembered, more antler, and broader shoulders and chest. Wow. Like the symbol of the old Hartford Insurance commercial, a magnificent icon of wildlife. 15 yards away, walking slowly, cautiously, aware of my presence as he looked my way and back. I froze, taking in the moment of his long awaited arrival.
And as he got to the back gate, he stopped, and turned, staring in my direction. I waited until I was sure his focus was on me, and I spoke soft enough to not startle, but loud enough to be heard: “Bucky, is that you?”
A few seconds silence followed as he stared at me, then, in a Hollywood moment that felt like there should be music in the background, he nodded. A slight gasp escaped from my throat. I blinked, he turned slightly and started to walk away. He moved slowly, then paused. He looked back, and I raised my espresso cup and nodded. He tipped his head slightly, then slowly walked off behind the brush. A long stillness of quiet reflection followed.
I went back inside and finished my espresso. Not exactly a Dr. Dolittle encounter, but an awareness of presence by man and animal that had both hesitate and focus. Debbie came back from shopping and I told her I had seen Bucky. A few minutes later Bucky appeared again, with a female deer, strolling back the other way. And did I get anything on video? Well, um, no . I was pointing it out to Debbie, because this momentary sighting was probably all we were going to see this year.
“It’s him”, she said. We watched as he followed the other deer past the fence. He turned his head to the right and looked at us, pausing for a couple seconds, then strolled out of sight. Maybe he’ll hang around awhile, I hoped. Looks like he may have a new girlfriend.
I have not seen him since. And in the many times I described this encounter afterward, I referred to it as a “conversation”. Yeah, Bucky didn’t say much. But I’ve had longer talks with people that had less impact.
So, I think I’ll put my wild game camera out there and try to capture the next moment on film. That way the neighbors won’t have to wonder why I’m always on the back porch with an espresso, staring at the pond anxiously.
Like you’re wondering right now.
SO A GUY WALKS INTO A BAR WITH A BED OF NAILS…..
It is a little known fact that the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, has a bar on the campus. Yes, really. It also has its own bank and post office. Back to that in a moment.
In one of my training sessions at the FBI Academy I was in a class with about 20 other guys and the instructor tried to make a dramatic point about confidence in decision making. He asked for a volunteer. A guy in front stepped up. The instructor was an FBI agent who had grown up in Virginia. He told the volunteer, who was a New Jersey State Police officer, that if the New Jersey guy followed his instructions, everything would be fine, confidence in the decision was the key. Ok, the New Jersey guy said.
Then the instructor pulled out a board that was about 2 feet long and 1 foot wide with even rows of nails spread out, all pointed up. Uh huh. He took out an apple and dropped it on the nails, where it stuck. Just to show us how sharp they were.
He had the full attention of the class as he started to take off his jacket, shirt, and tie. The instructor told everyone to come for a closer look, in the front of the room. Everybody did. At this point, more than half the class had their phones out to film what looked like a promising show ahead. The instructor laid down with his back on the bed of nails. Ouch, right? Can’t buy this kind of entertainment back home.
The instructor held a flat board on his chest. He told the New Jersey guy to place a nearby cinderblock on top of the board. He did. The New Jersey guy was then told to pick up a sledge hammer . He did. He told him to hit the cinderblock on the board. The instructor had him try it in slow motion first, so there would be no question about angle or target center. Then the instructor told him to hit the cinderblock hard enough to break it in two.
The New Jersey guy came down dead center on it, but you could tell he was holding back. Well sure, I’m thinking who wants to wind up on the six o’clock news explaining how this went wrong. Still, a couple chunks went flying, and you could see the board press down and the instructor flex a bit. Ooooooh, hair standing up on the back of your neck scenario. Now the instructor told him to give it another, and not hold back. Insane? Kind of.
The New Jersey guy reared back and this time came in pretty hard. The cinderblock cracked a bit, but remained mostly intact, several more pieces flew through the air. Everyone was standing, making sure they could see clearly. I was thinking this beat the heck out of your average lecture class.
And then the instructor, who bounced a little on that last one, told the New Jersey guy, one more time, hit again. The New Jersey guy came through with a solid slam, breaking the block into multiple pieces. Sighs of relief and a fair amount of applause followed. The instructor got up, smiling. Across his bare back were rows of tiny red punctures, which he said he didn’t feel. He cleaned off his back, put his shirt on, and class continued.
When I returned home to Rocklin, I must have told that story 50 times. I told everyone how, after that class, later on in the bar at the FBI Academy, several of us said that day would go down as the most memorable. And you know what? The people back home only had questions about what the bar was like. Go figure.
GET YOUR BUG AND WE’LL FIX THIS THING
Debbie asked me to take a look at the mattress in one of the spare bedrooms because it seemed to sag. We went in and looked at it, and it was sagging in the middle, so we debated if we should just flip the mattress. As we started to lift the mattress we saw that the box spring underneath it had the same problem. Uh oh.
So we looked at the box spring and found one of the boards was cracked. Crud. I looked at it and told Debbie it seemed like a simple fix. Just pull out the nails and staples in the board, pull back the fabric and the liner put in the new board and staple everything back in. I looked up a YouTube video to walk me through it.
I found two manual staplers in the garage, and a pneumatic one. Stapler overload for sure. I went down to Home Depot and got the board I needed, and, just like the YouTube video, I pulled all the staples out and took the broken board off. So far, so good. I attached the new brace board and got the staple guns.
But, I couldn’t find any staples for them. Each took a different size staple, so we started looking through the house for staples. We found some, but they only fit the two office staplers we had inside the house. Debbie tried to get the bottom part of one of the office staplers to fold down so it had been used to staple into the wood. It broke, in two places, as she tried to get it to fold down. Great. Five staplers and only one that functions AND has staples. That one stapler left was a conversation piece because it had a praying mantis design. No, not kidding, it was part of a matching two piece set with a tape dispenser shaped like a snail.
So, with the praying mantis in hand, we stapled the whole thing back together. Whew! Bed frame done and ready to put it all back together. So now of course, I’m waiting for someone to ask for assistance in stapling something back together. Just so I can say “Let me grab my Praying Mantis and I’ll be right over”. And if they give me a strange look, I’ll follow it up with “don’t worry, I have the snail as a backup”.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER
Back in the early 90’s we had a series of rainy days that led to some flood issues in the town. Part of it was on my home street, which got particularly bad for the neighbors just across my back fence who lived in the cul de sac. I had gotten to know them for a couple of years and had been in their back yard, which they had put a pool in, just a couple years before the heavy rains. Well…..
In the year of the rains, the creek behind my neighbor’s fence overflowed into their backyard and over the pool, and into their garage and living room. The fire department, public works and the police showed up to sandbag around the house to try and divert as much of the floodwater as possible. I was one of the guys who responded from the PD with another Officer, Tom. As we were standing in the street on arrival we got a quick briefing about walking around the back yard in a line because the water was flowing nearly 8 inches above the ground so you couldn’t see anything on the ground but water, which was moving. Me and a couple guys from the fire department and public works knew Joe the owner of the house, and we knew the layout of the back yard.
We all grabbed a sandbag and headed through the water flowing out the back gate. Joe was in the lead. Since I had been in the backyard before, I knew roughly where the pool was, though the flow of the water was more than ankle high, when I walked along the edge of it, and you wouldn’t know it was even there because of the muddy tide rushing over it. As we sandbagged around the back door to try to divert the flow, I realized Tom was no longer a couple steps behind me.
When I got back to the street where the sandbags were, he was standing there next to a fireman explaining how he had fallen into the pool. Soaked from head to toe, quite upset about not knowing the pool was even there, he asked me if anybody else fell in. “Naw”, me and the fireman said, “we had a briefing about where to step just before we went in there.” The look on Tom’s face was a mixture of surprise and tension. Apparently he hadn’t heard the discussion, and was rather peeved that everyone else did. And his foot hurt, because when he stepped off the side of the pool he was carrying 2 full bags of sand, and the extra weight plummeted him to the bottom of the pool, which was only 4 feet deep.
A few weeks later I was talking to my neighbor, Joe about the damage to his house from the flood. He said that everything was dried out and repairs were ongoing. He also told me that he had to drain and clean his pool because the muddy creek water had made a real mess of it. When he drained the pool he found a bunch of rocks, a dead fish, and two sandbags. I explained how Tom had found the pool the hard way.
I thought Tom probably wondered where the sandbags wound up, and the fish probably wondered what landed on top of him just before the lights went out. Looking on the bright side, hey, we got our sandbags back!