Stars of Heaven: Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Girl at the Well

Mary Kate Riley  maneuvered toward the ice moon which was only a couple of hundred yards ahead.  Ice moon is what they called it anyway.  It had been a piece of ice orbiting Jupiter at a great distance and it was made of ice, mostly at least.  She had made this trip numerous times before, and during the lonely work, she had considered the various aspects of the case.  As it was no longer in orbit around Jupiter, was it still a moon?  As it was orbiting the sun instead of a planet, wouldn’t asteroid be a better term?

“Mom,” she spoke into her microphone, “what are we going to have for supper? Going for water always gives me a big appetite.”

Her mother was an old-fashioned farm wife that still made everything from scratch and “supper” was a big family affair.  She and her five brothers and four sisters and often any number of their friends would be there.  

“Quit worrying about supper,” her mother answered. “You’d think that we starved you.  You’ll eat whatever is put before you and be grateful for it.  Stop worrying about your stomach and keep your eyes open for scavengers.”

She smiled at her mother’s gentle scolding.  She was about to tell her mother not to worry that there hadn’t been any scavengers seen in these parts in a month or so.  Then she saw it. The moon was slowly rotating, and something that couldn’t be good news came into view. Something was moving against the dirty ice of the ice moon in front of her. She hit her gas retros and brought her craft to a near stop.

Her breath came a little quicker; her face felt a little hotter.

Her family at great expense and greater risk had retrieved this ice moon from far away Jupiter and had brought it back nearer the sun so they could farm using water from it.  No one had been using it before. No one had helped them, sure as hell not the government.

It was theirs.  And it was a valuable commodity.  You needed it for drinking,sure.  You needed it to water your crops, certaining.  But you absolutely had to have it for propulsion.  This you did, essentially, by getting it very hot and pointing it the opposite way you wanted to go.

The scavengers, as her mother called them--much to politely in Mary Kate’s opinion--didn’t care how much effort Mary Kate’s family had gone to to secure the ice. In their minds, perhaps, they were just doing what Mary Kate’s family had done.  They sneaked in from time to time and stole or attempted to steal a couple of hundred tons of ice.   They took it out in roughly cylindrical chunks about 20 feet in diameter and 20 feet thick..

Typically they had lasers to cut 20 feet deep along the circumference of a circle on the surface.  Then they used the laser to dig a bigger hole in the middle. They then lowered the laser into the hole in the middle and, turning it at a right angle to the axis of the cylinder, cut loose the back side.  They tried to do this last part as quickly as possible to cause a small steam explosion to dislodge the block. If all went as planned, they attached an engine directly to the ice and  flew it to whatever cockroach nest they were staying in.

If they were closed to being finished, there wasn’t much she could do alone.  If she called home for help, it would take the better part of an hour to get out here.  As far as dealing with it herself,  the closest thing she had to a weapon was the laser she used for her own ice harvesting. Since they were similarly equipped and she was outnumbered, she had no desire to get into a laser fight.

She considered calling her father for help in spite of the time it would take for her dad to get there, but then she had another idea.

Mary Kate was in one of her family’s forklifts. It was a general use piece of equipment used on the family farm. It looked liked the piece of earthly equipment which sported the same name with some appropriate exceptions. In addition to the fork on the bottom there was a matching fork on the top. This was to help her grip the ice chunk, the retrieving of which was the purpose of her trip.  On earth you can count on gravity to hold down your load, but not here.  She also had a powerful spotlight.  The was very useful in illuminating some of the shady places in which she worked.

They hadn’t seen her yet and probably wouldn’t. Her forklift was small, gray, and had no reflective surfaces and the vast blackness of space surrounded her.  Her plan was to maneuver to within a 30 yards of them, putting the body of the moon between them and her until the last minute, and hit the with the spotlight on its highest setting.  She thought that this should scare them off. And  as her parents monitored radio traffic habitually on their scanner, they would pick up on what was going on, and hightail it out here.  She couldn’t risk a message to her family now because that would alert the scavengers and they might work faster.

She would be careful as she didn’t have much water for maneuvering; that was one of the reasons she was out to bring home more.  While they did drink water and use it for their farming, the vast bulk of that was recycled. In order to move around, they heated water with a small atomic reactor, and blasted the water out in one direction at a high speed.  Because every action yields an equal but opposite reaction, whatever craft you were in moved in the other.  This particular means of travel did not lend itself to high-speed chances among people who were frugal with their water.

She was moving along in short bursts when she came over the hump on the side of the moon, and saw her quarry not 30 yards away but more like 30 feet away.

Damn. She cursed to herself.  She didn’t want them to get this close of a look at her.  She hit her spotlight as quickly as she could in hopes of blinding them.

“Halt your illegal operations,” she said in as stern a tone as she could muster.  “You are under arrest by the authority of the Allied Federation Farmstead protection act. Drop your weapons.”

She was broadcasting on all frequencies, so they should have heard her.They stopped the work they were doing to look up, so they must have.  

It appeared to her that they had already cut around the circumference and were drilling in the middle of the cylinder.  If they still had the back to cut, it would be more likely they would run.  If they could, run that is.  It now occurred to her, that if they were out of water and counting on the water they got here to get back, they would have no alternative but to stand and fight.

Oh, shit.

One of the men--and she was guessing they were men because they were in suits--turned towards her.  His faceplate was reflective and obscured his face.  His suit was tattered, in some places there was more patch than suit.

“You don’t look like a Fed to me,” came his response.  “There aren’t enough of you.  Fed’s are too shit yellow to come after anybody without two dozen backup.  I think you are just one of Farmer Riley’s daughters.”

In situations like this, the human being’s natural response falls into three modes.  Freeze, fight, or run, with the wisest opting for the last of these in cases such as this.  Mary Kate knew she was in no position to fight, and it was not in her nature to freeze, and while if she lived beyond her current age of sixteen she would gain wisdom, such had not developed in her yet.  She was thereby forced into fourth mode of response.  She lied her ass off.

“You are absolutely right there,” she said, her voice strong, clear, and unwavering in spite of her fear.  “There are 50 Federal Marines on there way and they will be here momentarily.”

That provoked a laugh, a hearty, healthy laugh.

“Fifty Federal marines?” he said.  “There aren’t they many Feds this side Mars.”

What happened next not only surprised him, but also stole ten years of Mary Kate’s growth as well. As suddenly there was a blinding spotlight coming down on the site from almost directly overhead.  Then accompanying it on all frequencies in a synthetic voice: “Desist from all activity and set your weapons and tools aside.”

****

Jethro was somewhat disappointed at not being chased.  But not really. He made himself comfortable within his escape vehicle, which meant he nestled himself close to his computer console.  Being somewhat old school, his favorite means of interfacing with his computer was the command line, but that was so quiet.  Having just left his home in a rush, he felt somewhat lonely.  He decided he you use speech mode.

“A.I.,” he began.  “What is the probability of my being chased at this point in time?”

“Chased by who, Jethro?” the voice replied.  The voice itself was not of Jethro’s design.  It was an off the rack voice he had found stored on unsecure server.

“The Feds,” Jethro said. And then to clarify, “The Allied Federal Police.”

“There is a less than 2 percent chance of the Feds following you,” A.I. respond.  Jethro noted with pleasure it had learned to replace “Allied Federal Police” with “Feds.”

“How long until we rendezvous with rendezvous with the engine ring?” Jethro asked.

“We will rendezvous with it in 17 days, 10 hours, and 42 minutes with a margin of error of plus or minus 20 minutes due to the uncertainty in the position of all massive objects in the region,” A.I. answered.

“A.I.,” Jethro said,”round out calculations such as this one to about 17 and a half days when you are reporting them to me.”

“Yes, Jethro.”

They continued through the 17 and a half days without incident.  Jethro spent his time much the same way he would have at home and truth be told didn’t interact with humans much less than he did at home. It was somewhat ironic that he spent much of his time programming A.I. to interact with humans.

The actual linking with the ring was the riskiest part of the whole trip. While he had retros to slow down, to turn, and to stop, he had nothing that would get him going with any real speed.  The gauss guns had gotten him up to traveling speed but all that energy would be gone once he stopped. If the linking didn’t work, he would either have to call for help and thus get caught or starve.

Jethro let A.I. handle all of that and so it went without the slightest hitch or uncertainty, because computers are really good at that sort of thing.  Once the process was completed, he had to engage the engines to begin pre-warming the water before they begin.  He also needed to tell A.I. where he was going.  He had kept that information even from A.I. up to this point for the safety of those to whom he was going to flee.

He told A.I.

“How long will it take us to get there?” Jethro asked.

“The answer depends upon how much water you would like to have left when we arrive,” A.I. replied.

“I would like half of the water left in case they don’t want to hide me and I have to go to my second choice,” Jethro said.

“In that case,” replied A.I., “it will take about 37 and one fourth days.”  

“Thank you.”

Thirty-seven and almost one fourth days later, even such a solitary soul as Jethro was about to lose it. He’d thought that by training the A.I. to speak to him it would give him company it.  That was true to a certain extent, but the company was somewhat flat.  And the part of it wasn’t flat was like a version of himself who knew an incredible amount of trivia.  This was enough to make him barking mad.

He’d taken to monitoring radio traffic to use listening into conversations a form of company.  There was one set of conversations that was getting louder as time passed.  It appeared to be a family farm. There was a welter of voices.  

At first he had trouble discerning them as masculine and feminine, but as time passed and the signal grew stronger he could not only tell masculine and feminine but also by age.  Clearly some were children, but others were adults.  There was a mother and a father, and one or two he would classify as young adults.  One of these in particular was a favorite.

He’d always been an only child and his family life had been mostly about him.  This family had several children in it that were required to do chores that required EVAs. Apparently they went out in their spacesuits tethered by lines; this seemed dangerous to Jethro. They did things that it seemed to Jethro the parents could’ve done more easily themselves but were insisting the children do. Jethro wasn’t quite sure of the point of it.

But then there was his favorite voice.  Sweet but strong and confident.  Humorous but respectful.

Today the sound was so clear he could almost reach out and touch it.  He’d thought it for several days, but now he was sure: these were the people to whom he was fleeing.  This was the family of the farmer Samuel Riley.

He had scanned them with his radar discretely over the last several days as well.  Their farm consisted of a cluster of habs which were all fairly close together and then an object that appeared to consist of mainly ice that was a bit farther away from the rest.  If they used it for its water, he wondered why it was so far away.  It must take an round trip of a couple of hours to get water from it.

His favorite voice, whose name he has learned was Mary Kate, came over the com.

“Mom, what are we going to have for supper? Going for water always gives me a big appetite.”

He used his radar and that transmission to get a fix on her while her mother answered her.  She was fairly close to the object that was made of ice, so apparently it was used for water.  

Jethro saw something on the radar the other side of the ice source.  It was in a radar shadow from the direction of the Riley’s main hab, but it wasn’t from Jethro’s angle of approach.  It was a ship what was parked about 100 yards from the ice object.  

He noticed that Mary Kate had momentarily stopped as if she had seen something she didn’t like. She wasn’t saying anything over the radio.  That might mean she was afraid to.

“A.I.,” Jethro began,”what is the probability that the ship 100 yard from the ice asteroid is involved in criminal activity?”

“Given that the ship is stationary, near the habitats water source, and has not communicate with the habitat’s owners, the probability approaches 95 percent.”  

Since Jethro’s father was a smuggler--and a very rich, successful one--the ship he was in was all but invisible to radar.  It looked like nothing more than an asteroid, as long as he didn’t accelerate or decelerate in an unnatural manner. He had been planning to begin his deceleration soon, but he changed his mind.  He decided that perhaps the best place to meet the person who belonged to that wonderful voice was near that asteroid.

“A.I.,” Jethro said, taking on a determined tone. “Bring us to a stop as close to the equator of that asteroid as soon as possible without danger to us or the ship.”

He felt the ship speed up slightly, but shortly thereafter it began to brake.  He was pulled against his harnesses.  He began to worry.  He thought he might throw up; then he thought he might pass out; then it was over.

He was within fifty yards of the asteroid.  He was listening to the com as the asteroid rotated below him.

It was Mary Kate’s voice. She was trying to bluff her way through.  He could hear her beautiful voice:

“You are absolutely right there,There are 50 Federal Marines on there way and they will be here momentarily.”

There was laughter. Then a male voice:

“Fifty Federal marines? There aren’t they many Feds this side Mars.”

It was about that time that the rotation of the asteroid brought all of them into his view.

“A.I.,” Jethro said. “Turn the spotlight on the group and repeat the message that I am typing in. Sound stern.”  

A.I. complied: “Desist from all activity and set your weapons and tools aside.”

And they did.

Stars of the Heavens: Chapter 1

Readers,
I have been inspired by the Martian, among other things, that the age of didactic science fiction is not over.  This has set me to thinking about how realistically the human race might proceed to Interstellar colonization.  I've thus begun a project of thinking out how that might proceed.  My goal is to produce a new chapter a week.  It will end when it tells me to.  Having been inspired by Andy Weir, the author of the Martian, I think it is only fitting to invite feedback.  So, please communicate with me in the comments things you think could be improved.

Thus we begin, Stars of the Heavens.

Chapter 1: Run

Jethro was sitting at his computer console working on a program and that is why he saw it in time.  The Feds were coming for him and he knew why.

Had he been in the home theater watching movies he wouldn’t have seen it.  Had he been in his father’s completely furnished gym, he wouldn’t have seen it.  Had he been in the “game room” interacting with his father’s collection of porn, he wouldn’t have seen it.

Had he been using any of the incentives that his father had bought to lure him away from the computer console, away from being a computer nerd, he would not have been seen the warning that flashed across his screen as the Feds set off the alarm system he’d set up.

That meant he had about an hour to get out of here as nonchalantly as he could.

He wanted to tell his parents, his mother in particular, that he was leaving.; to say he loved them; to say he was sorry; to give them an indication that he was alive.  They were gone, however.  His father doing business and his mother socializing with the wife of the man his father was doing business with.

He accessed the controls to his mother’s stereo, set its volume volume to high, and set it to play a portion from an old song on a loop: The feel I'm on a cross again, lately /But there's nothing to do with you/ I'm alive, huh, huh, so alive/ I'm alive, huh, huh so alive.  He knew his mother’s taste in music enough to know that she would find it detestable, but would get the message, regardless.

He knew the Feds would find anything he sent electronically, and he didn’t want to risk a handwritten note.

There was really no reason for this secrecy except his desire to deprive the Feds of information in the same way they deprived everyone else of information.  With their control of the Net, they controlled every bit--literally every 1 or 0--of information that humanity had spent millennia of gathering.

And control it they did.  Under their control and over time, history changed.  Heroes became villains. Monsters became saints and then monsters again.  This had been done for hundreds of years, of course, but with the control of information in a few hands and that information subject to change there was no means to fashion a reasoned rebuttal.  Books had become electronic file and libraries, other than placed to buy coffee and use computer terminals, had become shining artifacts of the past.

Jethro hadn’t been the one to discover the malleability of history. It had been known for a long while. Jetro had come up with a solution, however.  He had created his A.I.

It was an artificial intelligence program, but he had long since quit thinking about it in terms of anything but the two letters A.I.  He had written it himself on the basis of some old technology that had come into his father’s hands.  Jethro’s father was a ...um... an entrepreneur who dealt in things that were difficult for citizens to obtain on earth. Things often came into his hands that wouldn’t come into the hands of someone not in his profession.

Though his father did want his son to be more social, he was still a father and loved him.  In one of his many attempts to build a bridge to Jethro, he had turned this old technology over to Jethro to “play with” as he had put it.  Jethro had indeed played with it.  He took it apart physically and put it back together. Then he did the same with its programming, making use of all of the data sources the government still allowed free access to.  This is probably what put him in crosshairs of the Feds.

Part of controlling the access of information is, of course, monitoring it. Searches for information form a pattern. While it was impossible for the Feds to monitor everyone all the time, they could watch patterns of searches.  They could then focus on those relative few who were searching is certain areas.

People who made the sorts of searches Jethro had were ordinarily rounded up very quickly.  Jethro had an advantage over most people, however.  Realtors would say he had three advantages: location, location, location.  

Jethro was a bit far from police headquarters.  He lived in the asteroids.

At first, going to space was something only governments did. Then there began the drip, drip, drip of private enterprise as it became practical.  The drip, drip, drip became a trickle with the infrastructure developed to the point of putting some of our nastier, carbon heavy production in space with robotic factories. This trickle became a stream when it was fully understood that since no country owned space, none could tax it or regulate it.

Some thought idyllic at first until the robotic factories in space created a large permanent class of unemployed who lived off the state.  This large class of unemployed had within it two sorts of people, those who desired to be entertained and those who, for a fee, would provide entertainment of a sort.

This entertainment came in a variety of ways.  Some of it was herbal.  In space away from large celestial bodies--say in the asteroids--the sun is always up.  Plants need the sun, need water, need carbon dioxide, and a few other easily available things.  Some of the unemployed found themselves tending marijuana, poppies, and coca plants in greenhouses among the asteroids.

Some of the entertainment was chemical.  Industrial chemistry had entered a golden age in space.  Compounds with nasty bi-products could be cooked up in the depths of outer space that would never created on a large-scale so cheaply on earth because of all of those pesky regulations.  It was easy for certain entrepreneurial types to purloin equipment and supplies from these mainly robotic chemical plants and press them into use in the manufacture of recreational chemicals.

There was even a little moonshine made, but that was mostly for the use of the folks who lived in space.

And there were folks who lived in space.  As good as the robots used in manufacturing were, there were still a few people needed.  An ironclad rule had been discovered: while it is cheap to take things down to a planet, it is expensive to bring them up.  Bringing up whiskey in quantity is too expensive. Easier to make it in space.  After the initial steps into space most everything used in space was built there.

Jethro’s father’s part in all of this is best described by the word middle-man. He didn’t grow marijuana or synthesize  any of the exotic narcotics and he sure as hell didn’t use them.  He was able through certain relationships to get them to where they needed to be and do so in a way that was lucrative to those with whom he worked.  He could deal with the sorts of folks who grow weed in space as well as the slick government types who he kept at bay with bribery.  

But when the Feds sensed a threat against their control, not even bribery would help.  They were coming for Jethro.

After Jethro left the message for his mother.  He left the rim of the family habitat, which was spinning to maintain gravity.  He made his way to the hub where his getaway vehicle was located. He never thought that this would be the last time that he would see his home. He didn’t get misty about maybe not seeing his mother again.  He was a 17-year-old boy and they don’t think about things like that. He focused on his plan.

Being in the profession he was, Jethro’s father had realized that one day he might need a quick getaway and had used his money well in this reward.  He’d probably never thought his son would be needing it instead of him.  The getaway ship was a small, hollowed-out asteroid.  It was mounted within a metal frame that consisted of four blackened steel rails spaced at equal intervals that ran the length of the asteroid that were connected to each other by three blackened steel hoops, one at either end and one in the middle.  From the right distance, it looked as if someone had put a baking potato in a cage.  

There were actually five of these ships, but only one was outfitted with living quarters on the inside.  The rest were filled with hot water.  The idea was that these would be decoys.  The hot water would fool any heat-sensing equipment that the Feds had.  

The steel in the rails also had a purpose. Each of the ships would be shot into space using a gauss gun. That is to say, large electromagnets would send them out into space without any flash that would betray him to the Feds.  It would be much easier to escape if the Feds had to search his habitat before they discovered he was gone.

The other four ships would go out in random directions at random speeds, while his ship proceeded to another gauss gun one hundred kilometers away where he got another boost.  With luck, he would have gotten his second boost.  Any slight course corrections he needed could be obtained by compressed gas jets that wouldn’t be visible to the Feds.  

The downside to all of this was that the lack of control. If he missed he ultimate target, he would simply be another rock in orbit around the sun, and there were a lot of those.

His ultimate target was a ring of engines that was design to fit around his baking potato in a cage.

He climbed into his ship and accessed its console.  From it he download his AI into its computer system. Satisfying himself that the transfer had been successful, he sent the single to the hab’s computer to purge the A.I. and fry the storage it occupied.

He then strapped himself in, and pressed the button which started shooting the ships into spaces.  Between the time he’d seen the warning that the Feds were coming and he felt the jolt of his ship being launched, 12 minutes had passed.  By the time the Feds had arrived, he had already received his second boost.  By the time they got back into their ship and checked the radar, they only saw five rocks speeding away from them.  Not liking their odds, they headed back to base, working on their report along the way.

Meanwhile, Jethro was at his computer console working on his A.I.

Meeting Jesus

I wrote this in 2010 shortly before my mother died.  I thought I'd blog it now.

11/30/2010

Meeting Jesus

By Bobby Neal Winters

Two years ago we moved Momma into a nursing home. She didn’t want to go.  She kept asking, hinting, yearning to go home.  It was heart-breaking for her to ask but it was more heart-breaking when she stopped. She’s lost names, she’s lost people, and then she lost home.

We climb the mountain on faith, then we see the valley to the other side, but when we climb down the hill we do it on faith again.  We can’t remember what we saw, but there is no other direction do go but toward the valley.

Momma taught us, me and my brother, about Jesus.  The first song I remember was “Jesus Loves Me.”  It is not a masterpiece of music; it is not a marvel of the poet’s art.  I’ve not used it as a foundation to learn a great deal about either. But Momma did teach us to have a foundation of love.  If my brother and I ever met Jesus, it was not through the dulcet tones of a musical instrument or through the effort of any preacher, but through the love of a mother.

We went to see her for Thanksgiving. She is going through a time of changes and with dementia there is only one direction of change. We know it’s coming; there is only a question of when.  God gives us ambiguity as a mercy.

As we entered the door to her room, I could tell she was happy to see us.  She doesn’t know our names; at least she can’t say. And I can’t say that she knows who we are.  But she looks out and there is love in her face.

“How pretty,” she says, looking at my daughters and wife.  “I love you.”

I sat by her side and held her hand.  It’s warm now.  When she could still string sentences together, she would complain about being cold.  Now the ambient temperature of the room is about 85 degrees and she’s covered with a blanket, and her hand is warm.

“Has the preacher been by?” I ask.  I don’t know why.  Her look is blank.

“Father was here,” she said.  This is followed by a series of words, none connecting to the one before it and no grammar to hold it to gather.  My brother and I are confused because she never called her father “Father.” He was always--always--Daddy.

“Jesus came,” she added with the same stream of nonsense.

Then she looked around the room again, at my brother, my wife, my daughters, my daughters, my son-in-law, and me.

“I love you,” she said.

“They are good people here,” she said. “They help me.”

She’s talking about her nurses.  They feed her and change her.

“Jesus came,” she said.

I take my hand and pull her hair back from her forehead.  It’s pure white, like snow.

“I love you,” she said.

This is the woman who dressed me in paisley with a bow-tie and shiny, black dress-shoes and then left black marks on the sidewalk as she dragged me into church.  He is the woman I stood beside as we sang hymns: “Oh! precious is the flow /That makes me white as snow / No other fount I know / Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

God breathed the world into being.  He created it with the Word.  He knows us as we actually are.  His word for me is the very thing that I am.  We use words to create things, to claim things, to control things.  But often those same words we claim things with are barriers to them.  

Momma has lost her words for us. All that is left is the love.  It will be left with us when she meets Jesus face-to-face.

(Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University.)

School reunions, White pickups, and a little politics

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been down to visit my people at a school reunion.  My school was so small, we don’t have class reunions; we have school reunions. They try to have it in the Chickasaw Community Center, but there was a mix-up this year, so they had to have it at the Central Church of Christ activity center.  Not that we could’ve done anything at the Chickasaw Center that we couldn’t’ve done at the Church of Christ, but I thought I’d just give you a little background color.

Anyway, social time began at 4:30pm so my brother and I arrived at 4:15 and there were already quite a number of people there.  My people arrive early for things.  I found a parking spot and went in.  As I did, I noted there was a white pick-up truck that was parked “whawmper-jawed” up next to the activity center.  If you’ve never encountered this term before, I beg your forbearance because there is not a better word to describe it.  Even if there had been lines painted there in that particular spot like there was every place else in the parking lot, he wouldn’t have been between them. Even if he was between them, he wouldn’t have been pulled in all the way.

This is not all that unusual among my people.  We are oilfield people and there are not a lot of painted line in the oilfield.  People drive trucks and other oilfield type equipment and they tend to park parallel to the road so they can pull-out instead of back-out.

When I entered the activity center, my eyes scanned the room for candidate for the owner of the white pick-up and I found several.  Men who’d had sun cancers removed from their faces because of years of being unprotected from the weather.  Men with enough wrinkles to impress a shiatsu. Men with open-faces and hands stretched out to shake.  In short, the men who built this country and have earned the right to park any danged old way they please.

I proceeded into the gym wherein the tables were set up and began to mingle.

I am not the world’s best mingler because I am an introvert. I like smaller groups.  The trick is to recognize a group like this is made up of a bunch of smaller groups.  In our case, the group is like an Indian blanket.  The threads in one direction are the classes and they are woven together by the families that span the generations.  So I started working the room and I was reminded of what everyone in the group notices eventually.  An inordinate number of educators have been produced by my tiny, little school and an inordinate number of those of superintendents.

I have my theory as to why both of those things are true.  The ones who go to college become teachers because they have never really gotten to know any other educated person.  It is a rural area and any professionals that might live there do their socializing in town. They become superintendents because in a community like that you get to know everything about everybody at a level of depth and detail that is difficult for someone who lives in a town even the size of Pittsburg to imagine.  

You learn the depravity of man and his ability to transcend that depravity.  You either become a superintendent or a preacher.  We’ve produced a lot of preachers too.

I began to gently probe for political winds.  I talked to one of the superintendents and we played a game I called “whose legislature is worse?”  It goes like this. You ask the question and then alternate saying “Mine is” “No, mine is.”  We had to draw on legislatures but he yielded on governors without a contest.

Politically the group spanned the political spectrum from conservative to ultra conservative with a couple of notable outliers on the left.  There is a broad stripe of libertarianism painted down the middle of all of them.  They wouldn’t mind if you were free to grow marijuana if they were free to gut you with a dull deer antler if you got their child hooked on drugs.

This is in stark contrast to the fact that most of them are church-going, fundamentalist Christians.  I would say this paradox is resolved in the statement that the believe that you ought to be free to go to Hell if you want to, but they will be praying for you and trying to get you to church in the meantime.

Time passed and I was concerned as the meal hadn’t begun.  I was slated to pray because I am Methodist and represent an insignificant neutral minority between the Baptists and the Church of Christ.

Someone went up to the microphone and I thought it was to announce dinner and the blessing but no.  The MC announced that there was a white pickup that was blocking traffic and needed to be moved.  Five minutes passed.  Another of the organizers announced that they didn’t want to bother anyone’s visit, but the white pickup was keeping the caterer from coming in. There would be no food if the white pickup was not moved.

Five more minutes passed, a man with a cowboy hat (who I’ve known all my life but will keep his name out of the paper) got up and with a voice that has been used to announce rodeo told the crowd that they would soon be taking the pickup out in pieces if it weren’t moved.

Ten minutes later, I was called up to pray.

We are a people unto unique and wonderful. There are none to be had like us anywhere else. And that is a danged old shame.

(Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Playing in the weeds

This is from 2003

Playing in the weeds

By Bobby Neal Winters

I began kindergarten in 1967 and graduated from high school in 1980. All of these years, nearly half my life, were spent at the same school, McLish. It was named after the layer of sand they found oil in.

I recall very few of the hours I spent in the classroom before the seventh grade, because kindergarten through the 6th grade was all housed in one building that was surrounded by a magnificent playground. We had a swing set, teeter totters, a slide, and monkey bars. There was also a genuine dirt basketball court. During the summer, grass would grow back in and try to take it over, but as soon as school started back, the grass would start looking ground again.

However, these amenities were just the beginning. There were other things to play with that required a bit more from us but paid back so richly.

There was a huge storm cellar with a flat roof that was an ideal location to play king of the mountain. The doors—one on the north and one on the south—were made of iron that had been painted silver, and on cool days they had soaked up enough heat from the sun that you could lay on the south door in the lee provided by the cellar and stay reasonably warm.

There was also the building itself. We would break into groups and play cowboys and Indians. As there were quite a few Chickasaws at the school, there were a lot of Indian cowboys and cowboy Indians. We didn't know who was what most of the time, but there was a lot of running and screaming, shooting and dying.

Then there were the weeds behind the school. After frost had killed the grass, the tall weeds dried up into what we considered good building material. We took them and made them into forts that we then destroyed. The Indian boys were particularly good at this sort of construction.

We weren't always allowed to do this, and it seem to me now whether we were depended upon who had playground duty. You see the reason there were weeds there was because it wasn't mowed that often. The reason it wasn't mowed that often was because it was frequently wet, and I suspect the reason it was frequently wet was that was where the sewer drained. I don't know whether some of our teachers weren't aware that we were playing in the sewer and had to be told, or whether they all knew and just gradually gave into the inevitability of it.

I left that part of the world behind me physically over twenty years ago, but the spirit of it lives on within me. As more of the outside world, by which I mean "outside of there," has been forced upon me, the more I have come to know what a rare place it is in this country. Think about it. How many people can say they had a graduating class of eighteen? Not very many, only 18 per year times the number of schools that small not to put too fine a point on it. We who have come from such a place are a rare breed and look at the world as if we are just playing cowboys and Indians. You might get shot, but you get right on back up.

They can never take that away.

The rains come in the spring and seeds shoot up from the ground. They grow into plants, they bloom, have seeds, the seeds fall into the ground, and the plant dies. This is the way of the world, it is the way God made it, and it is good, but it's not always easy.

Late this may, the doors of McLish School will swing shut, and they won't reopen as McLish School any more. Even things like schools can grow old and die, but like the flowers of spring, McLish has planted seeds in the ground. They are all around you, but you can't see them. The winter will come, but it will be followed by the spring, and it will rain, and those seeds will grow. And little cowboys and little Indians will play among them.

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Telling the story

By Bobby Winters

Back in the middle of the 1980s, I used to regularly go between Stillwater and Harden City, Oklahoma.  I was in my 1980 Ford F100 pickup.  It has a stick shift on the floor--three gears and overdrive.  I had no air-conditioning and frequently the air temperature was in the 90s, often over 100. No problem, you just make sure both windows are rolled down, both air-scoops are open, and drive a little faster.

It those days I was not yet married. I didn’t even have a girlfriend.  

But I did have a boon companion in my stereo.  In such listening conditions as those, the music you listen too has to have a certain robust quality. A good tune is essential of course but with wind rushing past you at 75 miles per hour your pleasure can’t be contingent on hearing the triangle be struck at just the right time.

It was in such setting that my fondness for Lynyrd Skynyrd grew.

I must confess that I had never heard of them before the plane crash that took the life of Ronnie Van Zant on October 20, 1977, the day before I turned 15. I’ve never know the band while RVZ was alive, and, quite frankly, until a concert by some of the surviving members of the band last night, I’d never thought of them artists.

There will be those who disagree with me and I claim no special expertise, but it seems to me that if you want to call something art you’ve got to have a couple of things in place. You’ve got to have something to say and you ought to have a way of saying it.  I was going to put a subordinate between the it and the period in that last sentence but anything I thought was just too restrictive.

And, though there will be those who disagree with me most vociferously, I have to say there were points when RVZ came dangerously close to creating art.

Much of the problem of recognizing this is that the points where the art was committed are places where it was most deeply Southern and earthy.  The song “I ain’t the one” describes a problem alien to standard American middle-class morality.  There is a southern subculture in which when a sexually promiscuous young woman becomes pregnant she chooses not the most likely candidate for paternity among her paramours, but the one who is most attractive in some other particular way.

In “I ain’t the one” the singer protests, in very earthy terms once it’s de-coded, that he isn’t even a theoretical candidate for paternity.  It reeks of a very blue-collar way of looking at the world.

It’s not just blue-collar. It’s rednecked blue-collar.

In “The Mississippi Kid” there is the line “because she was raised up on the cornbread / I know that woman will give me some.”  It is a line which is opaque to the innocent and absolutely transparent to those in the know.  It echos with the best lines of the tradition. There are things we want to talk to other adults about but don’t want the children to understand.

The lasting popularity among those of us who grew up within that rednecked blue-collar culture is a testimony to how effective Lynyrd Skynyrd was to communicating that culture to its members.

Much of the group’s most popular work has been heavily informed by the band’s life on the road. While this is very heavily colored by their southern culture, I find myself wishing that there had been aspirations beyond that. Though this may be simply the reality of the artist on the road. One can hold “What’s your name?” up against Bob Seger’s “Turn the page” and see similar slices of this world from two different perspectives.

I would like to have had his perspectives on other things, but he was taken. We are left to tell the story ourselves.

The Giver: Imagine

By Bobby Neal Winters

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

--John Lennon

Imagine a world with no war, with no hunger, with no disharmony.  Imagine a world in which every person had the perfect family selected for them, the perfect job selected for them.  All the decisions for you are made by a wise council of elders.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Those of you who are fans of The Giver, a book by Lois Lowry, will know that the answer is not necessarily yes.

The book has now been made into a movie.  If you’ve been about it the world, the moment you discover that one of your favorite books has been made into a movie is not one of unalloyed joy.  One does recognize that the movie is a work of art in its own right, but there have been occasions when the movie has missed the point of the book or has subverted it entirely.

Neither of these has happened in the current case.

Indeed, the movie maker has managed to preserve the point of the book without trying to slavishly replicate it in its entirety as Peter Jackson has done to in with The Hobbit parts I, II, and, may the good lord help us when it comes, III.

Preserving the point of the book while only taking a select portion of it, means the movie maker, regardless of his skill, has to rely on the viewer. It is a two way process.  The movie maker has to allow the possibility that he might be misunderstood in order to allow the viewer the possibility of understanding.

All of this to say that there is enough on the screen to allow the viewer to walk away with a lot to think about.

In reviewing this movie, I would like to pay my readers the same respect the maker of this movie did his viewers and allow you to interpret it for yourself. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point towards some details the reader might want to examine.

The movie is shot in black and white with the protagonist, Jonas, gradually seeing more things in color.  While this sort of thing can be done incredibly heavy-handedly (and I classify the Girl in the Red Coat from Shindler’s List in this category, though I still love that bit), here is comes as an absolute necessity of following the book.  It is done in an artful way that shows the power of cinema. I was moved to tears more than once.

Jonas is a variant of the name Jonah, the Biblical prophet. Everyone gets distracted by Jonah’s getting eaten by the big fish, but ignores his role as a reluctant prophet.  One might contemplate a connection here.

One might also want to pay attention to Jonas’ (and Fiona’s) use of apples and the apple’s traditional connection with that ancient story about expulsion from paradise.  It’s kept the Rabbi’s busy for a few thousand years. You might want to think about it for a minute or two.

It’s a good movie from a good book and well worth your time.

Fire on the Mountain

By Bobby Neal Winters

Now my widow she weeps by my grave

Tears flow free for her man she couldn't save

Shot down in cold blood by a gun that carried fame

All for a useless and no good worthless claim

--Marshall Tucker Band

The desire to be great ruins lives.

I’m not the best speller and that last sentences was anti-intuitive, so let me repeat it: The desire to be great ruins lives.

We are taught from the time we can understand that we are to aim for the stars, “You might not get there but you will go farther than if you aimed on a level with yourself.” I don’t want to argue against that as a means of building your self-confidence to try difficult things.  

But we have to work on our sense of reality.

You are never going to be president of the United States.  Seriously and especially if you are reading this you aren’t.  Let’s do the math.  You have to be 35 to be president.  Say you are one of those rare folks who is vigorously healthy until you are 80.  That gives you 45 years.  There will be at most 12 presidents in that time interval.  We could say there are 300 million others, but according to Lawrence Lessig, author of Lester Land, there are only about 144 thousand who, because of financial considerations, can even think of running.  So you have 12 chances out of 144 thousand.  That is a 0.00008 probability of being elected.  

That works out to 1 chance in 12 thousand.  The odds of dying by firearms is about 1 in 6000.  So the average person is twice as likely to die from a bullet than even a rich person is of being elected president.  

And if you aren’t rich, your probability is zero.

What is driving me to write this?

It is about a type of personality that I’ve seen on campus. It’s among the students; it’s among the faculty.

Those of you who remember the television program Cheer might remember Diane Chambers.  She was a professional student. She had majored in everything.  She was going to be a great actress, a great poet, etc. Being good at anything--and certainly being a good waitress--wasn’t enough.

As a result, she’s never stuck with anything; she never became anything.

I think that we should stop saying to aim for the stars.  I think there is a better way to phrase what is really the same sentiment: If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.  Or, as Confucius said, “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” (Okay, I’ve never read Confucius, but I’ve played a lot of Civilization.)   It’s not we who are great, it is the task isn’t as great as we think if done in small pieces, often by many hands over time.

This shields us from the poisonous idea that we are great or can be great or should be great.  It removes that distracting sugar bait of greatness and allows us to pursue a better goal: To be good.

There are two kinds of truth.  There are the truths that are true whether we believe them or not: If a closed population does not maintain a 2.1 average birthrate, it will disappear in time.  Then there are things that if you believe and act on, will become true: Moving a mountain or building a cathedral would be examples of this.

If you do something over and over, you will get better at it.  If you walk 40 minutes a day, you will be healthier than if you didn’t.  If you practice a language 45 minutes a day, you will learn some of it. You won’t be a great athlete or a world renown linguist.  

But you will better yourself and, perhaps, be a benefit to others.  That’s not to be sneezed at.

Fossils

By Bobby Neal winters

I am constantly perplexing my daughters with expressions that come out of my mouth.  A frequent one is “I will have to lick my calf over.” This is because I frequently don’t get things right the first time and have to do them over.

Many people, maybe most people, will look at the phrase and be perplexed as well, but those who grew up in an agrarian society, at least one centered around cattle, are not confused at all.  When a calf is born, it is covered with afterbirth--amniotic fluid to those who learned about birth by reading about it rather than seeing it--and the calf’s mother licks this afterbirth from the calf.  If she doesn’t get it all, she will continue until she has, i.e. she licks her calf over.

It is a linguistic fossil.  It is embedded in my speech because I heard my mother use it all the time.  It is likely to disappear from use quite quickly as generations move farther and farther from that agrarian existence to find more and more of the natural world to be disgusting.

That is a shame because linguistic relics such as this are a part of our collective memory.  They are around everywhere.  There is, for example, Wednesday, Woden’s Day, reminding us of a time when our linguistic forebears worshipped the god Woden.

Place names also serve as cultural fossils.  Fort Smith, Arkansas; Fort Worth, Texas; Fort Scott, Kansas remind us of days--not that long ago--when this part of the country was very thinly settled and those few citizens out here needed soldiers for protection from the indigenous population of the region.  

Speaking of the indigenous population, we are reminded of them in other ways. The Washita River and the Ouachita Mountains are in central and eastern Oklahoma, respectively.  For those who don’t know, Washita and Ouachita are pronounced exactly the same.  It’s the English and the French taking the same Indian word which Wikipedia tells me means anything from “sparkling water” to “good hunting grounds” to “big buffalo.”  Regardless, you put these two words together and figure out that a lot of people have been across this patch of ground and none of them could agree on much.

Then there is the tree called bois d’arc in Oklahoma and Texas and hedge in Kansas.  Those of you who read French--and I only know enough of it for this example--might pronounce that bwah dark. And recognize it as meaning wood of the arc or wood of the bow.  It was a tree that the indigenous peoples used in making bows.  Folks in Oklahoma and Texas pronounce it bow dark, because they know this, but they don’t know French. This linguistic fossil reminds us through it’s meaning in French and it’s mispronunciation of the history of this region.

My visits to Paraguay have been a reminder of the religious spirit among those who built cities: Asuncion, Encarnación, and Concepción.  These are named after feasts of the Catholic Church.  Then there are the small towns of  Trinidad, and Jesus which are in Misionés.  This is a region of South America called Misionés that crosses the national borders of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.  It was established by Jesuit missionaries.  I have to believe they had something to do with the naming.

On another continent, in another language, there is King’s Cross Station.  If you’ve read Harry Potter or have seen any of the movies, then you’ve heard of King’s Cross Station.  It is a railway station named after an area of London that was named after a monument to King George IV that isn’t there anymore.  So the physical monument is gone, but it was preserved in the place name and that has been further preserved in a work of literature.

This happens quite a bit I suspect.  There was a truck stop called The Dog House in Ada, Oklahoma. It used to be by itself, but the area where it was is built up now.  It was on the highway, but the cross street became known locally as Dog House Road. The Dog House is now gone; the official name of the street is Country Club Road; to old nesters such as myself it is still Dog House Road. It is a fossil.

My family and I went to visit the travelling King Tut exhibit that is now in Kansas City at Union Station.  We discovered that after his death, his name had been removed from a statue.  They know this, because while it had been removed from the front, it had been left on the back which was against the wall.  This is reminiscent of the scene from the old Cecil B. DeMille movie the Ten Commandments wherein Pharaoh has Moses’ name removed from all the monuments, an attempt to make history forget him.  I don’t know whether this was done to King Tut, but he did disappear from history until his tomb was rediscovered.

Let me now bring up the example of the Washington Redskins.  Redskins is an offensive word and quite frankly I don’t know if it was ever not offensive, but I don’t think they applied the name to a football team in order to offend anybody.  The fact is that the indigenous people of this land scared the European settlers at various times.  The Europeans considered the indigenous peoples to be fierce warriors, and being a warrior people themselves (learn more of the history of England!)  they considered this to be a compliment.  This offensive name is a linguistic fossil of the fear the European settlers felt. If you want the proper context, remember one ancient European king used the silver-lined skull of a Byzantine Emperor as a drinking cup.  

It was an honor, but sometimes folks would rather forego the honor.

What does one do with linguistic fossils?  I suppose we should with them what we do with the more usual sort of fossil.  Preserve them in some way, be mindful of them, study them and try to understand them, as we try to understand ourselves.