Pater: the meeting...

Pater: the meeting...  At right, my dad tromping up Turner Mountain, near Mt. Lassen National Park in June 2007.  It was a balmy day, but he felt cold enough to need a jacket – very typical for him.  Note the hat, carefully shading his head to minimize the risk of developing more cancerous spots...

The meeting...

Way back in (I think) 1975, I was in the U.S. Navy, had been through a couple years of technical training (on repairing computers and associated equipment), and had been assigned to a ship (the USS Long Beach CGN-9) for roughly a year.  I'd made a couple of trips home while on leave to visit my family, but hadn't made trips to the mountains, to see flowers, or anything else that was typical of my family's vacations.  I missed all that, and I was more than ready to make up for it somehow.  My dad offered to meet me in Colorado to spend a July in the Rockies together – in prime wildflower season – and that sounded wonderful to me.

At the time my dad made the offer, I had “banked” 45 days of leave.  In other words, it had been 18 months since I'd last taken any leave (enlisted sailors at the time got 30 days of paid leave per year, basically paid vacation time).  That was right at the limit of what you were allowed to accumulate; anything “earned” over that was just lost.

So I submitted an application for the 45 days leave, well ahead of time, in January.  I didn't expect any problem, because in the year prior to that I had done a lot of good work on the ship.  There were a dozen or so pieces of gear that had never worked since they were installed, in some cases ten years previously, and I had gotten them all working.  Furthermore, on one particular system (the SYA-1 “Display Consoles”, similar to the slightly more modern SYA-4 consoles in the photo at right) I had reduced the number of broken machines to a record low.  The ship had about 20 of those consoles, and on average they'd had 7 or 8 of them broken at any given time – the things were not very reliable, especially with anything related to their high voltage circuitry.  I figured out that the reliability issues were mostly related to dirt and dust causing short circuits, and by the simple expedient of giving all the consoles a good cleaning I greatly reduced the failure rate.  With all that good track record behind me, and knowing that the ship's chain of command valued the work I'd done, I figured my application would be approved easily.

Well, I figured wrong.  Instead of an approval, I got a visit from the Electronics Material Officer (EMO) who told me that he was denying my leave application because my presence was “vital to the ship’s functioning”.  Not only was my current leave application denied, but so would be any leave application I made!

Apparently the officers involved didn't really understand the message they sent with that decision, so I told the EMO what message I was hearing: that if I wanted to be able to take leave, I needed to do my job poorly instead of doing it well.  Oh, no, said the EMO, not at all!  We're just saying you're too important to the ship.  Sounded like the same message to me – so I went “on strike”.  I showed up at work every day, did exactly what I was told – but not one thing more.  I took no extra initiative, and my troubleshooting skills suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.  Within just a week or two, broken equipment suddenly started showing up on the eight o'clock reports (a daily morning report of the status of the ship), and after another week or two, the EMO brought me back in and asked if my skills would reappear if my leave were approved.  I allowed as how they might, and my leave was approved.  But my outlook on the Navy was permanently soured; while I did keep the equipment I was responsible for working, I did it without any of my former enthusiasm.

With my leave approved, my dad and I could start making actual plans.  There was no email back then, so all the planning happened with an exchange of “snail mail” letters and (I believe) a single phone call in June.  My dad did his usual extensive research ahead of time, and had lots and lots of ideas about places we could go.  I didn't really care that much about the specifics; I was just looking forward to some time together in beautiful places.

At the time, my ship was based in Long Beach, California.  I owned a real beater of a car, a 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon (estate car to the Brits) – that thing got 11 or 12 miles to the gallon, and broke down regularly, but it was my ride.  The photo at right isn't my car, but it's exactly the same.  My dad was coming from the other side of the country, from his home in New Jersey.  We planned to meet up in Colorado, in the little railroad town of Monument, on the afternoon of July 2.  My dad chose Monument because the place where he wanted to camp was only an hour or so outside of town.  The date has stuck in my head for some reason, probably because it was so close to July 4, but I'm not positive about the year – I think it was '75, but it's possible it was '74.

Planning a meeting like that, back in those days, was considerably different than it would be today.  Now we would probably just say “I’ll call you when we get close to Monument”, because both parties would have mobile phones, and you could arrange the actual place to meet on the fly.  Not back then!  We had no mobile phones, and we didn't know anyone in Monument.  So my dad simply said to meet him in the parking lot of the biggest grocery store in town.  The town had 1,000 or so people, so there had to be a grocery store, and most likely just one big one – so we'd meet there.  We had a fallback plan: if we couldn't find each other by 5 pm, we'd call my mom back in New Jersey, and she'd help us get connected.

Well, that seemed like a tenuous plan to me – but I couldn't think of anything better, so that's what we went with.  I made the drive from Long Beach to Monument in two long days, stopping at a beautiful National Forest campground in the mountains 30 miles or so east of Salina, Utah.  My dad had a more leisurely trip planned, spending a week or so crossing from New Jersey and stopping at various gardens and nurseries along the way.

Around 2 pm on July 2, I rolled into Monument and started looking for the biggest grocery store.  I was a bit anxious – here I was, in the middle of nowhere, not a soul around that I knew, with very limited financial resources, and having had no contact with my dad for about a month.  Also, on the drive that day it dawned on me that I had no idea what my dad was driving – it never occurred to either of us that I might find that information useful.  So even if I found the grocery store and the parking lot, I wouldn't know what his car (or truck) looked like.  And of course I'd never told my dad what I was driving, so he likewise would have no idea what my car looked like.

Well, my dad was spot on about the grocery store – that town had two grocery stores, but only one of them was a supermarket.  The other was more like a 7-11 or Circle K.  So I pulled into the parking lot of that big grocery store, parked, and started looking around for my dad.  There were perhaps 40 or 50 cars in the parking lot.  None of them looked familiar to me at all.  Worse, there was nobody sitting and waiting in any of the cars.  I was a little early, so I really wasn't worried.  But after an hour or two went by, I started getting a sinking feeling...

Around 4 o'clock, just as I started to think about where I could most likely find a pay phone to call my mom, there was a knock on the passenger window of my station wagon – and there stood my dad, with a big, happy smile on his face.  He'd been in the parking lot since about 1 pm, and figured that it was a good time to take a nap – so he laid his seat way back and went to sleep.  He figured that when I showed up, I'd be smart enough to look for the only car with a New Jersey license plate (I wasn't, obviously!), and I'd wake him up.  He woke up on his own around 4 pm, went for a walk around and saw my station wagon with a California plate – must be me!  He clearly didn't share any of my anxiety about us finding each other; he just assumed we'd figure it out.  Which we did!

We did some grocery shopping, then drove out to the campground he'd picked and pitched our little tent.  Over our dinner, my dad rifled through a stack of papers and maps about 2 inches thick, detailing all the places he'd picked as possibilities for us to visit.  The research was typical for him, but it wasn't typical for him to ask me where I wanted to go – for my entire life with him up to that point, it was him who made those choices.  It took a while for it to sink in, but finally it dawned on me that my dad actually wanted to choose something I'd like.  He was treating me as an independent adult, instead of a dependent child – something I hadn't expected at all, and that I was quite touched by.  I also wasn't entirely sure I liked it :)

The truth about my preferences was that the primary interest I had was in spending time with him, and I didn't really care that much about how we did it, or where we went.  But happily he and I shared many interests, most especially when it came to wildflowers and mountain scenery.  I was a bit more interested in the geology and human history then he was, and he was a bit more interested in conifers and plant evolution than I was, but those were things that each of us could easily accommodate.  The kinds of things that we ended up doing on that trip became a sort of template for all the other trips we made over the years, not really changing in any substantive way until I added the availability of a 4WD vehicle to the mix (that made a lot more areas accessible to us).  That Colorado trip was the last time the two of us camped in a tent, though.  On all of our subsequent trips, we stayed in motels, B&Bs, or cabins.

Our last night together on that trip was in Dinosaur National Monument, in western Colorado.  We had our little tent pitched amongst the pinyon pines, just below a ridge top.  There was nobody else in the small canyon, and not a single human-made light anywhere to be seen.  We took our sleeping bags out of the tent and laid down staring up at the stars – one of the brightest, clearest nights either of us had ever seen.  We spotted meteors and satellites, and several nebulae were easily visible to the naked eye.  I can still remember the smells of that night – classic high-desert aromas that were, then, still new to me.  We lay awake for hours, talking about who knows what, knowing that in the morning we'd be traveling in opposite directions.  Even now, almost 40 years later, it still makes me smile to think of that evening...

The casual way my dad approached that meeting in Colorado – as opposed to my own anxiety about ever finding him – is very typical of his approach to travel in general.  He loved to travel, and never seemed to have any real worries about it other than perhaps missing something he really wanted to see.  The research that he loved to do before a trip wasn't about relieving concerns, it was about finding adventures – the beautiful scenery, the wildflowers in prime, the good eating.  Some of the things my dad and mom did I look back on now with pure awe – such as piling into a Volkswagen Microbus with four kids and not much money, and taking off on a 5,000 mile, weeks-long camping trip across the entire U.S. and back.  So far as I could tell, there wasn't any concern about what might happen if the Microbus broke down and needed major repairs, or if there was a medical problem of some kind, or even – on a more mundane level – where we'd camp each night.  We'd just go, and plans would be modified willy-nilly if new information came along, or the weather changed, or something unplanned occurred.  My dad always seemed utterly confident that there would be a way through it all – he never seemed worried at all.  That meeting in the parking lot of the grocery store in Monument was a perfect example: I was sitting there getting more and more concerned by the minute (and not thinking of the obvious tactic of looking for a New Jersey plate), and what was my dad doing?  Snoring away in his car.  That was him, right there...