Cement

The equatorial Pacific actually has seasons: Two. They are the rainy season and February.  That doesn’t mean February has no rain.  Since rain is measured in feet, not inches, February's downpours don’t count. 

LCT 973 built at Mare Island. Laid down 11/1943.
Launched   2/2/1944.   Commissioned 2/1944

Fate:  harbor utility craft YFU62 in 3/1966

Our ship was taking on maybe a thousand sacks of cement, and it wasn’t February.  

My crew didn’t care about the weather conditions. They folded their cap brims down so the slosh wouldn’t accumulate and suddenly gush down their necks.  And rain didn't mean a break in activity.  Squishy feet were ignored, and wet jeans would steam dry as soon as the drenching let up.  Sea Bees who were hand signaling the cargoes over the side to us wore ponchos, and merchantmen peered out from passageway cover, probably thinking maybe we on our LCT were nuts. But month after month of watching mist rise from our shoes,  our hair, and off equipment  had inured us to humidity.  We just didn’t enjoy it in our eyes, so the officers then would wear a “uniform” cap, and the men would wear their caps with the brims folded down.

   

Our open deck was less than two feet above a calm sea, and our progress through it was -- as one admiral put it -- not a matter of cutting through the waves, but of beating them out of the way.  So, even in dry, calm weather, being on the open deck of an LCT included a regular series of thumps, spraying foam over the rail walls. It didn’t register on us anymore.  Taking on hundreds of sacks of cement in a cloudburst that limited vision to one hundred yards was par.

This time Yarwick had a question.  He had been assigned to mind the fenders, a slight sea coming with this rain, and I didn’t want any fenders to be jerked loose as we almost rhythmically bumped the ship we were alongside.  Not against the ship loading us.

Yarwick kept looking up at the pallet loads of sacks coming over the side and gradually filling our deck. Then he'd look at those already there. When motor machinist mate Ellis came out of the engine room, Yarwick called over to him.

"Don," he asked. "What's the difference between cement and concrete?"

Ellis pointed up to a pallet load coming over the side.

         

"See those sacks up there?"

         

"Yeah," Yarwick  nodded.

         

"That's cement," stated Ellis. "Now see these sacks down here?"

Yarwick said, "Of course."

"This on the deck," proclaimed Ellis, "is concrete."

***

Manzanita

I’m not a collector. No stamps, no classic cars. Not even extra pairs of shoes.   On the other hand, I’m a reluctant discarder. My wife throws away my shoes for me.  And my tee shirts. It just doesn’t occur to me that wearing something with holes and scars isn't de rigueur.  With some regularity I’ll miss something, and learn that Muriel “unsaved” it for me. “Honey, it was ten years old, out of style, and it looked moth eaten.”

Really? I didn’t notice holes.”

So, I’ve had this root of manzanita wood for, let’s see, since David was in fifth grade, and he’s retired now.  It’s still a quiet decoration in a quiet corner of the living room. I do think it’s kind of, well, pleasant, with its Oz forest-like gnarled shape, although I don’t recall anyone ooo-ing and oh-my-goodness-ing over it. No sense of....uh, and like that.

Even I didn’t stop in awe when first I came upon it.

San Bernardino Mountains, Southern California

At the time I was director of a Boys’ Club summer camp in the high San Bernardino mountain range. A group of boys had hiked up near the top of a 9,000 foot peak, and I went to check on them. Near their overnight camp, up by the last part of the trail, I saw part of a root of a manzanita sticking out, creating a hiker’s hazard. I made a mental note to tell one of the counselors about it when I got to the hikers.

Reaching the hiking group's camping spot, I found that one of the boys had hurt his foot. The two counselors had been discussing how to get him to a vehicle so he could be taken into Riverside for treatment.  I gave the pickup keys to one of the young men. Leaving the other counselor with the group of boys, we two carried the injured boy the couple of miles to the pickup. Counselor and boy started driving down the mountain.  I prepared to walk back to main camp.

 Then I remembered the manzanita root.  I returned up the trail, and, with a pocket knife, worked the root loose.  Instead of tossing it in among the trees, I kept it, toting the five or six pound piece of forest junk back down the trail.  At least it was all downhill, and the hot part of this July day had passed.

Manzanita root: polished and saved for decades

Somehow, it never quite got tossed. It did get scraped, polished, oiled, and rubbed down. At home, I stuck it under my desk.  Over the next several decades iy has passively hung around.   If anyone had ever asked me why it was there, I’d have turned red.

If you ever get an irresistible urge to own a wavy, Oz forest looking piece of deep orangey red and taffy colored something, c’mon over. It survived several moves, even though it was never on the “to move” list.  It has been treated like a lurking electric eel.  It just didn't get tossed.

Spell Check doesn't recognize this thing, which means, I suppose, that it doesn't actually exist. Maybe it doesn't, as nobody seems to notice it but me.

     

One more thing: don't ask me to show it to you. Even though it's been under foot for decades, if you do, I won't be able to find it.

Bank of America

A. P. Gianini, founder of Bank of Italy in San Francisco, got his start by lending victims of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake funds to restart their lives.  He took their word as collateral.

Bank of America owes me a lot of money.  A couple of decades after “The Quake,” when I was in grade school, students were encouraged to learn the value of saving by bringing a few coins to school, exchanging them for savings stamps to put into a “savings” booklet provided by the then Bank of Italy (which later changed its name to Bank of America).  Soon other banks complained that Bank of Italy was monopolizing this practice, so the school district abandoned it. I never went to the bank to collect my savings.  I wouldn’t know where to start, since the bank name changed, and so did my family name.

I figure that at 2% annual interest, my original two dollars or so of savings stamps should be quite a bit by now.  It could buy a farm somewhere in East Troy, WI. Or perhaps a lot in front of the Washington Monument.  I could establish a wind power company in The Doldrums. Or maybe just buy Bank of America.

I saved other things, too, usually because they were temporary fads at school.  You know -- baseball cards.  I amassed eight or nine cards, I think.  And stamps.  I got a  stamp collection booklet, pasted  a couple dozen worthless foreign stamps that came with the booklet onto their assigned squares, then found the booklet years later in the leg of an abandoned sweat suit.

My sister suggested saving pennies.  She'd save them until she had five or ten, exchanged them for a nickel or dime, and saved those until she could swap for a dollar.  I don't know what she did with the dollars.  She liked those fleecy sweaters that girls wore to football games.

I never established one place to accumulate pennies.  My mother kept finding them in pockets of pants in the laundry.  She'd say, “Look what I found.” and keep them.  I didn't mind; but I didn't learn, either.

I was more successful with collecting sand. We lived on square miles of it. It came in with shoes, inside socks, with the morning newspaper, into the garage with the car, in with the cat, in hair, and in with guests.  

One reason I loved the shore was that, when the wind blew, what hit you was salty spray, not gritty sand.  That is, if you were at water's edge. If you were back a bit, you got sea spray AND sand in your eyes, ears, and teeth. People bringing a bag lunch to the beach usually opened it up behind a small dune, sort of out of the wind.  But I took mine right to water's edge.  The wind wet the bread a little, but the food was sand free.

If I ever decide to collect on my Bank of Italy savings, I think I'll invest in a startup company that turns sand into water, or helium, or sweater fleece.  My sister would have liked that.

A neighbor boy had an unusual collection. When I was young, Bayer sold aspirin in flat, rectangular tins, about a dozen in a tin.  This fellow's house had a living room cabinet with glass doors.  When he showed me his collection, there were hundreds of Bayer tins in it.   Looking at loose piles of aspirin tins, many of them dented, many rusted, I asked him what he planned to do with them.

 His eyes went wide for a moment; then he said, with utter contempt, "Keep 'em."