John and Liz' Elegant House in University Park, Dallas
After roaming the wilds of Arizona and New Mexico, we drove to Dallas, Texas and spent a few days with my brother, John Anthony, and his wife Liz, at their beautiful home in University Park. There my sister, JoAnne Anderson, and her husband Chuck, along with their oldest son Jay, joined us for a long-overdue family reunion. Sandie and I had not been to Dallas since 2004. In that time John and Liz had moved to a new home, their two boys Steven and Matthew had grown up and begun careers in distant places, and Dallas itself had undergone some changes – one of which, the addition of a new museum, was of particular interest to me; I’ll cover that in another post.
Liz and John’s house easily accommodated all five intruders comfortably, but parking was another matter. Our cars could all be parked on the street, but Chuck and JoAnne have a popup camping trailer, which had to be parked off the street and out of sight, which meant in the alley, in the small space behind the garage. (Of course that meant the garage couldn’t be used to park cars while they were there, but that was OK.) There was just enough room for both the trailer and Chuck’s truck next to it. It was a tight squeeze, but they managed it nicely. I managed to snap a few pictures of the parking operation in progress. Afterward I went out front and shot a few pictures of the elegant houses in the neighborhood.
Of course, family photos are de rigueur for a family reunion, so we all assembled out in front of the house on a sunny afternoon with our various cameras. I brought my trusty Canon EOS-6D with the 28-70 mm zoom lens to shoot all the pictures displayed on this page. Jay and I took turns snapping photos of the whole bunch of us, first on the porch – or rather in front of it, since there wasn’t room for all of us on it and the shadows were too deep there anyway – and then under a tree in the yard.
The final order of business was to shoot just the three siblings – JoAnne, John and me – again in front of the porch and then in the yard. Since I had to be in the picture, Jay did the photography for all of these.
Entrance to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas, Texas
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science did not exist when I had previously been in Dallas, in 1992 and 2004. It was created in 2006 by merging three earlier museums, the Dallas Natural History Museum, the Dallas Science Place and the Dallas Children’s Museum; and in 2012 it opened in a new home, the building which currently houses it, in Victory Park on the outskirts of downtown Dallas. Construction of the building was financed entirely from private donations, the largest of which, $50 million, came from the five children of Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems and two-time independent presidential candidate; hence the new museum was named for the Perots. Other donors also stepped up and brought the endowment to $185 million.
Designed by architect Thom Mayne, the Perot Museum structure is essentially a large cube standing on a large plinth (base), and has been described as “alluring but unsettling.” One possible source of this unease is a large (150 feet long) glass rectangle glued at about a 40 degree angle to the side of the building; this houses an escalator, affectionately known as the “T. rexcalator.”
The Perot Museum is very proud of its sustainable and eco-conscious design. It uses advanced off-grid energy generation technology, including solar water heating. Low-wattage LED lighting is used throughout the building, aided by skylights directing sunlight into appropriate spaces. Landscaping is accomplished with drought-tolerant greenery, based on indigenous plants, fed by a rainwater collection system that captures runoff from the roof and parking lot.
Whatever one thinks of the architecture, the Perot Museum deserves a visit. There is a wide variety of permanent and temporary exhibits, devoted to astronomy, earth sciences, various branches of engineering, biology and life sciences, and even sports. But even though I’m an avid amateur astronomer, I was mostly interested in the paleontological exhibits, which are on display in the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall, so I neglected most of the other attractions – all the more reason to go back for a return visit next time I’m in Dallas.
When you enter Pickens Hall, the first dinosaurs you see are the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Alamosaurus sanjuanensis on display in the center. Before venturing further, I should note that when I make reference to a dinosaur, or other extinct prehistoric creature, I am usually talking about a skeletal reproduction. These are in general not actual fossils but replicas constructed on the basis of the actual fossil bones as well as imprints of bones. Although there are exceptions, the bones themselves are generally too fragile, fragmentary and precious to be put on public display, where they would be exposed to all kinds of pollutants in the air as well as vandalism and accidents. But paleontologists have become very skilled at reconstructing and replicating skeletons from even very incomplete specimens of actual bones, and the skeletal reproductions look identical to the real thing.
The Alamosaurus is colossal, the largest dinosaur ever discovered in North America, and it dominates the hall. It’s fitting that it should be on display in Texas, although it was first discovered in New Mexico in 1921. I should note that the Alamosaurus was not named for the Alamo in San Antonio, but rather for the Oso Alamo geologic formation in which it was found. This in turn was named after a New Mexico trading post, which in its turn was named after a tree: the word “alamo” means “poplar” in Spanish. Further, the name of the only species identified for the Alamosaurus genus, sanjuanensis, comes from San Juan County in New Mexico, where the Oso Alamo formation is located.
There are other interesting dinosaurs represented in the hall, too. I won’t write about the T. Rex because it’s too well-known, and there were others that I’d never heard of before and deserve to be better-advertised. There was Pachyrhinosaurus (meaning “thick-nosed lizard” in Greek), a centrosaurine ceratopsid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period of North America. (Centrosaurine means pointed lizard in Greek and ceratopsid means “horn-faced” or beaked.) Three species of pachyrhinosaurus have been found in North America, two in Canada and one in Alaska. The third, most recently discovered, was unearthed by Perot Museum paleontologists in the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska in 2012, who had to climb a 300-foot riverbank in rain and snow to reach it. Anthony Fiorillo, who was curator of the Perot Museum at that time, named that species after the Perot family: Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, in honor of their contributions to the museum. Pachyrhinosaurus was related to the famous three-horned Triceratops, but rather than having horns it had bony knobs on its face known as bosses.
Not all fossils are bones. There is an exhibit titled “Following in their footsteps” featuring a “Cretaceous dance floor,” also known as a “Hadrosaur stomping grounds” – consisting of a set of footprints made by hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) discovered by Perot museum paleontologists in Alaska’s Denali National Park.
Representation in Pickens Hall is not restricted exclusively to dinosaurs. There was a pterosaur – flying reptile, not related to birds – up in the air above the Alamosaurus, and a prehistoric flying turtle too. (The turtle did not actually fly, even before it went extinct. It was just suspended in the air not far from the Tylosaurus.)
One of the exhibits most interesting to me was devoted to mosasaurs. These were large, predatory marine reptiles closely related to modern monitor lizards and to snakes. They lived in the late Cretaceous period, 90 to 66 million years ago. At that time Dallas was submerged in a tropical sea known as the Western Interior Seaway, which divided North America in half. The exhibit displays a skeleton of a Tylosaurus, one of the larger mosasaurs that lived in the tropical seas of Dallas during the late Cretaceous. This was a fearsome creature, the apex aquatic predator of its time, reaching lengths as great as 50 feet and feasting on all manner of prey including turtles, birds, bony fish, sharks, giant squid, and other mosasaurs.
In one corner of Pickens Hall I encountered the Paleo Lab, where fossils are prepared for research and reconstruction; it is separated from the exhibition room by glass windows, which allow visitors to see inside and watch the preparators work on the fossils.
According to a placard in the Paleo Lab, the smaller dinosaur displayed in the lobby on the first floor of the museum was a Malawisaurus, a smaller cousin of the Alamosaurus, first found in northern Malawi in Africa. It was a titanosaurian sauropod which reached a length of around 36 feet and a weight of 3 tons.
Mounted above the Paleo Lab is the only full-body reconstruction of Nanuqsaurus hoglundi in the world. Nanuqsaurus was another late Cretaceous dinosaur, in this case a carnivore, somewhat similar to T. rex though much smaller. It was discovered in 2014 in the Prince Creek formation of Alaska, and described and named by Anthony Fiorillo, chief curator of the Perot Museum at the time. The “nanuq” part of the name is derived from a word meaning “polar bear” in Inupiaq, a native Alaskan language, and the species name hoglundi honors Forrest Hoglund, a Texas oil executive who has donated generously to the Perot Museum.
Rose Hall of Birds
By climbing a short flight of stairs from the paleontological displays of Pickens Hall, one arrives at an area devoted entirely to birds, which is appropriate since birds are descended from dinosaurs. Exhibits in Rose Hall trace the evolution of birds, who first appeared in the age of dinosaurs, survived the extinction of their non-avian cousins, and continue to flourish today in the so-called age of mammals. Rose Hall also provides an experience whereby you can “create your own bird,” even including its own birdcall, although I did not take advantage of the offer.
Although the bird exhibits were quite attractive and illuminating, the glass enclosures surrounding them overwhelmed my meager capabilities as a photographer – too many reflections and refractions playing tricks with the light – so I have only one picture to present here. As the placard indicates, it features threatened and endangered birds of Texas.
Greater Prairie Chicken, Wood Stork and Peregrine Falcon
On October 5, 2022, Sandie and I drove from Flagstaff, Arizona, just 37 miles down Interstate 40 and visited Meteor Crater. We had wanted to see it for many years, ever since it first became known to non-indigenous people in the 19th century. 😉 The crater is the result of the impact of a nickel-iron meteoroid, about 160 feet across, striking the surface of the earth 50,000 years ago at about 29,000 mph, or 12.8 kilometers per second. The impact left a hole which is now about 3,900 feet (1,200 meters) in diameter and 560 feet (170 meters) deep, with a rim that is 148 feet or 45 meters high. At the time of the impact the climate of Northern Arizona was wetter than it is now, and the crater was at first filled by a lake; later the lake dried up and left the bare crater floor that we see now.
In the early 20th century the property surrounding the crater was acquired by Daniel M. Barringer, an engineer and entrepreneur who believed that the meteor strike would have left a huge lode of iron ore buried in the earth underneath the crater floor and expected to make a lot of money by mining the ore. He was wrong – it turns out that the impactor disintegrated into small fragments scattered all over the plain and left no commercially significant deposits – and he went broke from the expense of searching for the nonexistent lode; but the crater still belongs to his descendants, who eventually found a way to profit from it (or at least recover his investment) by erecting a visitor center and charging admission to the public for viewing the crater.
After driving 5.7 miles south from the I-40 exit, we arrived at the visitor center, which in addition to viewing areas includes a museum, movie theater, gift center and coffee shop. Admission is $25 per person ($23 for seniors like us), not an exorbitant price by today’s standards.
We were able to view the crater from three levels: the Main Observation Deck, which is approximately at the level of the top of the rim; the Lower Ramada, which is reached by a stairway from the observation deck and takes you down a little way into the crater, giving you a closer look at the crater floor; and “Moon Mountain,” a high-level platform which provides breath-taking (literally, since it is reached by a long stairway climb) views of the surrounding countryside as well as the crater itself. The viewing areas are equipped with small telescopes for closer observation. I mostly used my 70-200mm zoom telephoto lens with my Canon EOS-6D full-frame DSLR for photos from these platforms.
The Meteor Crater website claims four outdoor observation areas, whereas I remember three; this is because the Main Observation Deck has an associated platform at a slightly lower level, which can be considered a separate lookout point. Here I am not distinguishing between photos taken from these two points – I have lumped them all together as shots from the Main Observation Deck.
One reaches the Lower Ramada by continuing on down a stairway from the Main Observation Deck. That takes you a fair way down into the crater, so you obtain a different perspective on the sides as well as closer views of the bottom.
Since the impact that created it, a lot of sediment has accumulated at the bottom of Meteor Crater as a result of erosion from the rim and deposition by wind; as a result the crater is believed to have lost about 100 feet of its original depth, while the rim is estimated to have lost 50-65 feet of its original height. But 50,000 years is a relatively young age for an impact crater; most of them, such as the Chicxolub crater created by the asteroid or comet that (supposedly) did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, are so far eroded away to have become almost unrecognizable.
At the bottom of the crater, there is an old mine shaft with a fence around it. The Barringer Crater Company has attached an astronaut cutout and flag to the fence, presumably to remind us that NASA used the crater to train Apollo astronauts for missions to the moon in the 1960s and 70s.
Moon Mountain affords a bird’s eye view of the Discovery Center as well as of the other observation areas and the top of the rim.
Moon Mountain also provides a broad vista of the vast expanses of flat plain surrounding the crater as well as the distant mountains beyond.
Descending back down to the Discovery Center, we checked out the exhibits in the courtyard of the center, as well as the Gift Shop next to it. The courtyard hosts an Apollo 11 space capsule, an astronaut’s space suit, picnic tables and benches, and a statue of an imaginary alien. The capsule is not an actual Apollo spacecraft, but a mockup of the Apollo command module, called a “boilerplate“; NASA created a number of these, to use for testing and training purposes. This one is labeled “BP-29”.
I can’t resist airing my distaste for the alien statue. It looks vaguely humanoid, which is my first and foremost objection. Given the fact – as you can verify by consulting any respectable paleontologist (and I know a number of them) – that evolution on Earth has been a matter of contingency and happenstance, it’s really unlikely that any actual alien is going to look anything like a human. The purported alien comes with a puny physique and an oversized brain, which is a stereotypical feature of a crude Hollywood science-fiction flick of the last century. (The Spielberg vapidity Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes to mind.) The apparently naked alien is also devoid of any discernible sexual traits, so one wonders how such a creature is supposed to reproduce itself. I found it quite annoying that an institution – notwithstanding its private ownership – claiming to be concerned with science education and accuracy could put such an object on display; I suspect that it was a donation from some Hollywood studio which had no further use for it and would have otherwise thrown it in the trash, where it belongs.
Notwithstanding my objections to the androgynous alien statue, I was elated to have finally seen Meteor Crater in person after so many years of bypassing it every time I drove by on Interstate 40. It was a delightful diversion from what would have otherwise been an uneventful and boring drive in the desert.
I enjoy riding on trains a lot. I much prefer trains to airplanes, because trains let me enjoy the scenery and I don’t have to stay glued to my seat. Road travel by automobile has its advantages, but one must focus on driving and navigating. Buses also have their merits, but they tend to be somewhat restrictive of personal movement and viewing. On a train you can get up and move to the other side of the train or down the aisle; on some trains you can go between the cars or go to other cars which afford a better view. This was true of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, which took us from Chama, New Mexico to Antonito, Colorado one fine Friday in October, 2022.
The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, or C&TSRR for short, is one of the last remnants of a narrow-gauge network created by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad to access the mineral resources of southwestern Colorado. It started in Alamosa, Colorado, and the section from Antonito to Chama was built in 1880. It was then extended from Chama to Durango and Silverton, Colorado, and the stretch from Durango to Silverton still exists as another tourist/heritage railroad. I won’t go through the history of the C&TSRR in detail; Wikipedia has an excellent article on that subject, to which I often refer. Here I’ll just mention that in its heyday the railroad not only transported gold and silver ores from Colorado but also lumber and agricultural products from the Chama area. By the 1960s these resources were depleted, and the Denver and Rio Grande found that its revenues no longer justified the costs of operating the railroad in wintertime, contending with the prolific snowfalls in the Cumbres Pass area, and the company abandoned the line in 1968. The section from Antonito to Chama was then reborn as the Cumbres and Toltec, which operates only in the summer season and carries passengers exclusively.
I heard about the Cumbres & Toltec from my sister JoAnne and her husband, Chuck, who used to be a railroad engineer. He is even more fond of trains, and very much more knowledgeable about them, than I. They live near Cleveland, Ohio, which is a long way from New Mexico; they planned to set out with their trailer and meet up with their friends Lou and Flo, from Cypress, California, in an RV park in Chama. When Sandie and I found out about their plans, we decided to crash the party, except that we don’t have an RV, so we reserved a room in the Elkhorn Lodge in Chama which turned out to be just down the street from their RV park.
We arrived at the Elkhorn on the afternoon of October 6, and joined the group in their RV park for dinner. The next morning we got up and had a very ample breakfast in the Elkhorn Lodge’s cafe, leaving plenty of time to drive the short distance into Chama to catch the train at 10 AM, or so we thought.
It turned out that I got my directions wrong and at 9:45, when my sister called on her cell phone wondering where we were, I was driving south, away from the train station, instead of north, toward the train station. I hung a fast U-turn and, breaking all speed records for that section of road and risking life and limb, arrived at the train station. The nearest parking space was a long way from the station, so we jumped out and let Chuck park the car while we jumped aboard the train in the nick of time. As we did so I realized I had left my camera in the car. Oh well, I thought, I’ll get by with my cell phone. But then it turned out that the conductor took pity on us and delayed the departure long enough for Chuck and me to go back to the car and retrieve the camera. That’s why I’m able to post nice full-frame Canon camera photos here instead of low-resolution cell phone shots.
Before continuing the tale, I need to make a disclaimer. Although the train had loudspeakers and an announcer gave a running account of the highlights of the trip, we couldn’t hear what was being said, so we never knew exactly where we were on much of the route, and in retrospect it’s very difficult in many cases to correlate points on the map with the pictures I took. So when I identify a particular photo as taken at, for example, Phantom Curve, be forewarned that I might be lying, and it could be Niagara Falls instead. But if you see anything that is flagrantly out of touch with what you think is reality, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to shower you with scorn and ridicule.
Even worse, be aware that just for fun I’ve included a number of purposefully outrageous lies, both in the text and the photo captions. I’m offering a prize of $100 to the first person who correctly identifies all the lies. (Hint: that’s the first lie.)
With that out of the way, let’s continue. The first leg of the trip, uphill to the Cumbres Pass, started out through the gently rolling wooded country of the Chama Valley. The aspen trees were starting to turn to yellow and gold with the onset of fall. Rolling through the aspen groves, we passed a ruined structure which I guessed was a stock pen for a former sheep ranch. There had once also been a water tank at the ranch, which was used in filming the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We didn’t see the tank, though, since it was destroyed in a storm in 2006.
The rolling wooded country soon began to give way to stretches where the cliffs would tower over the train and deep gorges would yawn next to the rails, but the train kept chugging away on its gradual climb upward.
The train approximately followed the route of Highway 17, which like the railroad runs from Chama to Antonito. The highway crosses the railroad at several points, and cars have to stop to wait for the train to pass. 13.64 miles after leaving Chama, the train arrived at Cumbres Station, elevation 10,015 feet or 10,022 feet, depending on which sign you believe. It is the highest point on the railroad and the highest elevation of any narrow-gauge railroad in North America. (Don’t ask about standard-gauge railroads.) The long uphill climb from Chama uses up 3/4 of the locomotive’s water supply, so it must refill from a cistern at the station. The engineers also do a brake test, since the next stretch will be a long downhill.
Not long after leaving Cumbres Station, the train took a sharp turn to the south, parting ways with Highway 17 for a while and entering the storied Tanglefoot Curve where it doubles back on itself; this is done so that it can lose altitude gradually instead of risking burning out its brakes and careening wildly down a steep grade (which would happen if it followed the road) to end up as a pile of junk in Cumbres Creek. At Tanglefoot Curve the engine also performs a “boiler blowdown,” which entails releasing steam in a big puff to clear sediments at the bottom of the boiler.
After rejoining Highway 17 the train resumed its easterly direction for a while and then turned north into the Los Piños Valley, taking a long loop north to Los Piños Station. This is not a real station, though it probably was at some time in the past. Its sole claim to being useful is a water tank, but even this is only used for small engines and rotary trains (snow plows). But there are also a number of buildings in the area which make the place look like a station, so it’s easy to confuse with a real station and expect the train to stop there. Since I couldn’t hear the conductor’s announcements above the noise of the train, I did expect the train to stop there, thinking we had arrived at Osier Station, and was puzzled that it didn’t. Instead, it made a U-turn back to the south headed back to the point where it had turned north, and resumed its easterly course, leaving me to wonder why it had taken such a long, seemingly pointless detour. I speculate that most likely Los Piños was formerly important enough, maybe as a lumber pickup depot, to make it worthwhile for the train to stop there. Whatever the case, the Los Piños Valley is a pleasant alpine valley, with a wonderful pristine river, the Rio de los Piños, running through it. At least part of the riverfront belongs to the Western Rivers Conservancy, an organization devoted to preservation of habitat for fish and wildlife and to ensuring that rivers and streams remain available for public access.
After completing the Los Piños Valley loop, the train turned eastward again, following the course of the Rio de los Piños, and crossed Cascade Creek, just north of where it flows into the river, over Cascade Trestle, the highest trestle on the line, running 137 feet above the creek.
From Cascade Creek it’s just a couple of miles to Osier Station, the mid-point of the journey. There we met another train coming up from Antonito, and we all stopped for lunch. After lunch we had time to stroll around and check out the station and its facilities before resuming the journey.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines osier as “any of various willows (especially Salix viminalis) whose pliable twigs are used for furniture and basketry,” “a willow rod used in basketry,” or “any of several American dogwoods, especially red dogwoods.” We didn’t see baskets, willow rods or dogwoods of any color at Osier Station. Instead we saw a number of venerable structures including an old depot house, now a restroom, a water tank and a coaling facility; some old-time railroad equipment, such as the remains of a turntable; and some modern equipment, e.g. a little buggy that rolls along the tracks and pulls a trailer laden with maintenance tools – the modern-day equivalent of the old railroad handcar. My brother-in-law Chuck also regaled us with information about railroad tracks, where they are made and by whom, the different types, and so forth; for example, it turns out that curved tracks are made by a different company, to more exacting standards than straight ones, because they have to endure more stress and different force vectors. Incidentally, it’s also worth noting that the C&TSRR was built as a narrow-gauge railway (3 feet wide) not only because the narrow gauge was cheaper to build, but also because a narrow gauge railway can accommodate tighter-radius curves, allowing track to be laid where standard gauge (4 feet 8-1/2 inches) would not fit.
After leaving Osier, the CTSRR train followed the course of the Rio de los Piños southeastward, crossing the state line back into New Mexico. Before long we arrived at the yawning chasm of Toltec Gorge, where the train crawls precariously along a narrow precipice while leaning shakily toward the dropoff, and we had to be careful not to make any sudden movements lest we rock the train and send it careening hundreds of feet to the bottom of the gorge six to eight hundred feet below us.
Near the confluence of Toltec Creek with the Rio de los Piños we passed through the famous Rock Tunnel, but I was unable to capture any photos of it since it was too dark inside and I didn’t bring my flash. The tunnel was blasted out of Pre-Cambrian igneous and metamorphic rock with black powder in 1880, and the rock is so hard that no shoring or lining was necessary. Unfortunately, several passengers who had climbed onto the roof of our carriage to see better were scraped off as we rode through the tunnel.
Somewhere near the mouth of Rock Tunnel, though I missed it at the time, there is a monument to President James A. Garfield, who was assassinated on that spot by Charles Guiteau, a madman and disappointed office-seeker, on July 2, 1981, shortly after emerging from the tunnel on one of the first trains to pass through it. (Actually, Guiteau shot Garfield with a British Bulldog revolver in the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station in Washington, D. C., and Garfield lingered on for two months before dying, which probably could have been prevented by competent medical treatment. In those days insanity was given short shrift as a defense in a murder trial, and Guiteau was convicted and hanged in 1882.)
After exiting the Rock Tunnel, the train took a turn north and began a series of zigs and zags that took it back into Colorado, then south again. Somewhere in this bewildering sequence we rounded Phantom Curve, so named because of the eerie shadows that were created by the head light of the locomotive reflecting off the hoodoos along the tracks. Since it was daytime and the headlight wasn’t on, I didn’t see any eerie shadows, but I did see the hoodoos, which are ubiquitous along this part of the route.
Next we passed through another tunnel, 342 feet long and named Mud Tunnel because it was drilled through the soft weathered ash and mud of the Conejos Formation. Mud Tunnel is shored up with wooden pillars which occasionally collapse, burying whatever train is passing through and making it necessary to construct a temporary bypass called a “shoo-fly” for subsequent trains. The way this works is that the train is stopped and passengers and cargo are moved via the bypass to another train waiting on the other side of the tunnel. Fortunately, we did not have to endure this somewhat inconvenient arrangement.
After emerging safely from Mud Tunnel, the train arrived at Sublette, an abandoned railroad section camp, high in the southeastern San Juan mountains at 9,281 feet. The section house, bunk house and other structures have been restored and are maintained by the Friends of the Cumbres & Toltec. Sublette still functions as the first water stop for trains coming up from Antonito.
Leaving Sublette, the train began a gradual descent down from the mountains toward the plains west of Antonito and briefly crossed into Colorado again, where it traversed a pretzel-shaped stretch of track known as Whiplash Curve, a prime example of how early railroad builders used curves to gain elevation while keeping the grade as flat as possible.
Not far from Whiplash Curve, after crossing the state line again, we passed the siding and wye of Big Horn, New Mexico. The siding is no longer connected to the main line. A wye is a piece of track constructed, as one might guess, in the shape of a letter “Y”; its purpose is to enable a train to turn around by backing up on one leg of the wye, then pulling forward on the opposite leg to go in the other direction. This wye was originally constructed to enable snowplow trains to turn around, but it is now rarely used; since the Scenic Railway does not operate during the winter months, the rotary snowplow trains (of which there is only one left) are run only on special occasions.
By this time we were down on the plain of San Luis Valley, an incredibly flat, dry and boring expanse, but there was still one point of interest left on the route, though I missed it because I fell asleep. This was the chasm spanned by Ferguson’s Trestle, named for a man who was hanged from a locomotive there. Why they would hang him from a locomotive, when they had a trestle ready at hand for that purpose, I never found out.
At least the last part of the ride went by quickly, since the train had a straight and level shot to Antonito, and we pulled into the terminal sometime around 4:30 PM. Annoyingly, we had little time to check out the train terminal there because we shortly had to board our buses for the trip back to Chama shortly afterward.
Since it was October, darkness came early and we didn’t have long to enjoy the scenery on the way back. Also we were all tired and mostly fell asleep, until we were rudely awakened by an onslaught of nature. As we neared Chama, the skies, which had been sunny and bright all day with only a few puffy cumulus clouds, almost instantaneously clouded up and then began to shower bolts of lightning, claps of thunder, and a deluge of rain on our bus. We had to abandon plans for an outdoor barbecue upon our return and shelter in the Outlaw BBQ Company in downtown Chama. This was appropriate for me, an outlaw and carnivore by nature, but not so much for Sandie, who as a mostly-vegetarian had trouble finding something acceptable, since the menu had no non-meat entrees. She had to make do with side dishes such as potato salad. (Recommendation for Outlaw BBQ: Your barbecue is wonderful, but please include some vegetarian entrees on your menu.) Other than that, it was a pleasantly sybaritic end to a glorious day.
I highly recommend the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad as a day trip in the northern New Mexico/southern Colorado area.
NAVFAC CentervilleBeach - 1965 - Looking north along the coast
My first duty assignment in the Navy (other than training) was to the U. S. Naval Facility Centerville Beach, near Ferndale, California. The Naval Facility (NAVFAC) was part of the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which consisted of a series of small stations located up and down the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as certain strategically located islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere, including Adak in the Aleutians and Iceland in the Atlantic. The mission of SOSUS was to detect and locate Soviet submarines. More on that later.
Ferndale is a town in Humboldt County about 20 miles south of Eureka, situated near the mouth of the Eel River, about five miles from the shore of the Pacific Ocean. The population is around 1370 and hasn’t changed much since I was there in the ’60s. Another nearby town, much larger than Ferndale and about five miles from it, is Fortuna, situated along Highway 101. I arrived at NAVFAC Centerville Beach in early April, 1965, a few months after the Eel River flooded the area and cut Ferndale and the Naval Facility off from the outside world for a period of several weeks. By the time I arrived, the flood waters had receded, but the residue of the disaster was all too visible – washed-out roads and bridges, bare flood-swept desolation, debris all around. The Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Richard Dickson, was a kindly fellow, a nice guy who was on his way out of the Navy and did, indeed, retire a few months after my arrival. His Executive Officer, Lieutenant Skip Sedlak, wasn’t such a nice guy. He was an ex-submariner, which was fine; the trouble was that he was also a boorish, ignorant imbecile. He was single because his former wife couldn’t stand him, which was understandable, since nobody else could either; and he was a fanatical 300% American who saw a Commie under every bunk. He was also a bit of a sadist, but I’ll get to that later. My transportation at the time was a 1965 Triumph Spitfire, a two-seater sports car, which I had bought upon graduation from Naval OCS. Additionally, when I first reported for duty at the Facility and was making the XO’s acquaintance, I happened to mention that I had ridden a motorcycle before I was in the Navy. Skip’s comment on that was “Oh, the CO won’t like that. He hates sports cars and motorcycles.” Skip enforced the CO’s prejudices with gusto, and generally enjoyed making life miserable for as many people as possible.
For his part, besides disliking sports cars and motorcycles, the CO had other quirks. A couple of months before my arrival, when the floodwaters had cut off the Facility from the outside world and no supplies were getting in, the mission of the Facility was threatened, and the Navy doesn’t like excuses such as “well, we couldn’t perform our mission because we ran out of supplies and none of our equipment would work.” The CO got so frustrated at the obstacles that he kicked in a metal cabinet in front of the men, which is not considered “coolness under fire” in the Navy. His most notorious idiosyncrasy, though, was his prudishness. Although he had an extremely attractive Japanese wife, he had an odd attitude toward sexual issues. Many enlisted men in the Navy liked to keep pinups from Playboy in their lockers. LCDR Dickson prohibited these, and when he conducted inspections of the barracks, he would check the men’s lockers for pictures of naked or scantily clad women, and remove any he found. I was also told by people who had served with him previously, of whom there were several on the base, that when serving on shipboard as the Executive Officer of a destroyer, whenever he found a Playboy or other such publication on the ship, he would tear it up and throw it over the side. A couple of months after I arrived at NAVFAC Centerville Beach, he ordered all copies of Time Magazine removed from the base because the cover of one issue displayed a picture of a woman in a bikini. But I kept a low profile and managed to avoid running afoul of his prejudices.
At NAVFAC Centerville Beach, as a single officer, I lived in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters (BOQ). At the outset there were two other officers living there – Skip Sedlak, the XO, and Lee Elliott, the base Maintenance Officer, like me a new arrival. I had been at Sonar School in Key West with Lee, who was from Los Alamitos, California, right next to my home town of Long Beach. We got along well with one another, but Lee did not get along well with Skip Sedlak. The BOQ had one serious shortcoming which made life there (even disregarding Sedlak’s presence) quite unpleasant. The plumbing and heating system was badly designed, and the piping was put together such that the steam from the heating system created a water hammer effect which resonated throughout the BOQ at night, making sleep impossible. You could stop it temporarily by opening a valve to drain water from the piping, but it would soon start up again. Skip Sedlak ordered Lee as Base Maintenance Officer to fix the plumbing and eliminate the water hammer. This, it turned out, would have required a redesign of the plumbing and heating system, for which there was no budget, and was far beyond the capabilities of the base maintenance shop in any case. This meant nothing to Skip, who didn’t understand plumbing despite his years in the submarine service. When Lee failed to fulfill the order, Skip restricted him to the base indefinitely. This could have proved quite unpleasant for Lee, but fortunately for him it didn’t last long. After a few weeks Skip retired from the Navy, and as he drove out the gate on his way to civilian life, Lee was following right behind him in his Corvair with a big grin on his face.
U. S. Naval Facility Centerville Beach BOQ, 1965, with my Triumph Spitfire parked on the left and Lee Elliott’s Corvair on the right
Sedlak was also responsible, according to a story I heard from some people on the base, for a deterioration in relations with the local community. Prior to his arrival, I was told, the officers on the base had enjoyed frequent invitations to attend the functions of the Ingomar Club, the premier social club of Humboldt County, which was headquartered in the famous Carson mansion in Eureka. But after Sedlak had come around a few times, his boorish and crass behavior alienated the members of the club, and the invitations stopped, leading to a lamentable decline in the quality of life for the officers at Centerville Beach. I don’t know whether this story is true, but it’s at least believable, and it does illustrate what kind of a reputation Skip Sedlak “enjoyed” on the base.
I barely managed to avoid incurring Sedlak’s active enmity myself. Once in the BOQ he spotted a robin on the grass outside. He told me to watch the robin while he went to get his .22 rifle so he could shoot it. I saw no reason why he should want to shoot a robin, so while he was off fetching his .22 I ran outside and scared it away.
I have already mentioned that I drove a Triumph Spitfire; Lee Elliott had a Chevrolet Corvair (see picture above). One time I raced Lee from Ferndale to the base, a distance of about five miles. He beat me. He was probably a better driver, but his Corvair was pretty impressive for a car which was supposed to be “Unsafe at Any Speed.” I always thought that Ralph Nader, whose book by that name was generally thought to have led to the demise of the Corvair, was full of crap. Why didn’t he rag on the VW Beetle, which was surely less safe than the Corvair? I knew several people who rolled VWs in tight curves, but I never knew anyone who rolled a Corvair. I figure Nader’s major accomplishment in life was to discourage all technical innovation in Detroit, with the possible exception of his run for president in 2000, which had the result of drawing enough votes away from Al Gore to get George W. Bush elected.
Anyway, Lee didn’t remain long in the BOQ because a place in Navy housing in Ferndale soon opened up, and he was able to move his family up from Los Alamitos. His place in the BOQ was taken by a new arrival, John Powers. John was an austere, prudish fundamentalist Christian, not the kind of person I, an agnostic bon vivant, was likely to become best pals with. While I was there, his major pastime was taking flying lessons, which was admirable, but I’m somewhat acrophobic and wasn’t interested in becoming a flier. Strangely enough, while stationed at Centerville Beach, I did make a stab at flying, but it was not voluntary on my part. The XO (Skip Sedlak’s successor) was a naval aviator who had served as navigator on a P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft. Even while on shore duty naval aviators had to put in their quota of flight time to continue receiving their flight pay. The XO did that by driving down to Moffett Field in the San Francisco Bay area, boarding a P-3, and doing a ridealong, sleeping in a bunk in the back of the aircraft while it performed its mission checking ships off the coast. He took me along on one of these trips. The pilot and plane commander, LCDR Coor, invited me into the cockpit while we were flying at cruising altitude over the ocean. It was a fine day and the view was great. The co-pilot left his seat for a while to take a break. LCDR Coor invited me to sit in the co-pilot’s seat, which I did. Then he told me to take control of the aircraft so he could take a break. I protested that I had never flown an airplane and wasn’t qualified to do do. He retorted that it wasn’t an obstacle – flying a plane was natural, “just like feeling a woman’s leg.” I retorted that I hadn’t had much experience at that either, but he was insistent, so I grabbed the control stick. Immediately the plane went into a nose dive. I pulled up on the stick. The P-3 took off into the stratosphere. When I finally got it leveled off, the pilot told me to bring the plane around to a course of 180 degrees. I pushed the control stick to the right. The plane came around to 180 degrees – then 190, 200, 210, 225, etc. I pulled the stick the other way. The plane came back to 210, 200, 190, 180, then 170, 160, 150, 130, 90 and so on. By this time I was beginning to panic and wondering if the plane carried parachutes and rafts. In the meantime, my XO back in his bunk was getting annoyed at the constant gyrations the plane was performing, which kept him awake. Finally, operational considerations intervened and LCDR Coor took back control of the plane so he could zoom down and take a close look at a suspicious merchant ship. Thus ended my first and only flying lesson.
At NAVFAC Centerville Beach, the single enlisted men, of course, lived in the enlisted men’s barracks, pictured above. The married men, officers and enlisted alike, lived in naval housing in Ferndale. The enlisted men at NAVFAC Centerville Beach were (unlike the officers) a varied and colorful lot. A few months before my arrival, one of them who was on sentry duty had spotted one of his mates, a fellow named Ballard, and pulled out his .45 ACP and shouted jokingly, “Ballard, I’m gonna shoot you!” and he did. He thought the pistol was unloaded, and it wasn’t. Fortunately he didn’t kill Ballard, but that was the end of his sojourn at NAVFAC Centerville Beach.
Another incident, in which I was involved, featured a sly and unscrupulous radioman from Spokane named Galle. The enlisted men were paid in cash, and one payday a man in my division (Oceanographic Research) came to me with a complaint that he had gone to receive his pay and found that it had already been disbursed. It turned out that someone had collected his pay for him because he was on watch at the time and could not fetch it himself; but the someone who collected it hadn’t turned it over to him. That someone, it soon became apparent, was Galle, who eventually confessed to the theft. I never could figure out why Galle, who seemed to be a pretty smart cookie, thought he could get away with such a transparent trick. He was subsequently brought to Captain’s Mast, a kind of naval judicial proceeding where the judge and jury consists of the Commanding Officer, and given a relatively minor punishment.
NAVFAC Centerville Beach T Building, 1965, with the Pacific Ocean beyond
The NAVFAC’s military mission, which officially was “Oceanographic Research,” was performed in a windowless structure called the T Building. T stood for Terminal. That was because it was where the cable – actually two cables – from two hydrophone arrays out at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean – terminated. The cables transmitted sounds picked up by the hydrophones, and converted to electronic signals, to an array of equipment in the T Building which further processed the signals, converting them into 150-volt electric current which was used to draw lines on sheets of paper called lofargrams. The lines on the lofargrams varied in intensity according to the strength of the signal at any given frequency. Ships emitted sounds at particular frequencies according to type; a ship’s specific sonic emission pattern was called its “acoustic signature.” Merchant ships had their own set of distinctive signatures, military vessels operating on the surface had their own types of signatures, and submarines had still different acoustic signatures depending on their origin, mode of operation, type of propulsion, etc. Diesel subs and nuclear subs had very different types of signatures. Soviet subs were noisy; ours were quieter. I don’t remember that we ever picked up a Soviet sub when I was at Centerville Beach, though there were numerous false alarms. Anyway, life in the T Building was incredibly boring, especially for watch officers. Officers had to stand 8-hour (12 hours on weekends) watches around the clock, and almost nothing ever happened. It was a serious struggle to avoid falling asleep. The enlisted men who stood watch had to watch the lofargrams and write up everything they saw on forms designed for the purpose, and that kept them awake, more or less. The forms were then passed to radiomen in an adjoining room, who typed the numbers on the forms on teletypes, which then sent the data via encrypted landlines to the headquarters of the Oceanographic System Pacific on Treasure Island in San Francisco. Typing kept the radiomen awake. There was little to keep the officers awake. They were supposed to review the forms, but this was more honored in the breach than the observance, except when an unusual signature was detected. You could walk around and inspect the lofargrams, or pester the crew, or walk the T Building looking for enemy agents, but these activities were not enough to fill the vast stretches of dead time; and I couldn’t keep from dozing off now and then, especially during the midwatches (graveyard shift to civilians). On one occasion, a lieutenant named Ed Murphy came in to relieve me early in the morning and found me nodding off in the watch officer’s chair. He called me on the carpet (figuratively speaking, since there were no carpets in the T Building), noting that traditionally, military personnel who fell asleep on watch in time of war were shot. Of course he was right, but I resented it anyway, partly because Ed had himself objected to having to stand watches on a regular basis because of his elevated rank. He was a full Lieutenant, whereas all the other watch officers were Ensigns or Lieutenants Junior Grade (LTJG in naval parlance). Lieutenants were normally assigned to NAVFACs like Centerville Beach only as Executive Officers or Operations Officers. Ed was indeed an exceptional case. He came from Arcata, I think, which was a bit north of Eureka, in the metropolitan area of mostly rural (and remote) Humboldt County. His family owned a store there. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack and, in order to keep the store afloat, his mother needed help, so the Navy assigned Ed to the nearest naval facility, which happened to be Centerville Beach, on humanitarian duty. But Arcata was miles away from NAVFAC Centerville Beach, about an hour’s drive on lousy roads, and it was hard on Ed to help run the store and perform his military duties at the Facility, especially standing watches. He protested, to little or no avail except to arouse the hostility of the other officers, who would have to stand extra watches if he didn’t serve his time (we were already short-handed because the Vietnam War was drawing off people who would otherwise have been assigned to NAVFACs). So when he read me the riot act, I responded by telling him what all the other officers on the base thought of him. To his credit, he defused the situation with a conciliatory remark and let the matter drop. I was transferred to San Nicolas Island not long after, and Ed continued to serve at Centerville Beach a little while longer. I don’t know whether he managed to stabilize the situation with the family store, but eventually his humanitarian duty ended and he was given a “real” assignment: He became the executive officer on the USS Pueblo. On January 23, 1968, just as I was about to leave active duty in the Navy, the North Koreans captured the Pueblo and took the crew hostage, imprisoning and torturing them for a year until they were finally released.
Sea Shanty – a club for base personnel
After I had been at Centerville Beach for a few months, the CO and XO retired and a new regime took over. The new CO, Lieutenant-Commander Jack Vosseller, was the son of a vice-admiral and was determined to live up to the family name. Up to then most COs of SOSUS stations had been older men who were on their way out of the Navy and had been given the command position as their last stop before retirement. Vosseller’s appointment was supposed to be a signal of change – the SOSUS stations had acquired a higher profile as their ability to detect Soviet subs improved, and with this enhanced capability supposedly went a heightened emphasis on assigning up-and-coming people to the top NAVFAC jobs. However, I’m not sure whether this was for real or for show. LCDR Vosseller had started out as a naval aviator like his father the admiral, but had crashed too many airplanes, so then he tried the submarine service; but there he got into an altercation with his qualifying examiner, flunking his operational qualification and leaving him with the less prestigious surface navy as his only remaining option. Undiscouraged by these setbacks, he set out to make a name for himself by turning NAVFAC Centerville Beach from a spartan backwater outpost into a veritable paradise on earth. But he labored under several disadvantages. First, too many resources, material and human, were being siphoned off to the war in Vietnam. There were severe budgetary limitations and a shortage of qualified personnel, especially in the ratings associated with construction and facility maintenance. LCDR Vosseller wasn’t interested in any of these “excuses.” He was always going to Lee Elliott (the Base Maintenance Officer) with grandiose plans for construction of new amenities, such as a social club, bowling alley, etc. Lee would tell him that there was no money in the budget and nobody with the expertise to do the work required. The second obstacle was that nobody wanted to do any of the work involved or even reap the benefits of the work once it was completed. The single men (including me) mostly hated the place and wanted only to get out of there. The married men were more positive about their situation, but they mostly wanted to stay at home with their families and work as little as possible. Nevertheless, and amazingly enough, the CO did realize his plans for a club and a bowling alley, if not much else (he never did anything about the BOQ water hammer issue, for example). The club was named the Sea Shanty. I attended on opening night, to which a number of the townspeople were invited. I remember that some of them kind of looked down their noses at the Navy people. A couple of nubile young women were wandering through the crowd, and I heard one of them say loudly, “Doesn’t anyone here speak French?” I did, not too badly at that time, but I didn’t like her snotty demeanor so I didn’t say anything.
The CO started a bowling league, and tried to get me to join, but I brushed him off. I wasn’t interested in doing any recreation on-base; every chance I got I took off for Oregon or San Francisco. In retrospect, I hated the base and the area so much that I couldn’t give Vosseller an even break. Humboldt County is beautiful, and there is lots to do there if you’re an outdoor type, but at that time I wasn’t into any of it. Lee Elliott, more mature and resourceful (he was older and had come up through the ranks), was able to get involved with the locals in doing things like hunting and fishing. Years later, I would have jumped at the chance to go hunting and fishing, but at that time my priorities lay elsewhere. Women, for example. There weren’t many ways to meet women in the area. The most likely method would have been to go to church. I’m not a churchgoer. And Skip Sedlak’s alienation of the locals closed off some of the other possible avenues. But basically the problem was that I wasn’t interested in getting involved with the locals, who seemed to me a somewhat dull and uninteresting lot.
My highest priority at the time was the operational mission of the base, which did hold my interest. But that didn’t turn out well either. I started off on the wrong foot with the enlisted men, who found me an arrogant know-it-all and stuck-up popinjay. They soon put me in my place. One day while I was standing watch one of the men passed me what purported to be an SOS from a local lightship. A lightship was a ship that served the function of a lighthouse, to warn other ships away from potential hazards on the coast. The lightship was supposedly communicating through the hydrophone array to announce that it was in distress and needed help. I had the feeling that something was fishy, but played along with it and wound up swallowing the bait whole. After a few exchanges back and forth, with the messages from the “lightship” growing increasingly agitated, and me growing increasingly puzzled about how to respond, my relief showed up and explained to me that the whole business was a hoax, a practical joke played on me by the enlisted men to demonstrate that I was just a neophyte and not a very smart one at that. I took the hit with good grace and from then on got along much better with the men.
In fact, maybe I was too much on their side. When the new CO and XO took over, they were accompanied also by a new Operations Officer, whose name was Jess Kelly. The Operations Officer was my immediate boss. I got along well enough with his predecessor, Larry Brown, who called Ensigns (which I was) “insects.” Larry had his shortcomings – like anyone else – but he was a paragon compared with Jess Kelly, who, though he was an aviator, and so in theory was supposed to have something resembling a brain, was a few cards short of a full deck. He seemed to know or care little about the operational side of SOSUS; his major focus was on cleanliness. His favorite activity was to point to something and say, in a Texas drawl, “Iyutsfeyeelthee.” Not that he was wrong; the place could use some sprucing up. The trouble was that the enlisted men had long since grown accustomed to a regime that didn’t place top priority on spit-and-polish; they saw shore duty as a time to enjoy life and do as little work as possible, and they had been getting away with it for a long time. They figured that any extra time spent in making improvements to the physical appearance of the T-Building should be compensated by less time spent in off-watch training and analysis of lofargrams, and they had ways of enforcing their preferences. I didn’t disagree with Kelly about cleaning up the place and making improvements, but when it came at the expense of operational performance, I was at loggerheads with him.
In the end I made myself so obnoxious to the CO, XO and Ops Officer that Vosseller got the Navy to transfer out after I had spent only ten months at Centerville Beach. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I had put in for sea duty almost as soon as I had arrived there, before the change of command, but had been turned down; the Navy’s response was that it had spent a lot of money training me for duty in the SOSUS system, and it needed to recover its investment. If I wanted sea duty, I had to wait until my three-year mandatory stretch of active service was up, then apply for an extension with sea duty specified. I normally would have spent two years at Centerville Beach, so I’m pretty sure that LCDR Vosseller, with the connections that a scion of a vice-admiral’s family would have possessed, told someone in BuPers (the Navy Bureau of Personnel) that he needed to get rid of a thorn in his side, and would they please find somewhere else where they could stick me without violating any rules. The Bureau obliged by transferring me to NAVFAC San Nicolas Island, which, being on an island 60 miles off the coast of Southern California, qualified as sea duty, but also was part of the SOSUS system. Jack Vosseller may have thought he was having me punished for being an enfant terrible (which I certainly was) but he actually did me a tremendous favor, because being transferred to San Nic was the best thing that happened to me in the Navy. I should have thanked him profusely, but at the time my feelings about Centerville Beach were so negative that it never occurred to me to do so.
NAVFAC Centerville Beach had been commissioned in 1958. I was stationed there from April 1965 to February 1966, a period of ten months. Some time after I was transferred to NAVFAC San Nicolas Island, a tremendous underwater earthquake destroyed one of the Centerville Beach hydrophone arrays, severely impairing its detection capabilities. I think that the defunct array was eventually replaced, but I don’t know when. The North Coast of California, like all the rest of the state, only more so, is subject to severe earthquakes, and NAVFAC Centerville Beach underwent three of them in 1992. This may have provided the motivation to move the Facility’s operations to Naval Ocean Processing Facility (NOPF) Whidbey Island, which did not exist when I was in the service. From what I’ve been able to gather, the transfer was accomplished by “re-termination” of the detection apparatus to the NOPF, and that this entailed replacement of the underwater cables by some other means of transmission, but I have no information about the exact medium involved. In any case, NAVFAC Centerville Beach was decommissioned in 1993 and the site became a ghost town.
There is a detailed article about the SOSUS System on Wikipedia, for those who are interested.
On the beach at Key West, Florida, Feb. 1965; Ensign James A. Davis entering picture at left.
As I wrote in the account of my misadventures in Officer Candidate School and the aftermath, I arrived in Key West in mid-February in a pouring rain. This set the tone for the rest of the stay. Not that it rained the whole time I was there. There was plenty of sunshine, and lots of opportunities for relaxing by the swimming pool or on the beach. But the weather was fickle. On a perfectly sunny day, without a cloud in the sky, you could go inside for a few minutes, like about 20, and when you came out again, you would find yourself in the midst of a downpour.
But I didn’t mind that. It was the human environment that was most uncomfortable. Watching TV in the BOQ was particularly annoying. This was the era of civil rights demonstrations, and Martin Luther King was leading marches in Selma, Alabama and getting beat up by Sheriff Bull Connor’s cops and dogs. And the officers in the BOQ were cheering them on – Bull Connor’s cops and dogs, that is.
The classroom was no better. The instructor was a sonarman named Green, a PO2 (Petty Officer, Second Class). One day he got on a rant about Martin Luther King in the classroom. He went on and on about how MLK was the incarnation of evil and so forth. I finally interrupted him and told him that I didn’t think the classroom was the right venue for that kind of talk. Next thing I knew I was being called on the carpet by his superior, a lieutenant. Summoning me to his office, the lieutenant told me (a) that as far as he was concerned, the instructor, regardless of rank, was God in the classroom (I was an officer, of course, and outranked Green by several grades, but that didn’t matter in the classroom, nor should it have) and (b) he, the lieutenant, thought that the classroom was the right place for such talk. So I began my naval career with a reprimand right from the start.
There was an interesting sequel to this episode, which I’ll relate here even though it occurred several years later. After I finished my active duty tour in the Navy in January 1968, I moved to Eugene, Oregon, with the aim of attending Russian classes at the University of Oregon in preparation for studying Russian history in graduate school. I also enrolled in a Naval Reserve unit there to earn a little extra money and keep busy. Eugene, being a university town, experienced lots of political activity during the spring and summer of 1968, with the left-leaning students and faculty pitted against a sizeable local population of right-wing rednecks. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The next night I went to my reserve unit meeting. One of the enlisted men got on a rant about how Martin Luther King deserved to be assassinated because he was wrecking the country. I told him I thought it was the people like him who were wrecking the country. For this the CO called me on the carpet. To his credit, he did not agree with the views of the man doing the raving; he merely said that it was beneath me to argue with people like that. But it got me another black mark, and it kind of soured me on the Naval Reserve.
Anyway, there were some bright spots during my sojourn in Key West. My classmate from OCS, Jim Davis, destined for NAVFAC Nantucket, was there, and he was good company. He tried to teach me to play golf, which was fun though futile – I managed to hit all my golf balls into sand traps and lakes. I also met Lee Elliott, a mustang officer from Los Alamitos, who had been assigned to the same place as me, NAVFAC Centerville Beach.
But the high point of my sojourn in Florida did not come at Key West. One day I drove back up the Overseas Highway (US 1) to visit the Miami Serpentarium. I had seen it on the way down from Newport -you couldn’t miss it; it was right by the side of US 1, with a huge statue of a cobra rearing up out of the ground. I had previously read about the place in a magazine, so when I saw it I immediately vowed to come back and pay it a visit. I was not disappointed.
The Miami Serpentarium was founded in 1946 by William E. Haast, a native of Patterson, New Jersey, another place to which I have a connection of sorts (see the account of my visit to Paris earlier in 1964). Bill Haast, born in 1910, had an interest in snakes from an early age, and after serving as a flight engineer with Pan American during WWII, he determined to start a snake farm with the aim of producing venom for research and medicinal purposes. Long before then he had started milking poisonous snakes for their venom, and the profits that supported the Serpentarium in its early years came mainly from performing venom extraction in front of paying customers, of which I became one. He did this by using a snake hook to catch the snake and pull it out of its cage. Once the snake was out of the cage, he would grab it by the back of the neck and, with the snake’s mouth open trying to bite him, he would plonk its fangs down onto a rubber membrane stretched over a glass cup, and the snake would inject its venom harmlessly into the glass cup. I personally witnessed him doing this with a cobra.
Of course he got bitten – at least 172 times during his life (a Guinnes world’s record). To immunize himself against cobra bites, Haast began by injecting small amounts of venom, eventually building up to what would ordinarily be a lethal dose. He did this for many years and became the first person ever known to survive a king cobra bite – or so I read, though I don’t believe this is accurate. (King Cobras, the longest venomous snake in the world, are shy and slow by comparison with other cobras, but they secrete a lot of venom.) The gotcha here was that the cobra venom immunity was only effective against cobras and other neurotoxic snakes, and not even all of those, because the toxic components of snake venom vary according to species; it didn’t work for haemotoxic venoms at all. So he also injected himself with venom from other species of snakes – cottonmouths and rattlesnakes, which have haemotoxic venom, and kraits and mambas, which are neurotoxic but different from cobras. (In 1954 he barely survived a bite from a krait.) Even so, his immunity wasn’t complete, and sometimes he had to be hospitalized. In 2003 he was bitten by a Malaysian pit viper and lost a finger in consequence.
Haast was an outspoken exponent of the medicinal potential of snake venom, and he was convinced that it could be useful in the treatment of such diseases as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. In the early years of the Serpentarium there was some promise that it might help in the treatment of polio victims, but the advent of the Salk vaccine in the ’50s put the kibosh on that idea. I don’t know to what extent Haast’s beliefs were borne out in other areas, but the Miami Serpentarium did become a major world center for the production of snake antivenins, a considerable achievement in itself. And Haast’s own immunized blood was used a number of times during his life to rescue snake bite victims from the brink of death.
Visiting the Miami Serpentarium was an unforgettable experience, but unfortunately one that is not available to later generations. It wasn’t a snake bite that brought about its demise. Haast also kept other reptiles, including crocodiles, in a pit in the Serpentarium. In 1977 a 6-year old boy fell into the pit and was killed by a crocodile. According to a newspaper report in the St. Petersburg Times (Sept. 5, 1977), the boy was sitting on the wall of the pit, which was only 5 feet high, and he and his father, who had helped him climb onto the wall, were throwing sea grapes (fruit from a tree that grows in the Caribbean area, including south Florida) at the crocodile, whose name was Cookie, trying to provoke a reaction from it. The boy did indeed provoke a reaction, but not the way he had hoped; he lost his balance and fell into the pit, and the 12-foot crocodile instantly lunged and caught him. To my way of thinking the boy’s father was at fault for letting him sit on the wall. (If I remember correctly, in 1964 there were all kinds of signs posted with dire warnings against sitting on the wall or climbing into the pit.) But Haast was devastated and lost interest in running the Serpentarium. He closed it in 1984, and the cobra statue was removed, which I thought was a shame. In 1990 he opened a new establishment, the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, in Punta Gorda, Florida. But this facility, as far as I can tell, is dedicated solely to research and production of venom for medical purposes and is not open to the public. Haast himself lived to be 100 years old and died in 2011. He ascribed his long life to his practice of injecting himself with snake venom.
I completed the course at Fleet Sonar School in March and embarked upon the drive across the North American continent to California. My first stop was for the 12-hour sports car race at Sebring, Florida, which by coincidence was held just as I was driving through the area. The winner of the race was the Chevy-powered Chaparral driven by Jim Hall and Hap Sharp. The day after the race, I resumed my northward progress. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I had the top down on the Spitfire. Before I knew it, one of those sudden Florida squalls had come up, and soon it was pouring rain, and before long I found that I was driving along the highway in a bathtub.
After draining the car, I continued on to Tallahassee, where I turned westward. I drove through southern Alabama, where I found to my surprise (I was pretty naive on the subject of race in those days) that segregation was alive and well, or at least well-supported, in the Deep South. I stopped at a gas station and headed for the rest room. As I was about to go into the men’s room, a little black boy stopped me and gestured to a sign I had missed. It said “Colored.” I was about to go into the black men’s rest room.
Destroyer Piers, Newport, RI as viewed from the Officer Candidate School Campus, February, 1965
Although I came from a Navy family – both my biological father and my stepfather had served in the Navy – I had never thought of myself as having any aptitude for military service. I was bookish, absent-minded, reserved, withdrawn, awkward and, in sum, about as unmilitary as anyone could be. I figured that if I got drafted and sent to Vietnam I would surely be a liability to any unit I was assigned to and probably get shot right at the start, by my own side if not the enemy. When I signed up for the Navy, I expected that I would have a rough time in OCS – I knew guys in college who had bilged out of officer training and had very discouraging tales to tell.
NAVOCS Newport, RI, Feb 5, 1965 – Juliet Company Barracks
I wasn’t wrong. On September 19, 1964, I reported to Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, was assigned to Juliet Company, taken to the barracks and given a bunk. Next morning before dawn I was roused out of bed by the Voice of Doom. It belonged to a Southerner named Hollin (we called him Howlin’), who along with others proceeded to make my life a living hell for the next month. (Life at OCS only got a little better after the first month, but at least by then we were used to it.)
It was immediately apparent that my apprehensions about lacking military aptitude were well-founded. Like the traditional military academies, Annapolis and West Point, discipline at OCS was enforced by a system of demerits, known colloquially as “gigs”. As an officer candidate, you had to carry in your back pocket a form known as a “7-Alfa.” At any moment, an officer – either a student officer or a real one – could order you to hand him a 7A and write you up for any offense, real or imagined. Gigs were then assigned based on the severity of the offense. Your military grade was rated on how many gigs you got. You could get gigs for failing to salute, for any discrepancies in your appearance, for forgetting to ask permission to speak – anything imaginable, and some things that weren’t imaginable. I got plenty of gigs.
Naval Officer Candidate School, Newport, RI – Feb 1965 – Bldg 1100 (Offices and Classrooms)
One of an officer candidate’s duties was to stand the midnight watch in the barracks, which involved staying up all night to watch out for fires, natural disasters, spies, enemy attacks, etc. – and most important of all, waking up the company officers in advance of reveille at dawn We took turns standing midwatches. It turned out that my turn to stand the midwatch came on the night scheduled for the transition from daylight savings to standard time – in those days it came in October. This of course meant that I had to spend an extra hour on watch. I suspect that whoever was responsible for scheduling watches assigned me this night on purpose, because I was the least-liked person in my section. Whatever the case, I did indeed somehow manage to bugger it up. When the time came to wake up the company officers, I made the rounds dutifully, but somehow one of the wakees, I forget his name, showed up late, mumbling something about “the goddamn midwatch didn’t wake me up.” Not being able to prove him wrong, or even given a chance to revisit the issue, I got 7 gigs for that.
Officer candidates forming up in ranks prior to marching off to class, Naval OCS, Newport, RI, Winter 1965
I’m not kidding when I said I was the least-esteemed person in my section. (Companies were divided into four sections – these corresponded to grades in a school. Each month one section graduated and another was admitted.) At the end of the first month peer ratings were conducted. Ostensibly a method of rating one another’s suitability for leadership, these were actually more like popularity contests. I was right at the bottom in the peer ratings. I was considered gauche, error-prone and excessively nervous (all true). However, the peer ratings did not take into account performance in the classroom, which was not widely shared among the officer candidates; in that I was above average, though not at the top.
View of The Grinder (marching area) from second floor of Juliet Company Barracks
The hierarchy of command at OCS at the company level was topped by the Company Officer, an actual commissioned officer, usually a lieutenant, assisted by a Company Chief Petty Officer (CPO). Beneath him were the company’s student officers. Each section had a permanent Section Leader, an Assistant Section Leader and various other functionaries. Our Company Officer was Lieutenant J. W. Johnson, who was a mustang, an officer who had come up through the enlisted ranks. He was a good ol’ boy from Florida, coarse and rough-edged, a bear of a man with a stentorian voice, whose entire education beyond high school had been in the Navy. Some of the OCs, especially the ones from the South, considered this to be scandalous, and complained about not enough college-educated officers not being assigned to OCS. This was unfair. LT Johnson may have been uneducated, but he was smarter than most of his critics. The same whiners also looked askance at our navigation instructor, who happened to be African-American. He was an intelligent and highly educated person, and a capable teacher, but that cut no ice with the malcontents, who called him “Snowball.” I should hasten to add that not all the malcontents were from the South. One of them, Richey G. Hope, who happened to be from Illinois – in fact he was the nephew of Otto Kerner, a onetime Governor of Illinois – lamented that he had never before had to work under a black man and the Navy shouldn’t put one over him. LT Johnson, who as I already mentioned was from Florida, for this and other reasons didn’t take much of a shine to Richey G. Hope. He pulled a 7A on Hope, gave him 75 gigs and rolled him back three months. I don’t know whether Richey G. Hope ever graduated from OCS. But LT Johnson wasn’t the last mustang I encountered in the Navy. In the course of my three years of active duty after graduating from OCS, I served with, and mostly under, a number of them. A few were jerks, but most were extremely competent officers and convivial people.
Chuck’s room was right across the hall from mine. I remember that one time, after a hard day of work and study, I dozed off at my desk while reading a publication classified as Confidential. We had had it ground into us that we were to guard classified pubs with our lives and it would be the end of a career for anyone who lost track of a classified publication. (Confidential was the lowest level of classified-ness, the others being Secret and Top Secret.) I admittedly had kind of a cavalier attitude toward Confidential publications because my dad often had them around the house when we lived on the Philadelphia Naval Base. Chuck was determined to teach me a lesson. He sneaked into the room and delicately lifted the classified pubs off my desk without alerting me. When I woke up and couldn’t find them, I came unglued. I couldn’t understand how it happened, and I thought it was the end of my naval career. Chuck let me stew for a while and then gave back the pubs, to the accompaniment of severe admonitions. I guess I must have learned the lesson well, since I later enjoyed a successful run as Cryptocustodian and Top Secret Control Officer at NAVFAC San Nicolas Island. Chuck didn’t pull a 7A on me as someone less charitable might have done; he was a good guy.
OCS Graduation Day, Feb 5, 1965 – Newly minted Ensigns Charles Duchock (with wife), James MacMullen, and Terry Elliot (with parents on right and left)
I didn’t always get on well with my roommate, Assistant Section Leader Franzini, who was my roommate. Jim Franzini was a graduate of Penn State University. He had been to OCS on a previous occasion and had bilged out, to which there was no shame attached – it had been much more difficult then. (Sometime in the year before my arrival, after someone with influential relatives had committed suicide, the Navy had introduced reforms which made OCS a much less trying experience.) Franzini had served a year as an enlisted man, then reapplied for OCS, and this time he made it through with flying colors. But his first encounter with OCS had traumatized him, and he was a little insecure about it. I suspect he was worried that my proximity to him as a klutzy and ill-favored roommate would make him look bad and jeopardize his standing. He fears were not groundless, since his duties as Assistant Section Leader kept him busy and he had to rely on me to keep our room clean and neat. In the beginning he was always ragging on me for my shortcomings, assuring me that I would blow it and flunk out. But in the end he came around. Upon graduation he was assigned to Naval Intelligence in Bremerhaven, Germany, an assignment which I would have loved to get. To my considerable annoyance, despite my background with Russian and Soviet studies, the Navy did not even consider sending me to the Defense Language School in Monterey. I think the Navy used the “dart-board” method of figuring out where to assign OCS graduates.
ENS James G. Franzini (my roommate), at the Juliet Company barracks on Graduation Day, Feb. 5, 1965
In order to provide some leadership training in preparation for our future responsibilities, each officer candidate was given a shot at being “Section Leader of the Day” (abbreviated SLOD). This mainly consisted of marching the section from one classroom to another during breaks. Loudspeakers piped marching music from a tape player (“Waltzing Matilda” was a favorite piece) to keep us in step. It was the responsibility of the SLOD to make sure that the tape player was restarted when the tape ran out. Inevitably, when my turn came to be SLOD, I didn’t notice that the music had stopped and didn’t reset the tape. I forget how many gigs I got for that.
Officer Candidate J. L. Floyd at Los Angeles International Airport, en route back to OCS after Christmas vacation – January 2, 1965
My most grievous transgression, however, came in the last month of OCS, which was January 1965. The Navy sent us home for two weeks Christmas vacation, just like civilian schools. It hadn’t snowed much to speak of before Christmas, but on New Year’s Day, just before we were scheduled to return, a huge blizzard hit and shut down the entire northeastern USA. It was over by the time I boarded the plane at LAX for the return trip to OCS, but when I got back to Newport, everyone was still digging out. All the barracks had been shut down for vacation, and the heating system with them; it was a relic of a bygone age, it took a day or two to get it restarted and unfreeze the pipes, and in the meantime we froze. To speed up the process, the command ordered that everyone inspect the radiator valves in their rooms to make sure they were fully open. My roommate and I thought we had fulfilled the order, but when an inspection team came round to verify, they found that our valve had stuck half-way open. More pressure on the handle would have broken it loose, but we hadn’t realized it wasn’t open all the way. So we both got a lot of gigs for that. I think I wound up with a total of 31, with fifty being the limit.
Nevertheless, I graduated, and by the time it was all over, on February 5, 1965, I had a 3.2 grade average, which wasn’t bad for OCS. The Company Commander, Lieutenant Johnson, upon seeing this, roared with laughter – “He worried so much, he worried himself right into a 3.2!”
Naval War College, Newport, RI – Feb 1965
Our duty assignments came in during our last week of OCS. I was assigned to U. S. Naval Facility (NAVFAC for short) Centerville Beach, Ferndale, California. I had no idea where it was – it turned out to be in Humboldt County, south of Eureka, the county’s largest city. One other person in my section was also assigned to a NAVFAC – Jim Davis, who was going to Nantucket. Prior to reporting to our duty stations, we had to go through two weeks of training at Naval Communications School in Newport, then another five weeks and Fleet Sonar School in Key West, Florida. During the two weeks in Newport, I bought a new car, a baby-blue Triumph Spitfire.
The Comm School training was mostly concerned with cryptography, and the lion’s share of that was in the operation of the ADONIS system. This was a lineal descendant of the World War II German Enigma system, which used rotors to encrypt messages into five-letter groups. Enigma, as is now well known, was cracked by a British team led by Alan Turing operating out of Bletchley, England. But whereas the Enigma system had used three rotors, ADONIS used eight, which was supposed to make the messages virtually impossible to decrypt, even with the aid of a computer, unless of course you had the key used to align the rotors to the appropriate positions.
Despite many warnings, during our instruction in the ADONIS system I managed to assemble the rotors incorrectly, inserting seven into the containing cylinder instead of eight, which resulted in jamming my ADONIS machine and bringing the class to a temporary halt while the instructor extricated the rotors. The instructor read me the riot act for that, and I felt like sliding through a crack in the floor. Even worse, one of my fellow students tried to offer suggestions about what he thought I was doing wrong, and I nearly jumped down his throat in reply. The problem wasn’t what he thought it was; rather it was that the class went too fast for me, and I was too slow to keep up the pace that the instructor was going at. I’m a slow person – I like to think it’s a case of still waters running deep, but it’s probably just plain being slow.
I think I used the ADONIS system all of once in my subsequent naval career. It was on San Nicolas Island, to decrypt a TOP SECRET message.
In addition to berating me for my screwups, the Comm School instructor tried to fortify us for Sonar School in Key West. He recounted that when he woke up after spending his first night in the BOQ, he found a large pile of sawdust on the floor. This had been produced by the termites who infested the rickety and rundown BOQ building, along with hordes of other insects, most of them obnoxious. To deal with them, he went out and caught a lizard, whom he quartered in his room. The lizard took care of the insects and he was able to recover his composure. Unfortunately, the Filipino stewards didn’t understand the role of the lizard and tried to get rid of it, and he had to issue blood-curdling threats to get them to desist.
U. S. Navy ships in the harbor, Newport, RI, Feb. 1965
After completed the Comm School course, I headed south for Key West in my new car. I acquired a passenger, a fellow student in the class named Al Bognacki, who needed a ride down to Key West and was willing to share gas costs. It was still February and bitterly cold. As soon as we left Newport, which was late at night, my new car started sputtering and threatened to quit. I pulled into a gas station and asked the attendant for help. He said that I had frozen water in my gas and that it was clogging up the carburetor. He came up with a can of some chemical which was supposed to thaw the ice in the gas and poured it into the gas tank. It worked splendidly, and we sped off into the night. Except for gas and food, we didn’t stop until we got to Key West.
We arrived in Key West during a driving rain. It was so humid that the windshield fogged up and I couldn’t see where I was going. The windshield wipers were no help – the inside of the windshield was fogged up too, and as I dragged a towel across the glass, the fog followed right behind my hand and covered the glass again. I had to stick my head out of the window in the rain to see where we were going. Somehow we made it to the base and checked into the BOQ without wrecking the car. Thus began my sojourn in the tropical paradise of Key West, Florida, a state I don’t care if I ever see again.
The NAVFAC, for all its shortcomings, had a generous leave and liberty policy, and I was able to get away for several long weekends in the ten months I was stationed there. Most of them I spent in Oregon. Chuck and Elouise lived in married housing at the University of Oregon in those days. They took me on several outings – at least one into the Cascade mountains east of Eugene, another to the Oregon coast. I brought my camera along and shot pictures, and I also took photos en route back and forth from Centerville Beach. Here they are.
My Triumph Spitfire parked in front of Chuck & Elouise Mattox’s residence in University of Oregon married students’ housing on Columbia Street, Eugene, August 1965
One outing took us up to Three-Fingered Jack, an inactive shield volcano in the Cascades, 7,844 feet high. Unlike some other volcanoes in the Cascades, such as Mt. Jefferson and the Three Sisters, Three-Fingered Jack is very irregular and jagged, and its highest peak appears from a distance to consist of three jagged spikes, hence its name.
Oregonians frolicking in a meadow near 3-Fingered Jack
In a shady area on the northeast side of the mountain is a glacier, which (surprise!) is called Jack Glacier. We climbed up to it and shot a few pictures.
Jack Glacier – from left to right: Dixon Johnson, Elouise Mattox and Chuck Mattox
There is a pool formed by meltwater at the bottom of the glacier. Part of it is visible in the picture above, but you can see all of it in the following photo, which also features me standing on the surface of the glacier.
J. L. Floyd at Jack Glacier in the Cascades, with glacial pool at the bottom of the glacier
Near Three-Fingered Jack there is also a small mountain lake, Jack Lake, with a campground where we stayed.
Jack Lake, with 3-Fingered Jack in the background – September 1965
While on a hike, we came across an old hulk of a tree with a hugely deformed branch growing out of it in the shape of a J. Elouise sat in the crook of the J, and the picture I shot of her in this natural “tree swing” is one of my most treasured mementos.
Elouise’s Tree Swing, Oregon Cascades, 1965
On my way to visit Chuck and Elouise from Centerville Beach, the shortest way was to take Highway 101 through the redwoods to Crescent City, then cut inland through the Smith River Valley on US 199 to Grant’s Pass, and finally shoot up Interstate 5 the rest of the way to Eugene. A slower, but more picturesque, way was to continue on Highway 101 past Crescent City and on up past Coos Bay to Reedsport, then cut inland on Oregon State Highway 38, which follows the Umpqua River, and runs into the I-5 near Drain, a few miles south of Eugene. Sometimes I would take that route go back to Centerville Beach too. Either way there were plenty of opportunities for pictures.
Umpqua River, Oregon, Aug 1965
The Umpqua River Valley is a beautiful area, and the road ran right next to the river. Sometimes I would stop the car along the highway to take a rest, soak up the scenery, and take a picture or two.
J. L. Floyd’s Triumph Spitfire parked by the side of the road along the Umpqua River, Oregon, August
There was little commercial traffic on the river; occasionally a barge would drift by carrying logs or other forest products down to Reedsport.
Barges in the Umpqua River, Oregon, Aug 1965
As you got nearer to the mouth of the Umpqua, the river grew wider and more meandering.
The Umpqua River in Oregon widens as it nears its mouth.
Although the Umpqua didn’t quite branch out into a river delta at its mouth like the Nile or the Mississippi, it did sport a few islands.
Island in the Umpqua River, near the junction of the Umpqua Highway with US 101, August 1965
When I drove north along US 101 from Crescent City, I passed through Brookings, Gold Beach, Ophir, Port Orford, Bandon, Coos Bay and North Bend before reaching the Umpqua at Reedsport. The Oregon Coast is rugged and often stormy. Several times I drove through driving rains in poor visibility, with huge trucks spraying tsunamis on my poor little Spitfire, threatening to swamp it. But in good weather, the vistas are fabulous.
Oregon Coast – Aug 1965
The Rogue is one of the most famous rivers in Oregon. It flows into the Pacific near the towns of Gold Beach and Wedderburn, and US 101 crosses it via the Isaac Lee Patterson Bridge, pictured below. This 1938-foot-long bridge was built in 1931 and shows strong Art Deco influences.
Rogue River Bridge, Oregon, 1965
Continuing north from Gold Beach, one encounters some of the most spectacular stretches of the southern Oregon coast, with rocky shores and driftwood-strewn sandy beaches.
Oregon Coast – 1965
One also encounters picturesque towns such as Port Orford and Bandon. Unfortunately none of my pictures of those places have survived. Bandon in particular lingers in my memory because Brent Parker, one of my classmates at OCS, came from there, and also because it was the site of a famous cheese factory, which rivaled Tillamook in the excellence of its product. You could stop at the Bandon Cheese Company and sample their wares for free. Unfortunately, their competitor Tillamook, whose factory is also on the Oregon Coast but much farther north, bought up Bandon Cheese in 2005, fired the staff and shut down the factory. However, that isn’t the end of the story. I recently read that in 2013 a new company, Face Rock Creamery, started up on the old Bandon Cheese factory site with the help of the city government and participation of some of the former Bandon staff.
Oregon Beach, August 1965
North of Bandon lies Coos Bay. With a population of around 16,000, the town of Coos Bay is the most populous city on the coast of Oregon, and together with the adjoining town of North Bend and other nearby small municipalities, forms a metropolitan area of around 32,000 people, known as the “Oregon Bay Area”. Coos Bay is considered the finest natural harbor on the West Coast between San Francisco and Puget Sound, and its port is the second busiest in Oregon after Portland (which is not on the coast but a ways inland on the Columbia River). During the ’50s and early ’60s the port of Coos Bay thrived on lumber exports and fishing, but with the decline of the logging industry and the fisheries it fell on evil days. But my interest in the Coos Bay area was focused on Coos Head, the promontory on the south side of the entrance to Coos Bay – because of the US Naval Facility located there.
Coos Head, August 1965
NAVFAC Coos Head was a SOSUS station just like the ones I was stationed at farther south – Centerville Beach and San Nicolas Island. (There were two other NAVFACs on the Pacific Coast, Point Sur and Pacific Beach.)
U. S. Naval Facility Coos Head, 1965
While I was stationed at Centerville Beach, on one of my trips north to Oregon, I dropped by Coos Head and shot a photo of the NAVFAC. Months later, while stationed at NAVFAC San Nicolas Island, I visited Coos Head as part of an Oceanographic System Pacific inspection team. I remember that the people there tried to “influence” the officer in charge of the team, LCDR Stong, by giving him a beautiful Samoyed puppy. He took the puppy, but the gift didn’t have any effect on their grade on the inspection.
NAVFAC Coos Head, like all the other SOSUS stations, is now defunct, having been decommissioned in 1987. While I was in the Navy, all the SOSUS stations except the one operated by the Canadians (Shelburne, Novia Scotia) were manned exclusively by men, but later the U. S. Navy followed the Canadian example and assigned women to them; the last Commanding Officer of NAVFAC Coos Head was a woman, LCDR Sheila McCoy.
The closure of NAVFAC Coos Head, the largest U. S. Navy installation in Oregon, was an economic disaster for the local area. The impact was mitigated to some extent when a new tenant, the Oregon Air National Guard, was found for the base. However, in 1996 the Guard pulled out too, and the base was shut down.
The local Native Americans had had their eye on the property for some time, and after the closure of the base the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians began efforts to have the property turned over to them, which occurred in 2005. Their intention was to use it for tribal housing, administrative offices and an “interpretive center,” whatever that is. But the property was badly contaminated by PCBs, various solvents and petroleum products, herbicides, asbestos, lead from ammunition used at a rifle range, and it had to be cleaned up before it could be used. A joint cleanup project shared by the Navy, Air National Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was undertaken and was 80% complete by 2015. I haven’t yet found any information on the subsequent development of the property.
In early September 1964, I had just returned from Europe and was scheduled to report to Newport, Rhode Island, on September 19 to begin US Naval Officer Candidate School. In the meantime, I took a trip to Oregon with Chuck Mattox in his white Volvo PV544 – the one which looked like a ’48 Ford Wombat. Chuck’s younger brother Jim came along with us. We took the scenic route, driving up Highway 101, taking our time and stopping to smell the flowers, or at least the garlic at Gilroy.
California Farm County along Highway 101 – Sept 1964
The first night we stopped at Carmel and sacked out on the beach in our sleeping bags. In the morning a cop came along, sounded reveille and sent us on our way. This was probably one of the last times you could sleep on the beach at Carmel without being fined and/or thrown in jail.
Carmel – Sept 1964
Continuing on through Northern California into Oregon, we cut over to US 97 to take the road to Crater Lake. I had never been to Crater Lake before. If I remember correctly, the park lodge and campgrounds were already closed for the season and it had already snowed for the first time, but the roads were clear and so were the skies. The weather was beautiful but cold. We slept by the side of the road – again, if I remember correctly, one of us in the car and two in a tent, or maybe vice versa. I do remember that Jim complained bitterly about the cold.
Approaches to Crater Lake – Sept 1964
When we woke up in the morning, the lake was engulfed in fog. It soon burned off in the morning sun, but while it lasted it gave the lake and its rim an almost otherworldly, spectral appearance.
Crater Lake – Sept 1964
We drove around the rim, viewing the lake from several vantage points. Wizard Island, at the west end of the lake, is visible in most of these pictures. There is a cruise boat that you can take to the island, but it had shut down for the season by the time we visited the lake.
Crater Lake – Sept 1964
When the fog cleared, the green of the forest around the rim contrasted sharply with the rocky cliffs and the blue water of the lake.
Crater Lake – Sept 1964
Although I’ve been to Crater Lake a couple of times since then, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as beautiful as in early September 1964.
Crater Lake – Walls of the Caldera at the West End
To get from the road to Proxy Falls, we had to hike an easy 1.5 mile trail. The waterfall is created by a single stream tumbling over a moss-covered hillside in two separate cascades, which then come together again halfway down, forming a diaphanous veil.
Top of Proxy Falls, Oregon, 1964
Proxy Falls drops 226 feet from the top of the hill. It presents a distinctly different appearance when you get up close, and you can get close enough to get wet.
Proxy Falls flows in a bifurcated stream down a hill covered with moss – late summer, 1964
Chuck, Elouise and Jim scrambled around on the wet rocks at the foot of the falls and I shot pictures with the little Voigtländer Vitoret I had brought back from Europe. The water from Proxy Falls, oddly enough, doesn’t continue to flow down to join the McKenzie. It seeps through the porous lava at the bottom of the falls and disappears.
Chuck, Elouise and Jim Mattox at Proxy Falls on the McKenzie River in Oregon, 1964
For Sunday afternoon, October 27, JoAnn, who had been on the road for weeks or maybe even months or years, wanted to go home, and none of the rest of us wanted to venture into the sand-blown maelstrom on the floor of Death Valley, so we piled into Red Sonja (Sandie’s Subaru Outback) and drove south to Shoshone, a hamlet just east of Death Valley which claims a population of 31, a grocery store, gas station and museum, a wetland in the middle of the desert, and, of all things, a hobbit ghost town.
Our first stop was the Shoshone Wetland, a haven for fish (!) and migratory birds in the middle of a desperately dry and dusty desert.
The wetland is hidden out of sight in an area which is also the site of an RV park and a school; you reach it via an access road which takes off from the side of the highway near the Charles Brown General Store.
This road leads to Shoshone’s RV park, school and wetland.
This is the entrance to the Shoshone Wetland.
As you venture into the wetland, the path widens and is kept cool and shady by overhanging vegetation.
Shady Lane
Reeds, palms, willows and other oasis vegetation populate the desert wetland biosphere.
Reeds, palms, willows and other oasis vegetation populate the desert wetland biosphere.
Eventually you reach a lovely shaded pool, complete with table, a perfect spot for a picnic.
Picnic Area
Jock loved exploring the wetland paths, and being on a leash didn’t cramp his style at all. He just draged us along wherever he wanted to go.
Jock goes exploring.
Growing by the waterside was an old gnarled willow tree, which reminded me of Old Man Willow in the Lord of the Rings, who lurked along the Withywindle in the Old Forest, waiting for unsuspecting hobbits to come by.
Old Man Willow
The Shoshone Wetland is a sanctuary for desert pupfish, of which it claims to have its own species. Here Diana, Sandie and Kelly contemplate a pool full of them.
Diana, Sandie and Kelly check out the desert pupfish.
Pupfish are quite small and not easy to see even in a clear pool. At least they don’t have to worry about fishermen, since they are far too small for people to eat.
How many Shoshone Pupfish can you find in this picture?
Next to the pool was a placard telling us all we needed to know about the Shoshone Pupfish.
All about the Shoshone Pupfish.
On the opposite (south) side of town we found another distinguishing attraction of Shoshone – a series of little dwellings, dug into the side of rocky hills. There were two sets of them, one on either side of a broad wash; the places on the south side, dug into the side of a low mesa-like outcrop, were more numerous – there were five or six of them, while there were only one or two on the north side – it was hard to tell whether there were two separate dwellings or just one with two doors. To me it seemed as if a small tribe of hobbits had somehow made their way to the Mojave Desert, and carved out hobbit-holes here, perhaps later abandoning them (for they were vacant) when the Big People invaded the area.
The north side of the hobbit ghost town, with dwellings of Big People in the background.
In keeping with the hobbit theme, I named the north set Bagshot Row.
Bagshot Row in the Desert
The south side, although it was completely detached from the north, I decided it was one house with two doors, and named it named Bag End.
Desert Bag End – A veritable hobbit mansion, with two doors.
Unfortunately, the desert version of Bag End was rather dilapidated and run-down. I decided that maybe Saruman/Sharkey had lived in it after being expelled from Middle-Earth.
