Chapter Six Chapter Six We awakened early, driving north from Los Angeles past Santa Barbara, finally leaving Highway 101 at a small crossroads called Buellton. From there we took a narrow road to the left, heading west toward the distant sea. The road wound through hills and mountain passes. Soon the vista widened, revealing another small, flat town called Lompoc. A welcome sign at the city limits indicated that we had entered “The Valley of Flowers,” population 5,000. As always my dad had done his homework, and during the long drive across the desert we had all heard his briefing. We knew that Lompoc’s principal business over the past few decades had been the cultivation and exportation of flower seeds, largely made possible during the lean labor years of World War II by sending Italian and German prisoners of war from their nearby internment camps to work in the fields. We knew also that the local economy had benefited from Lompoc’s hosting of a maximum-security Army “disciplinary barracks,” a brig that soon would be taken over by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as a federal penitentiary.
We had entered the valley of jails and flower seeds. Other than the flower fields, there was not a lot to see in Lompoc. We blew through the town in an eyeblink, not even thinking to stop. The road grew even narrower, winding this way and that. The scrub-filled, unpopulated mountains grew steeper. The car moved ever more slowly. And after ten miles or so we found what my father had been looking for.
A gate.
Not a garden gate or a Golden Gate or a Watergate. But neither was it the kind of brick-walled, iron-fenced, elaborately defended gate that we had grown accustomed to entering when we reached the outer perimeter of a military base. The gate itself was a little concrete island with a sentry post, sitting amid a field of raw, torn soil. Behind the gate, wide roads were being scraped from the dry orange earth. The foundations of buildings were being laid. Caterpillar tractors and bulldozer scrapers churned busily, far into the distance. A yet-to-be-populated community was coming alive before our eyes.
At three o’clock in the afternoon we were the only car waiting to enter the gate. The air policeman checked my father’s identification and waved us through. As we drove along the roads inside, we could not make out the sort of headquarters buildings and other infrastructure that usually signified a major military installation. Indeed the very sign above the guardhouse at the gate had been small, temporary, and unconvincing: COOKE AIR FORCE BASE. Until a few months before, the installation, then owned by the Army and most recently operated by the California National Guard, had been named Camp Cooke. Within another few months—on October 4, 1958, not incidentally the first anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1—the 85,000-acre facility in this wild, remote corner of Central California would formally be renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Through my father’s many vignettes I had already learned that the Air Force and the Army did not like each other and rarely seemed to agree on much, especially on how to spend the Department of Defense budget. Indeed this was the very reason that the Army Air Corps had so persistently lobbied to separate itself from the Army in the years leading up to the 1947 National Security Act, which had created not only the Department of Defense but also the Department of the Air Force. But the motivations of these two services had been similar in securing this vast piece of unpopulated land that bordered a rough and untamable stretch of the Pacific Ocean, even though their actual uses could not have been more different. Both the Army, beginning in 1941 as the country was mobilizing for World War II, and the Air Force, which was now taking it over in 1958, had sought out this territory north of Santa Barbara and south of San Luis Obispo due to its value as a vast and otherwise useless wilderness.
During World War II, Camp Cooke had been a heavily used training center for infantry, artillery, and tank units heading to war in the Pacific. Beginning in 1942, units from the Army’s 5th, 6th, 11th, 13th, and 20th Armored Divisions trained at Camp Cooke, as did the 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiment and the Army’s 86th and 97th Infantry Divisions. In all, during the course of the war more than 400 military units, including medical, combat engineer, field artillery, ordnance, armor, infantry, and antiaircraft artillery, underwent training there. With the onset of the Korean War, Camp Cooke had again been activated in order to provide training for units headed for Korea. After the war the camp had been largely deactivated, although it continued to be used by the California National Guard.
Soon to be named Vandenberg Air Force Base in honor of General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the second chief of staff of the Air Force and once director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Camp Cooke was ideally suited to become the principal base for the Air Force’s missile program. The base covered an immense space at a time when no one knew how large America’s missile program might eventually become. The property was already owned by the U.S. military, which eliminated any complications that might arise from interdepartmental transfer or the acquisition of nonfederal lands. It was both expansive and remote, valuable attributes, given the risks and safety zones necessary for the experimental launches of large missiles in an age of unproven and highly risk-filled technology. Its western border was on the sea, not only a safety consideration for missile launches but also a long-term guarantee against any future encroachment from civilian enterprises of a sort that could not be fully anticipated.
Additionally Vandenberg’s far-western position on the elbow of the California landmass fit well with the Air Force’s objective of putting satellites into polar orbit, whereby a missile would be launched in a north-south direction. Complementing this plan, the civilian launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, would be sent eastward over the Atlantic, into east-west orbit. Thus by design, at each launching site few American cities and indeed few people would be at any risk if a missile launch went badly, requiring the control officers to abort the launch and destroy a missile in midair when it exceeded the acceptable beams of its trajectory.
This was a wise precaution. Especially for the U.S. military, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of missiles behaving badly. Our country was frantically trying to catch up with the Soviet Union. Risks needed to be taken. In those early days a lot of our Thor, Atlas, and Scout missiles were doing weird things. Sometimes they would blow up on the launching pads; sometimes they would veer suddenly toward the mainland just after launch, requiring them to be detonated, scattering pieces all over the Central Coast. Sometimes they exploded high in the sky because of a malfunction as their systems transitioned from stage one to stage two, or from stage two to stage three, treating those of us who were watching from the ground to a thunderous atmospheric display as if they had been giant firecrackers.
But this was the summer of 1958; none of that had happened yet. Camp Cooke had just awakened from the sleep of its World War II and Korean War origins, to be converted into Cooke Air Force Base and then, eventually, to become the dynamic and vitally important facility of Vandenberg. Over the next year the base would grow from a population of nearly zero to 12,000. The atmosphere was chaotic, like that of a California Gold Rush town. And in the years following, it would grow even larger.
Odd cream-colored buildings dotted the landscape as we drove inside the base, holdover structures from World War II. Tall eucalyptus trees lined the narrow roadways, swaying from the sea breeze, planted during the war as windbreaks in successive lines that melted into a far horizon that eventually met the sea. There was, predictably, no military housing that would offer us a place to live, although we could see from the activity of the bulldozers and tractors the areas where the Capehart homes were being built. There were no schools, although my father assured us they would soon come, along with the housing. There was no operating infrastructure that would absorb the medical and recreational needs of military families. And there was no local population outside the gate itself that might have offered, say, a fast-food joint or a bowling alley or a movie theater—or, more important, a motel where we could spend the night.
All around us there was, basically, nothing.
Our car finally reached an old building where my father presented his orders and reported for duty. He was told that the nearest place that could accommodate a family of six was probably Pismo Beach, fifty miles north along narrow unimproved mountain roads that passed first through the small towns of Santa Maria and Arroyo Grande.
In Pismo Beach we found a motel room for $5 a night. The dingy, mildewed place sat on a hill overlooking the fog-filled pier and streets lined with penny arcades. Expert settlers by now, we quickly adapted to the dark motel room. Without a car for ourselves, we spent idle hours at Pismo Beach as my father drove more than a hundred miles every day along the rough two-lane roads to and from his new assignment. The room was technically called an apartment, since there was a tiny kitchen in one corner. My father negotiated the motel manager down to $25 a week for all six of us, since he could guarantee that we would be staying for a while.
Pismo Beach was more interesting than the Gila monster shop next to Route 66 in the Arizona desert. In fact it became an adventure. We played Skee-Ball at the penny arcades and spent long hours walking along the dull-grey beach, comparing it to the glorious salt-white sands of Sarasota that we had just left behind. We stared westward toward the open sea, watching half-interested fishermen pull an occasional fingerling from the ocean as they conversed with each other on the pier. We rarely saw my father, and we never discussed with him what he was doing in the scrub brush amid the rattlesnakes and wide patches of ice plant at the edges of this same ocean, far to our south.
As the school year neared, my father found a rental home in Santa Maria, which was being vacated by an Air Force officer who had just been reassigned from Vandenberg. Our house in Santa Maria cut my father’s commuting time in half, but it still required him to drive twenty-five miles over the rough mountain roads before he reached the gate at Vandenberg, and then several additional miles to the missile pads that bordered the sea. A few months after that we were among the first group of families to move into the new Capehart housing project on the base itself. Thankfully and finally, we would stay in a new three-bedroom home at 612 Arbor Drive for a year and a half—the longest time we would occupy one home, other than Felix Street in St. Joe, in my entire childhood.
I began the eighth grade in Santa Maria, a quiet farming town of 25,000 people known mostly for its expansive strawberry fields. Sometimes as we drove past the fields I would watch my mother in the front seat, staring knowingly through the car window at the Mexican workers bringing in the fruit. I could see the memories floating through her eyes and feel them coursing through her veins. White County, Arkansas, was known mostly for its cotton and its lumber mills, but the small town of Judsonia, just a few miles north of Kensett, had once labeled itself “The Strawberry Capital of America.” My mother had picked and chopped a lot of cotton, but she also remembered well what it was like to work long hours in the strawberry fields, stooped over in the heat, carefully removing the fragile berries and filling up the baskets.
The education degeneration that had begun with our return from England hit a rapid down-slope in California. I attended three schools in the eighth grade alone, each of them a step downward toward academic oblivion. In Santa Maria they tested the whole class and then put four of us into an experimental routine, something of a precursor to today’s gifted/talented programs, where we sat separately from the rest of the class and proceeded at our own pace. When my father was assigned to on-base military housing at Vandenberg, the kids at Capehart were initially bused into the overwhelmed school system in the tiny town of Lompoc. The classes were so crowded from the military surge into Vandenberg that the entire school was put on double shifts. In effect the school became two schools under one roof, the morning school and the afternoon school. Classes were so disorderly that often one could not even hear the teacher speak. There was no personal interaction; a student was nothing more than a name on the attendance sheet. Learning was impossible. This was not a school; it was a holding tank.
Just before Christmas, Vandenberg converted a sprawling, old World War II hospital into its own elementary and junior high schools. The one-story cream-colored hospital complex had consisted of a series of open wards connected by long, narrow hallways. Those wards were now our classrooms. School desks replaced the hospital beds. A portable green chalkboard stood in front of the desks, next to a larger desk for the teacher.
Mischief was rampant, both inside and out of these makeshift classrooms. Misconduct was the order of the day. Learning was not.
Entering the ninth grade, I established the school record on the California State Physical Fitness Test. As I was a year younger than my peers and rope-muscled, weighing in at about 120 pounds, it surprised more than one person to see my name in large letters at the top of the poster board that was mounted on a wall just inside the gym door.
Our physical education teacher, Mr. Purdy, was a hard-nosed disciplinarian who had most recently worked in the Lompoc Prison. In the shortened year before, the kids at Vandenberg Junior High had proved too irascible for several PE teachers, all of whom had quit. Mr. Purdy was the answer. He was a natural motivator. In the Marine Corps he would have made a great drill instructor. Inspirational posters filled the old World War II gym: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” and one that I especially liked, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
To my surprise and mild embarrassment, after the physical fitness tests were scored, Mr. Purdy lectured every class in the school on the subject of determination, and I was his teaching point. He told them that after eight pull-ups I should have dropped off the bar, but that I had refused to quit until I reached seventeen. I still don’t agree with him on that. I did seventeen because seventeen needed to be done, Mr. Purdy. But I have never forgotten how valuable a bit of praise can be, especially from someone who grudgingly gives it.
At Parents’ Night Mr. Purdy pulled my poker-faced father aside. “I did not know how your son got that score,” he said, as my now glowing father recounted when he got home, “until I saw him take his shirt off.”
The most memorable moments in the Vandenberg classrooms came from the missile sites, miles away along the coastline, where many of our fathers were spending impossibly long hours performing vital tasks that they could not tell us about. Without warning or fanfare, now and then as we sat in our hospital-ward classrooms the ground would begin to tremble and a dull roar would fill the airspace, becoming so loud that our teachers could not speak. We would pour out of the classrooms into the yard closest to the sea, looking westward and cheering as if we were spectators at a football game. Sometimes a Thor or an Atlas missile would loft majestically into the sky, pitching and yawing and rolling, finding its beam, then arcing into its second stage as it headed southward over the ocean. Sometimes the roar would suddenly stop, and we would know the mission had failed on the launching pad. Sometimes the missile would rise slowly and then go off-track, veering out of sight, and we knew that soon it would be destroyed.
In those moments I would quietly burst inside with pride. That was my dad out there on those pads. On October 16, 1958, the 1st Missile Division officially accepted the first Atlas ICBM launcher from the contractors who had built it. As I would later discover, my father had gained enormous credibility within the Strategic Air Command by having written the book outlining the procedures that the Air Force used to put the Atlas missiles into place. On September 9, 1959, the first Atlas-D missile was successfully launched from Vandenberg. A month later the Atlas ICBMs were equipped, on their launching pads, with nuclear warheads.
The officers and airmen out in the wilderness of Vandenberg had proven that the United States would neither be intimidated nor deterred. The challenge of the Soviet Union with the launch of Sputnik 1 and 2 less than two years before had been met, and surpassed. Later that year, during a visit to the United States, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the train past the tiny town of Surf on the outer edge of the base as he rode from Los Angeles to San Francisco. As the train passed near Vandenberg Air Force Base, he ceremoniously turned his back to us, staring out of the train car toward the sea. In the homes of Vandenberg we quietly celebrated this open and yet futile rebuke, for it could not have been a greater compliment. We had paid a price, all of us, but our fathers had made our country more secure.
In the midst of all this scientific and military achievement, Vandenberg remained remote, undeveloped, and surrounded by wilderness. There were no small commercial outlets such as McDonald’s or Burger King where we might eat or, better yet, make a few bucks flipping burgers. There was no gate ghetto outside the base perimeter, and there were no strip malls. In fact there were no stores at all, other than the commissary, where people bought their food, and the Base Exchange, which sold basic clothing and essential sundries. A military-run Teen Club was the only place where kids could gather for social functions; the small, leftover World War II building held little more than a jukebox and a dance floor and usually was open only Friday and Saturday nights.
The base movie theater had one screen, where twice a night it most frequently showed second-rate B movies. Admission was 25 cents for an adult and 15 cents for a child. In the ninth grade, at the age of thirteen and then fourteen, I found work there as a cleanup boy, coming in after school to sweep and swab among the seats and scrub the toilet areas in preparation for the night’s customers. The pay was minuscule, but there was little other opportunity for a job at Vandenberg. I mowed lawns here and there, and I tried baby-sitting, which for a boy was difficult work to find.
But the wild things in the dusty scrub and the sea life along the tidal pools and riptides of the Pacific shoreline were there to explore. The wilderness began at the edge of our housing project, continuing for miles until it reached the sea. I regularly took long hikes, often alone, sometimes carrying a shotgun or a rifle, my brother sometimes with me, carrying a bow. On the far side of a few stands of eucalyptus trees the trenches and the foxholes of the Army training areas still remained. Deer, lynx, bobcats, and rabbits often sprang before us. The rough seacoast was dotted with large tidal pools, busily diving cormorants, and thick colonies of sea lions.
The base shuttle bus made regular runs to a small beach area near the town of Surf, but few people took that ride and the beach was usually empty. Signs warned us that the often violent surf, riptides, and seven-mile-an-hour undertow precluded swimming. The target lanes and the impact butts from World War II firing ranges still lined some of the beaches, where soldiers had once fired their rifles toward the empty, turbulent sea.
Our family took weekend drives well to the north along the narrow, sand-filled roads that bordered the sea, the only greenery among the parched sand of the coastline from scraggly shrubs and vast fields of ice plant. My brother and I often went camping with our friends in the sand dunes. We explored the tidal pools and did our best to fish in the rough, almost explosive sea.
At home, my cow-whisperer brother now became the fish gatherer, building a saltwater aquarium for the creatures he took out of the tidal pools. At one point he captured an eel, which over the space of a few days managed to devour every other creature in the tank.
For a few months I operated what certainly was the worst little paper route in the world. Delivering newspapers door to door was one of the few ways that kids just entering their teenage years could make money in this remote place. Competition was fierce, and the methods of obtaining a paper route were shrouded in mystery. There was no place to actually apply for the job. Like the inheritor of a royal title or a family-held monopoly, a kid with a paper route at Vandenberg could not be challenged by a competitor or forced to subdivide his realm. Once he obtained a paper route, unless he grew tired of folding, bundling, and riding his bike through the neighborhoods or his family was transferred to another military base, the job was his.
The moneymaking newspapers at Vandenberg were the Los Angeles Times in the morning and the Santa Barbara News Press in the afternoon, followed by the Santa Maria Times for those interested in more local news. I made myself constantly available as a substitute carrier for the boys who owned the routes whenever they were sick or when their families were on vacation. This brought in some cash from time to time. It also allowed me to get to know the local distributors, who dropped off each day’s load of newspapers on the driveway of the carriers. A distributor finally gave me the franchise for sales in my neighborhood of the weekly Lompoc Record, a thin local rag whose business model was so skimpy that it did not allow for the complicated paperwork of subscriptions. Instead it required that the paper be sold door to door.
The financial results were slim, but I did sell a lot of Lompoc Records. My brief experience selling newspapers on street corners in Oceanside while staying with Aunt Carolyn had taught me a valuable lesson about face-to-face marketing. This was a military community that had precious little expendable income. With the Lompoc Record the challenge was convincing people to buy something that they did not particularly want or need, all in the space of about ten seconds and often in the middle of a hectic family dinner. This meant keeping potential buyers from giving an immediate no to the kid at the front door and balancing their lack of interest in the paper with the fact that it was only a quarter, given to a kid who at least had the industry to be walking through the neighborhoods in the darkness to try, Oliver Twist–like, to make a few pennies.
To this logic I added one more emotion-laden factor. Military family members opening up the door might not be particularly moved when staring into the face of a thirteen-year-old with an earnest but easily dismissed attitude. What they needed to see on their doorstep on a dark Tuesday night was a puppy that they instinctively wanted to pet. That part would be played by my irrepressibly lovable nine-year-old brother.
I carefully prepared Gary for the task, loading him up with canvas bags carrying copies of that week’s edition, fitting the bags front to back over his shoulders, burdening him as if he were a pack mule. I taught him how to hold the newspaper, in both hands just below his chin, as soon as the door opened. We rehearsed how he should look: wide-open eyes and hopeful half-smile. I made him practice again and again a slow, cautious phrase to utter as soon as someone answered the door, followed by the smile: “Do you want to buy a Lompoc Record?”
I walked with Gary along the streets, holding a larger bag and refilling his as it steadily emptied. Like a parent with a trick-or-treating kid on Halloween night I waited on the sidewalk as he approached each house.
We could not sell the papers fast enough. With each sale I would give Gary a nickel, keeping a dime for myself as the agent and manager. But a few dollars one night a week was a pittance compared to the money being made by the lucky few who had the big routes of the well-known dailies.
Finally one of the distributors offered me a base-wide route that had opened up due to the sudden resignation of the boy who owned it. A kid abandoning something as valuable as a paper route in Vandenberg should have given me pause, but the lure of having my own route made it impossible to even consider saying no. The distributor caught my excited look. He emphasized again that the route was base-wide and that I would have full rights to expand the subscriptions, with a bonus for every new one I could get.
Thus I was suckered into delivering the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Mirror News to homes spread out in various corners of the vast acreage of Vandenberg Air Force Base. I began with a few limitations, one of them being that I did not own a bicycle, and thus on a daily basis had to borrow my brother’s white secondhand twenty-incher that my dad had recently given him for Christmas. The second limitation was far more frustrating. Although my territory included the entire housing area, I had only thirty customers. So every afternoon I would load up my newspaper bags and pedal all over the sprawling base in order to throw thirty copies of these two newspapers into the driveways of people who, for reasons unknown even to me, were interested in reading them.
Sunday mornings were the worst. I would wake up before dawn, folding and loading the small pile of newspapers that had been left on my driveway, and then bicycle mile upon mile to deliver them before breakfast. I did not mind the waking up or the pedaling, but all of this effort in order to deliver a mere handful of newspapers seemed foolish compared to my peers, who in the same amount of time were making big money delivering hundreds of copies of the L.A. Times and Santa Barbara News Press. One cool, foggy morning I pulled myself inside the old green kapok parka that my dad still kept from his days in the frozen regions of Alaska. Coasting down a hill on a long stretch of houses where I had no subscribers, I fell asleep on the bike, crashing immediately into the pavement. Embarrassed, I was saved from real pain by the absence of traffic at six in the morning and by the pillow-like parka that had lured me to sleep in the first place.
The shock came at the end of the first month, when I went to the homes of my customers in order to collect payment. Fully half of them refused to pay me, informing me that they had tried to cancel their subscription to no avail. I had thrown newspapers onto their driveways for a month, certain that each of them would net me almost $2, and had received nothing. I was now down to sixteen customers, spread out over an area several times larger than the landmass of Arlington National Cemetery.
My distributor had obviously heard these complaints before. He promised me that I was first on the waiting list for the Santa Barbara newspaper if the boy who held the route ever quit, which I knew he would not do since he lived across the street and had told me so. The distributor also promised me that since I had the rights to deliver the Chronicle and the Mirror News throughout the base, I could continue to recruit new customers and thus grow the route. And with that, a light went on in my brain.
In order to grow the route, I told him, I needed extra papers to feed potential customers. He agreed, giving me a stack of complimentary copies every day. Rather than tossing them into random driveways in the housing areas in hopes of eventually finding one or two new customers, I took the extra papers to the military mess halls, where often bored airmen were gathering for their evening meals. This was a win-win solution for both me and the distributor. Instead of making 3 cents a day for every new subscriber, assuming anyone ever decided to subscribe, I now could make a dime for every paper that I sold in the mess hall. And the distributor did not care. If he lost me as the delivery boy for the sixteen scattered subscribers in the housing area, he would have to deliver them himself, because nobody who learned about the realities of this route ever wanted to keep it.
Selling newspapers in the mess halls was easy work and great fun. After a few days a couple of the military cooks adopted me, sneaking me an occasional piece of cake or pie. And convincing a handful of airmen to buy a newspaper taught me valuable new negotiating skills. Approaching the tables, I would quickly figure out which airmen had taken notice of my shoulder bag and would head for them immediately. In newspapers as in politics, there is no substitute for eye contact.
“Hey, mister, how about a Chronicle or a Mirror News?”
I would inevitably get a dismissive smile. “Not interested.”
“It’s only a dime.”
The resistance would weaken. “I can’t read.”
“If you buy one I’ll read it to you. Come on, mister, it’s a dime.”
There would be a shared laugh among military friends at the table: The kid has spunk. “Oh, all right. If you promise to leave me alone tomorrow.”
Pocketing the dime and handing him that day’s Mirror News, I suggested, “Check out the comics section. Mister, once you read this paper you’re going to be looking for me tomorrow!”
As we finished nearly two years at Vandenberg, the base itself was growing up. The trees and the yards in the housing areas were becoming more mature. Commercial zones were responding to the increased Air Force presence in the towns of Lompoc and Santa Maria and even in a few spots near the base. The base was becoming known, though not always in a positive way. One weekend afternoon our rather monotonous regimens were broken when a contingent from the Ban the Bomb movement located somewhere far away, probably San Francisco, made a curious march outside the main gate. We watched from inside the chain-link fence as they tried to enter the base with their protest signs. We cheered with relief as they were washed back across the road by air policemen with a fire hose. Surprisingly they then made a rather orderly departure, perhaps having captured their political moment with a few good camera shots.
Along the way, my father had gained a superb reputation for innovative problem solving in a professional arena where, at least in these early months, raw intellect was valued over formal education. In early 1960 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Along with a handful of others, he had become a true pioneer in the missile program and was among the first to be awarded the coveted badge of a Missileman to wear on the upper left pocket of his uniform jacket, below his ribbons. Above the ribbons, like a long-lost memory from another time, he was still entitled to wear the pilot’s wings that I had been so worried they would take away from him. Now he was assigned to Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, where he would continue to work on Top Secret issues related to our missile programs.
My ever-nomadic father was nothing if not predictable. Not having taken anything resembling a vacation in two years, the first thing the Old Man did before reporting for duty in Nebraska was to load us in the car and drive from California through Texas and all the way to Florida.
It was a brutal trip. The three shut-ups rule was gone, but with the improvement of our national highways the goal of 600 miles a day was now extended, my dad pushing for 700. The backseat of the car had not grown any bigger, but all four of us kids had.
Reuniting with the Colwell family, we spent a month fishing and water-skiing in the lake region near Ocala. Life was good in the normal, outside world. Uncle Bud’s silica sand plant was up and running with three full-time employees, not far from Florida’s famed Silver Springs. I was fourteen. I caught a lot of bass. I learned to pull two water-skiers behind the powerful outboard motors of a fiberglass boat. I hitchhiked here and there along central Florida’s tree-lined highways. I fell in love a dozen times a day. Then we turned around and headed halfway back across the country to the farmlands of Nebraska.