Windmills

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Originally uploaded by Michael Jones.

He was buried deep when he felt the turbulence around his right foot. The sheet of blue green fell in front and to the right of him as the opposing surface raced up on the left. There was an opening straight ahead that he raced for. That's the problem with the green room. You rarely enjoy it while you're there since you are always trying to escape. This is especially true when you’re suspended only 3 feet above a solid razor sharp surface. Daylight came into view only to reveal the wall curving in towards the shore and the curtain falling in front of his new opening. He knew it was closing in from behind as well. This time the opening at the end of the tunnel was large but it was a long way off and it was closing. He lifted his arm out of the water and rapidly alternated his position slightly to increase his speed. He made it to the opening just as the white foam obscured any path to escape. He could imagine the disappointed groans from the local boys on the cliff. He knew the cost of getting caught in the collapsing cave. This wave was triple overhead when he took off on it. It was big and steep at Windmills and even though it was crowded only one rider was paddling for a wave at a time while the rest scrambled up the face to avoid getting thrown over. The drop was vertical and the takeoff contained a moment of uncertainty when he could have just as easily gone over the falls. The wave retained all of its power but it was concentrated in this small room that was feeling more and more claustrophobic by the second. The collapse would hurt. At best knock the wind out of him and at worst drag him across the reef while he tried to find a way back to the surface. He reached down to grab the nose of his board to attempt an escape through the back of the wave. That'€™s when he heard the hissing. The wave was collapsing behind him and like a freight train the compressed mist was approaching, ready to push him through the recently collapsed exit. He flew out of the barrel and as the wave collapsed behind he coasted into the channel. He heard the boys and girls on the cliff hoot their joy and disbelief. He outstretched both of his arms towards the sky and gave the crowd the finger with both hands. He felt they deserved that much. He thought about paddling in. Best ride of the day. Can’t get any better then that. He flopped down on his board and paddled out scratching over the face of the last wave of the set.

The Ride from Anadarko

I know the day my life changed. My family and I were heading to California. Home from a trip to visit my grandma. We were leaving the holiday inn heading out to New Mexico to see the Carlsbad Caverns and then to Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon. My Dad was going to meet us in Las Vegas. The holiday inn had the best lemonade I had ever tasted in my 9 years of experience. Dad was with us most of the trip but flew home early for work. I knew a time in Las Vegas meant unprecedented freedom. We would stay at some kid friendly hotel like Circus Circus. I would get unlimited quarters for arcade games and I could wander around the hotel without anyone checking up on me. I loved sneaking around in the stair wells that were only meant to be used for fire escapes but were open to the outside. I would try and sneak into the basement or best of all get onto the roof and see the strip, or some other feature of the surrounding area, from a perspective that I thought no one else appreciated. I remember some strange mechanical structure in the parking lot. I think it was a crane. At the time it seemed like some great relic of industrial development. The mysteries of the adult world were apprehensible to the attentive young boy. I admired the women who flirted with me and the men they attached them self’s to in the elevator. This was ideal road trip for a 9 year old boy.

The trip to the inn was just as memorable. I loved my family and I loved experiencing new things. We came to my grandma’s house by way of Fort Worth. This was where my Dad’s parents lived. We had to call them Grand mother and Grand Father. They were Methodists. It was summer and the road was hot. I saw those mirages on the ground at every dip in the road. They still amazed me. How much they looked like water. The desert north of Fort Worth is flat and barren, as I remember it. The July sun was blazingly hot. The heat was dry. In contrast to the incredibly humid Fort Worth heat. I tried to appreciate the out doors once at Grandmothers house. I went into the back yard and laid in their hammock. Within minutes I was miserable from multiple mosquito attacks. I scratched for days after, until the swollen wounds bled. Mom was able to convince me that scratching wouldn’t help. We had no air condition in the car. Dad gave each of us water so that we could cool our selves off on the drive. We were told to save it till it got really bad. Soon it was really bad. I poured a small amount of my ration on my chest and it evaporated immediately. I then dumped the remainder on my head and it ran down my back and sides but never hit the seat. I could tell my mom was begrudging my dads hack attempt at making the ride tolerable. The road was a long, strait two lain road. You could see boring flat desert in all directions. Not like the amazing Arizona or Utah deserts I had seen before. At one point Dad let me sit on his lap and steer. This made mom very anxious and he immediately stopped the procedure.

When we crossed over into Oklahoma we came across rivers whose waters were colored by the red mud which could be seen along the shores. My mom always pointed stuff out like this because she knew these natural phenomena interested me. They interested her too. She told us a story. My grandfather had taken a dare from his friend to swim from the shore of one of these murky red rivers to a log they had spotted near the edge of the opposite shore. He tired himself out swimming across and had intended to rest on the log when he got there. Unfortunately when he touched the log he quickly realized that it was a sleeping alligator. He rushed back to his shore of origin. The landscape had changed as we crossed over the boarder. The land was green with rolling hills. I think I had been complaining about how flat it was because my mom pointed out that there were mountains in Oklahoma. I mocked the ones I was seeing. Quietly or vocally I don’t remember. They were dwarfed by the Santa Monica Mountains that surrounded the west San Fernando Valley and they were made insignificant by the Sierra Mountains my brother bragged about scaling. I was already learning to express notions of superiority and a monopoly on the truth. I am not sure when my father left us to head back home but I don’t remember him at Grandma’s house.

Grandma’s house was very old. It was the first house in Anadarko to be built and occupied by a non Indian family. My grandmother was the first white women to be born in that town. This fact seemed to not be very intriguing to some local Indians whom my sister found to make small talk with on a subsequent visit. They politely ignored her comments. The house had a garage, or work shop, filled with ancient treasures. I remember an old ice box and my other brother told me about a first addition playboy that was hidden in there. The one with Marylyn Monroe on the cover. He spent more time in Texas and Oklahoma then any of the kids. He went to school in Waco. On one visit they told him that he could take anything he wanted from the garage. He had always been a collector. Particularly a collector of magazines. I had previously defiled his meticulously arranged collection of mad magazines as I read them and folded the hidden message page on the back on summer days. Great summer days of country time lemonade, I hadn’t experienced the true lemonade of the holiday inn, saltine crackers and messing up the chronological order of all of my brother's Archie comics and Mad magazines. For my brother the First playboy would have been the mother load. Actually that would be a great investment for anyone who understood the collectors market. He was two embarrassed to ask for it. He is sure that some, not all to altruistic do-gooder, who volunteered to “Clean Up” the garage after my Grandma died, got all of the good stuff. I think the house was Spanish style. There were rounded arched passage ways between rooms. I could clime up them side ways with my hands on one side and my feat on the other. Like a chimney clime in a wide gap. The house was adjacent to a small apartment or office rental that Grandma owned. It had two rooms. It was a great place to escape to when you just wanted to hang out with kids. My brother had come up at some point on this trip with some of his friends and a cousin or two. They all wanted to hang out there one night. I didn’t want to be left out and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want me there. Mom made my brother include me. He seemed only slightly disappointed and then tried to make me feel included. I thought that the older boys were mocking me when they all came back from getting burgers. I unwrapped mine and it had a bite taken out of it. It was intended as a joke for one of the other guys. And they made the true victim accept the damaged burger as he protested. “I’m not going to eat it. You gave it to him!”. They responded, “Common you can’t make him eat it”. Later that night Johnny Carson made a joke to one of his guests which featured an innuendo that went strait over my head. As they all laughed I begged them to decipher it for me. They seemed to all speak in chorus that I was too young. This was a joke for older people. Gramma’s house was also filled with bugs. They would fall on you at night from the ceiling. Very creepy. I don’t think she was uncleanly. It was just the nature of an old house in an area like that. The bugs at night did creep me out although I cried and fought with my sister over one daddy long leg that she insisted must die and I insisted was a living being worthy of our protection. I don’t think I saved that one.

Grandma was great. She could be silly like my mom could be. She stayed up late and played cards and she joked about her age when I was amazed that the skin under her arm swayed to and fro as I batted it back and forth with my hands. Grandmother would have never have appreciated the humor in that. Grandma, however, could not cook and Grandmother was amazing. That made up for a lot of the latter’s diminished since of fun. I also had an accident in the Anadarko house. I peed in the bed. It wasn’t that I was prone to bed wetting or that I had been subjected to any recent trauma. I simply needed to pee so I dreamed that I got up out of bed walked to the bathroom in Grandma’s house and released the pressure in my bladder. The dreamed turned sour as I wondered why I wasn’t hitting the toilet and why my leg was getting wet.

I don’t remember leaving grandma’s. I just remember the great anticipation I had about seeing the caverns in New Mexico and visiting, what my oldest brother had referred to as, the world’s biggest whole in the ground. We would get bored on the drive and play some standard games like license plate alphabet or 21 questions. We never played slug bug. Maybe it didn’t exist yet. Better then that, we all got a turn to tell the story of some movie we saw. I think that was mostly my brother's idea. And he was the best story teller. He loved movies. I wished that I could tell the stories as well as my sister and brother and they got bored when it was my turn. The holiday inn was great. I already told you about the Lemonade. The pool was inside and it was surrounded by internal walkways to the rooms on all levels. I thought this was amazing. The water was clear and cool. Not like those cheap hotels that had so much chlorine in the lukewarm warm murky water that your eyes would burn all night. I left the Mexican Jumping Beans that I bought at one of those roadside tourist traps in the sink in our clean bathroom. There was a mummy at the trap and about 100 signs every few miles preceding the location.

The next day we were to make it all the way to Carlsbad. I was anxious to leave but was conflicted as I realized that my Jumping Beans were no longer jumping. I kept taking them out of there bag to see if I could revive them and asking Mom if we should go back and return them for some that were less dead. I also realized they were some sort of bug and I felt bad as I realized they were dying. Not as bad as I felt when I caught a Monarch butterfly in the enclosed porch at Grandmother and Grandfather’s house. We went to dinner and on return I searched for it and searched for it. I finally found it folded on a beam in an upper corner of the patio. I cried as I only wanted to keep the butterfly for a short time because it was beautiful. I thought my actions had killed it. I was assured that they live a very short life and that it would have died anyway. I then realized that I diminished the experience of its last few hours of life. My mother was exasperated.

That morning after Mom had talked to Dad we were told that we were not going to Carlsbad or the Grand Canyon and that we would not be meeting dad in Las Vegas. She told us, or I overheard, that he had noticed a lump on his neck. That he went to the doctor and that he was worried. He didn’t want us to change our plans. Mom apologized to me since she knew that I would be disappointed. We needed to go straight home and be with Dad.