Meeting Mrs Bird
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (youth and childhood)
(this is an old -true!- story I wrote many years ago…)
MEETING MRS BIRD
I had to admit to my girlfriend that I had been putting it off. There was no point in denying it. She knew. I knew. But…
I had GOOD reasons, I kept telling her. It would NOT work. I KNEW it would be a disaster. I had experience of these things…
But she was adamant.
We had been going out for four months. Her mother was insisting that I be brought home for inspection. My dilly dallying was getting her mother worried. It was only making it worse. Better come home, meet the parents, and get it over with.
It would be all right, she promised. She had prepared the way. They would like me. No problem. Just relax.
Oh, yeah?
I knew better. I was a bit on the wild side. Mothers didn’t like me. I’d been through it all before. I avoided girlfriends’ mothers and fathers like the plague…
I was twenty something. Loved my motorbike. A whopping big Triumph Trident seven fifty. Went like sh… manure off a shovel. And I used to BELT around on it. It was a three cylinder job, with a luvvely roaring British motorbike sound. None of your Japanese strangled-cat box-of-rusty-nails irritating whining. Nope. A deep, lusty, booming British motorbiking bellow. I loved it. I had ended up back in Ireland, and there were some crackin’ good biking roads in Dublin that had stone walls on each side. I would drive miles out of my way to be able to go balls out down those roads, revelling in the melodious din. Melodious to me, that is. Trouble was, some people had no soul. And I was aware that some folk did not like a thirty second advance warning of my meteoric arrival. Personally I liked the sound of distant motorbikes appearing over the far horizon. Going flat out, approaching like some demented warrior riding for Armageddon. To me it was a sort of poetry in motion, a definite art form,and I was a passionate motorcyclist.
I rode thousands of miles all over the Wicklow mountains, and some sweeping mountain roads never lost their attraction, no matter how many times I traveled them at speeds varying from a ‘ton up’ sizzling one hundred plus, to a mundane, gentle, thoughtful ‘forty to fifty’.
The bike was a problem. But not the only one. There was also the black leather jacket. And the black gauntlets. And the black leather boots. I had originally tried motorcycling without leathers. In a long raincoat. With black shoes. Gentlemanly.
Sort of…
What a farce. It was cold, the wind whistled straight through, and the rain soaked through in an instant. My coat flapped gaily and irritatingly in the breeze, my socks were soon soaked, and chips and stones would rattle painfully off my unguarded shins. I had always associated leather motorcycle jackets with hoodlums and criminals. But I was soon converted. It’s the only thing to wear. It’s warm, relatively water resistant, and hellish good when you come tumbling off. It’s like an extra layer of rhinoceros skin, and many a time I was to thank my leathers when I was left with torn leather, rather than torn ligaments.
The problem was that I knew all this. But I couldn’t (and didn’t) expect the uninitiated plebs to realize the finer points of motorcycling attire. And parents of girlfriends were definitely members of the uninitiated plebs.
The bike was a problem. The way I drove it (thrashed it) was a problem. The leathers were a problem. But…
What REALLY did it, I think, was the combination of my broken front tooth and the magnificent creation that adorned my face: my beard…
Photo of a bearded hippy by Jan Tik
The tooth I couldn’t be bothered to get fixed. I don’t know why. So it was a bit of a mess all right. Upper front right tooth was a broken old stump. So what. I wasn’t vain. Everything else, yes, but vain, no. Unkempt hooligan, more like it. And the beard…
Hell, I liked it. It… kept my face warm. And I thought it looked good. It varied in size a bit, from a smallish beard, to a mammoth beard. It went in phases. And, at the time, it had reached well down my chest. At the youth club, my little charges would amuse themselves by seeing how many byros/ballpoint pens they could conceal/attach, in/to my growth. Byros? Why byros? Never did figure that one out. I believe the record stood at fifty seven.
Of course, you had to watch things with a beard when motorcycling. It was often a good idea, when it was THAT big, to either tuck it inside your jacket, or wrap a scarf around your face, or else be VERY careful when you looked over your shoulder…
As I had discovered one day almost to my cost.
I’d been blattering down this steep mountain road, with a low stone wall on my right, racing a mate on his Norton. There was a drop of several hundred feet on the other side of the two foot wall…
Well ahead of the Norton dope, I had cast a quick, smug, look over my shoulder at this distant figure chasing me, hopelessly outclassed by me, the road racing professional. It was only as I swung my gaze back quickly to the road ahead, fast being swallowed up beneath my wheels, that disaster had struck. Somehow, my mammoth beard had blown UP in the wind, right in front of my face, totally obscuring my view. With both hands needed on the bars to control the pounding beast on the bumpy road, the sudden complete loss of vision had startled me greatly, and the resultant weird wallowing manoeuvre alarmed my pursuer to such a degree, that in the pub that night he had dined out on the story:
“Jayzus, tell ya, I thought he was going over the edge. He had his beard up in front of his eyes. Can ya BELIEVE it…? “
Of course THAT was not the only hazard associated with my beard. There were others.
Meeting girlfriends’ parents was definitely one of them…
On top of everything else, I was a lapsed Catholic.
Natalie Bird was a Protestant. With a figure like she had, I couldn’t give a hoot myself if she’d been a Muslim or a Buddhist. But I had gathered from the lovely, virginal Natalie that her parents were ‘strict’.
Great. This was going to be real great. I knew it. No, I did not want to meet her parents.
No, Natalie, tellin’ ya, it’s NOT a good idea…
She was not to be moved. I had to come and meet her parents. Oh, Gawd.
* * *
The dreaded day arrived. We drove up to her house. I approached slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible. Difficult, on a Triumph Trident. Arrived at this mucho Impressive House. Long tarmac drive. Posh neighborhood. Lovely gardens. Big car.
Oh well, here goes… Drove up. Parked between the big car and the flowerbed. Natalie mutters something about her mother winning trophies for her prize garden. Uh-huh. She’s nervous. Me? I’m terrified.
Lock the bike up. Take helmet off. Follow Natalie’s directions. You want me to go in through the kitchen? Okay. (Door’s a bit stiff) (Give it a shove)
Hey-ho. (swallows hard)
In I go.
What a racket! The tumble drier is going, and there’s music playing. I find myself in a huge modern kitchen, with a lady of massive proportions standing with her back to me, obviously unaware of my presence. Labouring with a big basket of washing.
She’s BIG… Oh, boy.
Where’s Natalie? Outside taking her boots off.
Errr… oh,well, here goes.
“Hello, Mrs Bird! “
No reaction, obviously can’t hear me above the racket. Try again.
“HELLO, MRS BIRRRRDDDD!! “
She looks around, startled, and (utterly) illogically, upon seeing a totally harmless innocent stranger smiling at her, (he can’t help it he’s got a broken tooth and a beard and a black leather jacket, CAN HE?), takes one look, and, promptly…
drops the basket…
(huh?)
SCREAMS the bloody house down…
(oh, mother!)
and runs like hell.
Great. Marvellous. NATALIE!!!!
(I told you so, I bloody TOLD you…)
I stand there like a prize LULU. You know, proverbial lemon. Natalie comes running in the kitchen door. And a small wizened little man with spectacles, presumably hubby, appears in the other door, staring wildly. He makes a frantic dash for the radio and the tumble drier, and strikes a blow for sweet quietude.
Oh, boy. Here we go.
The echoes of the scream have died away, and an awkward silence hovers expectantly. Malevolently.
Smile, Frank, smile! Totally un-taken aback. Pretend you didn’t notice anything unusual. Pretend it happens all the time…
Advance forward, hand outstretched.
“PLEASED to meet you, Mr Bird, I’m Francis… ”
Smile…
It seems to work. Hubby stammers something about his poor darling little (LITTLE?) wife having a nervous disposition (could have fooled me), and accepts my handshake with seeming warmth.
I laugh it all off. Ho-ho-ho. No problem.
Ho-ho-bloody-ho…
Yes. Of course I’ll take my gear off. Thank you. Right. Slightly nervous hand goes to zipper of leather jacket. The zipper goes from top to bottom to unzip. You have to give it a healthy yank. Unfortunately for me, my beard has chosen this of all times to get caught in the zip. Happens once in a while.
So you have (cool) motorcyclist standing there, pretending to be all relaxed.
Puts helmet on kitchen table.
Pulls off gauntlets.
(cool, boy, cool)
Chucks them on the kitchen table.
(nonchalant, y’ know)
Yanks down on jacket zip.
Rips out handful of beard by the roots.
(Hurts like hell)
Swift, unstoppable comment slips out:
(Yikes!!!)
“BUGGER! “
(oops…)
I might as well have declared my unswerving allegiance to the Pope in Rome. Dead silence. Malevolent.
Oh, hell…
Try ever so hard to carry it off. Keep smiling.
Of all the times to swear…
Frosty silence.
I make it as far as the living room.
VERY difficult conversation indeed. Full of pauses, and pregnant silences. It’s absolutely terrible.
The tea and biscuits arrive…
Nice china and porcelain cups.
All nice and fancy and slim. And you need to drink three of them to have the equivalent of a decent MUG.
For goodness sake, Francis, be CAREFUL!
Trying to be helpful. Pull over a table for Mrs Bird to place the tray on. Meant well. Unfortunately the strategic placing of the table is revealed by my action: A big bare patch on the carpet is now revealed.
A shiver travels round the room. Natalie stiffens. I might as well have peeked in the dirty laundry.
Why me, Lord, why me?
The thin little hubby actually EXPLAINS it apologetically. He’s EMBARRASSED about it. Mutters something about their finances being a bit tight.
(thinks) Mate, don’t be embarrassed about your CARPET for goodness’ sake… I couldn’t give a toss if you’re on floorboards…
Unreal atmosphere.
I struggle through. Trying desperately to keep the conversation going. Feigning calm.
What am I doing here?
What have I got in common with you two?
Natalie’s big sister ambles through occasionally. Ugly cow. No, that’s not fair, Frank.
‘A lady of ample proportions’. That’s better. Yes. Got to be charitable.

Anyway.
She doesn’t like me. Very supercilious with me. Looks at me as if I’m a freak. Seems to derive amusement out of the fact that her stupid little sister could drag in such an unkempt monster.
Ugly cow…
The conversation turns to my religion. What? You can’t be serious…?
But yes, sure enough, I get a lecture. About the importance of their daughter’s religion, and the difficulty of reconciling it with my ‘different faith’.
Oh, for goodness’ sake.
It gets worse and worse. I say all the wrong things.
Like the fact that I believe that if there is a God, then He cares for all men, and no way will any one religious faith have a monopoly on the Truth.
Natalie gets upset, and argues with her mother. Ugly cow sister chips in delightedly on the side of her mother.
I get narked. Dangerous when I’m narked. Pretty fluent at arguing at times. To their astonishment quote some of the Bible back at them. Shakes them. I may be an agnostic, but I’ve studied the Bible…
Sister gets nasty with Natalie. I have heard about this. Natalie has told me sister is a bully. I can see that for myself now. Sudden dry cutting comment from Frank. Sister taken aback. Snaps at me. That’s a mistake. Gets the soft spoken SHARP side of my tongue. Doesn’t like it a bit.
Stomps out of the room.
I’m getting fed up with this. I KNEW it would be a disaster. Nervous little man now has beads of sweat on his forehead. And massive wife looks as if she’s going to have a nervous breakdown.
(thinks) Well, I’m sorry, but keep that ugly milk machine out of my hair then…
Conversation limps on. Slightly better with sister gone.
But.
(thinks) I want OUT. I like Natalie. She’s nice. I’ll stay going out with Natalie if she wants. But right now I want OUT. Give me an exit line, somebody, PLEASE…
Ugly sister comes roaring back in. Dramatic entry.
“HIS STUPID BIKE’S FALLEN OVER INTO THE FLOWERBED AND IT’S LEAKING PETROL ALL OVER THE PLACE!!! “
And she’s pleased about it…
(Thank you, God, my prayers answered)
I follow the stampede out the door, but leisurely.
Amble into the cloakroom. Put my leathers on. Gauntlets. Helmet.
From outside I can hear screams of anguish.
“MY FLOWERS! MY PRIZE PETUNIAS! MY BEGONIAS! MY GLADIOLI! “
I stroll out the door.
Yep. Quite a mess. One Triumph Trident. On its side. Undamaged. In a flowerbed. Soft landing.
One flowerbed. Wrecked. Annihilated. Three gallons of petrol and some engine oil spilled.
One large female: yelling about her blessed flowers.
One small little man: crying about his tarmac drive, which has been dug up by the weight of the bike’s center stand.
One ugly sister: gloating in delight. Winding up mother dear for all she’s worth. And shouting at Natalie.
One virginal Natalie: hollering back.
Yep. Quite a mess.
Stride out one motorcyclist. Delighted to be going.
Positively thrilled. Picks up bike. Stands there for a second, in middle of prize flower bed, holding onto his bike.
Then laughs, uproariously. Splits his sides.
Throws his leg over saddle.
Kick starts the love of his life.
Grins at the gobsmacked expressions from his audience.
Shouts: “See you in the buttery tomorrow, Kiddo! ” at Natalie, and then…
guns the throttle…
And one Triumph Trident seven fifty leaps out of the flower bed, and down the drive.
Above the roar, a voice floats back:
“NICE MEETING YOU MRS BIRD! “
And one motorbike roars down the posh road, flat out.
The sound takes a long time to disappear…
And, further and further away, up the mountains, a hurtling missile speeds ever faster.
Photo ‘Soaring Free’ by Ti
Astride the missile, a grim, helmeted figure, dressed in black, is reflecting on the afternoon’s events.
He is grinning. He can see the funny side.
Yep. Even by HIS standards.
Quite a mess…
Francis Meyrick
(c)
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on August 1, 2009, 2:34 pm
Floater Me
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (spiritual quest)
Fishermen waving like crazy; a small atoll lost in the Pacific; photo by me, from a Hughes 500 helicopter
FLOATER ME
I used to get this recurrent dream.
I think I probably had it hundreds of times. It got to the stage where I know I would pretty well “groan in my dream “. A dreamed “Oh-no-not-this-dream-again ” type groan. Frustrating.
It was always the same. I was real busy in the middle of this humongous, hot, sun soaked, arid, bleak, yellow sand duned desert, digging away with a ridiculously small spade. Not much bigger than a kid’s toy spade. Like you’d expect Johnny to have down at the beach.
His little bucket and spade…
Not just any water. It was some kind of special water.
The desert for some reason reminded me vaguely of the dead lands of Saudi Arabia.
I mean, it was a big son-of-a-gun desert. No kidding, a ‘heap big lot of sand’. And there I was, digging away, really sweating it. Anxious. Really trying hard. To find…water. The sand was so fine, it would trickle right back into the hole I was trying to shape out. It was maddening. And I needed to find water…!
And of course I never did. It never quite got to be a nightmare, but it was a very tiresome, frustrating dream. There was me, perspiration pouring down my face, trying so really hard… kind of panicking. I needed that water to drink…
And then, woven through this dream, entwined in the way only dreams can do, ran another theme. In that strand, there I was, looking DOWN at me, from a height of maybe three or four hundred feet. I would watch myself digging. And in my dream I KNEW that it was me watching myself dig. However, the ME that was digging couldn’t see what the ME that was watching could see…
A massive lake of fresh, pure water, out of sight just over the dunes.
If only the digger ME would look up, turn ninety degrees right, and walk just a little ways, then digger ME would find that massive fresh water lake. Cool, clean, sparkling in the sun. Airborne ME, or rather, FLOATER ME, could see it perfectly clearly.
But of course digger ME never looked up, or around, or walked just a little ways.
So digger ME never found what he was looking for.
Very, very frustrating…
* * * * * * * * * *
Now you may think I’m making this up.
Honestly, I’m not. I never did figure it out though.
But I’ll hazard a guess…
Digger ME is the stubborn, mule headed part of me that keeps me going. Who tries to learn from past mega mistakes. Digger Me is the part that works hard, is detail conscious, and worries a lot. Digger ME is well meaning. A little clumsy perhaps, not real smart, and prone to tunnel vision. A hefty pre-occupation with minute details, to the point that I lose sight of the big picture.
You might think Floater ME is the pilot. I don’t think so. The aviator is mostly digger ME. The me that tries so hard to be a good, safe pilot. Who meticulously pre-flights his aircraft, checks the weather carefully, studies the Regulations, and ploughs diligently through the company Operations Manual. That’s Digger ME. Not a saint, don’t get me wrong, but a well meaning, plodding, conscientious type.
Now, Floater ME is harder to figure out.
Floater ME is partly a Dreamer. The amateur scribbler. A seeker of The Truth. Searching for…God? The idealist, horribly impractical, with a vague Mother Theresa instinct. A little bit of a bloody do-gooder, a male version of Florence Nightingale.
Mostly, in the opinion of earthly Digger Me, a real pain in the butt.
With, it has to be admitted, reluctantly perhaps, even by Digger Me, the…
very occasional flash of insight and inspiration…
Photo ‘The light shines through’ by Firehawk77
Now, ask me the question, as to how a persistent dream comes along and weaves all this together in some vaguely intelligible format that we then spend years and years trying to decipher…
that one I can’t explain at all…
Francis Meyrick
(c)
Credit: Photo ‘Toddler on the Beach’ by Peaches & Cream
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on June 7, 2011, 11:04 pm
The Murderer
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (law enforcement), Sheriff Pilot
Photo by S.Baker
THE MURDERER
Kafka!
It hit me, all of a sudden.
Kafka!
I’d been trying hard to think what my present surroundings reminded me of. I knew it was a novel, or a short story. Something depressing, that had registered with me a long time ago. And now, I was having a flashback.
Kafka!
The German author.
That was it.
These surroundings were straight out of one of his short stories.
We turned down yet another long corridor. Concrete floor, concrete ceilings. On each side, obscuring steel doors on prison cells. This was a high security prison, and there were no cages like you see in the movies about Alcatraz. Just endless, interminable corridors, with row upon row of reinforced steel doors. Uniform, gray, forbidding.
I cast a sideways glance at my two companions. They marched along, expressionless. The sergeant, short but tough. Experienced. Eighteen years a corrections officer.
The corporal, tall, thin, and slightly mournful looking.
I couldn’t but help to fall in with the marching step.
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
Kafka!
It was surreal. We were the gaolers. Three uniformed men, with guns and chains. Pepper spray, and electric shock Tasers. Marching, expressionless. Grim. On the way to pick up a murderer. A young man, a gang member with a long rap sheet, who had murdered a close family member.
We turned another corner.
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
How long had we been walking? It seemed like an hour. We’d been up elevators, along corridors, up some more elevators, and along yet more corridors. Was there an end to this place?
Sometimes we would meet a prisoner coming the other way. Chained. You could tell his risk status by the escort. If it was just one corrections officer, you know the prisoner was just dangerous. If it was two corrections officers, you could figure the prisoner was highly dangerous. We, on the other hand, were a threesome…
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
I had never before been in such a large institution. Twenty-thousand-prisoners. Housed in two towers with no windows facing outside… I had visited hundreds of gaols. Mostly picking up. Extradition flights. From out of state back to home state. Pick ’em up, and fly them back. Wanted on warrants, mostly serious felonies. The lower ranks of prisoners were bused around the USA. That, strangely, could take weeks. Prisoners would have to endure crazy, zig-zag routes back to their home state. To face the music. The more seriously dangerous, the VIP prisoners, were flown. First class.
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
Somewhere, somebody was screaming. The long, drawn out wailing, not of a person being beaten or otherwise physically hurt, but rather the screaming of the mentally disturbed. It went on and on. But nobody took much notice. Situation normal.
I wondered if I would end up screaming in a place like this. Probably. It was inhuman.
Tragic. Wasteful. But… what alternative was there?
I thought of the lecturer at the Academy I had attended. What was it he had said?
“….there are many who would say that you cannot incarcerate your way out of the problem facing society today… “
Incarcerate. Lock up. Confine. Take away light, air, windows. Chain. Cor-rect.
Correct? Make better? Turn back to the straight and narrow? Cor-rect.
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
Another turn into yet another half mile hallway. Dear, sweet Lord, how long does this go on for? Miles and miles of incarcerated humanity. Screaming. Sweating. Hating. Despairing. Making plans. To hurt. To love. To steal. To connive. To…
The lecturer again. Echoing through my head. He had been telling us endless stories of how corrections officers and law enforcement personnel had found themselves compromised. Their careers ruined. What started out as compassion, a “feeling sorry for “, a warm human emotion, ended up in disaster. I had seen it happen. The well meaning, dreamily idealistic pastor. A sweet person. Fell in love. With a prisoner. Helplessly.
And got caught… supplying drugs. Ouch… The corrections officer. Well meaning. A good human. Thought just a little cuddle to comfort a female prisoner would do no harm.
Wrong... She had led him on, and ruthlessly turned him in. Ruthlessly.
What was it the lecturer had said, over and over again?
“…remember, they don’t call them CONS for nothing… “
To con. To mislead. To deceive. To lead on, and then slap down. To hurt…
I’d seen it happen. It made me nervous of them. With good reason.
Tramp-tramp-tramp.
I tried to be professional. They said we could empathize. But not sympathize.
Be aware of a prisoner’s problems. Show concern. Be willing to listen. But don’t show compassion. Don’t suffer-with. Oh, no. Stand back. That way lies… disaster.
They will use you. Trick you. Play on your feelings. Trap you…
What, all of them? They are all cons, not to be trusted, to be kept at arms’ length in this hell-hole of a travesty of human relations?
Yes, all of them. Because you can’t tell them apart…
We turned another corner. We were told to wait. Finally, we were there.
A few minutes passed by. We waited, expressionlessly, without conversation.
I thought of the phone call. The secretary to my boss. Concern in her voice. If I would be willing to pick up an exceedingly dangerous prisoner. Who was on suicide watch. Who was thought to be capable of anything.
And here we were….
A doctor came out. A nice lady, concern etched all over her face. She was sorry, she said, but she could not release the prisoner to us. Upon being informed that he was going by air, he had screamed hysterically that he would kill everybody if he got the chance.
She told us he meant it.
The two officers with me looked at me. It was my decision, as captain of the aircraft.
I said it was okay. We’d take him. We were prepared. We did this all the time.
She demurred. We discussed it. She relented, reluctantly, but not before stating expressly that we had been warned.
They brought him out. Young. Good looking. Fit and strong. A faceless, expressionless,
shuffling, chained, human being, on suicide watch, classified as “highly dangerous “.
We talked to him. Politely. Explained the options. Come with us and behave. We’ll all have a pleasant day. Or…
He was thinking about it. I studied the gang insignia. Especially the tattoo of the three small tear drops, trickling from his left eye. Three kills… he was saying he had killed three men. He probably had. The gangs in gaol were very well organized. One phone call was often all it took. And a new arrival’s gang affiliations, his gang record, his reputation, would be scrutinized by the other inmates. Anybody making false claims was liable to such severe punishment, that few dared.
Three kills…
The sergeant was talking to him. Quietly, politely, yet firmly. He was not in any hurry. Nor was I. This was a psychological moment. A time to measure the risk of violence.
He thought about it. Then he nodded. Quietly. It was enough. He was coming, quietly.
For now, anyway. For now…
* * * * * * * * * *
We flew along at Flight Level one-two-zero, at a steady one hundred and seventy knots.
Everybody was quiet. Only the steady beat of the engine disturbed our thoughts.
The controller handed me over, with a pleasant “good day “. I thanked him, and tuned the radio to the next frequency. They were good, the folk at Air Traffic. They knew who we were. In the remarks section, I always explained what we were doing.
“Prisoner transport, high risk “.
It had paid off before, when an airborne prisoner had turned violent on us. It was good for immediate priority over other aircraft. Only the callsign “Lifeguard ” that I had used in prior emergency medical flights, commanded more authority.
I wondered what he was thinking, this tough, hard young killer. As he looked out the window, and saw the world slide down below. Did he think it a pretty sight? Or even beautiful? Or did his hard, unseeing eyes see only his future? The judge he would be facing? The inevitable gaol term? His victims?
It was impossible to know. I wondered what the girls would make of his handsome face. The raven black hair, the strong cheekbones, the deep brown eyes. In his young life, there had to have been young women who had fallen in love with him. How, I wonder, had he treated them? Not too well, by all accounts.
He had murdered one of them…
A few hours later, we had landed back home. As we taxied up to the Sheriff’s hangar, there was a feeling of relief. Quickly, we unloaded him, and placed him in the waiting prison van. The door shut, and now all that was left was the inevitable paperwork.
The sergeant and I went back to the office to attend to that, leaving the corporal on his own watching the van.
The paperwork shuffle was complete, and soon my passengers would depart by road, and I would be able to go home.
We were feeling pleased with ourselves.
The corporal came in. Something in his voice alerted us.
“Well… “, he said, and trailed off.
I looked up sharply.
“What? ” I said.
My mind instantly saw the prisoner going berserk in the van.
“No “, the corporal said, reading my thoughts.
“He’s just…. “
His voice sounded unsteady.
” He’s lost it. He’s crying…. “
We went out to check.
From within came the sound of a human being letting go. All the days and weeks of toughness, all gone. It was beyond tears. Beyond crying, weeping or wailing. There are no verbs, that can describe the sounds we heard. Just a deep, deep heartfelt sobbing, that combined a primitive wail of a wounded animal with the broken hearted gasping of a lost child.
We looked at each other. There was nothing we could do.
The sergeant spoke, softly. There was compassion in his voice.
Entirely against regulations.
“I think it’s hit home, now he’s back “.
The corporal and I nodded, and instinctively, all three of us tip toed away…
F.M.
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on March 30, 2014, 8:47 pm
We have never met
February 29, 2008 in Poetry
We have never met
(A love poem to a gentle lass, who quietly encouraged me to write)

We have never met,
and never will
and yet…
artistically,
creatively,
I long to be
your friend.
They say mockingly
it’ll never be
we’re far away
nothing to say
I cannot touch
your face.
If we find perchance
in cyberspace
a quiet place
where we can walk
and gently talk
and I can hold
your hand.
Would you smile at me
laughingly
recite to me
joyously
your favorite poem
your heartfelt song
and never leave
my side?
Or would you grow away
leave the light of day
become tired of me
disrespectfully
and wish perhaps
you’d never read
a word?
So I fearfully
tremulously
nervously
like a child
gingerly
offer you
my hand.
Photo “Child Reaching ” AKphotos
Be soft with me
muse with me
lie with me
tenderly
Never
let
me
go.
F.M.
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on July 31, 2011, 9:53 am
Bounce (3)
February 29, 2008 in article about writing
(This story was originally written for “Writer’s Cafe “. It was in response to some really intolerant nastiness, which was causing disruptions and bitterness. There were and are many good people on the Cafe. But there also some hate mongerers, who were bringing the site into disrepute. I left eventually, after some really horrendous hate mail, and with a feeling that I was not able to create in the sort of calm atmosphere I was looking for. I re-post the story, not so much as a “look behind “, but rather more as a “look ahead “.
I’m hoping we can stay friends on the Harbor…)
Bounce (3)
A good humored rant about ‘reviewers’, ‘incipient puberty trips’, ‘garbage’, ‘verbiage’ and ‘connectivity’
A recent thread in the forum got real bitter.
That saddened me. It’s not good. What do “guests ” think? That we’re all a bunch of jumped up spoiled prima donnas? Yes, you should be able to offer an opinion. But if it degenerates into public bitterness, then we all lose. Intolerance is a strange thing. Have you ever noticed how those who are the first to scream “intolerance “, or “prejudice “, are also those who seem, in their writing and attitudes, to…. you get my point?
Reviewers are important. They are also rightnot even remotely always right. But they need intelligent encouraging, not abusive castigation.
It seems to me….
that reviewers that actually review, as in criticize constructively, as opposed to those who write the equivalent of:
“Yeah, dude, thas was, so….nice, man…way to go… “
…are in short supply. Lotsa writers, too few “guests “, and way too few “reviewers “. Pity the honest, helpful, sympathetic reviewer.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d much, much rather have a review that simply said: “I liked this… “, than no review at all. When you look at a story with 55 views and not a single review, you wonder if you maybe wrote it in Greek or Ancient Hebrew or something…
Did I leave my fly open, or what…
But sometimes, people need to stand up for art. Stand up for the love of English. Stand up for… real writing. As opposed to some kind of incipient puberty trip.
I tried one day, in a good-humored, joking way, with a particularly smutty, immature, overtly sadistic piece advocating cruelty to women, from a popular WritersCafe writer. At least, lots of reviews from what Montilee Stormer calls the “rabid fans “. I received a furious, hate spitting e-mail from said ‘writer’, with an abusive “comment “. I was invited, no, commanded to stay “the hell away ” from “his ” site.
Okay…
I tried. I shall not try again.
I had this thought. But I didn’t e-mail it. I didn’t want to cause…bitterness. An angry fight.
It didn’t seem right for me to say:
“Stay…in your tiny, small minded, dubious smelling Narcissus pool of introverted self admiration. Surround yourself with those who swoon at every syllable, and post hero worshipping on-their-knees salutations. Convince yourself that you are a writer. Or, as you would say, fucking good. And fucking perfect, God’s gift to women and the world. Go take some more drugs. Convince yourself that your spelling errors, your grammar goblins, and your thematic wanderings are in fact art. Convince yourself that we are all shocked by your crudity. As you know, we were all raised in monasteries. Most of us are virgins. We have never had sex. This is our first rodeo. So, yeah, you shock us by describing your penis.
Is that what that is…? Wow….
(yawn…)
What….is your really drab view of the female body about? To you, is it merely a pleasure device for your torture fantasies? Go, get laid a whole bunch of times, get a nice girl friend, and grow up. Then come back, my friend, and write some more… “
No, it didn’t seem write to say anything like that, so I didn’t. I like peace. I’m tired of fighting. Been through enough wars… I just… kicked it into touch.
Sighed philosophically. And moved on. I’ve done that a lot in my little life.
Sometimes, reviewing, in the broad sense, reviewing Life..., is no fun at all.
My point: Honest reviewers…
…are the writers’ best friend. Writers like Edmund Jonah, Montilee Stormer and Crystalwizard, to mention but a few, are not always the most popular. They say what they think, with some demonstrated skills of their own to back up the validity of their verbal clout. They will, unavoidably, on occasions, give you the literary equivalent of the back-hander review, the…
“HAYAAAAH—HOOOO—-KA-POW!! “
…treatment, as they come flying at you with a springloaded reviewer Karate kick.
Right on the chin…
Ouch! You son of a …..@#!!#!!
On these occasions, it us good for us ordinary mortals, us humble drivers of a working class pen, not to take offense. We don’t all write with a guilded tip to our pen…
Sure, sometimes…. these negative reviews are, to put it diplomatically, full of “shite “. You read it, chuckle, and let it go at that. Often enough, some other reader, who would not have left a comment, feels a need to jump in and protest the validity of your case for you. Now you can sit on the sidelines, with maybe a nice cup of tea, and snigger quietly to yourself as one sympathetic reviewer dukes it out on your behalf with the protagonist. It can get quite heated in this kind of bar brawl, and you, lucky writer, you are now able to pull up a comfortable stool to the bar, sip your pint of Guinness, and watch Homo Sapiens after so many thousands of years of cultural development, still going at it with bare fists and teeth… It gets amusing when you know you’ve stirred the pot once again. After all, you wrote the blessed thing, didn’t you? You…troublemaker!
Sometimes… you sit back and you think… he’s got a point!
Hmmmmm……
Now your writer’s brain ticks over a little faster. It’s as if the reviewer has given you another vantage point, another observation plateau, from which to look down on yourself…
Hmmmmm….
T.O’Neal, well worth a visit, if you haven’t met the feller, offers some quiet little insights in that soft spoken way of his. We had an interesting exchange of e-mails on various subjects. He was one writer who gave me a different place, from which I could observe…
that fellow down there…. that weird dude….ME…!
He said that at times I lost him. Lost you…?
What do you mean, I lost you…?
There followed more e-mails, which suddenly give me this interesting perspective from another writer’s point of view:
Too much verbiage…
I formed this mental impression of this ‘mad painter’, me, flinging vast quantities of paint at the canvas with a trowel. Throwing words with an intensity, a passion, a burning desire to express the Muse, an overwhelming craving to…
Get my point? Perhaps, Francis an excess verbiage problem…
He liked the story about ‘Our little….Pussycat’. Which was actually a goose…
That was a gentle story. Without the same clash of cymbals, the roll of the drums,and the mighty orator shaking his fists at the skies…
Nah. A nice story...
He talked about “telling the story as if you were telling it to a friend “. I could see his point. He does that, in many of his stories. A gentle, rambling, good natured, funny-in-a dry-sort-of-way come and listen, and I’ll tell you a story…
He also talked about his “voice “. And I know what he means there.
For me, interesting stuff. Made me think I should try and vary my “voices “, and maybe write more “Pussycat ” style stories…
Maybe sometimes go for a little more simplicity, Francis. How about sometimes putting aside the trowel, and trying an artist brush? Eh, Francis?
Which takes me to my friend Moonlight… She who can wield a mighty fine artist’s brush when she feels like it…
All of this can be ‘bottomlined’ if you refer it to the concept of “connectivity “.
T.O’Neal has great “connectivity “. People that warm to his style. Repeat readers.
He’s got something…
That of course is not to equate “good writing ” in direct proportion to numbers of “hits “.
But, we needn’t worry, Montilee Stormer already took care of that problem, by her withering comment about “rabid fans “.
Well, I hope I stirred the pot a little. If you’re fucking mad at me, feel free to e-mail me. I shall doff my cap, bow my head, put on the the most penitent expression I can muster, and I promise faithfully to listen to your point of view. I don’t want us to be bitter, or twisted with each other, but I’ll happily listen… if you are willing, rationally, nicely, to tell me why you think I’m wrong.
And if I do chuckle…. I’ll do it quietly. How’s that?
F.M.
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on February 29, 2008, 4:55 pm
A Blip on the Radar (part 2) “Running the Gauntlet “
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (tuna helicopters), Blip on the Radar
A Blip on the radar
Part 2: Running the gauntlet
It’s hard to fathom how immense the Pacific Ocean is.
Even looking at a globe, and studying how much of the world is in fact covered by said megga puddle, does not convey the breathtaking vastness of a world of waves. From horizon to horizon. Take that globe, and look up the islands of Hawaii. From Hawaii, go to Guam, which is another…. whole lotta miles east…. Found it? Now, with your finger, trace a line down to Papua New Guinea. How many thousand miles is that? Then, roughly half way along that line, imagine me, floating in all that water, all on my lonesome, with only my life jacket and thoughts for company. And a bunch of hungry sharks of course. Now factor in gale force winds, producing twelve foot waves.
No, it’s not pretty, is it?
Put it this way, you’re a thousand plus miles offshore.
There’s no ‘search and rescue’ friendly US Coastguard out there.
When you run into trouble, big trouble, like I did, you know full well, deep down, that you’re in some serious sh…..! I ask you to imagine this, because, believe me, I was staring at it. For real…
If you fly in a relatively friendly place such as the Gulf of Mexico, there are weather stations everywhere. Some with trained weather observers. Via telephone or Internet, you have a blaze of weather information available. Current, forecast, winds aloft, radar summary charts, satellite pictures… anything you want.
In the early nineties, flying off Taiwanese tuna boats in the middle of the Big Puddle… we didn’t have all that good stuff. You could always moisten your thumb, and hold it up in the wind… The ship’s radar, set to the furthest range, would give you a rough idea…
But in the final analysis, you were on your own. On the exploratory rides, hunting for the elusive tuna, we had to keep a wary eye out for fast moving storm fronts. On the day in question, I had flown east from the Hsieh Feng 707. With a pleasant following wind.
It had been cloudy for a few days, light rain, but nothing too bad. We knew there was bad weather out further west, but we didn’t realise how fast moving a storm front it actually was. Little did I surmise, as I departed eastbound over the horizon, losing sight of my only landing platform within one thousand plus miles, that the front was already about to surge over the western horizon towards the Hsieh Feng 707. What compounded the problem was that the captain, exhausted from an early rise and ‘set’, had gone to bed for a quick nap after my departure. And promptly ‘conked out’. Nobody of course thought to wake him up, as dark and evil storm clouds raced for the ship.
What brought him back into the action was the ship rocking and rolling, and spray cascading over the decks. By the time he, breathless, called me on the radio, I, sixty miles away, had already turned back, observing for myself ominous dark towers on the distant horizon. His voice betrayed his anxiety within seconds.
Moggy-Moggy!…Weather BAD…come back!..come back!..come back to sheeeiip!!
I acknowledged his call, and wondered what I was getting into.
I ran the numbers, and from what I could see I should be able to arrive back at the ship with a healthy thirty-five to forty minutes of fuel reserve. That should give me quite a bit of time for poking and prodding my way cautiously around the bad weather. It seemed not too bad, although I noticed the waves were building rapidly in size. The areas of foam,sliding off the back of the swells, were getting noticeably larger. Still, I had a pretty good feeling about it. I pulled in a bit of power, and settled down to a fast cruise. I was running on a westerly course now, into a stiff headwind. Stiff, but nothing I hadn’t allowed for.
Then… the wind started to howl. It had been blowing all day at a respectable twenty to twenty five knots. With five to six foot waves. Enough to be downright windy, but eminently within the range of what we coped with all the time. But now, studying my groundspeed, I was dismayed to watch my progress over the waves starting to decay rapidly. The wind was fighting me now, getting stronger by the minute. I maintained my heading, and the feeling of being in a stage of “alert ” intensified.
Boy! Those clouds on the horizon… they sure look dark. Wind is coming up. Damn. Look at those horses…
The waves, getting angrier, were building in size, and throwing up angry white foamed crests, like horses on a mad gallop, their manes streaming behind them.
Ten minutes had gone by, and the aviator’s instinct within me had upgraded the “alert ” status to “alert status: stage two “. I had flown over this kind of scene many a time.
I wasn’t “alarmed ” yet. But I wasn’t happy either…
Then… the wind, maturing beyond the howling stage, started to shriek. Soon, I was staring in disbelief at the GPS. If it was telling me the truth, my gound speed had decayed to the point that I measured the headwind at a cool 40 knots.
Uh-oh… This is getting bad. I wonder what the Hsieh Feng’s roll rate is…
In the Gulf of Mexico, a typical company limit would be a vessel ‘roll rate’ of 2.5 degrees either side, and a ‘heave’ of ten feet. Beyond that, you can’t land. Safety first. And second. And third. Commendable. Things were a little different on tuna boats. It wasn’t that we didn’t care about safety, believe me, a lot of us did – with a passion, it was more that sometimes… there wasn’t exactly a whole lot of choice of landing pads.
“Hsieh Feng 707, Two-Mike-Delta! “
“Moggy! Go ahead! “
“What’s your roll rate, captain? “
The answer, when it came, with a strange background noise, didn’t please me at all.
“Moggy!…. Bad! Very bad!…. fifteen to eighteen degrees! We climb over…. very big waves! …. this is STORM… my helideck… big waves over helideck!… I come to your position!…. “
“Oh, fffffff….uck! “
Now I was alarmed.
Oh, dear… The helideck was twenty five feet above the waterline, above the bridge. If he was getting waves over the helideck… things were bad.
Another crew member came on the radio. In the background, I could hear the unmistakeable noises of a ship being tossed around like a cork in a commode.
Things crashing and clattering, and a demon in the background, screaming like a joyful banshee certain of its catch… interrupted by an occasional slamming noise.
“Moggy-Moggy! Fong tai-tah! Bad! Bad! Pooh-how! We have… very bad weather. Fong tai-tah! “
Oh, boy. He was trying to warn me. “Fong tai-tah! ”
Strong wind…
I’ll say. I was staring nervously at my groundspeed. Son of a gun…
It was “pooh-how ” all right. Very bloody pooh-how…
Mentally I berated myself for not seeing this coming. I should have… been more vigilant. I should have… not gotten into this mess.
I shook my head. This was not the time to be introspective. This was the time to… concentrate. The ship was showing only twenty three miles away. Ordinarily, a mere twelve to fifteen minutes flight time. But I didn’t have a hope of getting there on my present track. A massive, ugly gray and black cloud stood firmly across my route, positively barring my direct track home. What was worse, there was heavy rain deluging out the bottom. The silver sheening iron curtains of the torrential downpour hung all the way down to the ocean. There was no way I could possibly continue that way…
“Hsieh Feng 707, Two-Mike-Delta! “
“Moggy…!? “
The reply was instantaneous, without the usual slight pause.
“Captain, I can’t make it on this track. Weather too bad! I try go North! “
“Moggy! I have you on radar! I just see you! My radar full! You try north! Okay! “
The ship’s radar was not designed for the purpose, but I knew he would be able to see me as a ‘small blip’. Surrounded by powerful echoes coming off the storm cells. He would be able to give me only limited guidance information around the worst of it.
“My radar full…! “
It might be ‘pigeon English’, but I knew exactly what he meant. His radar scope was chock full of angry echoes, with me, a small blip, vainly struggling to find a way around it all.
A few minutes passed by.
During which time I was burning up precious fuel. This… wasn’t working.
And I knew it. My path was being cut off by more violent black clouds, and cascading tons of water crashing out of the heavens. The visibility underneath there would be zero. It was borderline suicide to even try.
I turned around, and now I was heading south… Looking hard at my fuel gauge.
Twenty five minutes left…
I looked nervously at the waves. They were up to nine, ten feet. There was no way I could land on the sea. I’d flip over almost immediately. I’d probably go over backwards, as the helicopter would want to weather vane into wind, putting me perpendicular across the waves. You’d ride one wave, become unstable on the second one, rocking fore-and-aft, and number three would complete the process and….over backwards you go.
No fun at all.
Twenty minutes left…
Now I had traveled four or five miles southwards, but the approaching weather was pushing me back, on a south-easterly track, away from the Hsieh Feng 707… I could tell from the GPS. The rain, if anything, had intensified. It was one of the worst downpours I had seen in a long time. It had turned really dark. Spray was blowing around in a hazy gloom. Lightning was flashing in the distance as well, leaving me in no doubt as to the power of this monster…
Fifteen minutes…
I couldn’t find a way around this stuff. Hopeless.
I was looking at the waves now. Wondering… if I was going to end up in them. This was…. not going to be pretty. The helicopter was going to tip over immediately. Despite the floats. Too rough to remain upright. Assuming I got out okay, and that was always an “if “, then I would float away from the helicopter. The upturned machine, with only the white floats on the surface, would be hard to impossible to find in this weather and sea state. As for the pilot, with just his head and shoulders bobbing around in this swell, with this current, and with the possibility, no, probability, of sharks around…
“Moggy! “
“Go ahead, captain! “
“Moggy, I try to come to your position, but bad weather come with me… “
He sounded choked, almost tearful. I’d never heard him like that before…
“I can see it, captain, weather push me back away from you… “
I spoke in the same peculiar, clipped, short phrased English. He had difficulty understanding long sentences. But neither of us had any difficulty understanding the enormity of this mess.
“Moggy, I call Fong Sheng 727 and Fu Kuan 606! They turn around, start to come to your position! “
Two of the captain’s friends. But neither boat had a helideck. And they were still far away. I knew what it meant. The captain was preparing for a search and rescue mission. He was assuming I was going to run out of fuel and go in…
Bummer…!
Many of us developed a relationship with our helicopter. She was our girl. My girl.My baby. I washed her, and waxed her, and polished her. I was proud of her. Although I covered her in salt spray during our many fish herding rodeo sessions, I nevertheless afterwards, solicitously hosed her down with fresh water. I would clean and inspect her. At night, I might stick another coat of wax on her, but I would certainly cover the exposed metal parts with a protective covering of WD-40 or Teflon. I actively looked for incipient corrosion, and treated it where possible. I changed her oil and fluids. On occasions, I carried out major surgery. I had changed out engines and transmissions, rotor blades and radios.
Now, faced with the prospect of an imminent ditching, I was looking around the cockpit as if I was saying goodbye to an old friend. An old friend, who I had spent countless hours with darting around the waves, chasing clouds, and sliding down rainbows…
“Moggy! How much fuel you have? “
“Not a lot, captain, maybe ten minutes or so… “
“Gott!….Oh, Gott!….. I try to come to your position….very hard! “
I said nothing. I knew he was trying. Very hard. So was I…
So was I…
I looked up at the towering black cloud bearing down on me. It had been steadily pushing me back. Somewhere, under that dark monster, lay the Hsieh Feng 707, and the only landing site within a thousand miles. How, I wondered, had I ever gotten here? What strange quirks of fate and happenstance had conspired to park me in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, within only minutes of fuel remaining, and borderline zero options?
What had I done, to deserve this? Yes, I had known the risks. The image of Barry, a friend of mine, another pilot, floated through my mind. He was talking, leaning against a bar somewhere, Honiara perhaps, or Tarawa, maybe Rabaul, somewhere, putting into words what we all knew, but preferred not to dwell on.
“You know, in the first two years I was flying tuna helicopters, I counted fourteen people killed in helicopters out of Samoa and Guam. And I heard more than that, out of South America. After that… you know, I just quit counting… “
I seemed to remember I’d drunk a beer to that. In a silent acknowledgement of the guys that didn’t make it. It wasn’t… that we didn’t think it couldn’t happen to us. It was more that most of us were super cautious. We knew the risks, and we measured them carefully. We put a lot of thought into what we were doing. But some guys… we had guys with two hundred hours flight time masquerading as two thousand hour pilots. So that they could get a job. They would just whip out a pencil and their logbooks became a form of creative fiction…. Then we had the wild ones… guys with high motor skills, but no imagination. No fear. No…respect. We had the odd Vietnam vet. Still fighting wars in his mind. And we had a gaol bird or two, who had been stripped of all their licenses. Flying on forged paperwork, brooding and dark. Drug runners and weapon smugglers.
The half crazy ones.
When you heard one of them had piled in… sometimes you just were not surprised.
I’d been on a search or two. Long, lonely, futile rides. Trying to find a head and shoulders bobbing about in the Pacific ocean. Worrying yourself sick that he can see you, frantically, but you can’t see him... Like looking for half a needle in ten thousand haystacks… Deep down, you know he’s a goner… but you try. You try….
I shook my head.
It was as if a voice was shouting at me in my head:
“Enough of this introspective brooding shit! Okay, you’ve got a problem… what are you going to DO about it…?? ”
It was decision time.
Probably the wisest course of action… was to fly away from that big black brute of a cloud, pick a spot, pass back the coordinates, and ditch. Roll over, swallow sea, spit it out, and swim. And hope that the raging current didn’t sweep you away so far they’d never find you….The only other choice was unthinkable.
Ten minutes left…
The only other choice was a bad one.
Punch right on in to that ugly grey-and-black Mother, and go for it..
I had a fair few thousand hours over water under my belt, and I knew that you should never try and fly under a torrential downpour that reaches down to the sea. Everybody knows that. Basically, you can’t. There’s no visibility, severe turbulence, and water coming down by the ton. You’re going to get what’s known amongst pilots as spatial disorientation, roll over and crash. And die. And what’s worse, you’ll wreck your beautiful helicopter. The only sensible choice was to retreat, fly off somewhere and ditch, with at least a modicum of control. Better that than crash. Out of control.
So ran the deliberations though my mind, as, sadly, I prepared to say goodbye. She, my pride and joy, hummed reliably on, like a patient, good-natured dog, trusting her master to do what is best. I felt like a traitor. A damn traitor…
I was in…, underneath the pounding Niagara waterfalls, before I knew it.
Water hit the windscreen so hard, with such sledgehammer brutal force, I thought it would splinter and cave in. It felt like I was submerged already. The shock hit me like a body blow. One second I had been in a gloomy external twilight, and the next second, somebody had switched the lights out, and I was in an internal, dark, unearthly cavern. With walls of angry water, a floor of waiting water, and a ceiling of imminent water…
I was moving slowly forward at about seven knots or so, and hovering maybe ten feet above the sea. I was now in a place I had never been before.
And a place I knew I should not be…
Rain beat with an insane fury on me. Visibility through the windscreen was zero. It was impossible to see. With the doors off, the only visibility I had was out sideways.
I was hover taxying along, looking sideways out the doors.
Tremendous turbulence shook the helicopter with demented fury, and I wondered if she could hold on. The rain was so intense that it had actually beaten the waves down.
I had been flying over nine, ten, and twelve foot waves. Now, astonished, I could see, through the swirling currents of air and water, and the spray that lashed into my face through both doors, pock marked waves of only two to four feet high, turned a strange foaming gray and green color. It seemed as if I observed these events with detachment, like some other-worldly event to which I was a mere casual spectator, whereas in fact I was working like a devil. Slowly, slowly, I inched my way forwards, alternating rapid glances out of either door to stay level, with a quick glance inside at the GPS. The Global Positioning System. The “get me home box “. I needed that navigational information desperately, for it was the only way to find my mother ship. Without it, in fifteen to twenty foot visibility in this hail of fury, I was lost in every sense. It was therefore a nasty shock, compounding itself to my many worries, when I realized salt water was now pouring off my instruments and my radio stack.
Dammit! If that lot decides to short-circuit, and trip off-line…
I checked the course and range to the ship.Eight point six miles, bearing three one zero…
The noise was deafening. Even with my helmet on, padding my ears, I was acutely aware, over and above the sound of my turbine, and the beat of my rotor blades, of the rain beating on me. Pummeling me. Determined to drive me forcibly into the swirling gray and green waiting waters below. And the fuel gauge… was heading purposefully towards the large ‘E’. Empty...
Was I praying? Hell, no! I was far too goddam busy!
But I know I felt… that peculiar combination of emotions, where you know on the one hand, that you are peddling like a monkey in a circus to solve the problem. On the other hand, deep down, on another level, you know that this… is beyond serious. This…
…could bloody well kill me…!
For now another worry was nibbling at my mind. Even if the GPS and the radios held up in all the salt water, even if…. I actually found the blessed boat…. how was I going to avoid running into it? My forward visibility through the windscreen was exactly zero.
Whilst I jockeyed and swayed and hover taxied unsteadily along, I contemplated the supreme irony of being run over by twelve hundred tons of well meaning Taiwanese steel. I could kick on a little tail right-left yaw, enabling me to peer forwards through the door on my left. Problem was, I instantly received a face full. I had salt crystals embedded all over my glasses. I could lick my lips and taste the sea.
I resolved to navigate as close as I could, and then I would just have to fishtail left-right-left in the final stage.
With the GPS showing four point three miles, bearing three two five, I had another heart stopping moment as the lights illuminating my radios flickered…
…OFF…on again…. OFF… on again…
At the same time as my heart rate was fluttering wildly, I heard the captain’s voice.
“Moggy!…where are you?…I lose your position….? ”
I knew he’d lost me on radar, which was no surprise. No more blip… With the risk of tripping a circuit breaker with all the moisture, I didn’t dare transmit.
All I wanted was the GPS to keep working…
Ignoring his repeated and increasingly frantic calls, I busied myself on closing the distance.
Two point two miles…
I sneaked a quick look at the fuel gauge. It was pegged on empty.
Grrrreat…! Now I’m running on fumes…. this can’t possibly get any worse…
The flash of lightning and the tremendous thunderclap were instantaneous.
It felt like a detonation, an explosion, and I would have jumped clean out of my skin… but I was too busypedaling like a monkey out of a circus on fire… For a brief instant, it illuminated my surroundings, and the beaten down waves below me. Their color changed, for the brief few seconds of the lightning flash, from a gray-green tint to a much brighter gray-white. I could see further, but still only the silhouettes of yet more waves.
One mile…
I was getting tired. The concentration was intense. I couldn’t afford to lose focus for even a second. Now I also had to allow for the risk of an engine flame-out. With its attendant immediate descent into the sea. I would have perhaps a second to react correctly.
Half a mile…
The lights on the radio stack were flickering again. Somewhere, moisture was getting in to vital electrics. I was surprised they had held up this long…
Quarter of a mile…
Trying to push the risk of a flame-out-at-any-second… to the back of my mind, I was now needing to deal with my next concern: not getting run over… I absolutely needed to see the Hsieh Feng coming. The only way I could do that was to fish-tail like crazy, snatching a quick look out the open door each time I kicked sideways. Now I was soaked through, and so was the inside of the cockpit. My beard felt strangely saturated and seemed to be flattened against my lower face like a washcloth. I needed…
There…! There she is……!!!
Looming up above me, towering up into the sky, the bow of a ship split the rain curtain. It rose up, and then plunged down, slamming into the sea. White foaming bow waves, cleaved by her passage, stretched weirdly towards me, even as I banked hard right. I passed by her port side, along the deserted rear working deck, and hauled myself around in a screaming seventy degree bank over the stern. One glance as I passed by had been enough to see how much the ship was struggling. The bow was rearing up, and then slamming down, to where the heave was probably twenty-five to thirty feet. Spray was everywhere, and water was pouring off her decks.
Sunshine! Where’s Sunshine…?
I positively, desperately needed my deck helper, my assistant, whom I had nicknamed “Sunshine “, to be ready and waiting to instantly, the moment I touched down, secure the belly hook and quickly wind in the arrester cable. In that way, I would be secured to the deck, regardless of the roll rate. Otherwise, with fifteen to eighteen degrees of roll, I would land, and be hurtled clear off the ship again. I couldn’t see him…
With grim determination I swung around onto finals. I had to climb up to reach the helideck, and as I did so, ominous white tentacles started to engulf me. If I went into cloud at that critical moment, I was a goner. All I could do was concentrate on the helideck, still fish-tailing crazily, and try and ignore those white, ghostly talons appearing in the corner of my eye.
Sunshine…! I need you bad…. where the fuckkkk are you…???
I had been allowing for an engine flame-out whilst hover taxying towards the boat, but now I was flying again. I had speed and altitude, and now would be a real bad time for those fuel vapors to run out…
I hit the helideck firmly, instantly caught in the bow spray. I could feel myself sliding sideways off the deck…
Sunshine…..!!!???
A small, oilskin clad figure erupted like a missile from behind the dubious shelter of the radome, and sprinted towards the helicopter. A brown, rain lashed face, showing nothing but the grimmest determination, concentration etched in every line, hurled himself bravely underneath the sideways sliding helicopter, and latched on the cable. Then he slithered and clawed his way out, and bolted back to the winch.. Operating the winding lever as if his own life depended upon it, in seconds he had the cable tight and locked. Now, whatever happened, we were at least secured by one line… he shot back to the helicopter with the four tie-down cables, and quickly, expertly, secured those. Then… wind lashed, rain soaked, cold, he looked up at me, and grinned. Grinned. That huge big, “welcome home “ typical ‘Sunshine grin’ I had learned to appreciate more than he could ever know…
As I walked down to the bridge below the helideck, holding onto the rails for dear life, I marveled at the weather I had just come through. The spray over the decks didn’t worry me now. It was almost a pleasure to be able to feel it. I was already soaked beyond mere saturation anyway. I actually felt borderline jocular. It was coming up to lunch time, what the Taiwanese call “Tsuh-wann “ and for some reason I felt deliriously hungry…
The captain, gripping the helm firmly, and peering through rain lashed windows, past wipers going at maximum revolutions, looked over at me as I stepped in. His face, white, strained, and his eyes hollow, said it all. He had screwed up, by going to sleep while his helicopter was on a long range search, and damn near lost his pilot in the process.
Our eyes met, and I just grinned.
Hey! I’m here…!
In answer, his eyes just rolled up, with an expressive up and backwards jerk of his head. It was as if he was saying:
“I’m glad you’re back. I was worried sick… “
He never did apologize. That wasn’t his style. But after that, he took extra care. And showed, in his own way, that he was concerned about my safety. And my welfare.
In that respect, he was one of the best captains I ever flew for.
I enjoyed my tsuh-wann. Despite the burns. From the hot coffee, which I spilt, half an hour later, when I started shaking. I covered it up with a laugh, and a joke.
But I knew, full well… that fiasco should never have happened…
I knew, but for a little bit of skill and a lot of luck, that the captain’s radar scope might have recorded the permanent loss… of my little blip.
And that would have been pooh-how. Definitely. Very bloody pooh-how…
F.M.
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Last edited by Francis Meyrick on March 19, 2014, 10:48 pm
The Guinea Pig
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (law enforcement), Sheriff Pilot
THE GUINEA PIG
Captain Peterson leaned up against the counter, seeking some refuge from the teeming humanity around him. He had been waiting for hours…
For the hundreth time, he glanced at his watch. At this rate of going, they would never be able to fly back before nightfall. He disliked flying single engine over mountains at night. It just pushed the risk factor up a notch. Without good reason.
Why, oh why was it so often the same foul up?
They would call him several days beforehand. Telling him where and when to pick up the prisoners. He would make his own phone calls the day before. His standard patter:
Yeah, good morning. We’re flying down to you tomorrow morning in a light aircraft, to pick up Doyle, James A. I just wanted to make sure that the prisoner is ready, and that you have all the required paper work. The file number is GU2345-000087422…..
Then the fun would begin. If it was a smaller gaol, a mere five hundred inmates or so, you had a reasonably good chance that the process of eliciting information would not be too painful a one. You would quickly be put through to somebody who actually could help you. And many correction officers you dealt with, despite the staffing shortages, were extraordinarily helpful. Even offering to come and pick you up from the airport.
The bigger they got though, with inmate numbers stretching past one thousand to multiple thousands, and even tens of thousands, the more chance you had of the dreaded
“WHO? Never heard of that name?! “
Sometimes, you would be left hanging on, for an eternity. With maybe the background noise of gaol. A harsh melody. People shouting. Orders being given. Orders being given again, in an exasperated manner. Inquiries. Urgent inquiries. Somebody hollering.
Somebody screaming… A cacophony of disjointed input. Anger, despair, frustration.
Overworked, understaffed, under supported officers trying as best as they humanly could to deal with “swamped “.
Welcome to America.. and some of the parts OFF the tourist trail…
And so, here he stood, despite his best efforts, seven hundred miles and four hours flying time away from home. Tired already. He had been up since five o’clock that cold spring morning, had been airborne at six, and walked into the gaol at eleven. Now it was past three in the afternoon, with still not a sight of the prisoner…
Situation normal. They were overcrowded. Five thousand prisoners in a gaol built to house three thousand. Understaffed. Overburdened. Intakes took priority. Cell searches took priority. Lots of things took priority. Over supplying one solitary prisoner to a visiting officer from another state…
The counter, in the reception hall, strong and solid, was now his refuge.
He could lean against it, taking some of the weight off his feet. And survey his surroundings. And the hundreds of people, coming and going. Take in the noise, the smell, the tumult, the pandemonium of a busy gaol reception hall. Endless counters, cubicles, and holding cells. With glass walls. So you could watch the prisoner easily. In case of contraband, drugs, knives, fights…
They were like… like monkeys, in a zoo. No, more like a collectors’ exhibit….
If this was a museum of the future, with holograms depicting the participants, then he could just imagine a prim and proper school ma’am of the future, guiding her troupe of chattering school children past the exhibits.
“And now, children, you can see a prison two thousand years ago, in the year 2007. Notice how mean and brutish some of these people look. These people here are the guards. They used to call them “correction officers “. They were supposed to “correct ” the bad behaviour of some people. As you can see, a lot of these guards are not very happy. You can see from their body language that… “
He winced a little at the sudden yelling beside him. An officer, a guard, was bawling out a prisoner. The prisoner was shouting obscenities. Shouter and shoutee, it was hard to know which was which, faced each furiously with only one inch of plexi glass between them…
“…that they are very stressed. See this one? He is shouting at a prisoner in a cell, behind a glass wall. You can see the guard is very, very angry. They are both shouting now. Nobody is listening. Aren’t they horrible? Look at his face, can you see how contorted and ugly it is? You can see the veins standing up. Maybe he has high blood pressure problems… “
He wanted to move away from the shouting. But it would be over in a minute. And he liked leaning up against the counter. He didn’t want to give up the spot…
So, maybe he could just pretend that this wasn’t happening. Maybe he could just tune out the shouting and the threats… and ignore the smell of violence. He gazed at the lights, the artificial lights. Everything was artificial. There were no windows at all.
It might upset the town’s good citizens. Because of this, there was this peculiar air of unreality. The shadows cast were false shadows. The figures moving back and forth became extensions of the false shadows… And the chain gang that had just been brought in, fourteen prisoners straight off the prison bus, chained together two by two, did not exist, if he decided so….
“…and here, children, you see a gang of prisoners being transported to gaol. Notice the prison jump suits, bright orange, for easy identification. Do you see how they are chained together in seven pairs? Look at their expressions! Remember what you see there. DO you see anger? Bitterness? How about this one, this very young man. Do you see fear and bewilderment perhaps? How do you think he feels, children? “
His gaze, detached from his mind, swept sightlessly past the rows and rows of glass cages. He had seen it all before. Many times. Nothing about it was new. It was, on the contrary, old, decrepit, soiled, dispiriting. He wanted to leave. He felt trapped, imprisoned, in this airless, hot, stifling, suffocating torture chamber. How many souls were there in this hall? Hundreds… Was God here? Aware of each and every person here? Aware, divinely, of their loves and hates, their consciences and their failings?
It seemed impossible that any Being could, or even would, reach down to these simple, fallible, imperfect mortals. It seemed incredible that many people believed so firmly and seemingly unshakably in an all powerful, all knowing Supreme Power…
“…as you know, children, people’s lives in the society in the twenty-first century were not very nice at all. In fact, their lives were nasty, brutal, and short. There was very little compassion, and most people who were not in gaol just thought all the people in gaol deserved everything they got… “
Maybe it was true. Maybe they deserved everything they got. Maybe they were the lowest of the lowest, the scum of the earth. Unworthy of pity. Maybe…
The glass cages were full to over flowing. All except one. Only three men in that one.
Two of which were leaning silently, unmovingly against the wall. Their mean, hard faces were expressionless, and coldly, contemptuously, ignored the third man. The latter, a younger man in his mid twenties, seemed engrossed in a slow, silent, mime of some kind. His expression indicated that he might be mentally retarded. As he moved about the cage, seemingly unaware of his surroundings, he seemed at peace with himself. He would face the wall, and his lips would move, as if he was in silent conversation with an unseen friend. He would smile, and nod wisely. Then he would move slowly, his arms miming a strange unheard music, and move over to the two men. It was as if he was making them an unspoken offer of some kind. They, coldly ignoring him, wore contemptuous expressions when he came close, and he, seemingly sensitive to the rebuttal, smiled serenely, and glided, arms still slowly moving to an unheard melody, away from them.
Peterson, shaking his head to surface back to the real world, glanced at his watch.
This was… getting worse with the minute. He needed to get out of here!
A correction officer leaned across the counter.
“Captain… I’ve phoned again. They said they’ll be bringing him down in fifteen minutes. “
Peterson smiled his weary thanks, and his gaze moved slowly, inexorably, back to the mime artist. The officer, following his gaze, murmured quietly:
“You see him…? See those two villains in there with him? Those two are crystal meths manufacturers. The worst… The P.D. just rolled them up. Turns out that they were in the experimental stage. The poor retard there… “
He nodded his head towards the distant glass cage.
“They used him as an expendable guinea pig. Didn’t care if it killed him or not. As for him… He’s just harmless. Gentle as a lamb. They filled him up with all sorts of filthy chemicals, and as you can see, he’s away with the fairies. Mind, he was like that before those two sadists got hold of him… “
Peterson shook his head, and felt a sad, quiet stab of pity for the mime artist. He had seen the so-called drug labs. If only the public could see the appalling lack of cleanliness and hygiene in these back street drug dens. The cavalier, reckless, indiscriminate mixing of chemicals, normally used for mundane purposes such as cleaning toilets, that would now end up in people’s bodies. Maybe then, young people might just…
“…We talked about drug abuse, children, and the dangerous chemicals people would stick in their bodies. A lot of these chemicals were dangerously toxic, even if mixed by people who knew what they were doing. In the hands of amateurs, operating only for greed, these dangers escalated exponentially. Now here, you see a sad result of the sadistic cruelty of some of these drug manufacturers. This young man, mentally handicapped, was recruited for the sole purpose… “
The lights were tiring him out.
This false shadow play, this flux of humanity passing over, this excuse for an existence!
How he wanted just to get the hell out of there… There was an awfulness here, a hidden, hovering cruelty, that made him question the very concept of Reality?
What was Reality? Was this gaol real? Was the retard real? Were those who passed by his cage, in chains, and who looked up and mocked him, were they real?
The floor of the glass cage was deliberately designed to be two feet above the corridor. The purpose of this design was so that prisoners could be closely observed, even with persons passing by in the corridor, The unintentional side effect however, was that the appearance of a caged exhibit was heightened. It was as if the mime artist was performing on a stage, his slow expressive dance for the benefit of the chained prisoners and officers passing by the dozen below him. They, for their part, thanked him not. Their eyes, full of ridicule, or empty of emotion, contained no warmth. No light.
And still, the mime artist performed…
Could there be a God, who saw this act?
A merciful, compassionate God, who saw and noted mens’ hearts? The God of Abraham, and the God of Moses? Surely not. In this setting? Surrounded by steel doors, bars, chains and handcuffs? Curses, taunts, and blasphemies? The God of Jesus? Mohammed? Here?
Why would he even bother?
“…of experimentation. The drug dealers would give him their newest drug, to see what effect it would have on him. To see how potent they could make it. They didn’t care about his health, or even his life. Unfortunately, his already handicapped brain, damaged at birth due to oxygen starvation, in this manner suffered additional degradation as a result of toxic compounds entering the anterior cortex, and setting up the conditions for cerebral cancer. Associated with this cancer is swelling, hallucinations, and extreme migraine headaches. Life expectancy in such cases… “
credit: Andreufg
Oh…! The retard was looking straight at him. Despite himself, despite his experience in dealing with prisoners and mentally handicapped persons, he felt a shiver run down his spine. Across the melee of the booking hall, across the desk, the filing cabinets, and the heads of several hundred people, there he was, staring, staring, directly into Peterson’s eyes.
What….? Quit staring at me, you fool!
It annoyed him, and he looked away. A safe distance in time later, he carefully, casually, looked back, his face composed in a professionally neutral, practised non-seeing mask.
And still the little bastard is staring at me…!
The retard, smiling ephemerally, into a far distant galactic spectacle of the myriad mysteries of the Universe, was still there, looking directly into Peterson’s eyes. Then, casually, gently, as if it was part of his mime, he beckoned the uniformed spectator to come to him…
The correction officer, observant, still leaning over the counter confidentially towards Peterson’s ear, chuckled quietly as he watched the silent invitation..
“He likes you…yeah, you know, he’s super friendly…! I don’t even know why the cops brought him in. He’s done nothing wrong. I think it’s gonna be protective custody for a while, until he sees the medic… “
Peterson forced himself to look away. He wanted not to see that horrible mime any more, that strange shadow play, the fluent conversations with unseen visitors. The lips that moved as if in earnest discourse, the nods, the head movements, the silent assent when agreement was reached on an important item of philosophical interest…
Peterson wanted to fly home, back to the comfort of his wife, his dogs, and his computer.
Almost angrily, no, angrily, he dismissed the creature from his mind, and, with his own prisoner now finally making an appearance, chained and escorted by two officers, he was glad to involve himself busily and importantly with the paperwork.
He left the building, ten minutes later, but not before he had sneaked one last glance at the mime artist. For a brief millisecond. And realized, with a shock, that the retard, unmoved, was still standing in the same place, smiling peacefully, looking straight at him.
And waving goodbye…
Despite himself, he had felt a peculiar wave. In that millisecond, before his bullet proof protective shell had slammed down around him, it was as if he had been… what?
Who, he asked himself, is the incarcerated one?
In this bi-polar world…. the Godless, tragic, futile one that he saw and worked in, that wrestled furiously with the unseen, maybe non-existing spiritual world that was nonetheless a fervent reality in many people’s minds… who was free?
Who was it that was locked up? The retard, in his glass cage?
Or… himself, stepping out even now, strongly, in the bright sunshine, down the sidewalk
hopelessly locked up
in the prison
of his walled, dull mind
penned up,
helplessly,
in the cloisters
of his starving
feeble
light-starved
………
soul…??
Francis Meyrick
Last edited by Francis Meyrick on July 16, 2013, 9:27 pm
A Blip on the Radar (part 1) “Staying with the Herd “
February 29, 2008 in Auto-biographical (tuna helicopters), Blip on the Radar
(this one bounced off a single phrase in the review by Tara Shannon on my story “If you’re good… “)
credits: Vangelis, “Conquest of Paradise “
A BLIP ON THE RADAR
(Part 1: Staying with the Herd)
“What do you do for a living? ”
It’s a valid question, as we all trudge our way meekly or otherwise through this vale of…. of… flowers. Some people plan careers, and stick to that plan their entire working lives. Some even stay in the same place. That must be nice. I wouldn’t know. I’m not like that.
I get restless…
I’m just a blip on the radar, that shows up unexpectedly, and frequently unwanted,in different places…
Some people have ordinary, hum-drum, safe and sensible jobs. They like it that way. That, also, must be nice sometimes.
Me? Oh….You don’t want to know…
I spent five years flying helicopters off Taiwanese and Korean tuna boats.
Yes. Flying-helicopters-off-tuna-boats. All over the Pacific Ocean.
Why? I guess it seemed like a good idea….
If… you’re interested, I’ll tell you the story.
I’ll shut up, if you’re not. And go away. Disappear off your scope…
Just be sure to tell me, ya hear….?
Five years….That’s fairly unusual. Many pilots only sign up for one six month tour. Many of those don’t complete that tour. They quit in disgust, or they get fired.
Or, not infrequently, they crash and die. I talked with some ex Vietnam pilots who commented ruefully that the accident rate amongst tuna helicopters was higher than Vietnam. That at first glance alarming statement does in fact bear up to scrutiny. It’s a combination of adverse factors. For instance, a lot of the maintenance takes place out at sea. This puts a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the field mechanic. Who may not be that experienced. Or that familiar with type. The way a helicopter works, you had better spot a hairline crack in some vital component or structure at the very early stage.
If you don’t…
that flaw will propagate very quickly indeed. When you’re talking vibrations, you’re up against a dramatic exponential progression.
2…4…8….16……………32………….64!! Ccrrrrrrack!
I once heard a Hansen Helicopters pilot, real cool character, remark over the radio to his buddy that he thought he had a small vibration. A few minutes later, he said he was turning back to his ship as a precautionary measure. Dead cool. A minute after that, in the same tone of voice, he was asking for his buddy to get the hell over there, because he was ‘going in the water- NOW!’.
Boom. That fast.
The supply of spare parts was another problem. It could take weeks and weeks for a much needed spare part to arrive, via another fishing vessel. Or maybe via the Phillippines, from Guam, through Fiji, to some port in… Papua New Guinea.
Where you might be going. Depending on the catch. The customer. And the freezer container ship, which might or might not be going to…somewhere else.
The Solomon Islands maybe. Or Easter Island. Nauru. Truk. Rabaul. Tarawa. Madang…
Heck, you might be going just about…anywhere. It was only human nature to push the limits…a little. To try and please the captain, and keep the show on the road. Just soldier on with the tail rotor gearbox… making a bit of metal. Not really….much. Just…a little bit. Showing up on the magnetic chip detector. But… it’ll be all right.
And of course, next thing….
Another problem was simply the nature of what we did. Just about anything. Long range searches. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles. With your mothership long since disappeared over the horizon…. five hundred miles or a thousand miles from land….
and not a soul around, not a ship, nothing…. believe me, it get’s interesting.
It gives you a whole new understanding of being alone…
We did emergency medical runs. Injured crew members. Shopping trips. Take the captain to go visit his buddies and go gambling mid-ocean. Herding…
A lot of the captains liked us to herd the fish. Herd? Like cattle? Yes, kind of…
It involved keeping the fish inside the net, whilst it was still open, and slowly closing.
As the nets would sink down, to a depth of one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred feet…. and as the ship would play out the nets, steaming around in a huge circle…. the fish, understandably, would often try and swim out.If they decided to go under the nets, you were, technically speaking, goosed.
Unless you wanted to go play submarine. (People actually did, often enough, but not intentionally.) If, however, the teeming mass of thousands of fish, the so-called foamer, stayed at or close to the surface, now you had a chance. As the foamer headed for the exits,you, the crazy helicopter pilot, could could screaming in, and hover noisily just ahead of the leading tuna. If you hung close above the water, typically four to six feet, and pedal turned furiously, causing the tail rotor pitch to change constantly, in a high pitched, teeth grinding yowl, then…. you had a fair to good chance of turning the ‘leaders’ around. They would then swim back into the slowly encircling nets. If only one leader got out past the helicopter….you were done. The rest would follow, nose to tail… Just like humans.
You could watch them, hovering only feet above them, but there was nothing more you could do, except watch and enjoy the sight of a worthy, beautiful quarry escaping to swim another day… If you were really fast, you could keep the leaders in, and you could hold them all in. But you had to be mobile. Because no sooner had you stopped them from crossing the line in one place, than they would be trying to break out at another spot fifty meters up the line. The speedboats couldn’t keep up with a determined foamer trying to break out. Only a helicopter, flown by a dervish, wheeling, tail spinning, and moving like greased lightning, could often save the day. And make the difference between a three hundred thousand dollar profitable afternoon versus a big fat zero. With the Taiwanese captain, after three weeks of sailing maybe… and not a single fish caught, more than emotional. Over the radio. Screaming hysterically. My nickname was “Moggy “. In Korean, it means “mosquito “. Kind of apt, I guess.
All I would get was:
“Moggy-Moggy-Moggy!!!….
behind you!!!…Gott!…Gott!…..Moggy!!….towline….go to towline….Moggy!!!
Come to back of ship! Come to shipppppp!!!….Moggy-Moggy….
feeshh get out…!!…..Aaaaahhhh!!!!
It got pretty intense. It was wonderful if you liked to fly… After some of the lumbering big 21 seat helicopters I previously flew, or rather, just drove along… You could handle a nippy light helicopter like a turbine powered Hughes 500… and make it go like the ultimate teenager stunt motorcycle.
I used to spin-drive ’em just for the sheer fun of it. ‘Spin-drive’ means flying in a straight line whilst spinning around the vertical axis continually through 360 degrees. A bit like a kid’s toy, I guess. Maybe exactly like a kid’s toy…The problem was, at those low altitudes, you couldn’t afford any mistakes. Additionally, huge rolling waves would come through. It was nothing to find yourself performing this low level air show in remarkably lousy weather. The captains would ‘make a set’ even in borderline gale force conditions. If they were desperate enough. Now you would find yourself well below the top of the waves, fighting to keep the foamer inside, whilst trying to keep an eye on that next big roller coming in behind you. You can’t do both… at the same time. So in practise, you would mentally time the seconds before that next big one was going to get you. With a couple of seconds to go, you’d kick hard left, check the wave, haul up collective lever, lift over the swell, and back down the other side to go back to what you were doing.
And again. And again. Hundreds of times…
It probably looked suicidally crazy. And many, many were the pilots who accidentally stuck their tail rotors into an unfriendly wave. Instant catastrophe…
Hasta la vista!
I knew one guy who had crashed and been underwater three times. That can’t be any fun. Swimming out from a drowning helicopter with enthusiasm, I’d bet… But his captain, the honorable customer, liked him… so his company, well, they would just… give him another four hundred thousand dollar helicopter…. and off they would jolly well go…
I simply…enjoyed it. Raw nature at its best. The chase…, the hunt, the handling, the salt spray, the turbine howling, and the feeling of the controls in my hands, and the pressure of the pedals on my feet.. Fish jumping… Speedboats criss-crossing in frantic haste. The smell of the sea, jet fuel burning, adventure, and excitement…
And the awareness, the constant, striving awareness, of where the next wave was coming up behind me, of how much fuel I had left, of where the fish were, of how much power I was pulling, and where the wind was coming from, and how effective my tailrotor was given that power setting, that wind direction, that wind strength, and that rate of pedal turn… All of which varied of course continually. And I would weave, and bob, and jink, and race a hundred meters in a frantic dash, pedal turn violently, lift up over a wave, and then… do it all over again…
Throwing up masses amounts of salt spray, that I would spend hours afterwards clearing off…. to prevent corrosion.
With the cockpit doors removed, I would literally taste the salt as I got hosed from time to time. Sometimes I could see little rainbows appear and disappear… in the spray outside my windscreen.
I once, after a particularly hectic session in appalling weather conditions, got a call to go to the bridge. The pilot on a nearby American ship, the Martinac, wanted to speak to me. Wondering what the problem was, I called him up. His voice, crackling and tinny in that peculiar ‘transmitted way’, spoke volumes:
“Hey Buddy! My name’s Dave! Just wanted to say hello… This is my first fishing trip, but I’ve been flying helicopters for near thirty years…. Just wanted to say I ain’t ever seen anything quite like that show you just put on!…. I reckon that was one of the best pieces of helicopter flying I’ve ever seen, either that…or you are…
… the craziest, dumbest motherfucker I’ve ever met….! ”
Mmmm… I knew he had a point. I wasn’t the only one that flew that way.
A lot us long timers did. Some guys, a few, had been out there for twelve to fifteen years.
We knew what we were doing. None of us wanted to ever crash.
Too damn dangerous…
The whole thing was….
It was a drug. Kinda crazy. Kinda fun…. See the world. Bury the past. Move along…
A lot of guys like that.
And then of course… there were the unexpected weather changes…
that’s when things got REALLY wild…
Francis Meyrick.
(c)
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Last edited by Francis Meyrick on October 27, 2012, 10:13 pm