“Right Back at Ya, Doc”

Once in a great while I make time to go to a doctor.  In truth, I have little faith that the doctors I visit are invested much farther than the money that they will be able to collect from my insurance agency.  Proof of that I find every time I have an appointment.

 

This afternoon’s appointment was pretty standard.

I walked into the doctor’s office a few minutes early. 

They asked my name, and then demanded proof of my identification.  I try not to take offense, I am after all in my later 50s and while unlikely, memory loss can be sufficient already in one of my years that I might have gotten my name wrong on walking in the door.

Immediately following that formality was the “proof of insurance” routine.  On this one there doesn’t seem to be any concern about what name it is, as long as there is a name and a card of some sort.

Then the pleasant gal behind the counter handed me a clipboard with “a couple of forms” that she needed me to fill out.

Twelve pages later, I had written and rewritten my name, address, and contact information no less than 18 times.  I had checked boxes that indicated that I wasn’t allergic to anything known to man, and that at 57 and male, I wasn’t pregnant and wasn’t planning on it.  Next was a list on which I certified that I had nothing from an Abdominal Aortic Aneurism to my lack of Zygomycosis. 

Oh, and before the Alzheimer’s that their ID process is apparently concerned about kicks in; why is the word “Abdominal” in front of Aortic Aneurism?  After all, since the Aorta only exists in the abdomen, the only way there could be a Non-Abdominal Aortic Aneurism is if the Aorta was no longer in your abdomen.  In which case I would think there might be one or two other priorities before having me checking a box about where the aneurism actually happened to be.

 

But I digress.  After turning the forms back over to the gal at the desk, I sit back down to wait.  Pleasingly, for only a very short while before a young assistant calls me out of the waiting room and escorts me into an examination room.  There she asked me if I wanted to keep my clothes on, or wanted to disrobe and put on a paper gown.  I could tell from her diminutive instructions on wearing the gown that she likely wouldn’t know how to deal with my telling her it wouldn’t bother me to strip down and stand there in the all-together.

I am nothing if not a man of my times.  We grew up rambling, running, and in that world, a bit of naked was nothing unusual.  Communal showers in the raw at school beginning in the 7^th grade, bathing in cold snow-melt lakes in the Sierras, and the general hazing of youth all conspired to eliminate my worries about someone seeing me naked.  Not my problem if they do.  True, I surely am not the physical specimen I once was, but still, not my problem.

 

In any case, after she takes her leave and I strip down and don the gown, the doctor walks in.  He looks older than the last I saw him, but I guess since the appointment clerk advised me that it had been 14 years, I guess he is due.

He asked if there was anything specific and I told him that; yes, it has been a while since I was here and I have some spots I figure you should look at”.  So he decides to do an over-all skin check.

He starts by picking up a comb and working over the hair on my head.  “Hmm”, He says, “there seems to be a scar up here in your hairline, how did you get that?”

“Oh, that was from a rock my scoutmaster beaned me with when I was about 17” I say.

“How about these two right up top here?” he asked.

“Those are from a rake along about 8 years old” I replied. 

I’ll shorten this up a bit; the next several answers were “Hatchet”,  “Wood carving tool”, “Drill bit”, “Table saw”, "T-post", "Broken glass", "Rusty sheet metal", "Barbed wire", "Barnacles" and “Nail gun” respectively.

The doctor looked at me pretty serious and said, "you really need to stop this, all this scar tissue is not good for your skin".  Then he touched a spot in the middle of my back and asked,  “And just exactly how did you get this one”.

I asked him if it was the straight one or the “L-shaped” one.

“L-shaped one about 2" on each side", he answered.

“Oh”, that one", I said, "you gave me that one the last time I saw you, Doc.”  

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

Things that go “Bang” – Part Three – Smoke on the Water

Back about the time these events were occurring there was a popular Rock band out of England named Deep Purple.  One of their most recognizable hits was a tune titled Smoke on the Water. 

That song’s lyrics actually relate a true story of a Frank Zappa/The Mothers of Invention concert held on December 4^th 1971 in the Casino Montreux during which an audience member fired off a flare gun and the resulting fires consumed the entire casino complex, spreading smoke out over Lake Geneva.  The members of Deep Purple were there intending to use the concert venue to record an album beginning the next day.  The following morning, in a different location, Deep Purple Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore created what Total Guitar magazine calls the 4^th best guitar riff of all time.

 

Our father used to often quote that “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing” when referring to us boys and our adventures.  One of the more notably of those adventures began when Barry learned about Sodium Metal in High School Chemistry class.

Sodium, the key element of salt is actually a metal.  Refined into its pure form, it becomes a dull silver material that is very soft.  Easily molded and cut.  To store the stuff, you have to keep it away from both air and water.  So it is usually stored in a container filled with oil.

The really interesting thing about sodium metal to us boys was the aggressive speed of oxidation.  Unlike steel that rusts over a period of days and weeks, sodium metal when exposed to oxygen “rusts” in seconds.  And it is so aggressive at that oxidizing action that it will literally rip a water molecule apart just to get at the single oxygen atom that is there.

When it does that, three things happen all at the same time.  The sodium instantly oxides, the resulting chemical bond dissolution and reformation generates a bunch of released energy (heat), and the leftovers of the torn apart water becomes an accumulation of hydrogen atoms.

Hydrogen Gas and Heat. 

Have you ever see any pictures of the Hindenburg Zeppelin fire at Lakehurst Air Station in 1937?  If not, you really should google it.  There is even video footage of the thing going up in a raging fireball.  Yes siree, too much heat and hydrogen produces some spectacular and dangerous results.

Now I ain’t admitting to knowing nothing about how it happened, but not too long after Barry learned about sodium metal in Chemistry Class, a small bar of the metal came into the possession of us boys.  Understanding enough to know that it did spectacular things we set out for a bit of fun.

We took a few of mom’s empty canning jars, lids and rings and headed out to the abandoned rock quarries out west of town.  Our set up once we got there was easy, the results were tremendous. 

By punching some holes in the jar lids and filling the bottom half of the jars with rocks we created several “depth charges”.  All that was left to do was to slice a bit of metal off the bar with a pocket knife, drop it into one of the jars, screw on the lid and ring and toss it into the water.  The jar would hit the lake surface and disappear with a small ripple.  The weight of the rocks pulled the jar under and the holes in the lid let the water pour in inundate the sodium.  The water surface immediately went flat and glassy again.

Briefly.

Very, briefly.

 

Have you ever watched one of those old WWII movies of the navy at work in the Pacific?  You know; the ones where the destroyer is busy hunting an enemy submarine and trying to blow it up?  The movie always has a scene where you see a depth charge roll off a rack at the stern of the ship and then as the ship moves about 150 yards away all of a sudden the surface of the water “humps up” and a foaming white geyser shoots straight up in the air?

Those small homemade explosions looked just like that. 

I have to give Hollywood credit on that one.  While those shots may be the only ones that Hollywood ever got right about explosives, those shots are dead on accurate.  When our little charges detonated, the water would surge up in about a 25 foot circle, with a foaming geyser about 8” in diameter shooting up 20 feet or more.  You could feel the shockwave through your feet.  And hear a low, deep “kah-rump” sound.

And as the geyser water rained back down, there would be a thin, low cloud of smoke on the water.  Wafting slowly off into nothingness.

 

Now I can’t tell you if we were partially responsible for this next bit or not.  But at least it didn’t have any actual Vandermolen fingerprints involved. 

A couple-three years later when I was in Physics and the teacher pulled out the sodium metal to show how it reacted Harvey and I were sitting in the back of the class and I told him about the times Barry, Jeff and I had gone blasting in the quarries and the arroyos around town with that stuff.  Apparently that sounded like a grand time because Harvey decided to pinch a bit for his own fun too.  Problem was that old “little bit of knowledge” quote was hanging out waiting to ambush someone.  For once it wasn’t me.

Right at the end of class that day Harvey snuck into the Chem Lab reagents room and slipped a piece of sodium metal into a pocket of his North Face down jacket.  I remember trooping out of class behind him wondering exactly what he had in mind. 

Right after Physics we both had Psychology together, so out of the science building, across the quad and up the stairs in the main building we went.  Kind of curious to see what was going to happen, I just followed along behind, trying not to be close enough to get any DNA on the situation.

So there we are in the class listening to Mr B drone on about something or other that seemed perfectly senseless to me.  I mean after all, if the guiding light of your field of endeavor is a character as screwed up as Ole Sigmund was, there really is not much credibility that I can give your profession.

After a while, I notice that Harvey is beginning to squirm around in his seat a bit.

Then a bit more.

Then, suddenly, he leaps to his feet and begins beating the tar out of his right side coat pocket with both hands. Fast, really fast. Fanning and slapping away, until a short block of smoking metal melted its way through his pocket and dropped to the floor.

Everyone in the class sat stupefied by that performance.

You may not know this, but an old wood floor has a lot of moisture condensed on its surface in the best of times and it had been raining earlier that day so all the shoes had drug in a bit with them.  That blob of sodium metal sucked all that moisture up off the floor and it began to spin and dance around under the desks just like one of those whizzer fireworks that you can buy on the 4^th of July.

As it spun and collected water, and dumped heat and Hydrogen, a small flame flickered up on the surface just about the time it spun out into the main isle down the center of the classroom.

Mr B reacted instantly.  He was a quick thinking man.

The difficulty was, he was applying soft science to a hard science problem.

Now, in any other circumstance, it would have been just the right thing to do.  Unfortunately, as he grabbed his habitual double mega sized icy drink off of the desk and sloshed it on the spinning ball of flame, the situation devolved from ugly to down right dangerous.

After an hour or so, the smoke and the water that had been streaming out of the classroom windows and down the main stairs subsided.  The fire trucks rolled up their hoses and departed, and the school administrators had successfully shoed most of the kids off home.  The 90 year old wooden upper floor of the classroom was in need of replacement along with some water damaged hallway as well, the smoke alarms and fire extinguishers needed to be retested and recharged, and Harvey’s father had arrived as summoned.

Harvey didn’t get to walk in the graduation ceremony later that year, but thanks to the fact that his father was a local professional and generously donated to not only repair the damage but fund a couple long sought after improvements, he did get to graduate.   

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Things that Go "Bang" - Part Two - The Marble Cannon

Did you know that the invention of black powder is credited to the Chinese over 750 years ago?

Or that it took the Chinese close to 100 years before they learned to use it as an implement of war?

 

Well, not so my brothers and I. 

One summer while playing mountain climber in the garage, one of us kicked over a number of boxes and in so doing unearthed a heavy wooden crate. Digging into that wooden crate we found some strange looking tools, a cloth bag with come birdshot, a few bullets, and a can with gunpowder in it.

Now, we might not have recognized the reloading tools for what they were, but the gunpowder was instantly recognized.  Not only was it recognized for what it was, it was recognized for what it could be.

It could be hours of joyful destruction, that’s what it could be.  Not that we thought of it that way, and luckily not that we ever destroyed anything of consequence with the stuff, but destruction in a can is what it really was.

Unlike the Chinese, it didn’t take us long to make the jump from “Hey, we have some powder here” to “Hey, we can make a cannon”.  Maybe a millisecond, perhaps two, but definitely not three.

 

Unfortunately Mom and Dad were due home from work at any time, so we carefully replaced the can in the wooden crate and carefully restacked the knocked over boxes to mask the fact that we had found the gunpowder.

Next day we biked down to the Carnegie Library to do some research.  Times then weren’t like they are now.  The Internet has made most any information immediately available and even better, you can watch videos of people make almost anything.  Heck, this was back even before the Anarchists’ Cookbook had been published.

So we looked in lots of books.  Not for instructions to make a cannon, although there might have been some in the library somewhere.  But because while we had a need for the information, there was no way we were going to let that gray-haired nosy librarian know what we were up to by asking her for instruction on how to build a cannon.

So we looked at lots of pictures.  Pictures of Knights and castles, Civil war paintings, and battleships. We looked at pictures of anything that lobbed a projectile using gunpowder.

All that “book learning” got us headed down the “right” track.  Now the local constabulary, assembly of preachers and priests, school teacher’s union, and the gaggle of busybodies might not agree with that.  But, right or not, we had the beginning of a plan.

So it was off to Stark’s Bargain House an old scrap yard down between the railroad tracks in town.  We just knew we would find a big old cylinder that we could use as a cannon barrel there and some round balls made of metal to use as cannon balls.

Old man Stark had bought up an old humped back corrugated metal “Quonset hut” that was backed up to the Western Pacific tracks down near “Joe’s-ville” and gathered together all the stuff that people had wanted to throw out but were too lazy to drag out to the dump on Vasco road.  He had old rusty washers and dryers, Refrigerators with sprung doors, buckets of hinges and nails and railroad spikes.  Metal bed frames in the yard, and musty books and fabric inside.   Lanterns, and stoves, rotting rubber wheels and broken bikes; yep, that there place simply had everything a true blooded boy need back then.   

I remember finding a great big old piece of pipe there, must have been at least 6 inch stuff.  And long.  Long enough that if we could have afforded it, we probably would have not been able to afford the hernia care required after dragging it home.  But we couldn’t talk him out of that for our pocket change.  And even if we had, he didn’t have any 30 pound cannon balls that would fit it.

Dejected, we left the “emporium of the possible” with our tails dragging and our hands in our pockets.

 

Back to home we started digging around the house and finally realized that we had some marbles that were just about the right size to fill a piece of pipe.  And as luck would have it, we found a short piece of the right sized pipe and a single metal pipe cap in the supplies dad had on his workbench.

The next day, we carefully drilled a hole near the end of the short piece of pipe, close to the threads.  Then we wrenched on the cap, and found some wood to make a “gun carriage” out of (see I told you there was some book learning involved here, if nothing else, we learned the term “gun carriage”).

Then gunpowder, cannon, and marbles in hand, we set out to find a firing range.

Now the key to a good firing range when you are testing a completely unscientifically designed destructive device is fairly simple.  You need a long stretch of fairly flat ground, some way to determine where your cannon ball is going to land, and a big pile of dirt.

The dirt pile serves two purposes; first, it is to act as a backstop to hold the cannon in place.  Second, and more importantly, it has to be big enough to hide behind.

 

We found just what we needed.  Out south of town an old grape vineyard had been torn out to make room for a bunch or tract homes.  The field had been cleared and mostly leveled.  There were a number of piles of dirt, and as luck would have it, they had flooded a large area with a thin layer of water that would allow us to see the marble splash down.

To my child-sized memory, the flooded area ran for a half mile or more between our cannon dirt pile and South Livermore Avenue.  In truth it was closer to a quarter mile.

Barry charged the cannon with a liberal pour of powder and pushed the marble in place with a stick.  Then he set the cannon carriage down butted up against the pile of dirt and poured a pile of gunpowder over the touch hole and a trail away from it about 10 inches.  Jeff and I took cover, staring carefully downrange. Barry lit the end of the powder trail and threw himself behind the pile of dirt.

 

A little knowledge about how much powder constituted a proper charge would likely have come in handy that day.  But even without that, the cannon went off.

The dirt pile behind it may have slowed it up some, I suppose, as the cannon ramped up the front wall of the pile and launched itself backwards into space.  The thing must have been tossed a good hundred yards or more.

The4 sound was deafening.  The smoke was astounding.

And that marble?

I have often wondered about that marble.  Never saw a ripple in that big old pond of water.  So, either the marble cleared the pond, crossed South Livermore Avenue and ended up on Old Man Baranus’ place somewhere (embedded in the side of his barn is a distinct possibility).

Or we just plain vaporized that dang thing.

 

 © Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, all Rights Reserved

“Hey Vandermolen”

Genetics or environment.  The argument has waged for years in an effort to define why it is that people turn out the way they do.  Take any 1000 people born into poverty, some percentage of them will find a way to lift themselves out of it.  Not necessarily the smartest, or the most talented, but some will.

And look at those truly gifted in any endeavor, great musicians, or painters, powerful speakers, or innovative engineers; all with lesser accomplished brothers and sisters from common parents.

Heck, look at my brother’s and I.

Same parents, born within three years from oldest to youngest, same rules, same schools.

We all got our Father’s Father’s Father’s Y chromosome, yet we were and are very different people.

If physical stature counts for anything, I got our Mother’s Father’s Mother’s X chromosome, while Barry and Jeff got our Mother’s Mother’s  X chromosome.  But even the two of them are different.

So, raised the same, but genetically different, and yet……..

One day when I was about 16 years old, I was walking down the main street of Pleasanton, the little town about 5 miles east of Livermore, when I hear a voice behind me yell; “Hey Vandermolen”.

Turning, I looked back.  There was no one there that I recognized, and while it is true that I am a bit near sighted, I had my glasses on so that wasn’t the problem.

Turning back I continued onward.

Running footsteps clattered up behind me and again “Hey Vandermolen” floats on the air.

Turning this time, while I definitely did not recognize her, a girl a couple years older than me is running to catch up.

When she pants to a stop she looks me over carefully and says; “You have an older brother named Barry, don’t you?”

I stared at her in dumbfounded surprise for a moment or two.

I mean, I had never laid eyes on this girl before, and she obviously hadn’t seen me before either.  And yet, she knew me.  So I asked; “Yeah, but how did you know?”

To which she replied; “You walk just like him”.

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

“Knot” for the Faint of Heart

Hank Ketchum the creator of the “Dennis-the-Menace” comic strip would have loved to have access to this story back in his heyday.  And in fact, if you were to sit down and review our childhood antics and the comic strip, you would find any number of similarities.  I have often wondered if ol’ Hank didn’t drive from the Monterey Area up to Livermore several times a week and charge the cost off as research.

That said, and knowing that many a boy fantasized about this, allow me to relate the summer that my brothers and I tied the baby-sitter up and threatened to burn her at the stake.  I know, it sounds too “made up”, a fictional recollection of blended pop-culture and personal fantasy.   Trust me on this one, as the saying goes, “truth is stranger than fiction”.  

That spring, as in most springs before, and some after, my brothers and I argued loud and long with our parents.  Our contention was we didn’t need a “babysitter” during the summer and that we were quite capable of taking care of ourselves.  Our parents contention ultimately boiled down to the fact that we might be able to take care of ourselves, however, without supervision, they feared that the town, valley, and county might not be up to the task. 

“Susan” our regular sitter for the past couple of years had just graduated from High school.  We boys were old enough to find her attractive, and young enough to be greatly intimidated by the fact that she had been valedictorian of her class.

And, as I said, we all knew each other.  She had watched over us before and as much as Barry, Jeff, and I hated to admit it, she was mostly a fun person to be around.  But, no matter how smart, pretty, and fun; she was the dreaded “babysitter” and we wanted no part of that.

This would have been the summer after 6^th grade for me I believe.  By that time I had come to realize that I would never have a career in music and I had moved on to vaudeville.  During the school year I had acquired a ventriloquist doll and spent hours practicing to talk without moving my lips.  And while the allure of a life of making wisecracks at someone else’s expense appealed to me, the mirror in front of me told me it wasn’t in the cards.

“Not in the Cards” got me to thinking, so I started reading up on Harry Houdini and all the great magicians of by-gone ages.  I bought a book on close up magic, card tricks, table tricks, and sleight of hand.  I bought a book on grand illusions and escapes.

I figure Barry was sneak reading my books.

Being the oldest may have its privileges, but it carries its burdens as well, so I blame Barry for the idea of tying Susan up.  You might note that I do that a fair amount in these stories and I therefore have to admit that while I blame him for this particular idea, I have to acknowledge that all three of us took part in the planning, and implementation.  The only innocent party was the poor girl. 

And in truth, the whole “burn at the stake part” really wasn’t part of the plan, it just spontaneously ignited in our brains if you’ll pardon the pun.

Call the genesis of the idea however you want, the upshot was that Barry, Jeff, and I entered that summer intent on tying Susan up. 

We began by spending a little time each day in the living room play-tying each other’s hands in front of our selves.  We practiced and struggled with learning how to use our teeth to undo the knots.  Then fingertips and pressure against other objects, and slowly over the course of several weeks we transitioned from tying hands in front, to behind backs, and then into chairs.  Flexing our wrists and working to shed ropes with what approximated the speed of a semi-professional.

Each day we tried to get Susan to try it as well.  We cajoled, and teased, and badgered, and pestered. 

All to no avail.

June marched onward.

July flew past on a hot dry wind.

August was grinding out the tail end of summer before one day, after watching Jeff escape from being “securely bound” into a ladder-back style wooden chair, Susan suddenly stood up from the couch where she had been watching all these weeks and said; “Let me try”.

We boys looked at each other in stunned disbelief.  Sure, we had had a plan, but the plan was kind of like one of those dreams of falling off a cliff, you know, the ones where you never hit bottom.

Susan obviously wasn’t paying enough attention because she completely missed the “overly nonchalant” manner that we took to her joining in.

Looking back on it, I have often wondered if that wasn’t the beginning of my concern over the quality of the education I was receiving.  If the best and brightest that our public schools could create was foolish enough to let three heathens tie her in a chair, I am not sure what value the educational system provides in return for the bottomless pit of tax dollars thrown at it.

My issues with public education aside, we boys instantly jumped on the chance.

Susan seated herself into the ladder-back chair.  No practice rehearsals of hands in front, no hands behind.  No deep-knee bends, jogging in-place, or warm up of any kind either.  Just plopped herself into the chair and said; “tie me up guys”.

At that time I am sure my brothers had the same thought I did…”dang, we only have a couple hundred feet of rope here”.

But we used that couple hundred feet of rope to good avail.  Susan didn’t quite look like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon when we got done, but close enough that anyone short of a certified entomologist wasn’t likely to notice the difference.

And that’s when it happened.  I can’t blame it on Jeff, though I’d lay odds that’s where it started.  Nor can I blame it on Barry.  And as much as I would have liked to have taken credit for the idea back then, I can’t claim it was mine either.

But one of us reached out and started wadding up newspaper into balls and tossing them under the chair.

Next thing you knew, the chair was surrounded by a pile of crumpled newspaper, and Barry, Jeff, and I were dancing around the pile with wooden matches chanting that we were going to burn the babysitter.

Yep, the plot progression in Lord of the Flies came as no surprise to me years later when I finally read that book in high school English.  I’d been there.  Many a time I’d seen the rapid devolution of boys into blood-thirsty savages long before high school English came along. 

But, after a while we tired of the game of watching Susan’s terrified eyes and useless struggles, so we went out to chase crayfish in the arroyo outside of town.

Not being entirely stupid, we got home before Mom and Dad were to return from work and set Susan free in time to clean up the mess and ingratiatingly plead for forgiveness.

It didn’t entirely work. 

To this day I really don’t think Susan was particularly mad at us as strange as that might sound.  Maybe there was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome at work there.  In any case, while she didn’t seem mad, she did decide that she should report the event to our mom.

Lord amighty, you would have thought the world was coming to an end.

Alright, admittedly, mom had some justification for being upset, but I figure it wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that Susan was the eldest daughter of our dad’s boss.  Yep, you heard that right, we tied up and threatened to burn the apple of the eye of the man who decided if our dad continued to be paid.

And that might have been a real crisis I suppose. 

Except when Susan related her day to her family around the dinner table that night, her father started laughing so hard he fell out of his chair.  So, seems like there may have been a family related inner ear problem that we had unwittingly helped out with there. 

Maybe we should have stopped by and offered to tie him in as well.

On reflection, it seems as though, for that summer anyway, Mom and Dad may have been right about our needing supervision.

But you all have to admit, even if they were right, they failed completely in providing it.

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved