Delivering Door-to Door

As I sat in my pandemic isolation this past weekend, having less than passing interest in the Superbowl, and it’s attendant foolishness, I couldn’t help but be struck by that old saw: “what’s old once turns new again”.

 

Now it wasn’t just that those words had been etched into my brain by hearing them time and again as a boy.  My mother was forever chanting that mantra, oh, sure, in her case she was espousing platitudes to convince me that wearing my older brother’s outgrown clothes was not only perfectly acceptable, but a nod to being a fashion visionary.  I am quite certain that in my entire life no one has ever considered me to be a fashion icon.

And my ears rang with the same words as grandmother was trying to prepare me for what was to be one of the longest nights I have ever spent on a lumpy mattress temporarily elevated by a squeaky spring suspension out in the garage, accompanied by the noisy banging of the house heater, the equally loud gurgling of the water heater, and literally tons of hot rod engines and drag racing parts.

It certainly seemed to be a “family motto” as my mother’s father made the same claim as he explained why I was fishing with a string tied to an old cane pole with a bottle cork as a bobber and a piece of fat cut from the previous night’s meat instead of a nice new shiny rod and reel while out dragging carp off the river bottoms of central Oregon.

And while on the subject why in God’s name were we fishing for carp?

I had survived all of those indoctrinations relatively un-warped, at least on that account.

No, it was the constant rattle and prattle coming out of television commercials that had me keyed up.  Commercials offering “home delivery” from my pharmacy, or grocer, or even used car sales company.

Home delivery, sold as the “newest innovation” of a passionate caring corporate America.  Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon; spa’s, legal documents, exercise bikes, single meals made ahead, single meals for me to make at home, new cars, used cars, toys, planes, trains, flowers, garden sheds, and whatever else I could possibly need in my life.

And those home deliveries were not just through the mail in a “plain wrapper” stuffed in my mailbox, oh no, stuff is coming via UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, various truckers, Door Dash, even flying drones and computerized rolling ice chests.

And if its food, who knows when the delivery “personnel” (human or machine) last washed their “hands”.

And yet, thinking back, I realized there was nothing “new” about this.  There had just been a few decades of adjustment since this was last readily available.

 

You see, as a boy, just beginning to find my way through life, I sold and delivered products door to door.  It was quite common in the 1950s and 1960s.

Among the various things I sold and hand delivered back in the late 60’s and early 70’s were:

            Flower and vegetable seeds for Burpee Seed Company

            Newspapers for the San Francisco Chronicle and the S.F. Examiner

            Brushes, brooms, mops, buckets, toilet cleaners, and cleaning supplies for Fuller Brush Company

            Bathroom and household linens, cleaners, and all manner of consumables for Amway

            Greeting cards, birthday, anniversary, and Christmas cards for some company I the name of which I can’t even recall.

            Christmas gift candles, ornaments, nativities, and kitchen towels for another outfit whose name has faded along with my memory.

            Chocolate bars and nut clusters

            Not to mention “Vandermolen’s; “Efficient weeding and detailed lawn care services””

 

And truth be told, I wasn’t making any $15 an hour at that.  But then, I wasn’t paying any taxes either.

But, that was before the politicians got involved and made it illegal for young children to have incentive.  Then they made it illegal for young children to actually go out and learn about the effort required to live up to the demands of a job, an employer, and a customer.  Before the politician’s made it illegal for kids to develop pride in their own ability, to set and accomplish goals, earn money, and save for a particular acquisition or for their future education.  Not to mention contributing to the local economies and reducing their educational debt burden thus denying the politician a wailing point about the need to “forgive” student debt.

Now of course, kids aren’t allowed to take on any of those jobs, because the politician who has to have a crisis to solve in order to justify re-election each cycle has “improved things” for us all.

 

© Copyright 2021, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Livermore High’s Football Bleachers

My brothers and I were born in the mid-to-late 50’s, ran wild staring in the early 60’s and had really hit our stride in the late 60s and through the mid-70s.

In our small town of Livermore, we roamed free, an experience that few children have known in the last 40 years or more, and in truth at a level that few children knew even back then.  We chased rabbits in the fields with homemade slingshots, jump shot ducks and “pinkie baited” crawfish along the arroyos; we gigged frogs in the flooded and abandoned rock quarries, fished in the golf ponds after hours and road bikes hither and yon all over the valley seeking, and mostly finding, adventures.

 

But, just about two blocks away from our house sat what was destined to become our alma mater, Livermore High School.  Foundered in 1891 it had already been attempting to bring culture, knowledge, and maturity to some 80+ years-worth of wild boys well before any of us graced its hallowed halls.  And one can’t blame Livermore High School, its teachers, or its staff for the spectacular failures it experienced in Barry, Jeff, and I.  For as alchemy proved centuries earlier, you simply can’t turn lead into gold to any high degree or with any regularity.

Now, I’m not saying that my two older brothers were troublesome, but for the longest time I thought my first name was really Ogodnotanother” by the way each of my teachers called roll on the first day of each school year when they got to my last name.

 

By our time, the campus consisted of an over-sized two story main building opened in 1931 during the height of the Great Depression, later stucco’d in 1937 as a WPA funded project, and three long single story general class-room buildings, a science class and lab building, an imposingly tall music building, and a large gym complex consisting of separate Boys and Girls locker rooms, separate full indoor wooden floored courts, and a pool that during the summers double as a community pool for the town where kids and adults both sought refuge from the triple digit temperatures that were quite common.  There was a metal shop and woodworking shop on campus as well, while the automobile shop was farther out East Avenue some mile and a half or so away from the main campus.

The property also included a baseball and soccer field off one side and a large paved basketball court, track and field, and a football field complete with steel pole and wooden seated bleachers off another side.  Each of those two areas was fully as large as the building section of the campus proper. 

As it happened, along with being very close to our house, the high school track and football field was in a straight line with one of the access points to the fields and railroad tracks that ran east out of town.  

Now railroads just seem to have a natural hold on the imagination of a boy, and we three spent a great deal of time walking those rail lines in the summers, and when we could get away from chores on the weekends as well, looking for treasures.  Rusty pieces of rail that had been bent and replaced, even rustier tie plates, old spikes, and whatever junk someone had chosen to throw out, whether off of a train, or just out of a pickup along the dirt road next to the tracks. 

We’d find upbroken soda pop bottles now and then, and even here and there a penny or a nickel that some other kid had lost.  Most of the coins I am sure had been placed on top of the track in an effort to get a passing train to squish then flat, rather like the penny crushers you see at fairs and arcades, but without the fancy embossed patterns.  Problem was, and I know this from vast personal experience, when a freight train that weighs 500,000 pounds or so comes rattling along (back then the rails were bolted together with ½” open joints or so, not welded into single pieces like now) a coin seldom sits there and waits to be crushed (most people won’t just calmly sit there either, so who can blame a penny).

Those soda bottles and pennies seldom saw home, mostly they went to the cash box of some local liquor store where we could trade in the bottle or penny for a piece of bubble gum or so.  Vut, as usual, I am drifting a bit.  I was talking about scrounging for treasures, and heck, I still have a number of old glass power pole insulators and even a couple old ceramic ones on display in my house that I found while kicking rocks along those creosoted rail ties, even though the pennies are long gone.

 

 

What with the proximity and location of the football field, my brothers and I spent a lot of time around those old wooden seated bleachers doing one thing or another.  Not sure how tall they were all in all, I know for a fact they are long gone now.  But they had most of 20 or 25 rows of seats and at the top there was a pipe railing across the back of the stand that must have topped out at 22-24 feet high.  In the middle of the “Home-team’s Side” was an added large wooden announcer’s box with wooden railed deck top for camera platform rising an additional 12 foot or so.

The whole structure was fabricated from 2” pipes sunk deep into concreted holes underneath and braced and cross braced all directions with 1-1/4 inch pipe.  Then 2” x 12” lumber was bolted down for seats and 2” x 6” lumber was bolted down for foot levels and steps.  Early on I don’t remember there being any chain link stretched across the back of those structures, and the track and field teams kept their landing mats for high-jump and pole-vaulting under the bleachers to be out of the way.

 

My first memories of playing on the bleachers are of swinging around under them in the pipe maze.  It was the world’s most elaborate jungle gym from our perspective and we spent hours pretending to be Tarzan flinging our way through the tree jungle without ever setting foot on ground.  Chase, tag, even “knock the nut” from the tree greased our hands, thickened our palms, and now and again knocked the wind out of us when we found ourselves the “appointed nut”.  Those times were wonderful in the cool dark shade offered by those bleachers on days that ran in the 100s and even 110s, even when we tore open a palm on a sharp bolt end or other metal bur.

 

But nothing ever remains the same as you grow older and those bleachers evolved as we grew up.  From expansive jungle gym they morphed into a tool when we started backpacking.  There is no exercise or conditioning quite so good at preparing you physically for carrying all your food, clothes, and sleeping gear on your back up and down mountains than running up and down bleachers until your calves and thighs screamed out an insistence that you stop and rest and catch your breath.  Good for conditioning the lungs and blood for hiking at 10,000 feet of elevation too.  At nearing 66 years of age, my calves remain the size of most people’s thighs and without any distinct layer of fat on them.  I firmly believe that is from the years of throwing papers from bikes and from running bleachers several dozen times a year in preparation for weekend and weeklong backpacking trips.

 

Then to complete the circle, as we grew into our mid-teens, those bleachers morphed back into play structures again.  Once we got old enough and strong enough, together, we three could grab ahold of the netting bags that enclosed the large foam blocks used to cushion pole-vaulters falls and drag them out from under the bleachers.  We would pull them out just far enough to use them as landing pads.

Once positioned, we would run around to the front of the bleachers, run up the stairs to the top, climb the railing, and launch ourselves out into space, freefalling, twisting, flipping, as we dropped to land safely in a cushion of foam; scramble off, and back around to the top again.

In our minds we dreamed of being stuntmen making movies, at least for a couple years, until reality wormed its way into our lives and set us all on different paths to more sure, more secure, healthier ways to make our livings.

Sometime around when Barry was a senior at Livermore high, when Jeff was a Junior, and I was a freshman; some coach, or janitor, or principal likely noticed us launching from the top of the announcer’s box and while they hollered and chased, we certainly were far too fast and experienced by then to be caught by some old man (who was then likely half the age I am now).  Once they spied us, they were certain to notice that no matter how sure they were that the pole-vault pads had been completely stuffed under the bleachers, the darn things kept creeping out.  And in a moment of uncharacteristic (for the time) concern about being sued by some parents whose kid misjudged the distance and hit dirt instead of foam, the decision was made to hold those things in place and chain link was installed with lockable gates to keep the net bags of foam from escaping ever again. 

Copywrite 2024 © Marty K Vandermolen

Rock Climbing 101

 I first began learning true rock-climbing skills along about 13.

 

Sure, my brothers and I had scrambled up and over cars, fences, bushes, rocks and steep hills for years before that time, and had spent uncounted afternoons attempting to climb around the internal perimeter of the garage walls without setting foot on the floor.  A game that somehow, regularly ended up with my skull dented by the tines of a heavy garden rack.

 

Heck, we even climbed scaffolding, bleachers, and building roofs; and to date, I am reasonably certain that the three of us were the only kids in history to be punished for climbing the 45-foot bell towers of Saint Micheal’s Church in Livermore.  Our protestations of innocent were weighted against the veracity of the old codger who lived across the street from our boyhood home, and a bit of belt tanning was used to tip the scales into presumptive balance.

 

But it was 13 years old before I really had an introduction to the sport of rock-climbing and anything that could be termed training.

 

That was the year I became a Boy Scout Patrol Leader, and I was lucky enough to be mentored by Roman Bystroff as our Patrol Dad.  Roman had been an avid climber when he was young and though the demands of job and family had trimmed his time and dedication, they had done nothing to diminish his joy of the sport.

 

 

Roman began by simply bringing along an old climbing rope he had on all of our scout trips.  Never pushing his agenda, Roman would set back and watch the ebb and flow of boys working on their skills, lashing poles, starting fires, or identifying edible plants.  Roman knew that at some point the scout outdoor skills work would devolve into some sort of boredom, expressed either as wandering off or brawls, depending on the day and the idiosyncrasies of the specific boys involved. 

 

Once that happened, the potential for a youth leader to reestablish control was virtually gone and the potential for serious injury grew exponentially.  Now that’s not a condemnation of youth leaders, but the raw truth of the matter is, as my father would say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.  The same idea holds true with boys; they can be lead, when they are willing to follow, but once their willingness is worn through, it is impossible to lead them anywhere.

 

That was when Roman would get up from where ever he was sitting keeping an eye on our progress, our injuries, and the likelihood that someone was going to be going home in an ambulance.  When he judged the time was right, he’d dust himself off, and wander over to his primitive campsite to retrieve a long climbing rope.  Perhaps primitive is the wrong choice of words, but certainly that or maybe minimalist are the best choices for Roman’s sleeping and cooking areas; he was one of the original “Leave no Trace” practitioners.

 

In all the years and on all the trips I shared with Roman, I never saw him pitch a tent.  In fact, I never saw him rope up a rain tarp.  Nope, if rain was likely or not, Roman simply laid a ground sheet on the ground, placed a ²/₃ rds pad down, and his sleeping bag.  Once rolled into his bag, if it should start to rain, all he did was to pull the extra ground sheet width over his sleeping bag and tucked it in, over his entire bag, head to foot, and over his face as well, then simply go back to sleep.

    

In any case, back to the main line of the story.  Long since, while sitting keeping an eye on us all, he had been looking over the various rocks, boulders, and dirt and rock walls within spitting distance of the campground.  It was magical to watch; Maria without an Edelweiss to be seen, Mary Poppins without an umbrella, The Pied Piper without a flute.

 

It helped that Roman looked the part, painstakingly and intentionally I realized years later.  He wore low-top hiking boots (European style), knee-length shorts, plaid shirts and always a felt Alpin hat.  He carried a leather flask “Bota Bag” instead of a canteen, and ate a simple mixture now known as “trail mix” for anything other than dinner, and often as not for dinner as well.

 

Years later I came to truly understand the reason that felt Alpin hats were so popular among climbers and non-climbers alike.  And while attired relatively similarly, you can readily tell the difference; Climbers do not have a belly that sticks out over belt or shorts, their forearms look rather like Popeye’s, and their felt hats never, ever have metal pins in them. 

 

“Wannabe’s” are fond of felt hats festooned with hat pins to show off where they had been.  But no serious climber ever did.  Cause while wearing a Felt Alpin hat may be stylish, the last thing you want while climbing is to “felt” what happens when a fist sized piece of rock lands on a pin that pierces your hat.  Felt hats provide a degree of cushion from a rock blow, but when a hat pin’s struck, it simply gets driven into your skull.

 

But they do keep your head warm during cool days, and they also provide a great place to hold “keepsake feathers” that you may have inadvertently torn out of some bird’s tail as it exploded past you while you are hanging with your feet precariously perched on tiny rock nubs, one fist stuffed in a crack, and the other hand inadvertently slaps down on a nesting Peregrine. 

 

Once your pulse rate and vocabulary settle back down, and you’ve mentally checked your drawers for dampness and any weight shift, you will see the humor in having used an extra feather or two to “row” your way slowly back towards the cliff face; propelled by the violent wagging of any feather you accidentally claimed.  And all it takes is one such event before you too will come to recognize that having your own stash of flight feathers will come in handy again someday.  But that is for a more involved story than this. 

 

As I was saying, Roman would wander back to his camp, dig a long section of climbing rope out of his backpack and stroll off to the closest obstacle to use setting up a bit of climbing practice.  We boys would naturally follow in orbit around him and next thing we would know Roman was coaching us in how to use our hands and feet and eyes to pick out nubs, projections, cracks and even some well rooted shrubs to scale whatever precipice he had selected.

 

We learned about three-point stances and grip methods; strengthen exercises, and limbering stretches as well; we scrapped up shoes, skinned knees, and quivered from equal levels of excitement and fatigue. 

We learned to use a rope from above to be “belayed” for safety while climbing.  We learned how to sit, and anchor ourselves and how to wrap the rope around ourselves when we sat “on top” and were the “Belayer”.  Through explanation, trial and error we learned how to control the tension on a climbing rope when a climber was moving up, down, or resting.  We learned the language of communication so that there was no confusion between climber and protector.

 

And then, best of all, we learned how to rappel.  There is nothing so much like freedom to a boy once he has learned how to trust himself and his rope that to walk backwards over a cliff and in controlled jumps leap out away from the cliff, control the fall rate and duration, and swing back into the cliff face with feet and knees acting as shock absorbing springs.

 

And this was no high-tech jamb nuts and ascenders type equipment rappelling either.  We learned to pretzel the rope around ourselves, using the friction of rope wrapped between the legs, up around the right side to your chest, over the left shoulder, and around under the right arm.  Left hand held the anchored part of the rope, right hand functioned as brake.  Speed was limited by the heat friction a person could tolerate.

 

Most of the boys found this a fun interlude in any weekend trip.  And activity to enjoy, but no more or no less than any other activity that Scouting regularly brought them into contact with.  But for me, those simple early days of scrabbling up 10 to 20 foot faces and launching back down again filled me with a sense of control in life that nothing else ever has. 

 

Over time I acquired a few carabiners, a couple pitons and made several crevasse nuts, slings, and quickdraws of my own.  I never could afford cams, true climbing shoes, belay devices or a good climbing helmet.

 

With experience small boulders and rock piles morphed into cliffs and mountains while I continued to climb with and without Roman’s presence and guidance for most of a decade, completely enjoying the strength, power, challenge, and confidence to be found in the vertical dimension.

 

 

   

 

Copyright © 2021 Marty Vandermolen All Rights Reserved