Landed in Pearland...

Galina may have misinterpreted my impatience to get on the road early yesterday morning, and we ended up having words before I left, which was around 9:45 am. I was troubled by how we had said goodbye, so I called the store once I got to Santa Fe and apologized (in conformance to Rule No. 1 of husband-wife relations). When Galina answered, she sounded pretty chipper and we ended the phone call with our usual mutual expressions of affection.

The big choice on trips like this is deciding which route to take, since I have a choice of three.

The traditional route, once I'm at Clines Corners, is to take I-40 east to Amarillo, then 287 down to Ennis, south of Dallas, and then I-45 south to Houston.

The next choice is marginally shorter, and involves getting off of I-40 at Santa Rosa, heading south on 84 to Ft. Sumner, and then east from there, past Clovis and then a whole bunch of towns in Texas (Lubbock, Abilene, Goldthwaite, Lampasas, etc.), with a home stretch along 290 from Austin to Houston.

The third choice is the longest, but simplest. It goes past I-40 at Clines Corners and heads south through Roswell, Carlsbad, and on to Pecos and Ft. Stockton, where you turn east along I-10 and don't stop until you get to Houston.

Since I was in dire need of footwear, and since I missed all the shoe outlets in Santa Fe, I decided to take I-45 to Amarillo, etc..

Everything went fairly well all the way to Amarillo. Drew's Honda is equipped with cruise control, which made I-40 through New Mexico a snap (80 mph all the way) and even going through Texas, I was able to maintain a respectable speed. I stopped and picked up a pair of sandals at a mall near Amarillo.

As I approached the 287 turnoff, I noticed some threatening clouds off to the north, on my left. Once on 287, a series of "emergency broadcast network" announcements began to interrupt my listening pleasure, warning area residents of a line of violent thunderstorms moving to the southeast at 40-45 mph. I could see the lightning flashes in my rear-view mirror, as I tooled to the southeast along 287 at 75 mph.

The announcements continued hot and heavy, interspersed so often that the station I was listening to (out of Quanah, Texas) could not successfully broadcast a single song in its entirety.

The thing that particularly concerned me about the storm was the part about "golf-ball sized hail and damaging winds." All I needed was to have Drew's car peened with dense ice balls traveling 60 mph or so in the vertical direction.

So I drove. Past Childress. Past Quanah. Past several other towns. Finally, when I got to Witchita Falls, I was pooped, and started looking for a motel. I spied a Motel 6, but the price for a night's stay was $45.99, or about fifty bucks once all the extras were taken care of. Yeow.

A Days Inn a few miles down the road wanted even more.

Eventually, I pulled into a picnic area and parked between a couple of 18-wheelers. As I got ready to snooze, the wind hit. Hard. Then the rain started.

The possibility of being swept away by a twister was balanced out by the fact that nobody was going to wander up to the car and try to mug me. Not in that rain and wind.

I woke at 6:30 am today.

More later.

Cheers...

P.S. Happy Father's Day to all you fathers out there.

Home stretch...and onward

Once on the road this morning, I took breakfast at an IHOP where the air conditioner was set to "meat locker." I was barely able to swallow a couple of cups of coffee and eat breakfast before paying and bolting for the parking lot, where the temperature was at least above zero.

The rest of the day was pretty boring. I got sidetracked north of town, when I got off the interstate to check if the COMPAQ store (where they sell refurbished computers) was open. I don't really know why I did that, since I have all the computers I need for a while. Maybe I was hoping for one of those "Hey!-We've-been-acquired-so-the-stuff-in-here-is-nearly-free" sales, though a lot of good it would do me.

The store was closed, but there was a new Fry's electronics store in the same parking lot.

Imagine a store about the size of two Wal-Marts. Now get rid of everything that doesn't have to do with electronics, computers, software, components, etc. That's Fry's.

I wandered around for a while and picked up a couple of interesting items. I got to the house at around 2 pm.

Shortly thereafter, Lee and I went out to do some food shopping. Then I bought a couple of tickets online to go watch Nicolas Cage in a matinee of Windtalkers.

* * *I recall, on the web page where I ordered the tickets, that one reviewer dimissed the film as another "run-of-the mill war flick." That's an easy enough thing to say, I suppose, but I'll bet good cash that the reviewer has never served in the military.

My attraction to the film rests on several legs. Living in the Four Corners region, the atmosphere is charged to an extent with the fact that the area is the home to the Navajo, who are in a sense the central focus of the film. My being an (ex-)Marine is a second leg. The "code talkers" were, after all, Marines.

My interest in the history of cryptography is the third leg of the tripod. The value of the "code talkers" was the fact that, not only could the Japanese not understand Navajo, but even if they had been successful in "breaking" the code, none of them could spoof such a radio network by trying to imitate a Navajo. In past years, I have been told by local Navajo residents that nobody has ever been able to master the language well enough to "pass" as a native speaker.

In watching the film, I recognized a lot of the techniques that I had been trained to perform, as a Marine. The bayonet work. Marksmanship. Teamwork. Saving your buddies. Also, I could swear that I've heard in real life a number of the exchanges and comments made by the make-believe Marines on the silver screen.

The violence depicted hit a vital spot, but in the final analysis, it was - despite the review mentioned above - a very real film, at least to me.

Sure, the dynamics of Hollyweird made some of the film predictable. (minor spoilers: The fate of the guy who "had this feeling" was predictable. Also, never bet on the survival of the guy carrying the flamethrower.)

And in the end, there really isn't any point to the film, except to tell a story. There's no great moral to be drawn from the plot, except perhaps the importance of honoring one's dead comrades and keeping their memory alive. Then again, most war movies don't really have a point, except to chronicle the survival of the hero and the horror of war (here, I have in mind movies ranging from Enemy at the Gates, to Apocalypse Now, to Sands of Iwo Jima, to the very, very old A Walk in the Sun).

To me, one of the true tests of a war movie is how well the audience "connects" to the characters. In watching, for example, Saving Private Ryan, everyone kind of sat there and absorbed the story. The audience today reacted several times to the understated humor of military life, and actually applauded at the end (I don't seem to recall applause at the end of the recent Star Wars instalment, but I digress, methinks...).

This is not to say there were no issues for the characters in the film. Ed Anders certainly had his demons, and was caught in a Very Bad Place when it came to issues of duty. Ben Yahzee seemed to not be a very focused character, or at least his focus did not seem clearly defined to me.

But I am getting very far afield. I enjoyed the movie and, while sitting here entering this post, have raised a glass to all Marines who have put themselves "between their lov'd homes and the war's desolation."

Semper fi.

Cheers...