Playing Fair and Being Kind

Since returning to Maine the middle of last month I’ve been fully engaged in many areas. Contacting friends to meet and debrief the seven month jaunt to New Mexico, Cuba, California, Florida and back to Maine. Seven months and twenty three thousand miles in Rocinante, untold number of couches, motel beds, and good friends with much love and affection. Even after I returned I felt a great need to drive to Boston to finally meet Nina in Brookline, Massachusetts. I visited brother Jerry on the same Boston day trip. I’ve been enjoying myself quite a bit of the time.

My 1990 Dodge Ram pickup truck wouldn’t start. The battery was dead so I borrowed a charger from Jason next door and let her sit overnight. I didn’t feel confident after the initial charge because the engine turned over really slow. There didn’t seem to be enough cranking amps coming out of the battery. I messed around for a couple of days charging with the charger and then letting the truck alternator charge and then I’d give it a crank and listen to the hesitant turning over before it would catch and go o.k. Not a real satisfactory result. I suspected the battery was pooched so I called the mechanic I bought it from; the warranty was still in force. I made plans to bring the battery to his shop and have him conduct a drop test to measure the cranking amps. Actually it’s called a load test.

The truck needed an inspection sticker so I arranged with Brian Wright up on Route 1 to do that for me and at the same time he said he could do a load test. During the load test he saw smoke coming from a ground wire on the firewall of the truck. Aha, he said. It seems the battery ground is kinda corroded or something. The battery is looking for a ground elsewhere. Good detective work, Brian, I said. I told him I’d find a ground strap at the parts store later when I got home and replace it.

When I got back to The Castle I waited ’til the next day to go under the hood to replace or clean the connection from the battery to the motor. I discovered the bolt that was most available for mounting a ground wire was a metric size, not SAE. Son-of-a-bitch, I muttered to myself. The bolt head size was in between a five-eighths and a nine-sixteenths. I don’t have but one set of metric combination wrenches in the tool box in the shed. I found the a fifteen metric falls in between the two SAE’s mentioned above. So, a fifteen, eh? I need two fifteens to do the job. I don’t want to go to town to buy one metric wrench and I don’t want to wait much longer to not have a reliable truck so now I am into my favorite past time of pissing and moaning about it all. I’ll get her done. Don’t fret.

There have been a bunch of impromptu meeting with friends and associates regarding organizing recruiting efforts to begin going back into Maine State Prison to do AVP workshops again. I have planted a few seeds to do the same in Boothbay with the community and also today I talked with old friend Heidi Grover at Two Bridges County Jail. We will meet next Tuesday to reconnect and make a plan to do AVP there as well. Next Wednesday the Maine contingent of AVP is hosting a luncheon in Rockland to recruit more apprentice facilitators. That will be exciting. There is a lot of energy for this kind of activity. I’m glad to be back in Maine.

When I was riding submarines there was an activity called ‘periscope liberty’. That is when during the process of being on patrol one had the opportunity to look through the periscope, if that was one’s duty station for various maneuvers. After being under water for a protracted period and to be able to gaze at distant familiar objects was luxurious, believe me. It was quite a treat and other crewmen were jealous.

Well, I did just the opposite tonight. I have been reading “Clear the Bridge!”, a true accounting of the war (WWII) experience of Richard H. O’Kane when he was commanding USS Tang in the Pacific. It is well written and I could picture all the parts and pieces of the Tang as he described the action and events during the war patrols. His descriptions were wonderful in that I was able to visualize and return to the USS Sirago in my mind. I was a young seaman then only 20 years old. Full of piss and vinegar and eager to learn and serve. Living the dream. The beginning of adulthood and wonderment.

I was picturing the scene going on in the control room and my memory of what the chief of the watch did as a duty did not come clear to me. I just couldn’t remember. Aha, I said to myself. I’ll call Bill in Bakersfield, which I did. Now that is what I would call a reverse periscope liberty. I called Bill and we shared sea stories and great memories about our days on Sirago, where each valve and lever was and who was supposed to do what. We did a virtual tour of the inside of Sirago. Can you imagine the images flying through the ether back and forth? What a great trip and what a great gift we gave each other this night, forty two hundred miles apart (by road). I’m still living the dream.

Good night, sweet people. I hope your day is as nice as this or at least close to it.

“Take me steep and take me deep! Two degree bubble and six-oh feet!

G. M. Goodwin 11 May 2017

P.S. Maybe I’ll give Tom Robertson a call in a few days and do something similar. g