Life of Brian

2001

Who's seen 2001: A Space Odyssey?  I don't believe I've ever watched it myself.  It came out in theaters in the year 1968.  My dad was in Vietnam.  My mom was in Ojai, I think.  Maybe she had gone back to New Mexico?  Now I'm gonna have to watch it so I can see what insights it provided about the future.  I however am here to talk about the past. 

 In the year two thousand and one I was 26 years of age.  The five-year mark of marriage was notched off on my belt and things were going swell.  I was having a blast working at Armored Transport.  My partner Dave and I got along very well.  He loved to chew Copenhagen tobacco, long cut, while at work.  I was already very familiar with most variations of alcohol, I mention this because I'd been buzzed on alcohol numerous times, and I'm not one to pass something up just because it's "bad" for you.  Illegal drugs are where I'd draw the line on that.  Obviously, I had to try some of his 'worm dirt'.  I took the tiniest of a pinch and stuck it in my gums.  About ten seconds after, I immediately spit it all out!  Not because it tasted bad, but because I was getting an immediate buzz off of it.  Dizziness and operating a 26,000-pound vehicle don't equate.  The buzz wore off fairly quickly.  I would not try the brown buzz bomb for another five years when another good friend of mine was a full-time chew-er.  Dave could chew that stuff all day long, even while drinking a soda!  He and I would joke around with one another on a daily basis.  Our armored trucks had windows, but they did not roll down.  We had a side door that opened and two back doors that opened after removing a pad lock from the outside.  The drivers' compartment was separate from the 'hoppers' compartment.   You could slide a very thick, bullet proof door closed and seal off one compartment from the other.  We called the guy that got out and picked up money inside the stops the 'hopper'.  If you had two employees with their gun permits, you'd trade off this duty halfway through the route.  You might be thinking it prolly got hot in that truck, and you'd be right.  There was an air conditioning unit in the cab with the driver that cooled air for the hopper.  This would be the air intake for the AC.  The hopper controlled the air flow from the back.  On a particularly extra gassy, hot day, Dave decided to close the bulkhead door and started ripping some extra juicy flatulent air bombs.  The AC box efficiently picked up these biscuits and sent them gale force right into my face sitting in the hoppers seat in the back.  All I could do was turn the fan off and wait for the stench to clear.  This was not pleasant.  I'd smelled plenty of shit before that did not belong to me, but these farts were atrocious!  I had no way of retaliating.  Or did I ... !  We kept a book of matches in the truck for this very circumstance.  I had lit a couple to make the air smell like something other than poop when an idea popped into my brain.   Dave would eventually have to open the bulkhead so that I could throw deposits up there for him to bag.  When he did, I pulled a match out of the book.  Flipped the matchbook inside out, placed the match in between the book and flipped it through the air.  This worked better than I had expected!  Little flaming fireballs were flying up right around Daves lap as we traveled down Hwy 126 at sixty miles an hour.  Once he figured out I was flinging matches at him, his concern for his polyester pants catching fire grew and grew.  The bulkhead was slammed closed, and he promised to curtail the release of methane.  

Remember me saying that not all Search and Rescue call outs were fun?  Many of them were not, some were pretty grim.  Back in 1998, when I was just a newbie on the team, a teenage kid from Ojai had murdered a younger girl, also from Ojai.  Her name was Kali Manley.  She was a student at Nordhoff Highschool.  She initially was thought to have been missing, and our team was called out to search for her.  This was around the month of December if I recall, and it was fairly cold out at night.  We searched extensively around the river bottom between Ojai and Ventura.  Her murderer, after a couple of weeks, decided to fess up and tell the Sheriff's department where he had dumped her body in the forest.  She was indeed where he told them she would be, and our search ended.  This was a sad event for our little valley.  The A hole that took her life is still in prison to this day and hopefully will not be let out on parole any time soon.  The following year our team would be called out at 2 a.m. in the morning.  There were reports of a car wreck off of Hwy 33 near Ventucopa.   Supposedly there were multiple victims over the side, so we were called out to rappel down and get them.  We knew these individuals were already deceased, but circumstances kept getting stranger on the hour-long drive to the accident scene.  We were told the driver had shot himself because he was distraught over killing everyone else in the vehicle.  Sure enough, when we arrived, down at the bottom of the river bottom lay a man who was in full postmortem rigidity!  His body lay about fifteen feet away from what looked like a full-sized station wagon.  This station wagon ended up being a full-sized pick-up truck that had landed upside down in the river bottom and had been squashed to half it's normal height!  The man laying out on the ground had been the driver.  He survived the crash, but when he came to, all he saw were two girls in the rear cab smashed to death and his male passenger knocked out.  He thought his front seat passenger was dead.  He walked down the creek bed to a bar called The Place and phoned for help.  He then walked back to the scene of the accident, pondered that he'd just killed three people, and decided to shoot himself in the head.  This is how we found him when we showed up.  His arm bent at the elbow, his hand still pointing to his temple.  His body lifeless.  There was a fog in the air that night and it was cold.  As I watched two very experienced team members rappel down to the crash site, I felt sorry for everyone involved.  It was morbid and saddening all at the same time.  I did not go down and look inside the truck.  The two females were smashed something terrible I was told.  Other than seeing my grandpa in his casket before burial, I'd never seen a dead body.  This would not be the last dead person I'd come across over the next few years unfortunately.  When paramedics arrived on scene well before us, they found that the passenger still had a weak pulse, and the helicopter was called in to medivac the guy out to a hospital.  I don't think he survived however, so the driver had indeed killed everyone in the vehicle.  The truck had vaulted off the side of the road and plummeted upside down about fifty feet.

Another call out, around the same year, involved carrying a DB out of the creek near Steckel Park.  We were called out around 10 a.m.  We were told that this was a body recovery and that if any of us were hesitant about participating we could hang out at the trucks and not have to see the dead body.  This young man that lay dead in the creek had evaded the police the night before.  He and his buddies would hop in a car and lead the police on a chase up behind Steckel Park.  On that side of the park there was about a seventy-foot drop-off down to the creek.  When his buddy's car came to a dead end, he got out and tried running on foot.  A Sheriff's deputy chased after him and recalled seeing him one minute, and then he just disappeared!  He had run, full stride, right off the edge of the seventy foot drop down to the creek.  This killed him on impact.  The deputy almost followed him over the edge but was able to catch himself just in time.  As we hiked into the creek where this young kid lay lifeless, I did not feel any remorse for him.  He had committed a crime, ran from the police, endangered countless civilians while doing so, and then almost got a deputy killed by nearly luring him off a cliff.  One thing that stands out in my mind is how you could tell there was no life remaining in that body by the glassy look of his eyeballs.  The lights were definitely out.  We carried him out of the creek and back to the coroner's vehicle, who was also with us in the creek bed to confirm the death.  I saw and learned a lot from my time on the team.  One evening we were called out to search for a missing adult female and her mastiff.  She had gone hiking up the Pratt trail while the sun was still out and hadn't returned by dark.  A guy by the name of Drew and myself were dropped off at the trailhead while the other team members were flown by helicopter up to Nordhoff Ridge.  On this search I would learn how to follow tracks in the dark.  We'd been told what kind of shoe she was wearing and of course she had the dog with her.  By shining our flashlights at a horizontal angel with the ground, we did indeed pick up her sneaker tracks.  She was wearing Reeboks and sure enough, we could see the logo printed in the softer dirt on the trail.  We'd radio in that we still had tracks heading up the trail and the helicopter would take other team members and drop them off higher up the trail.  This poor woman had become lost in the dark and no longer knew which way to go.  She ended up walking all the way up to Nordhoff Ridge and followed it east towards the look out!  I think she was actually found walking down hill towards Rose Valley Lake!  Besides she and her dog being dehydrated, she was in pretty good shape.  VCSO airlifted her and her big ol mastiff in the helicopter back down to the parking lot at Nordhoff.  Our team had done a good job, and it felt good knowing that we may have saved their lives that night.  Plus, we got to fly in the helicopter at night which was also really fun. 

In May of 2001, Sarah and I would become parents.  Our first child was a little girl.  She was born with jet black hair, and quite a bit of it!  Her eyes a shimmering blue!  I don't recall ever being nervous or scared to become a parent.  No overwhelming sense of responsibility ever plagued my mind.  I looked forward to being a dad.  We'd eventually bring Kaylie home to our apartment on Grand Ave and I would eventually switch to working nights so that I could take care of her during the day, and so Sarah could eventually go back to college.  Kaylie would be the first of three girls.  She changed our lives absolutely for the better.  I miss those days quite a bit, but it is also cool to see them becoming young adults.  I'd watch countless hours of The Wiggles and many other cartoons and fun kid stuff.  In reality, I was really still just a kid myself.  My older sister had already given birth to a boy in February.  Our parents were now grandparents, and my sisters were now Aunts.  Sarah's brother Kevin would become an uncle.  Our daily lives became ever busier, and our sleep dwindled.  I am very lucky to have been able to spend time with my kids in these early years.  We could not have done it without help from family though.  Family, as I've said before, are the most important people on this planet.

"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.  Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet earth."

-Arthur C. Clarke Space Odyssey