Mazatlan Beach

I was in Mazatlan wearing my swim trunks, barefoot, and headed for the beach.  There was a long, low beach house between me and the beach and I didn’t want to go around it because I was barefoot and the native plant growth tends to be pretty thorny.  One section of the building was open through to the beach, w/ just screens, so I walked through and came out on the beach.  The house sat on a high bank, ten or fifteen feet above the water and the beach made a big arcing curve off to the left.  I was surprised to see that the whole beach, as far as I could see along the curve, was covered w/ boulders of ice and snow.  It was completely covered right down into the water, but the water was still open and bringing in waves like normal.

I wished I had some shoes, but this was unusual enough that I wasn’t going to let cold feet keep me from doing a little exploring.  There was a small cove, maybe 100 feet wide and 100 feet in from the main beach just off to my left.  It was full of ice chunks, too, but there were dozens of people swimming in the water.  They were splashing around and having a great time, so I guessed the water must be warm.  It looked dangerous, though, because the ice chunks moved around with the water and crashed into each other as waves came by.  Some of these boulders must have weighed tons, so getting mashed between them would not have been good.  I found a place that looked stable and went down the bank and got my feet in the water.  Sure enough, it was bath tub warm, except right next to the ice I could feel the cold of the melt water flowing off the ice blocks.

I went back up the bank and at the top of it there was a man lying on a towel right in the only clear path.  I had to step on a corner of the towel because there was no space between it and the rocks and when I did the man yelled at me.  He claimed I’d stepped on his finger.  I had felt what I thought was a stick when I stepped on the towel, but hadn’t seen that his hand was under the towel.  I felt bad about stepping on him and tried to apologize, but couldn’t think what to say.

I went on up to the beach house to what I thought was the same door I’d come out, but when I went inside this time there were several young people in the room and there was some furniture – chairs, a couch, a bar – and they looked at me kind of wondering who I was and why I was there.  I told them I was just cutting through and they were OK with that.  I went out the back door, but this time instead of coming out on the street I’d come in from, I came out into Mexican wilderness – cactus, rocks, all kinds of sharp things that a person in bare feet wouldn’t want to walk through.  I thought that if there was a path I would chance it rather than going back inside and feeling a little like Inspector Clouseau having walked into a closet instead of the exit.  I looked around and there was no opening.  My only choice was to go back through the room to the beach side and try to find the right way through.

Football

I was in a High School and someone handed me a full set of football gear – shoes, pads, uniform, helmet.  They told me Dave and I would be allowed to play.  I was pretty excited about the chance to play a real game in pads, but I wondered how I would do against high schoolers.  Would I be too strong or just too slow?  I started to put the gear on, but realized that I ought to find the locker room so as to not be undressing in the hallway in front of everyone.  

Truck stop

I went into a truck stop restaurant in Morgan County at a busy time of day.  Chris Parker (Morgan County Extension Agent) was sitting at the counter tapping out a beat with a pair of drumsticks on whatever was in front of him – his plate, glass, the countertop, the vinyl seat cushion next to him.  His head was bobbing w/ the beat.  He looked around and grinned and people started joining him.  People sitting in booths eating their lunches started using their hands and their silverware and pretty soon almost everyone in the place had joined the jam in some way or other.  One man got up to leave and started tapping on the window with some one inch diameter rods.  A middle aged black woman wasn’t tapping, but she was dancing a swaying, almost hula-like dance to the rhythm.  The waitresses and cooks were tapping and smiling, too.  I wondered if this was a regular event because everyone seemed so comfortable with it and pretty able to stay with the beat.  I thought if it isn’t it should be.

I noticed Scott Kelly and his daughter wearing Union High School letter jackets.  I walked through the crowd and passed Jeff Bigger walking toward me, also in his Union letter jacket.

Iowa

Ruth and I were driving onto the old Mississippi River Bridge at Burlington when a semi that was going too fast lost control and sideswiped a long section of railing ahead of us, knocking it over and causing the concrete on the sidewalk and curb adjacent to it to buckle and break.  (There’s an inconsistency here, because the old bridge had a metal deck, and no concrete, which comes into play later.)  This section of the bridge had the truss under it, so the semi didn’t hit the structural members. 

The truck managed to back off the railing, get straightened out and continue east across the bridge toward Illinois.  I saw that the left half of the deck was bent down, leaning out toward where the railing had been hit, but the right half was still intact, so once the semi was out of the way, I looked things over and thought I would go ahead and cross. 

But just as I had that thought the entire span started to sag in the middle of the damage.  We were already out on the span that was sagging, so we got out of the car and started to run back toward the closest pier, but before we’d gone very far the entire span broke and dropped into the water.  It was a slow descent, but we ended up in the river in weather too cold for swimming.  Ruth was off the deck swimming toward the bridge pier, but struggling with the cold and all her clothes on.  I rode the deck down and was able to crawl across the metal grating keeping my torso out of the water as I hurried toward her. 

I eventually had to get into the water to get her.  I’ve been in the river before and knew that we couldn’t swim upstream, so even though it was cold I gave up on the pier and aimed us toward the shore, letting the current carry us downstream.  When we made it Ruth was shivering violently.  I wasn’t really cold, so I took my coat off to help her warm up.  When I looked at my coat it was torn up on the outside, but it had several intact insulating foam sections inside that weren’t even wet.

Later, I was at Mediapolis where my Dad had taken all the siding off the bottom eight feet or so of the barn.  Kyle Waller, from Morgan County Highway Department, was there looking things over.  There were three main sections of floor.  The center was dirt and the two sides had rough cut timbers up about two feet off the ground.  Dad wanted to keep the wood floors, but Kyle pointed out that most of the timbers had sagged from the years of load carrying and several were missing.  I noticed the barn start to tilt a little one way, then back the other way, making an awful creaking and groaning.  I decided it was time to get out.

Outside I saw that there were two cranes on the property.  One had hold of the barn and was picking it up off its foundation to be set aside in some open space to be scrapped.  The other had hold of another building that was being swung in to sit where the barn had been.  It was being picked from where the corn crib is, but it was a newer, better building.

The crane set it down on the foundations of the old barn and when it was all disconnected I went inside.  It must have had its own floor with it, because inside the floors were hardwood and smooth concrete.  It had some furniture in it for someone to use it as a house, but it had been a barn or corncrib recently because there were critters in it.

First, I caught site of a mouse scurrying by the corner of my eye.  Then as I got down on the floor near a piece of furniture where I’d seen the mouse I saw a black rat nibbling on some food.  I caught it by the tail and was going to take it outside, but before I could pick it up a cat saw it and attacked, biting it right on the neck.  I decided to let the cat have it and went back to scouring the room for other animals, chasing out snakes, raccoons, possums, and all kinds of insects.

I looked out a window and there was a cliff by the sea.  About 100 feet away was a point of rock with vertical or overhung sides.  Jeff Crabtree (Champaign Engineering) was driving one of those little four wheel scooters like handicapped people use and several people were walking behind him.  He drove it right out to the very point of the rock where he stopped, got up, surveyed the scene, and dived about fifty feet into the water.  This prompted the rest of the crowd, all in street clothes, to dive in too.  Jeff's dive was picture perfect, but the next guy behind him did one of those where the feet never quite get up and all that tucking the head down does is to make the person into an upside down V.  Fifteen to twenty people dived in and all looked to be having a great time splashing around.

An alley and a cave

I was in a crowd in a narrow alley.  I wanted to walk through a spot where a dumpster was sitting and the already narrow space got narrower.  There were some rough looking men congregated right there and when I got their attention and tried to go through, one of them stood about six inches from my face and glared at me.  I pretended not to notice and pushed on past him.  I wasn’t really scared, but felt awkward about the situation.

At the far end of the alley it opened up into a huge cave room about 50 feet high and large enough for two basketball courts.  The walls were made of thin layered, crumbly sedimentary rock, like shale or soft sandstone and the floor was dry and sandy.  There was a sort of rim around the main floor, up about three feet from the main floor.  People were bringing in cardboard boxes to recycle and others were cutting up and flattening the boxes, then throwing them on the lower floor.  Several people commented that the room would hold a lot of boxes.

A restaurant. A hospital.

I walked into a restaurant in a small town where I knew several of the people there.  People were seated at long tables in an area that was raised about four feet from the entry floor level.  Some waved and said hello, and I was feeling self conscious because I was wearing glasses.  I walked through the seating area to the back to an area that had a stage curtain mostly open. 

Behind it the floor was covered with thick, leather covered cushions – giant pillows three or four feet thick and maybe ten feet square.  There were also columns of these same cushions attached to the wall so that the top of each cushion was about 6 feet above the one below.  I bounced across the cushions and climbed up the wall level by level.  When I was standing on the penultimate level I looked at the top level and didn’t like the way it was attached.  There was a string attached to hooks in the wall, but the string looked frayed and the hooks didn’t look very substantial.  I looked over at the column to my right and that top cushion, which was up against the ceiling on its right, was attached by a series of tacks that had been pounded into the window frame and the wall.  Neither one looked safe.  I was probably thirty feet above the floor at this point, so even though the floor cushions were thick, I didn’t want to risk having a wall cushion give way and dump me.

I came back down to the floor level and walked along behind the curtain where I noticed lots of gift baskets sitting on a table.  They were filled with flowers and little knickknacks and toys.  There was a gift card attached to each one and I recognized my Mom's handwriting on the cards.  I was curious whether there was one for me, but there wasn't really anything I wanted in them and I didn't think she would appreciate me snooping, but sure enough, my name was on one of the cards.

Later I was walking through a hallway with concrete floor and ceiling and concrete block walls in the basement of a hospital when I noticed what looked sort of like the cap of a mushroom lying on the floor.  It was flat, about an inch thick, and about four inches in diameter, but not perfectly round.  I picked it up and it had the texture of a piece of raw meat.  I sliced it into little half inch cubes, but didn’t cut all the way through, so they were still all attached. 

Then I went into a classroom and a teaching surgeon came in with the thing I had just cut up.  He proceeded to talk about the possible ways to reconnect the cut up tissue so that it would work again.  He settled on glue, which he proceeded to apply in the cuts.  Somehow in this process he reshaped it so it was now thinner, narrower and twice as long.  He had a patient already on the operating table with his lower left leg exposed and cut open on the outside of the leg and he put the tissue in it.  I couldn’t really see what he did, but he must have been attaching blood vessels to it.  Then he closed the incision and stitched it up.  He applied electric current a few times and declared that it had beaten on its own up to five times.  He said they would continue the treatment and he was confident that it would begin to beat on its own permanently.

I was horrified that I had randomly cut up what was to be implanted as a heart in someone.  I thought I should tell the doctor, but I was worried about liability and worse, that I may have prevented someone from being able to recover.  The fact that the heart wasn’t working on its own meant the patient had his normal heart or some temporary blood pump working, but the fact that they were doing an implant in his leg obviously meant all was not well up in the chest.  I wondered about the implications of having the heart so low in the body.  It seems like that would cause the pressure on the heart to be much higher.

I went out into the hallway with the surgeon to tell him what I’d done when I noticed that he was coughing, a lot.  He said he thought he had TB and was concerned that several people in the hospital had it.  It didn’t seem right that he would be doing surgeries, even wearing a mask, but I wasn’t sure how contagious TB was.

Wierdness in Indianapolis

July 4, 2011

I was staying at Bryan Meyer’s house and needed to change clothes quickly.  There was a bedroom available with no one in it, but it didn’t have a door, just a section of military camouflage netting and I was hoping for a little more privacy since there were several children running around the house.

I went outside and started following a truck that was pulling an all white trailer.  The trailer had nothing sticking out, not a license plate holder, not a tail light.  It was smooth as an egg, but had a 50’s style streamline look where it tapered to almost a point at the bottom but the sides and top curved smoothly around so there were no corners.  I don’t know why it was important for me to catch it, but I was determined to catch and try to ride it.  The trailer turned into a tunnel that was too tight for me to fit between the wall and the trailer, so I had to stay behind, but there was nothing I could get a grip on to hold on and ride.

Later, I came to Anderson’s Orchard on

Greencastle Road

in Morgan County to deliver water by fire hose to irrigate a section of apple trees.  The entire east side of the orchard had been cleared and was just a hay field.  I walked up the top of the hill dragging the hose and as I got to the top I noticed that there was a great clear view of downtown Indianapolis.  I could see a McDonalds sign near I-70 and then tall buildings in the background, but over the center of the tall buildings was the St Louis arch.  It never crossed my mind that the arch was in the wrong city.  The view of the arch from here wasn’t straight on, but just slightly off of looking straight at the end, which sort of makes sense since the arch sits facing east and west and I was southwest of it.

I was so distracted looking at the city that I didn’t notice the people playing softball in the field.  I heard the crack of a bat, looked to my left and saw a ball sailing just ahead of where I was.  There were no fielders near, so I dropped the hose and took off at full speed for about ten steps and managed to reach my right hand out and knock it down.  I thought about throwing it back, but realized I had already interfered more than I should.