The StratoTanker Saves The Day

For reasons unknown to my concerned and attentive parents, I stuttered. Starting at the age of four and continuing into adulthood, symphonic eloquence roared like an endless ocean through my mind only to very disappointingly come to a screeching halt in the back of my throat. Any activity involving spoken words emanating from my lips was a mean playground of quick vocal injustice and an aural assault on anyone within earshot. Reading out loud, classroom presentations, answering the phone, talking to friends, speaking.... all were opportunities for my vocal chords and supporting machinery to betray me, which seemingly happened just about every time I opened my mouth.

Some stutterers live out their lives in silence. It is easier. My not-so-inner extrovert could not abide by this, however, and so I tortured others around me on a daily basis gamely attempting to overcome the jarring mismatch between the sentences so easily constructed in my head with the trainwreck of frustratingly dissonant sounds coming from my lips. The polite said nothing. The insensitive would finish my words. The rude said I was not thinking about what I was saying. The cruel imitated me. The heartless came up with a never-ending list of nicknames.

I threw my lot in with the polite and the insensitive and figured the rest would probably survive without me.

Though it sounds like it now, I did not obsess on this dislocation too much when I was younger. It was just there, a part of me, and I was always happy when I somehow was able to get through a particularly tongue-twisting event without twisting too much. Barrelling through the staccato stops, starts, and stammers, no matter who I victimized, always yielded more satisfaction than holding my tongue.

Superimposed against this confounding Harrison Bergeron-esque equalizer was the fact that our military family moved around. A lot. First Maine, then California, New Mexico, Louisiana, Florida, Nebraska, Alaska, Nebraska again, Oklahoma and all parts in between. At times it seemed a blurred movie of someone else's fast-forward life. Wherever there were KC-135s to fly in defense of the country and in support of other planes needing mid-air jet refueling, we went there. My father was building his career and wanted to make full colonel.

Coming home from work one day to our home in Nebraska in 1972 my father told us we were moving to Alaska. We were living in our first house, the first my parents ever owned, and had been there for all of fifteen months, which seemed to be a long time to me and a very short time to them. This split-level wonder of the 1970's cost twenty-eight thousand dollars and laid the bedrock of the American Dream for my mom—which my father shattered that afternoon with help from Uncle Sam and his demands that her husband fly spy missions around the perimeter of Russia with non-stuttering Russian linguists in the back of the plane.

She fainted dead away as soon as the words "Alaska" left his lips. Given to impressive histrionics, I was not terribly surprised at her reaction. As an adventure-loving ten-year old boy, however, I was thrilled. Alaska! I peppered my father with questions about igloos, eskimos, and how the place looked--as if it were a different planet entirely. He assured me that it was not like Earth and that I would not be disappointed. Stories of bear in our backyard, moose in our front yard, mini-bikes for all boys who made good grades, playing in the midnight sun until morning, fishing for grayling with Mepps #0 spinners, shooting guns, and gold panning to pay for it all were used to their advantage on me. Alaska could not begin quickly enough and it was all I thought about and attempted to haltingly talk about to my classmates at Twin Ridge Elementary School. I lorded this incipient adventure over everyone with all the braggadocio and youthful exaggeration of a member of Ernest Shackleton's expedition.

I'm still not quite sure which number move this was of the sixteen or so visited upon me growing up, though my mother kept careful track of each and every address. She gravely informed me she did this in case I wanted to work for a government agency where they needed a background check for my top secret security clearance. The list of residences was impressive because it included her twenty or so moves as the oldest daughter of an Air Force Chief Master Sargeant at the top and then our moves listed at the bottom. Woe be to the background investigator filing his expense report assigned to my case.

I think she kept this list as proof of the injustices she was forced to endure. No one, she would often complain loudly, should have to live such an intinerant life, ripping up your very existence with such frequency in the service of the taxpayers. Being the even more buxom and better-looking twin of Elizabeth Taylor had allowed her the choice of suitors ranging from the heir to the Holiday Inn empire--to which she said 'no'; to a driven young man who would eventually run a power company in Arkansas; to, my dad who told her in a bar "I fly jets" when she was just eighteen and he a grand old man of twenty-seven. She opted for excitement and chose the latter despite the logistical nightmares which would plague her life as a transient officer's wife.

My mother in 1973 in the middle of Alaska in her London Fog raincoat

I loved moving. Not entirely happy with who I was, moving gave me a fresh chance to conduct a grand experiment and reinvent myself every single time we changed locations. Slipping the surly bonds of 'me' and becoming another 'me' and no one would be the wiser. I committed myself to being different wherever we were moving next. Without fail, I swore to myself that I'd be cooler, more popular, funnier and would finally--finally--somehow find it within myself to be eloquent. Of course, this never worked as planned, and eventually I learned that you cannot run from who you are no matter how hard you try. My stutter was part of a very one-sided friendship that I was tied to along with all the other vestiges of my past.

And so the moving machinery was set into motion. Bills of lading and transport were created, and there were--all of a very quick sudden--strangers at our house who ensured our modest accumulation of stuff would find its way into the Great White North sans dings, scrapes, breakage and loss. We had two cars, a dog, a cat, two kids, and two parents all needing to get to the Arctic Circle, pronto. There was a Cold War to be fought and not a moment to waste.

Conveniently and thoughtfully, my father went on ahead of us and left my mother to handle the logistics. A gallon jug of Gallo Rhine wine at the ready to assuage and smooth over any moving catastrophe, and she jumped into the fray like a reluctant, but seasoned, storm trooper knowing what was coming next and dreading it. And so everything we owned was put in boxes and one day we headed north in 1972 on an airplane leaving behind a perfectly good house with a white fence.

Getting off the plane in Fairbanks on a very long flight from Seattle we were greeted by my father in total darkness. It was two-o'clock in the afternoon in February. He was holding ogle-worthy beautiful custom parkas with wolf fur that lined the hood for each one of us. There was an Eskimo story montage in seal skin around the circumference of each one and they were to keep us Eskimo warm, which is ostensibly warmer than Air Force warm. His was a scouting mission prior to full-family arrival, and he assured my mother he'd found a great house for us to live in on base.

A giant indoor thermometer in the Fairbanks airport said twenty-eight degrees below zero. For the flight, my mother had dressed me up in all of my polyester leisure suit finery because that is what you did back then when you flew. My pants stuck to my legs walking from the terminal to the car. The breaths I attempted to take while pulling my pants off my frozen skin were more painfully cold than any I'd ever taken.

In Alaska it is so cold in the winter that water in an ice-cube tray will freeze in less than a few minutes. As my mom learned, this is a great for parties. A pan of water thrown into the air will crystallize with a Pfffft! before it hits the ground. Whispered voices can be heard from very far away because of the higher density of the air when it is that cold. Best of all though, school was cancelled when it was fifty-below zero or colder. There was one time I didn't go to school for three weeks. The temptation to drink early in the morning must have crossed more than one lovely Air Force wife's mind during these dulling stretches of time and darkness with an absent husband and way too many kids trapped inside the house.

My father was very excited as we rounded the corner in the dead of night that afternoon. Our house was the only house on Eielson Air Force Base that was a not a duplex. This was high cotton and it was not clear how a lowly major in the Air Force rated a single house. There were four-plexes and some eight-plexes and all of my friends were jammed into these like so many bug-eyed sardines. Single houses were virtually unheard of on -any- Air Force base, let alone this one. Status being what it is though in the military, my mother was happy to have a well-deserved slice of it, however she imagined it to be. Lording this single house over the other officers wives at the Officers Wives Club would be wonderful without her ever even saying a word. They all knew probably before we even moved in and had fully-constructed gossip ready to go for the first meeting of the OWC that my mother would very reluctantly attend.

Walking into the house for the first time I was struck by the billowing smoke that very quickly filled the living room when we opened the front door. As we would learn, this happened every time the door opened in winter. Moisture from the house would freeze and immediately fog everything up and then just as quickly disappear. If you were from the Lower Forty-eight--the disarmingly quaint term for the rest of the US--and had never seen the indoor fog spectacle it was guaranteed to get you to jump up and utter "What the heck??!!" in loud disbelief.

This particular "checking out the new digs" exercise had been repeated by our family in the past and this was no different. Opening the kitchen door to the one-car garage as we ran through the new house I saw something that would not leave me anytime soon. High up on the wall was a rack of horns from a very large animal. My father was standing behind me and said it was a moose the previous occupants had taken but had to be left behind, because even Bekins Moving had rules about such things. Stretching across the garage, this rack came from a now hornless, if not deceased, animal consigned to hang in a garage funded by taxpayers in the dead middle of Alaska. I'm confident the moose, if asked, would never have guessed he'd end up like this.

Oriented properly, thus began the process of settling a new house, something blissfully lost on a young boy. To my parents horror, I wanted to play outside in the snow. I'm certain they had visions of a cold, stiff and lifeless little boy being found in the spring thaw by hungry wolves feasting on my carcass, but they said nothing. Jeremiah Johnson had just come out and I fancied myself as a Robert Redford mountain man with furs galore to keep me warm and all my friends calling me "Pilgrim". But before I could go explore the wonders of frozen extremeties topped off with gangrene, the whole family had to go to the base gymnasium and watch a movie on frostbite. This movie had nothing on the graphic and gore-filled drivers education movies designed to scare the living daylights out of young drivers. We were shown shocking pictures of frostbite in all it's black-fingered glory complete with a stentorian voice-over admonishing viewers not to wind up like the poor people in the movie--people who were poorly dressed when they went outside only to become disoriented and find their extremeties frozen solid. I took note of this and was allowed to play outside on a limited basis.

What I quickly discovered is that snow does not stick together when it's 20 below zero; hence snowmen, snow forts, and snowballs--really the key ingredients to a young boy's life in Alaska for the first time--were absent. The snow had the constitution of fireplace ashes and no amount of packing would make a decent snowball. I continued to play outside and only came in when I could not feel my feet anymore.

Winter passed. For the kids, too quickly; and for many of the adults, drunkenly, there being not much else to do. One day a heat wave passed over the state, the sun lit up the world and very brightly shined, and everyone was out in their shirtsleeves washing their cars, having cookouts and marveling over how beautiful it was outside. It was twenty-five degrees Farenheit and people were giddy over the prospect of such warmth.

I was flung headfirst into the simmering cauldron of fifth grade at Pennell Elementary School, a school populated solely with the children of the military. The flinging unfolded as it had countless times before. I walked with the counselor to my new classroom to be introduced with a variant of "This is your new classmate. He's from (pick a good location). Please make him feel welcome". First impressions are critical and I felt all eyes burning into me. The gears started grinding and almost trance-like I worked my magic on being different, better, and more eloquent. Over the course of months, however, the magic dulled bit-by-bit and I became myself just in time for the beginning of summer in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

The snow finished melting in June and small mosquito-filled ponds formed everywhere because the runoff could not penetrate the permafrost. In this strange struggle of cold versus hot, these emergent ponds were tempting to play around, which I did. One day, however, I fell through, not knowing the ice I thought was pond-bottom was so thin. Alamed, my other leg poked through the thin ice layer to the water below. I was ten feet from shore. My legs freezing and now up to my chest in water, I started panicking and yelling loudly for help. After time-stretched interminable minutes of struggle working in horrifying slow motion, I made it to the bank. I was soaked. I made the trip home to the clothes dryer in record time. No one ever found out and I never played around ponds in the Arctic ever again.

Camp Grizzly

My parents called me into the living room one day told me I was going to summer camp. I would be there an entire month during July. The minimum age at Camp Grizzly was ten and I was to have my own horse. The brochure described an exotic place of fishing, planes, horses and camping. My parents noted that out-of-state campers paid more than three times the amount in-state campers did, so this must be a pretty good camp. They also told me the only way to Camp Grizzly was by bush plane, horseback, or snowmobile. It being summer and horses being a bit slow, we opted for the bush plane for the ninety mile flight from Fairbanks.

Departure day arrived and my parents took me to the general aviation terminal at Fairbanks International Airport. There were two campers there older than me and they looked at me appraisingly as my gear was stowed. My father quizzed the pilot on his skills and apparently they were good enough because I was in the air and heading to the middle of the Alaskan wilderness in short order. The pilot asked before we landed if we wanted to see any tricks, and before we answered with complete commitment he did a Chandelle much to our open-mouthed astonishment.

Landing on a very short and rough cobble-covered runway produced a shaking and vibrating that I was convinced would snap the wings of the plane right off. But then it stopped, we got out, our gear was left by the runway, the plane shakily took off, and there we were standing next to one Lynn Castle, his rugged-looking wife, and their two adopted Eskimo boys, listening to the sound of a bush plane recede in the distance.

Camp Grizzly landing strip on the banks of the Wood River

"You must be Jimmy," said a rather rough-hewn looking Mrs. Castle to which I managed "Yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yes."

Looking at me quizzcally she added, "And you're the youngest camper we've ever had".

We gathered from the conversation the other campers were already in base camp, and so the seven of us walked with our gear through the trees where we were shown our wall tents, complete with wood burning stove and bunk beds.

Lynn Castle was world-famous for guiding big game hunts. Bear. Moose. Dall sheep. Walrus. I was inside his log house only once during my stay and I remember staring open-mouthed inside his axe-cut grand lodge at the high walls covered floor to ceiling with the stuffed heads and bodies of every imaginable large animal Alaska had to offer. Lynn Castle had guided American presidents, movie stars and on numerous occasions, the Shah of Iran, successfully getting these high-paying animal-loving luminaries close enough to the target to ensure a kill and a lifetime of exaggerated stories and half-truths. They, in turn, would tell all their luminary friends what a wonderful luminary guide he was and more luminaries would descend upon his camp during hunting season. The summer camp he ran as a side business to earn money in the off-season. A more hard-scrabble way to make a living I cannot imagine. One hundred miles from the nearest road. No phone. No TV. No grocery store. No doctors. No running water. No plumbing. No heat, except that which came from burning logs in the middle of an Alaskan winter. And airplanes as the only reliable source of transportation. In the eyes of a ten year old boy this was heaven.

Lynn Castle with his wife Samantha immediately on the left.





Me in front of Lynn Castle's lodge. Note the size of the moose racks. Mount Anderson in the background.

The complement of campers was no more than twenty ranging in age from me up to sixteen years olds. I was one of three classified as "in-state", one of the others being the son of an Eskimo language linguist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Hi name was Nathan and his dad was one of the world experts in Tlingit. Earlier that year Nathan's sister had been run over by a car and killed after his dad called her across the street while she was wearing snow skis. Nathan had been sent away so his parents could deal with their grief. Nathan didn’t say much.

Bob was the other in-state'er and he wore an Australian bush hat with metal pins all over it. He was a bit pudgy and turned out to be exceptionally pointed in his anti-stuttering barbarity, eventually settling on "Stutter-butt", among other colorful names. His name was impossible for me to say without stuttering and always came out "B-b-b-b-bob." He later accused me of stealing $4.00 in postage stamps from him, resulting in Mrs. Castle ransacking all of my gear, he having pegged me as the offender because of his teasing. I did not do it. But I'll never forget watching her rummage through all of my gear piece-by-piece looking for the stamps that I did not take.

During the boy-gang check-ride and level-setting that happens within every group of young boys seeking alpha-ness, they discovered I was the low-born son of a member of the armed forces paying in-state camping fees. This effectively put me in my place and thus the pecking order as youngest in-state military-dependent stutterer was established. It was to be the longest month of my short life.

Robbie Jonas was the scion of the legendary Jonas Brothers Furs in Denver. Mr. Castle had guided the dad numerous times and now the son was reaping the benefit of that relationship. Jonas Brothers was the biggest furrier in the United States in the '40s and '50s having revolutionized taxidermy by using Fiberglas forms to emulate an animal body. My father had a Jonas Brothers wolf-skin parka and it was the singular most impressive piece of clothing he ever owned. While fishing for grayling a few weeks later Robbie was hooked in the temple with a Mepps spinner and they had to use my razor blade to dig the hook out by flashlight. It was very bloody and we only had a few flashlights to illuminate the operating theatre--a log. Robbie was brave though and bit down on a stick while our counselor gave him a scar that would be the source of motherly-horror initially and then amusing stories for many years to come.

My inner excitement uncontainable, I began talking to everyone about every topic that popped into my head. Being youngest was a novelty and I was not intimidated at all. I had no idea my excitement and running commentary would soon drive everyone crazy though. I had a lot of energy, talked entirely too much and got on everyone's nerves quickly. I was precocious, strongly opinionated, and did not see my effect on people because at that point the entire universe revolved around me.

My horse, Sage, was assigned to me early on. They asked what kind of experience I had riding, which was "a lot" and which I was then forced to take a riding test to prove it because they did not believe me. Sage was spirited and they wanted to see me ride him. Hopping into the corral I approached him, grabbed the halter and calmed him down, after which I climbed into the saddle. No big deal, but I know it made an impression because everyone got very quiet as they realized a ten year old lad had just fearlessly calmed a horse sixteen-hands high. I'd done a lot of riding up to that point and had even gone to a two week riding camp in Iowa and it showed. My stock went up a bit after my riding test and I was accorded a slight bit of grudging respect. Sage and I spent hours together riding and he became a wonderful friend. I did not stutter when I talked to him.

The base camp had wall tents, a dining hall, the Castle's very large cabin and a few other outbuildings. We spent a few days in camp getting oriented, swimming in the very freezing swimming hole and getting ready to take our horses to a far-flung camp for some even grittier camping. The couple assigned to be our counselors did a wonderful job getting us organized for this. We had saddle bags, pack mules, and when fully loaded ready to go looked like we were riding straight into a John Ford western, except for the 1970's John Denver-like puffy down jackets each of us had to keep warm in the Alaskan summer.

Every morning in base camp, Lynn would take off in his plane and circle the camp and outlying areas looking for the horses. Each horse had a bell and they would wander during the night in search of grazing. He let them graze like this instead of in a corral as a way for them not to be eaten by bears. After spotting the horses, Lynn would fly back to camp, turn off his engine in mid-air no more than a couple hundred feet up and then yell and point out the window as to where and how far away the horses had strayed. We always waited and listened for his engine to restart and then we would head off to where he pointed and go round up the horses. Years later I learned Lynn Castle was killed in a plane crash doing exactly this maneuver.

The taunting of others began as is common with a group of boys. They wait for the adult to leave and then they start in on whoever is different. Every group of boys does this and it's a rite of passage; though if you're unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end all the time it can become overwhelming, which it did in short order. I'd never been away from home so long and despite my brave face, was terribly home sick, in addition to being really sick with some awful bug that rendered my insides unstable and watery. Time stretched into misery, my home sickness grew, and I recall more than one instance shedding quiet tears in my bunk over the injustice in my little world of being trapped in a bad situation that had no end.

Mrs. Castle, one of two women in the camp, had all of us write to our parents weekly. To ensure compliance we assembled at the dining hall for an hour of letter writing every Saturday morning. I wrote more often, however. My third letter home I asked my parents to come get me as I was unhappy, the kids were picking on me, and I did not feel well. It was a desperation communique of last resort and I embellished it with all kinds of horrifying details in order to get my parents attention.

Very shortly thereafter another bush plane landed at camp and it brought the incoming mail. There was a letter addressed to me from my father. In it he wrote soothing words of encouragement and told me that he had a surprise for me that would be delivered Saturday hence. I was heartened, but then realized that was many days away. I promptly forgot about the surprise given that my very survival was at stake by living with a pack of hungry laughing hyenas.

In the meantime we camped and rode our horses packed with gear to wherever our counselors were taking us. We camped near the Wood River Glacier, where we explored and were lowered into a crevasse. We climbed Mount Anderson, the mountain behind base camp, and I become the first to summit it after drawing straws, which I now think was fixed in an effort cheer me up. We very dangerously rolled giant boulders down the mountain and Lynn flew his green Cessna no more than fifty feet over our heads on the summiteers and waggled his wings.

Saturday morning we were assembled in the dining hall writing our letters home, Mrs. Castle supervising us. Heads down, peeking around, we eagerly wanted to finish in order to start the next adventure. I continued surviving and was looking forward to cooking the brown bear roast in a buried burlap sack that Lynn had shot earlier in the year.

The Wood River Glacier was not far up the river from Camp Grizzly. It was so violently fast that, standing on the bank, you could hear not only the water but also the large cobbles the size of bowling balls loudly bumping down the river in search of peaceful rest. It was quite a racket and it reverberated through the camp the entire time.

That morning we heard something else though. It was a rumbling off in the distance that grew louder and louder. Freight trains? Tornadoes? We ran outside leaving our paper, pens and a flustered Mrs. Castle wondering what was going on. Speeding toward the source we ran to the air strip to wildly look around and assess the situation. At first there was nothing obvious to see, but the noise certainly was real and getting louder. Then Robbie looked up the valley and pointed and said, "Look at that huge plane!".

We all looked up, and saw coming toward us with landing lights on, a gray airplane whose wings seemed to nearly stretch across the entire valley. No one could speak or be heard because the rumbling of the engines drowned out even the sound of the Wood River cobbles as it approached. Our mouths agape, we all stared as the plane came in very low over the camp with engines screaming like banshees. It roared no more than a couple of hundred feet over our heads and we snapped them around to watch it head back up the valley toward the glacier. As it left, it very slowly canted its wings back and forth, and then disappeared over the ridge.

"What was THAT??!!!" one of the campers asked.

I was elated. I replied "That was my dad. He flies jets. That was a Boeing RC-135 Stratotanker, just one of the many that he flies around all day long on secret spy missions." I did not stutter and I felt my heart swelling with pride as I began to realize what had just happened.

The boys all looked at me in wonder , amazement and reverence. Mrs. Castle had a big smile on her face. In less than about twenty-five seconds I went from miserable young pup to being the very coolest kid in the camp...ever.

Shortly thereafter, my home-sickness miraculously disappeared and I was not picked on ever again at Camp Grizzly.