Black Velvet
On most of my adventures, nobody's flesh got deep-fried, just two of them.
In 1961, I graduated from high school, and in the fall of that year I began my studies at UCSB. I was staying with my mom in Carpinteria, driving the 25 miles to campus for classes, then returning to Carp, where my same circle of high school friends were going on with their lives, part time jobs, surf adventures.
I was not ready for life at the university. My grades in high school had not been good enough, but scores on IQ tests throughout my childhood, and finally my exceptionally high math score of my SAT test qualified me for entrance somehow. That being the case, I enrolled as a math major. I was put in the most advanced calculus class, taught by a Russian visiting professor, whose accent was very hard to understand, and though I'm sure that he was brilliant, his subject matter was so advanced and over my head to begin with, the lectures quickly reached the point of gibberish.
In the middle of October, I dropped out. My surfing buddy, Dave, had an adventure going, working on a boat, and invited me to join in. I caught a Greyhound Bus to Coos Bay, Oregon. Dave met me at the bus and we drove to his dad's place. I had heard about him from Dave's stories and at one time I had read an article about him in "Reader's Digest". The magazine had a recurring feature called "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met", and Dave's dad had been the subject of one of them. The story was a tale of him using his seat-of-the-pants backwoods engineering skills to singlehandedly replace a country bridge over moving water with the crudest of equipment in some ingenious way.
Dave's father had a great big second hand store with room after room packed with stuff. I remember him sitting under a high carport pulling things out of a four-foot cube of a crate. He had gotten the crate very cheaply at a military surplus auction, identified only as miscellaneous electronic parts and devices. He was sitting there pulling things out of his mystery box and trying to identify what they were while tinkering with a contraption that was going to be our autopilot. His invention was a modification of a big ship's compass. It's degree wheel marked with compass points floated in oil to keep it level and buffer its motion relative to a moving ship. It had a glass face about 10 inches in diameter with two electrodes drilled through the glass which would make contact with a moving needle on the plate below. Wires from the electrodes went to solenoid switches, which in turn would activate hydraulic cylinders back at the rudder. When the ship was heading off course, a switch would be triggered and the rudder would compensate. I understood the principle of his invention, but we never saw it installed or in operation.
Down in nearby Charleston Harbor, lashed to the end of a two hundred foot dock of the Kelly Boat Works, was the vessel to be the focus of our efforts there. The Sea Hunter was a 110-foot WWII "submarine-chaser". Dave's father had ended up with it through his horse-trading. Our project was a major remodeling so that it could be used to haul small loads of freight, or to fish, or catch crabs. We could take watermelons to Alaska and return with salmon, for instance, was one of the scenarios he envisioned. We were going to cut the big wheelhouse from the deck and move it back so that there could be a big hold in the middle for cargo or catch. It had two big 671 diesel engines that we would need to move out of the hold area also, remount them, and shorten the drive shafts.
Our sleeping quarters were in the prow of the ship, with four big bunks and toilet compartment at the very front. There was a rudimentary galley with a wood burning cast iron stove that Dave and his dad had rigged up so that we could turn on a slow drip of diesel fuel onto an iron plate where it would burn slowly; and that was our space heater. It was winter and it was cold on the water, but we could keep the cabin warm, but it was the unhealthiest breathing mixture. Our nostril hairs would become black with soot. It was like sleeping with a smudge pot.
We worked for months on that boat but by the end of February we were pretty frustrated with the situation, and looking forward to improving weather. We weren't getting paid any more than enough to feed ourselves and have a few bucks to go out on a weekend and try to have some fun. We had met some girls at a bowling alley in Coos Bay on Friday night, and we all had planned to meet there again Saturday.
Our problem was that for transportation we had an International Harvester flatbed truck, and Dave's motorcycle. The windshield wipers on the truck weren't working, so paradoxically, if it looked like rain, we would have to take the motorcycle. It looked like rain. It had been raining on and off during the day and it began raining lightly as we were getting ready to go. Not wanting to arrive at the bowling alley wet, we went back on the boat to wait it out. It rained harder. We were getting bummed and we were yelling our frustrations and throwing firecrackers off the boat just to hear it resound and echo around the little basin at Charleston Harbor. After an hour, the rain stopped and the skies were clearing.
We walked down on the dock. I learned to ride a motorcycle on that dock. It was eight feet wide and had no railings. It was 6 to 10 feet above the water, depending on the tide. I don't know why Dave chose that location to give me a motorcycle lesson. Maybe he thought that it would help me focus. Anyway, this night, Dave had just gotten it started when we noticed two flashlights coming down the dock toward us. It was two Coos County Sheriff's Deputies. They had a report that there was a lot of shooting and yelling down in the harbor, and one Charleston resident had heard us shouting curse words and did we know anything about that.
Well, we knew all about that so the deputies said we should just go back on the boat and shut up. We were happy to shut up, we had already got that out of our systems, but Dave took issue with being told to go back on the boat arguing that we were already on private property, the leased dock, and that they didn't have the authority to order exactly where, on said private property, we had to be. They replied that Dave might well have a legal point, but that if they arrested us, then they surely could tell us where to go.
We spent the night in the Coos Bay Jail. I was still two days away from my 18th birthday, so they put me in the juvenile lockup. I was the only one there. Dave was put in the drunk tank.
Next morning, a plain-clothes detective took us to a courthouse in Coos Bay to see a judge. We had our hands cuffed behind us. He parked the unmarked car on the street near the Courthouse Annex, and let us out of the backseat. He had to get some more stuff out of his car so he told us to wait on the sidewalk. As we were standing there leaning against the wall, lo and behold, the two girls that we were supposed to meet at the nearby bowling alley the night before came walking by. They stopped to chat and we teased them with different excuses for not showing up. In a minute or so, the detective collected his stuff and came over to us. "OK, Let's go." We said quick good-byes and walked away, following him. Only then did the girls realize we were in handcuffs.
The Judge said that since I was almost 18, they would consider me an adult. We were charged with disturbing the peace, bail set at $50.00 each. Dave was at odds with his Dad at the time, and didn't want to call him. We didn't have $50.00 between us, so we were just going to be locked up for a while. We were transferred to the jail in Coquille, the county seat.
At the Coquille Jail we were put into a cellblock that had about 10 cells in a row, each with four bunks and a toilet on the back wall. The jail wasn't full so Dave and I had one of them to ourselves. During the day, the cells were left open to the 5-foot wide walkway that ran the length of the cellblock. Across the walkway was a wall of bars all the way up to a ten-foot ceiling. Outside the bars, guards could come in and walk up and down and see into all the cells. At the north end was the heavy door they brought us in through. At the south end there was a shower stall and an opening in the wall where food was passed through from the kitchen. There was one rule: don't flush a toilet while somebody's in the shower.
A narrow table was attached to the wall of bars for most of its length, for us to eat our meals or whatever. The north end of the table was stacked high with paperback books of all kinds. There was a mix of not-too-serious offenders in there with us. There was a big red-headed guy who was the good natured alpha dog there, he was finishing 90 days for assault and battery. He kept the peace among us, as he just wanted his remaining time to be uneventful. There was a car thief, some burglars, check bouncers, shoplifters; a miscellaneous population of short sentences. We were going to spend a few days and it wasn't too bad. We had been working all winter on that boat, and living below decks breathing diesel smoke, and not getting paid. At least we were warm and dry, we had our meals prepared for us, and there was nothing to do but lie around and read books.
I spent my time reading paperbacks on my bunk, scratching the number of days on the wall like a convict in a cartoon. My 18th birthday passed. One afternoon I had been reading, and put the book down and got down from the bunk to relieve myself at the back of the cell, and...I flushed the toilet. There was an immediate scream and a stream of expletives coming from the shower at the other end of the cellblock. Oh, oh...I had forgotten the rule. There was a big naked wet guy yelling and coming down the row cell by cell to find out which toilet was still running. All of a sudden, a jail guard burst into the outer walkway and started giving the scalded one a scolding and threatened to make extra trouble for him if he didn't go straight into his cell and shut up. The jailer said he had been on the other side of the wall from the shower and he had been there with a couple of women on the kitchen staff. He had a problem with the ladies being exposed to such crude language. That was the other rule in the Coquille Jail: No loud cursing when there are ladies in the kitchen. I think we got out of there the next day.
Finally Dave's dad had noticed we were missing, found us in jail and posted our bail. We decided to leave Oregon, it obviously wasn't working out. Somehow, Dave settled up with his dad for a little Hillman station wagon, and we loaded it up with our few belongings, and hit the road south. March 6, 1962.
It was late afternoon when we finally got rolling and it looked like there was going to be a little rain. Dave decided that he should ride the motorcycle in the wet weather since I didn't have a lot of experience, and I would drive the Hillman. We did the first hour and a half like that and when the rain stopped, Dave pulled over. He had gotten thoroughly wet and was so cold he couldn't open his hands. They were stiff in the position of holding the grips. So I bundled up to take my turn on the motorcycle.
We continued on for more than an hour with me in the lead, before I noticed he wasn't behind me any more. I turned around and headed north again to look for him. A couple miles back, he was alongside the road, out of gas. That's how we learned the Hillman's gas gauge was broken.
We were able to disconnect the fuel line on the motorcycle and drain out about a quart of gasoline. Most of it we poured into the Hillman's gas tank, saving a little to pour in the carburetor to get it started again. He took off leaving me there in the cold and dark, trying to kick-start the motorcycle. Was the valve turned the right way? Was the carb flooded? I was unfamiliar with the whole thing but finally I found the right combination, and it roared to life. I tore off to catch up with Dave. It was a beautiful road ten miles north of Brookings. Highway 101 down the Oregon coastline at that time was a nice two lane road rising up and down and gently curving in and out as it followed the topography of the shoreline. I was enjoying the ride.
The 1960 BSA Gold Star 650cc motorcycle was going about as fast as it will go in 3rd gear, it must have been over 80 mph, when in a blink, the headlight burned out, and I was hurtling through total blackness. In my moment of shock and terror, I was unsure which way the road curved next. I would be sailing off the bluff to the jagged rocks in the surf below if the road curved left, or I would smack square into the stone face of a road cut if the road turned right. I backed off on the throttle and quickly slowed down and stopped waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I was right on the centerline. A funny thing had happened in that moment I thought myself to be facing annihilation. It was similar to my out-of-body experience on ether when I was three. This time I had the feeling that I was suddenly getting very large; like 50 feet tall. In total blackness, there was no visual frame of reference to gauge the size of anything, and I had become an immense invisible being flying through an icy void. It scared the beejesus out of me. I was shaking.
I continued on slowly, sticking pretty close to the white line. There was no moon and the line was just about the only thing I could see in the starlight. I found Dave, sitting by the gas pumps of a closed service station in Brookings, where we spent the rest of the night waiting for the place to open. In the morning, Dave took the front wheel off his motorcycle, hooked the forks into the Hillman's rear bumper, and lashed the handlebars so it would tow like a trailer. We made the rest of the trip like that down to Berkeley where Dave's brothers lived.
That particular disaster didn't happen, just a metaphor for life: 80 miles an hour toward a black velvet curtain. Life: a disaster that is not finished happening. A couple of years later I careened over a cliff in that Hillman in a wreck that could easily have been the end of me.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
In 1961, I graduated from high school, and in the fall of that year I began my studies at UCSB. I was staying with my mom in Carpinteria, driving the 25 miles to campus for classes, then returning to Carp, where my same circle of high school friends were going on with their lives, part time jobs, surf adventures.
I was not ready for life at the university. My grades in high school had not been good enough, but scores on IQ tests throughout my childhood, and finally my exceptionally high math score of my SAT test qualified me for entrance somehow. That being the case, I enrolled as a math major. I was put in the most advanced calculus class, taught by a Russian visiting professor, whose accent was very hard to understand, and though I'm sure that he was brilliant, his subject matter was so advanced and over my head to begin with, the lectures quickly reached the point of gibberish.
In the middle of October, I dropped out. My surfing buddy, Dave, had an adventure going, working on a boat, and invited me to join in. I caught a Greyhound Bus to Coos Bay, Oregon. Dave met me at the bus and we drove to his dad's place. I had heard about him from Dave's stories and at one time I had read an article about him in "Reader's Digest". The magazine had a recurring feature called "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met", and Dave's dad had been the subject of one of them. The story was a tale of him using his seat-of-the-pants backwoods engineering skills to singlehandedly replace a country bridge over moving water with the crudest of equipment in some ingenious way.
Dave's father had a great big second hand store with room after room packed with stuff. I remember him sitting under a high carport pulling things out of a four-foot cube of a crate. He had gotten the crate very cheaply at a military surplus auction, identified only as miscellaneous electronic parts and devices. He was sitting there pulling things out of his mystery box and trying to identify what they were while tinkering with a contraption that was going to be our autopilot. His invention was a modification of a big ship's compass. It's degree wheel marked with compass points floated in oil to keep it level and buffer its motion relative to a moving ship. It had a glass face about 10 inches in diameter with two electrodes drilled through the glass which would make contact with a moving needle on the plate below. Wires from the electrodes went to solenoid switches, which in turn would activate hydraulic cylinders back at the rudder. When the ship was heading off course, a switch would be triggered and the rudder would compensate. I understood the principle of his invention, but we never saw it installed or in operation.
Down in nearby Charleston Harbor, lashed to the end of a two hundred foot dock of the Kelly Boat Works, was the vessel to be the focus of our efforts there. The Sea Hunter was a 110-foot WWII "submarine-chaser". Dave's father had ended up with it through his horse-trading. Our project was a major remodeling so that it could be used to haul small loads of freight, or to fish, or catch crabs. We could take watermelons to Alaska and return with salmon, for instance, was one of the scenarios he envisioned. We were going to cut the big wheelhouse from the deck and move it back so that there could be a big hold in the middle for cargo or catch. It had two big 671 diesel engines that we would need to move out of the hold area also, remount them, and shorten the drive shafts.
Our sleeping quarters were in the prow of the ship, with four big bunks and toilet compartment at the very front. There was a rudimentary galley with a wood burning cast iron stove that Dave and his dad had rigged up so that we could turn on a slow drip of diesel fuel onto an iron plate where it would burn slowly; and that was our space heater. It was winter and it was cold on the water, but we could keep the cabin warm, but it was the unhealthiest breathing mixture. Our nostril hairs would become black with soot. It was like sleeping with a smudge pot.
We worked for months on that boat but by the end of February we were pretty frustrated with the situation, and looking forward to improving weather. We weren't getting paid any more than enough to feed ourselves and have a few bucks to go out on a weekend and try to have some fun. We had met some girls at a bowling alley in Coos Bay on Friday night, and we all had planned to meet there again Saturday.
Our problem was that for transportation we had an International Harvester flatbed truck, and Dave's motorcycle. The windshield wipers on the truck weren't working, so paradoxically, if it looked like rain, we would have to take the motorcycle. It looked like rain. It had been raining on and off during the day and it began raining lightly as we were getting ready to go. Not wanting to arrive at the bowling alley wet, we went back on the boat to wait it out. It rained harder. We were getting bummed and we were yelling our frustrations and throwing firecrackers off the boat just to hear it resound and echo around the little basin at Charleston Harbor. After an hour, the rain stopped and the skies were clearing.
We walked down on the dock. I learned to ride a motorcycle on that dock. It was eight feet wide and had no railings. It was 6 to 10 feet above the water, depending on the tide. I don't know why Dave chose that location to give me a motorcycle lesson. Maybe he thought that it would help me focus. Anyway, this night, Dave had just gotten it started when we noticed two flashlights coming down the dock toward us. It was two Coos County Sheriff's Deputies. They had a report that there was a lot of shooting and yelling down in the harbor, and one Charleston resident had heard us shouting curse words and did we know anything about that.
Well, we knew all about that so the deputies said we should just go back on the boat and shut up. We were happy to shut up, we had already got that out of our systems, but Dave took issue with being told to go back on the boat arguing that we were already on private property, the leased dock, and that they didn't have the authority to order exactly where, on said private property, we had to be. They replied that Dave might well have a legal point, but that if they arrested us, then they surely could tell us where to go.
We spent the night in the Coos Bay Jail. I was still two days away from my 18th birthday, so they put me in the juvenile lockup. I was the only one there. Dave was put in the drunk tank.
Next morning, a plain-clothes detective took us to a courthouse in Coos Bay to see a judge. We had our hands cuffed behind us. He parked the unmarked car on the street near the Courthouse Annex, and let us out of the backseat. He had to get some more stuff out of his car so he told us to wait on the sidewalk. As we were standing there leaning against the wall, lo and behold, the two girls that we were supposed to meet at the nearby bowling alley the night before came walking by. They stopped to chat and we teased them with different excuses for not showing up. In a minute or so, the detective collected his stuff and came over to us. "OK, Let's go." We said quick good-byes and walked away, following him. Only then did the girls realize we were in handcuffs.
The Judge said that since I was almost 18, they would consider me an adult. We were charged with disturbing the peace, bail set at $50.00 each. Dave was at odds with his Dad at the time, and didn't want to call him. We didn't have $50.00 between us, so we were just going to be locked up for a while. We were transferred to the jail in Coquille, the county seat.
At the Coquille Jail we were put into a cellblock that had about 10 cells in a row, each with four bunks and a toilet on the back wall. The jail wasn't full so Dave and I had one of them to ourselves. During the day, the cells were left open to the 5-foot wide walkway that ran the length of the cellblock. Across the walkway was a wall of bars all the way up to a ten-foot ceiling. Outside the bars, guards could come in and walk up and down and see into all the cells. At the north end was the heavy door they brought us in through. At the south end there was a shower stall and an opening in the wall where food was passed through from the kitchen. There was one rule: don't flush a toilet while somebody's in the shower.
A narrow table was attached to the wall of bars for most of its length, for us to eat our meals or whatever. The north end of the table was stacked high with paperback books of all kinds. There was a mix of not-too-serious offenders in there with us. There was a big red-headed guy who was the good natured alpha dog there, he was finishing 90 days for assault and battery. He kept the peace among us, as he just wanted his remaining time to be uneventful. There was a car thief, some burglars, check bouncers, shoplifters; a miscellaneous population of short sentences. We were going to spend a few days and it wasn't too bad. We had been working all winter on that boat, and living below decks breathing diesel smoke, and not getting paid. At least we were warm and dry, we had our meals prepared for us, and there was nothing to do but lie around and read books.
I spent my time reading paperbacks on my bunk, scratching the number of days on the wall like a convict in a cartoon. My 18th birthday passed. One afternoon I had been reading, and put the book down and got down from the bunk to relieve myself at the back of the cell, and...I flushed the toilet. There was an immediate scream and a stream of expletives coming from the shower at the other end of the cellblock. Oh, oh...I had forgotten the rule. There was a big naked wet guy yelling and coming down the row cell by cell to find out which toilet was still running. All of a sudden, a jail guard burst into the outer walkway and started giving the scalded one a scolding and threatened to make extra trouble for him if he didn't go straight into his cell and shut up. The jailer said he had been on the other side of the wall from the shower and he had been there with a couple of women on the kitchen staff. He had a problem with the ladies being exposed to such crude language. That was the other rule in the Coquille Jail: No loud cursing when there are ladies in the kitchen. I think we got out of there the next day.
Finally Dave's dad had noticed we were missing, found us in jail and posted our bail. We decided to leave Oregon, it obviously wasn't working out. Somehow, Dave settled up with his dad for a little Hillman station wagon, and we loaded it up with our few belongings, and hit the road south. March 6, 1962.
It was late afternoon when we finally got rolling and it looked like there was going to be a little rain. Dave decided that he should ride the motorcycle in the wet weather since I didn't have a lot of experience, and I would drive the Hillman. We did the first hour and a half like that and when the rain stopped, Dave pulled over. He had gotten thoroughly wet and was so cold he couldn't open his hands. They were stiff in the position of holding the grips. So I bundled up to take my turn on the motorcycle.
We continued on for more than an hour with me in the lead, before I noticed he wasn't behind me any more. I turned around and headed north again to look for him. A couple miles back, he was alongside the road, out of gas. That's how we learned the Hillman's gas gauge was broken.
We were able to disconnect the fuel line on the motorcycle and drain out about a quart of gasoline. Most of it we poured into the Hillman's gas tank, saving a little to pour in the carburetor to get it started again. He took off leaving me there in the cold and dark, trying to kick-start the motorcycle. Was the valve turned the right way? Was the carb flooded? I was unfamiliar with the whole thing but finally I found the right combination, and it roared to life. I tore off to catch up with Dave. It was a beautiful road ten miles north of Brookings. Highway 101 down the Oregon coastline at that time was a nice two lane road rising up and down and gently curving in and out as it followed the topography of the shoreline. I was enjoying the ride.
The 1960 BSA Gold Star 650cc motorcycle was going about as fast as it will go in 3rd gear, it must have been over 80 mph, when in a blink, the headlight burned out, and I was hurtling through total blackness. In my moment of shock and terror, I was unsure which way the road curved next. I would be sailing off the bluff to the jagged rocks in the surf below if the road curved left, or I would smack square into the stone face of a road cut if the road turned right. I backed off on the throttle and quickly slowed down and stopped waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I was right on the centerline. A funny thing had happened in that moment I thought myself to be facing annihilation. It was similar to my out-of-body experience on ether when I was three. This time I had the feeling that I was suddenly getting very large; like 50 feet tall. In total blackness, there was no visual frame of reference to gauge the size of anything, and I had become an immense invisible being flying through an icy void. It scared the beejesus out of me. I was shaking.
I continued on slowly, sticking pretty close to the white line. There was no moon and the line was just about the only thing I could see in the starlight. I found Dave, sitting by the gas pumps of a closed service station in Brookings, where we spent the rest of the night waiting for the place to open. In the morning, Dave took the front wheel off his motorcycle, hooked the forks into the Hillman's rear bumper, and lashed the handlebars so it would tow like a trailer. We made the rest of the trip like that down to Berkeley where Dave's brothers lived.
That particular disaster didn't happen, just a metaphor for life: 80 miles an hour toward a black velvet curtain. Life: a disaster that is not finished happening. A couple of years later I careened over a cliff in that Hillman in a wreck that could easily have been the end of me.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com