CV Rick

Sylvan Pass in the Winter - Part Two

For the first part of this story, click the Sylvan Pass topic at the end of this post, in the sidebar to your right, or just click here.

“Is it worth it? We could die up here, but you wanted to save a few hours.  I hope you're happy.” Eve was justifiably pissed.  The sandwiches were gone, the beer was gone, and she was stuck in the cab of a U-Haul truck with her husband whom she barely liked, some guy she barely knew – me, and a dog so hyper with pent up energy that she kept climbing over and around all of us.  And the place stunk like the adults and the dog hadn't washed in four days.  Because we hadn't. 

Gerold D. Thibedou didn't say anything except, “I'm sorry.”  He had nothing else to say. 

I also sat quietly, the uncomfortable third party in a two-party fight.  It was obvious to me that their marriage was doomed.  It seemed be a two-sided affair, passion and anger, with the random coin flip determining the switch.

The storm stopped on the third day.  The sun came out.  Snow was up to the door on  my side, but drifted clear to the window over on Thibedou's.  We tumbled out in relief, still hungry but able to stretch our cramped bodies.  The dog burst through snow drifts in fits of burrowing energy.

And it was quiet. 

“Hey, Thibedou.  Let's rummage around the truck and see if you packed any food in the household supplies,” I suggested.

Eve clenched her fists and folded her arms.  “Yeah, you useless bastard.  Why didn't you think to find any food back there yesterday, or the day before?”

“Because it would've been too hard to search through the boxes in the dark,” Thibedou said.

Eve screamed a loud piercing scream that echoed from all directions.  If anything would've caused an avalanche, that scream was the thing.  Fortunately we weren't in a valley, we were just about at the peak.  She ran back to the door, kicking snow and she fell right into a drift.  She screamed again.  Agony, anger, frustration.  I thought Thibedou should go to her, but he stood staring as if he had no control over the show. When she reached the truck she pulled out the big six-volt box lights, holding them both over her head she yelled, “What the fuck are these for?”  Then she threw one at Thibedou who was still standing slack-jawed.  It bounced off his head and thunked into the snow.  Thibedou was alert now and the second flashlight missed him. Then Eve was into the glove box and came out with all three Mag Lights.  These are the heavy kind with black handles the right diameter for the batteries that power them.  She threw the small AA one at him first.  “Flashlights.  That's what you spend all your money on, fucking flashlights.  But when it comes to going into the back of a truck you're afraid of the fucking dark?”  She threw the C-cell at him.

Sylvan Pass in the Winter - Part One

I hopped a ride in a U-Haul moving van towing a full-sized Ford truck all the way from Rantoul, Illinois to the top of Sylvan Pass in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.  Packed into the bench seat was Gerold D. Thibedou, his wife, Eve, Lucy their four-year old Irish Setter, and me.  Thibedou, Tee-Bee-DO with that hard O sound at the end, had been my partner in tech school.  I'd washed out of Pararescue and he'd flunked weapons school for a pronounced misunderstanding of electricity, so we both ended up in Aircraft Maintenance – pneudraulics specifically.  Dirty grimy nasty work more specifically. 

When I heard that Thibedou was going to Spokane, Washington I asked him to drop me off in Southeastern, Idaho where I could see my parents and pick up my car before heading back to my first duty station: Minot, North Dakota. 

I should've just taken the bus.

There are three things about Thibedou I remember the most.  First was his name. It rolled off the tongue, Gerold D. Thibedou.  He was Cajun and introduced himself with that complete name, no abbreviation, no nickname.  Second was his flashlight fetish.  When Thibedou walked through the utility aisle at Wal-Mart, his breath quickened.  He handed me packages.  “What's the candle power of that one?”  “I could illuminate a football field with that baby,” he'd say.  In the front of U-haul he had one powered by the cigarette lighter, it made tree shadows on nearby mountains; two square boxy lanterns that looked like the flashlights victims carry through the woods in slasher horror movies, they'd light the ground beside a corpse at the end of a gruesome scene; and a full set of mag-lights like the cops use, from the two-foot club to the tiny pencil.  “Don't worry,” he assured me.  “If we need more I have a gas generator and two light stands in the back.”  I felt the relief cascade through me.  Third was the scratches down his back one night five years later at a German night club.  He'd been dancing with this Turkish model and they cleared the dance floor during the full-length version of Don Maclean's American Pie.  It was hot, Thibedou's shirt was soaking and he tossed it aside halfway through the song, the model rolled across his well-muscled body sensuously like a dark snake coiling around Tarzan.  It was rhythmic sex on the dance floor between those two and at the end of the song he slid down her body, kneeling before her alter of sex and she loomed over him disco lights glistening off white teeth, white eyes and her nails like panther claws in a black-light poster.  She reached down on either side and raked him from waist to shoulders, drawing eight long lines of blood in an orgasmic climax.  To me, those are the memories that make up Gerold D. Thibedou.

The erotic dance came several years after Eve divorced him.  I remember her best in profile.  She had a dainty pointed nose and high cheekbones.  She stared straight ahead on that trip, her eyelashes silhouetted long and dark against the landscape.  She wasn't happy but I remember wondering what she'd look like if she smiled.  I never found out.

We made quick time across the plains, driving in shifts only stopping for gas.  Eve had prepared a cooler of sandwiches and beer.  This was the eighties and the DUI crackdown hadn't really gotten going. 

Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming. Then we had a choice. 

New Year's Eve, Minot, North Dakota, 1985

Snow on the prairie can make you blind. There is no distinction between earth and sky, near and far.  It's just white.  Not that your other senses are any more useful.  The wind's howling overpowers your hearing, and everything's cold, feels cold, feels numb.  There's nothing to smell.  If you try your nostrils will freeze for sure. 

That's what standing on the alert pad in Minot, North Dakota was like.  We had two F-106 Delta Darts sitting in the hanger.  In a month they'd be retired, replaced by bigger, angrier F-15s.  But for now the sleek rockets of the 106's crouched behind blast doors ready to swing open at the Klaxon.  It was like being in a firehouse if a firehouse were as far removed from any other buildings as possible, if the firehouse were at the far end of a two-mile strip of concrete, flat gray on flat white; a two-dimensional world.

We had a firehouse pole and we were supposed to slide down it at the first sound of that Klaxon horn.  If they replaced the airplanes with trucks, we could have been firemen, except air-to-air missiles didn't extinguish anything, except life.

Two minutes was our record from dead sleep to launch.  That might be classified, I'm not sure.  The planes are retired so the record is useless information now, but at the time we jumped, grabbed a coat, down the pole, pilots leaping into seats, crew pulling chocks and dashing for cover, a salute, and full afterburner as the twenty-ton doors swung out of the way with a whoosh.

Up there on the frozen tundra of North Dakota we protected America from . . .

Canada?

We lived in the alert house  with the pilots during the duty.  We had a pool table and I got pretty good. We had ping pong and a pinball machine as well.  There was a bookshelf with donated books and we'd read all the good ones.  You could tell because those were falling apart with stopgap Scotch tape repairs.  One of the favorites was Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear.  The movie had just been released.  It was playing at the theater downtown but we'd been on Alert for a week. 

I was the greenie.   It was my first alert and I'd only been on base for a couple months.  They made fun of me and pulled pranks.  I didn't take it personally.  I knew my time would come.  But as new as I was, I pulled my own weight.  We were a good crew and it was New Year's Eve and we were to be relieved at dusk.  In North Dakota that happened before five in the afternoon.