Y’all have probably seen news of that recent study that showed what everyone knew all along–being in touch with nature has real health benefits. After some recent surgery with a side of complications, I’m really grateful to live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I had already decided to post something about what it’s like living here in semi-rural semi-solitude communing with nature, but for now I’ll just share two extra-magical nature events that we’ve enjoyed here. (I’ll split my stories into two posts to strengthen my resolve not to make my posts too long.)
1. Ten summers ago or more, we had our grandsons with us for about a week, and it seemed that all of nature, especially the Chesapeake Bay, was cooperating to help keep them entertained. While they were here, we had extra-high winds that made it possible for teen/tweens to get a surfing experience on the beach out front, and still calm days just right for kayaking along the shore. We saw dolphins jumping in the air in front of our house, something I’ve probably seen less than five times in the 20 years we’ve been here. Eagles and hawks would swoop down and catch fish right in front of us and take them to their aeries down the street. We spent days stalking a manatee that had somehow strayed up north into St. Leonard harbor (we never caught a glimpse of it, but we saw its lair, and it was fun searching).
It was a great week of swimming, boating, and other playing, from before the time when our grandkids got too cool to wear their enthusiasm on the surface. By the final morning, we were spent and happy and out of ideas, and we were wondering if we could find a topper for their visit, or if we could just be tired and crabby until it was time to take them home (which still would have marked an overall successful vacation).
There was a commotion of people on the beach in front of our house, unusual for so early. The Bay was experiencing a red tide, and fish and shellfish were straying close to, and sometimes on, the shore to get enough oxygen. We saw flounders hiding in the sand, and scooped up a dozen crabs which we had for breakfast. What a perfect finale!
(This is what our catch looked like all those years ago, but it’s actually a picture of the crabs I caught for breakfast this morning, as we’ve had another red tide.)
THE SCENE: In a dimly-lit, nearly-abandoned Navy base, a skeleton crew is working to organize the base’s environmental records. Conspiracy theories are posited, secrets shared, triplicate forms collated and stapled.
(If you haven’t read part 1 of this story, you should start there.)
I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 2)
One morning as the base shutdown was progressing, I welcomed into my office a couple of polite young beefy men in dark suits. They showed me their credentials: they were agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), and said they had some questions for me, and would like to look at some of my records. Our environmental office records (and indeed the whole base) got inspected regularly without advance notice by Navy, the state and the US EPA, but this was the first time I had entertained a criminal investigator in my office.
Back then I was 25 years younger and had a much much cleaner conscience than I do now, and it literally didn’t occur to me that I could have done anything to attract the interest of NCIS. So I said sure!, and answered their questions, and gave them access to all of the records we were working on.
They came back repeatedly after that over several weeks, sometimes asking new questions about how the environmental office worked or about some record they had found, sometimes carting away whole boxes of notebooks or other documents. When I asked what this was all about, all they said was that they were not at liberty to say.
The weeks stretched into months, and the NCIS agents’ continued visits started to get under my skin. Sometimes they would take away documents we were in the middle of archiving, or active records that I would need to produce if an environmental inspector visited. And although they assured me I would get everything back, I had not seen a single page returned. Plus they still wouldn’t tell me anything about what they were looking for, and I was starting to feel the pressure. It was obvious that I was a “person of interest”.
I started mentally reviewing all the environmental compliance training I had taken, and second-guessing my judgement calls about about what spills needed to be reported, or how to handle a pollutant or a hazardous material. Maybe I had done something after all, or failed to do something, and not realized it?
What if they demanded a vital record, but in my paperwork incompetence I mis-filed it somewhere and couldn’t find it?But surely if it was an accidental oversight, they wouldn’t send the criminal investigators in? What if I had inadvertently sent some Hazardous Waste to a shady disposal company, who dumped it at the side of the road?
It was a stressful time. At least I was doing a good job of avoiding that document organizer and her amorous advances. Or maybe she was avoiding me, seeing the handwriting on the wall that my time as a free man was ending!
Finally one day, the agents announced that they had done all of the investigating that they intended to do. They said they hadn’t developed any new leads, so they were just going to ask me about it. They showed me their smoking gun–a list of place names on a yellow legal pad in my handwriting.
They had gotten a complaint that this note showed that I was keeping a secret set of records of polluted sites on the base. The Navy is governed by hazardous waste cleanup laws like everyone else, and one aspect of those laws is full public disclosure, so having a secret list of sites would have been a serious criminal offense on my part! I would be in deep trouble, not just because I was the base’s “designated jailee”, but because the secret records had clearly been written by me personally!
From the www.spiritanimal.info site: “The owl spirit animal
is emblematic of a deep connection with wisdom and intuitive knowledge. If you
have the owl as totem or power animal, you’re likely to have the ability
to see what’s usually hidden to most. When the spirit of this animal guides
you, you can see the true reality, beyond illusion and deceit. The owl also
offers for those who have it a personal totem the inspiration and guidance
necessary to deeply explore the unknown and the magic of life.”
I don’t know if everyone has an animal totem but I
always thought my daughter Piri did. I feel sure that her animal totem is an
owl because when she was a baby, a particular barred owl living in our woods,
got obsessed with her and seemed to be constantly watching her. He would even
perch on a low branch outside the living room window so he could stare into the
house when we were not outside. At night he perched on the hip of the roof and
made those wheezing owl noises that are not hoots. When she was pre-school age
her favorite dress, that she insisted on wearing almost every day, had an owl
on it.
So when I painted Piri, I wanted to include her animal totem. -LP
The thing I am having the hardest time getting used to in retirement is all the free time. Not long ago, while I was in the work force, I was getting up at 4 AM every weekday. That was what I needed to do to get everything done! With all these looming extra hours that I have now, I find that I feel a little guilty at not using my time efficiently. But there is so much of it! I would also like to be more in a routine, but I haven’t even figured that out. For a few brief moments I entertained the idea of using productivity methods left over from my work experience to gain retirement efficiencies…
This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.
I call this story “I was a fugitive from the NCIS“. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)
Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.
Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.
That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation.
The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.
In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.
It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did.
She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.
I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now.
But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking).
One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!
