Seasonal memories

   I grew up in the Berkshires village of Williamsburg, Massachusetts, where spring is fragrant and verdant as the ground thaws, summer is balmy, fall is spectacular with the trees putting on their brief annual display, and winter is harsh but also filled with a cold beauty. I remember snowfalls haloing the streetlights and covering the countryside in softness and stillness. Sometimes a freezing rain would crust the snow thick enough to cautiously walk on and speed our improvised cardboard sliders down hillsides.

  

   My father was a deacon in the golden-domed Congregational Church that still dominates the village center, and my mother taught Sunday school to the kids there, often using a changeable felt board with homemade multicolored cutouts for illustrations. Mom baked for the Wednesday evening church suppers that were some of the finest meals I’ve ever had, because all the women brought only their best recipes for casseroles and salads and meatloaf and cakes and pies. After each convivial feast there would be entertainment—a world-traveling adventurer presenting a 35mm slide show of exotic places, or a magician, or a black-and-white comedy movie.

   When we knew there was going to be a full moon to bathe the brilliant snow and make the blue night clear as twilight, we’d spend a Saturday afternoon shoveling off a frozen pond deep in the woods—which bore here and there the tracks of woodland creatures—clearing a place up on a bank amid the laden evergreens, and setting a bonfire with downed wood gathered from the surrounding forest. That night we’d hike through the snow back to the pond, light the fire, and skate as the moon and stars swung overhead, taking breaks to drink hot cocoa from thermoses. We’d drizzle maple syrup onto the snow to turn it into a chewy candy that fueled us with carbs against the chill.

   As Christmas drew near, volunteers would go out to village home yards and sing carols, their breath pluming the night air. Church members would drape the sanctuary balcony with garlands of aromatic balsam. On Christmas eve we’d attend the candlelight service and sing the old carols. On Christmas morning Mom would insist we attend services before returning home to share the tree and then enjoy her special dinner.

   I hope you, too, have good memories of seasonal holidays past, and I wish you memory-making celebrations as 2019 draws to a close.

   Have an exciting and rewarding New Year. Please join me here on occasion for more thoughts on life and writing.

Phil

Good Grief America

Naomi and I were watching "Good Morning America" the other day when one of the multi-million-dollar talking heads said in all his studied sincerity, "The teenage pilot was flying this ultralight above a lake when one of its propellers stopped moving." The screen was clearly showing the single-engine ultralight in flight. This is equivalent to reporting that "the accident happened as the driver was travelling on the Interstate and one of his steering wheels stopped moving." I'm glad that in my piloting years none of the propellers on my single-engine Cessna ever once mysteriously stopped moving. 

Our schools for some sad years now have been failing to educate the mass of people on even the simplest levels in an attempt to never leave even the slowest student behind, embracing brilliant ideas such as open book testing and question-by-question pre-coaching so a high majority will pass achievement exams and the schools will thus look competent. Consequences of this trend have recently surfaced in the news as arrogant, affluent parents have been caught bribing officials to wedge their over-privileged, under-educated, and lazy offspring into prestigious colleges. 

So I guess we should not be surprised to be burdened with a couple generations of idiots in even high well-paid places.

Phil

Kitty O’Neil

     In 1976, on pure speculation and little cash, I drove a tin-can Fiat from North Carolina to Bonneville, Utah, to cover attempts on the Word Land Speed Record in a hydrogen peroxide powered three-wheeled rocket vehicle on the vast salt flats, one for the men’s record, the other for the women’s. The drivers were Hollywood stunt man Hal Needham and beautiful part-Cherokee stunt woman Kitty O’Neil, who had been deaf since stricken by three childhood diseases at once. Kitty had already been an Olympic diver, had become the first woman member of Stunts Unlimited, providing stunts on demand to film makers, and had raced motorcycles in the grueling Baja 500. At only five feet two inches and 100 pounds she was small but nonetheless impressive with an infectious radiant smile. I interviewed and photographed her and sold my article to The Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest reprinted it.

     Kitty battered down many barriers, overcoming cancer and meningitis. Consider her deafness alone; imagine never hearing another human voice, or music, or a breeze teasing through pine trees, or a rain shower, or a competitor’s racing motorcycle coming up on her from behind, or even her own voice. To converse she read lips and spoke in a monotone.

     She performed many daunting stunts, including a record 180-foot fall from a helicopter. Dressed as Wonder Woman, she leaped in a swan diver’s pose from the top of the Valley Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California, onto an air bag 127 feet below, the bag looking like a postage stamp from that height. She did stunts in Airport 77, The Blues Brothers, The Bionic Woman, and Smokey and the Bandit. She set 22 speed records on land and water, including water skiing at 104.85 mph, the water like concrete at that velocity. She drove the rocket car on dry lake Alvord in Oregon at an average two-way speed of 512.71 mph, hitting at one point 621 mph. No woman before or since has gone faster. Mattel put out an action figure of her and actress Stockard Channing played her in a movie called Silent Victory.

     She died at 72 of pneumonia in Eureka, South Dakota, in late 2018. I was privileged to have met her.

     It is no coincidence that the independent, beautiful, part-Cherokee, motorcycle-riding love interest in my suspense novel series is named Kitty.

Phil

A Miracle becomes a Nightmare

     When I was growing up our black dial three-party-line telephone was the major thing I remember that was molded of plastic. It was a substance called Bakelite, a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin invented by Leo Bakeland. Lots of other uses caught on. Buttons, billiard balls, lamps, chess sets, poker chips. Highly flammable celluloid had also been around for some years, used to make things from jewelry to handles for straight razors to thousands of miles of movie film.

     It was early days in the making of our Plastic Planet.

     In my lifetime I’ve seen these miraculous synthetic materials come to be used in every aspect of our lives—even to enhance and extend our lives with plastic contact lenses and lens implants and safety glasses and hard hats and helmets and pacemakers and medicinal syringes and IV bags and implantable artificial joints and prosthetics and medical equipment. Thousands of beneficial products.

     But there is an ever-looming and much larger dark side to our Plastic Planet. In 2020 people around the Earth will buy a million plastic beverage bottles a minute, buy 24 billion plastic-containing pairs of footwear, discard a billion plastic toothbrushes and three trillion plastic cigarette filters and miles of plastic food wrap and millions of other plastic objects after only brief one-time use. Plastic items are easy to throw away—the roadsides everywhere are evidence of that—but the problem is they don’t go away. Tedious, complicated, and expensive recycling is only making an insignificant dent in the problem.

     It’s fast becoming a nightmare, choking our waterways and oceans and landfills, killing fish, bits of it even lodging in our bodies. Creating an ugly landscape of lingering litter everywhere.

     There are things we all could be doing to at least reduce the problem. Carry reusable beverage bottles and cutlery, buy degradable bamboo toothbrushes, donate rather than discard old shoes, store leftovers in glass containers, request paper grocery bags, carry fabric shopping bags, don’t use plastic straws, buy fresh foods not wrapped in plastic. Don’t litter; recycle instead.

     For the sake of our only planet—our only home—we need to do these things and more and teach our kids as well.

Phil

A reminder: My new novel Killing Ground is available in print or e-book on Amazon. There's an easy buy link on www.philbowie.com  Check it out. Maybe a Christmas gift for a reader you know?

Where’s the Net?

   It reaches around our planet, but where could you go to find the Internet’s source?

   Turns out it’s in many places.  There are 3,900 co-location data center sites, about half in the U.S., that host multiple websites and connect billions of people.  Thirteen big Google data centers scattered around the globe (seven of them in the U.S.) store our search histories.  Four vast Facebook centers (three in the U.S. and one in Scandinavia) are constantly a-buzz with inane conversations and selfies.  Twelve independent companies run all of the world’s root name servers (many of which translate domain names into IP addresses), and a lacy network of some 329 major undersea cables stretching thousands of miles transmits 99 percent of the world’s data between continents.  And of course the Net is also circling out there in space and sizzling between cell towers and humming in the air all around us wirelessly.

   Maybe someday they’ll implant a chip in each newborn so everybody will be connected all the time.  To watch people, especially young people, and their near-constant attention (not to say addiction) to their cell phones and tablets and laptops now, maybe that day has almost arrived.

Phil 

p.s. My new novel Killing Ground is live on Amazon in print and e-book. The story is set in Africa against a background of elephant poaching that is still decimating the once great herds across that vast and troubled continent. There's an easy buy button on www.philbowie.com Please have a look and maybe pass the word on to your social media friends.   

Autographs

     When I first began selling my debut novel in stores, I couldn’t believe anyone would want my autograph, and I still can’t quite believe it five books later.

     A few famous autographs and what they’ve sold for:

The last autograph John Kennedy signed, on a Dallas newspaper copy.   $39,000.

A Jesse James signed photo.   $52,000

An Albert Einstein signed photo.   $75,000 in ‘09

A baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.   $191,200 in ‘06

A baseball signed by Babe Ruth.   $388,375

A signed John Lennon/Yoko LP, owned by John’s murderer.   Perversely, $525,000

Lincoln’s signed Emancipation Proclamation.   $3.7 million

George Washington’s signed Acts of Congress.   $9.8 million

     Before Neil Armstrong blasted off for the moon in July, 1969, he and crew mates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins wanted life insurance, but it was way too expensive, considering their uniquely risky occupation, so they autographed hundreds of commemorative envelopes their families could sell if they didn’t make it back.  The envelopes have become collectibles, and one sold in 2013 for $50,788.

     So buy any one of my suspense novels, available on Amazon and also easily through my website.  And some day . . . who knows what it might be worth?

     By the way, my NEW stand-alone novel Killing Ground is live on Amazon in both e-book and print versions. Check it out on my website.  www.philbowie.com

Phil

Flying Facts

    Flying has become so commonplace that we take it almost entirely for granted. There are now 100,000 commercial flights a day around the planet, and at any given time there are a million people in the air. In ten days that’s a million flights. Not incidentally, all these flights, of course, are constantly spewing a prodigious tonnage of exhaust into our thin and fragile atmosphere along with a billion terrestrial vehicles, an unprecedented fact noted by more than a few scientists trying to warn us of inexorable global warming.

   The daily consumption of aviation fuel, in fact, is staggering. So much that tanker truck transport from refineries to major airports is far too costly and impractical, so pipelines do the job. Raleigh Durham Airport 100 miles inland from my home is served by the same jet fuel pipeline that supplies Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which handles 275,000 passengers a day on 1,000 flights using their five runways. It’s the biggest airport in the world, serving every major carrier and a flock of minor ones. The terminal buildings alone cover 156 acres in seven concourses housing a total of 192 gates and 263 concessions--restaurants and snack shops and retail outlets. The speedy underground train that connects the concourses whisks 200,000 people daily. There are 30,000 public parking spaces. The rental car complex covers 68 acres and the cargo warehouses take up another 30 acres. Baggage handling is extremely complex, of course; it’s a miracle they can handle it all so efficiently and reliably. It takes 63,000 people to keep this one vast airport pulsing, not including pilots and crews.

     Facts concerning the flights themselves are equally interesting. In an airliner on the takeoff roll you're doing at least 160 mph before the wheels leave the ground. Most flights cruise at five or six miles high where the temperature six inches from your nose in a window seat is often 50 F below zero and you're doing 500 to 600 miles per hour or about 80 percent of the speed of sound. (In the year I was born airline companies boasted of astonishing speeds up to 200 mph.) Most of the background noise you're hearing in flight is not the engines but is simple wind rush past the fuselage and wings and control surfaces. At cruise the cabins are pressurized but not to a full atmosphere. That’s to extend the life of the fuselage by cutting down on the considerable expansive force of each pressurization, and it's a reason many people go to sleep during a flight.

   Flying is statistically quite safe, of course. Yet the occasional crash that kills a few hundred people gets wide notoriety, while some 40,000 annual motor vehicle deaths and 4.5 million injuries in America alone get little media notice at all; we simply tolerate it. In 18 months, more people die on American highways than died in a decade of Vietnam, yet there is no memorial to them. Some 5,000 people are dying on our roads every year now because of cell phone use alone, yet nobody seems to give a damn. There are no protests, no interminable congressional debates, no outraged articles in the The New Yorker. At the recent North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh the state police had a BMW on display that was almost crushed into a ball in a 60-mph collision that killed a 17-year-old girl who was on her cell at the time. People shook their heads at the gruesome sight but I'm betting most forgot it before the day was done and many used their cells on their drives home.

     So, buying an airline ticket--despite the minor TSA hassle and the contribution to global air pollution--rather than slogging to your distant destination through the high-stress mayhem on our highways, is often well worth the cost. It might even save your life.

Phil