Empty Halls

Once on one of my photo forums was posted a series of haunting photos of a decades old crumbling medical facility. Much of the equipment was still there, dust covered and wasting away.

Picture if you will that old hospital waiting to be demolished.

Footsteps echo of days gone by, of lives saved and lost that reverberate off the walls. Once bustling with doctors and nurses, scurrying around ministering to the sick, now are dark, cold and foreboding.

As the saying goes; “if the walls could talk”, certainly applies. Once shinny floors are now covered with dust, foot prints showing the few who frequent these halls forgot by time. The glare of florescent lights, casting their reflective glare off the walls, and various medical carts are gone, replaced by a few emergency lights, casting a foreboding shaft of light down these long empty halls.

All the emptiness plays on the mind, conjuring images and echoes from another time. Dimly lit and eerily quiet they sit, waiting, waiting on a future that will never come.

Standing quietly you can almost hear the voices and see the wispy vaporous shadows of the past. The noises heard from the old building sound like groans, a moaning if you will, of a glory lost and resistance to an inevitable future. 

  

Like our bodies, aging and worn, the building too knows it’s time is limited, soon to be cast aside and replaced by a newer building, one that has yet to create it’s memories and become a part of history.

Empty halls, pierced with shafts of light and reverberating echoes are all that remain.

 

A Day on the Lake

We were told by our puppy trainer to expos our dogs to at least one new experience weekly (yes you can introduce puppies to the element of behavioral training, and introduce we did) and that we had no problem with as we traveled, and back and forth to our lake house.  All we have to do is jingle the car keys and they are ready to go.

Our town home has a small back yard that backs on miles of “green belts”. When in town we walk these daily, working mainly on “stop”, “stay” and “go” these for approaching street crossings.

The lake house is a totally different story. Here they have the run (under our supervision) of three yards and a community of rolling hills and roads, ponds, creeks and woods…a “doggy heaven”.

One particular favorite of theirs is a small beach. Most of the homes have bulkheads along the water, however, just past or neighbor is an undeveloped lot with a small beach. This they check out daily on their “routes”…it’s amazing to follow them around and note their patterns. Digging, barking at the ducks, or wading in the water they make this a daily stop.

These are two very fit dogs…they “walk me” two miles daily, they romp and play for most of the day. This romping through the garden beds, rolling in the grass and dips in the lake make for some really dirty dogs! So a daily “hosing down” and brushing is required.

Then their all pretty again…until they go out again and the cycle begins again.

A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

An often used line for a good adventure story goes…”It was a dark and stormy night!” And so does this story about such a night.

After too many years I was recently reunited with a pilot that shared that “dark and stormy night” forty eight years ago. Our bond was built around that harrowing night in Viet Nam.

Turning back the pages of time our story begins in the late afternoon hours when our entire helicopter company was called out to support an emergency situation, the details of which have escaped me. The flight, some twenty plus helicopters, “slicks” (transports) and their “guns” (armed support) escort launched into gathering storm clouds and headed north. 
 

It quickly became apparent that we were headed directly into a wall of thunderstorms!

I will have to stop the story here for a little background information. First, few helicopter pilots at that time were instrument rated (able to fly on instruments only in bad weather). Second our helicopters were not really equipped to fly “instruments”.

Fortunately CWO Driggers, our company training pilot, diligently worked on preparing his young pilots, many of us in our late teens or early twenties, for “inadvertent flight into IMC” (Instrument Meteorological Conditions). This training was conducted “under the hood” or a shield fitted over our helmets that only allowed a view of our “instruments”.

Ok now the stage has been set. On this evening, as we approached the line of thunderstorms we blindly followed our leader into the storm. Almost instantly the “dark and stormy night” wrapped around us and hurled us into its churning cauldron of heavy rain, buffeting winds and intense lightening. What we thought we were doing has puzzled me for all these years. However, we took the training Mr. Driggers had given us a plowed ahead.

The radio was a cacophony of urgent messages from the other helicopter as they realized their predicament and elected to divert to a number of different alternates. Darkness rapidly enveloped the entire flight. Our door gunner and crew chief gunner silently closed the doors and prepared for the worst and were surely praying the two young pilots up front knew what they were doing.

The helicopter pitched and rolled as we fought the weather and an even worse enemy, vertigo. With the interior lights reflecting off the windscreen and the outside flashes of lightening we quickly became disorientated and wracked by vertigo. Vertigo is like being sea sick, a stomach churning off balance situation. Fortunately I had a bout of vertigo on one of Mr. Driggers training flights and remembered him quietly saying….”believe your instruments and not your brain trying to tell you what’s up and down”. Each of us were overcome as we flew onward. Each spelling the other until caught up in their vertigo.

How much time went by I have no idea…we just dialed up the nearest Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) radio beacon and plunged onward until we passed over the beacon then made successive turns back to the beacon and started descending until we broke out over the airfield. Did we call for permission? I don’t remember…I do remember the tower telling us to stay where we had landed until the monsoonal rains let up enough for further instructions…this we did!

Thanks to our training from Mr. Driggers, our own practice when returning from flights and confidence in each other we survived. Others were not so fortunate on that “dark and stormy night”.

Wow!

It's been a long time since I last posted....seems I've been posting all my stories over on Facebook.

Well here is what I am going to try...keep posting the "short" version on FB and a longer version with pictures over here.

I am working on one now....so stand by.