Читать книгу No Excuses - J. Larry Simpson I - Страница 10

Story 2

The Inyokern Picnic

First Peter 5:5

Pulling out of Bakersfield early that Tuesday morning, we had already told my Uncle Travis and family goodbye. We headed up the Greenhorn Mountains on Highway 178 to what would be our next adventure. The terrain told us we were in rugged country, and the 1953 Ford F-350 pulled hard. Dad was pulling the trailer alone that day as I was sitting in the front seat of the fifty-three Buick Roadmaster with Mom. Jeanie, David, and Susan sat craning their necks in the back seat.

Trixie and Tony, our good dogs, stood on Dad’s handmade toolbox just panting with excitement. As hard as the wind blew while driving, I never knew why their jaws didn’t flop off onto the highway or blind another car with the slobber flying fifty miles per hour backward.

After about two and a half or three hours of driving, we stopped and ate lunch. Mom fixed the best sandwiches from a baked ham on the bone with mayonnaise, tomatoes, and lettuce that a growing thirteen-year-old could ever taste. Homemade tea, which is cooked tea, with lots of sugar on ice was just right for the road.

Pulling a trailer was fun and challenging. Dad was a great driver and especially of big equipment being a diesel mechanic and having to drive Euclids, caterpillar, cranes, and the likes.

So we pulled off the side of the road at the top of the mountain and had a picnic.

My brother David would say one sweet day as we traveled, Sandy, myself, David, and his wife, Connie, that he thought that those stops were just a picnic and that’s just what life was. David has lived life like a picnic, “Everything was all right.”

So once having eaten, we pulled back out onto old, ragged 178.

In a little while, as we descended the eastern slope of that rugged mountain, we could start to see the desert, the Mojave Desert, brown, rolling on forever, vast. It stretched out endlessly before us.

Dad got to the stop sign first and pointed five or six times downward, turned left, and there we saw it, Inyokern, down below. Our new town.

Lying at the foot of the mountains with Ridgecrest in the distance, Mother started crying. “Surely, this is not where Walker brought us! Surely, we’re not going to live here!” And she cried, almost broken. The sign with an arrow on it had thick black letters.

We four children kept quiet.

She turned left. We followed the fifty-foot-long turquoise-and-white trailer, a half mile behind.

Turning right down toward the little town, we came to a welcome sign with the population on the bottom, 356 it read. It came to my tricky mind that we would be the largest growth spurt Inyokern would ever have.

“Now the population, Mom, will be 362!” “this will be the largest growth they’ve ever had”

Mom started laughing.

Now that was Mom, and we knew we were going to have an Inyokern picnic.

Dad had already been to Inyokern and found a trailer park for us to move into. We parked in the first spot directly behind the owners’ house and dog lot.

After the weeks trip to California, two weeks in Bakersfield, here, it is August, and we are settling in once again.

Dad was miserable. Jobs were not as plentiful as he had been led to believe. He took a job in a rock quarry as the company mechanic. Crushed rock dust flew everywhere, covering up anything in its path for about two hundred feet, less pay, and Dad’s skills were greater than the job.

Dad was miserable, less pay, and not full use of his skills. Disappointment was all over him. Living in the desert, so different from our green tree covered country in Tennessee and almost broke.

Dad was miserable. While passing through New Mexico to California, the state patrol stopped us on the outskirts of Tucumcari on Highway 66. Dad was ticketed for being two feet over the maximum length for trailers.

“That will cost you $500,” the arrogant officer said.

The fine was $500! That was a lot of money to a man with four children, a wife, and two dogs. It took about half of what Dad had saved for the long move.

So now, in Inyokern, Dad was trying to recover his losses and almost instantly decided to move back east although he didn’t let us in on it.

How could we get back? This rig was too long. Not enough money!

Here’s what Dad did. He cut the truck in two! Yes, sir, he cut the truck in two. With torch and determination, he cut out two feet and four inches of the bed, drive shaft, and all other parts in the way, then welded it back together.

By March 1958, he was ready to go back home, anywhere east of the Mississippi! Besides, this was aggravated by the sad death of his father, Granddaddy Simpson.

In the meantime, life was a picnic.

The little Baptist Church—that is its people—was sweet. The smell of the desert, the sea of spring flowers, Betty Jo, an undefeated basketball team. The bully and tacos for the first time just freshly made by a good Mexican family (that’s all we knew to call them) from our church, visits by LT and then Travis with their families, got us through.

Yeah, a picnic. Mom made it that way. It came from the McCollum’s, “Just enjoy what you’re doing every moment.”

I learned a lot in Inyokern.

The bully was determined to make me afraid of him, so I told him I was going to the restroom and for him to come in—he didn’t show up. From that day on, he changed his ways. It was said that “bully boy” came from poverty, a broken home, and no discipline. He was known for punching holes in the walls in his little home with his angry fists. To this day, I can still see his brown chiseled face, greasy long ducktail hair, and angry look. I know he sits in a prison cell or lies in a lonely grave today, sixty-one years later.

Basketball

It seems to me, as a lifelong experience, that everyone has to locate and define themselves.

Now I can see more clearly who I am, but I was content with myself even in those early days mostly. Sometimes I felt inferior, but that drove me to “be somebody.” Dad and Mom taught us that but let us be a kid and ourselves. Somehow, they made us believe that we were just okay like we were, significant, could do anything, and gave us a rope. The rope we were attached to was pretty long, as long as we were respectful and obedient.

This carried over into mine, Jeanie, David, and Susan’s lives to make us positive, ambitious, and workers.

God was good to me. He gave me victories in life that made me know I was okay, strong, and could achieve. I was locating and finding myself.

Basketball became a defining moment of personal strength and self-image in Inyokern.

There were only thirteen, or was it sixteen students in the sixth to eighth grades? But the administration wanted us to have a basketball team. There was only six or seven of us on the team, had only a few days to practice before we played our first and only game against Ridgecrest.

Ridgecrest was a big town and a big school compared to Inyokern.

They arrived to play in our little gym.

They beat us—badly.

But the Ridgecrest coach saw potential in me. He approached me, my parents, the school, and the Inyo County School Board about allowing me to play on their team.

The permission was granted, and I became the first student allowed to be in one school yet play ball on another team in Inyo County.

Not having trained skills and no coaching, yet I was blessed with speed, great jumping ability, a will to learn, and absolute determination. I became a starter.

We had a six-foot-four boy, but who do you think jumped center to start the game? A five-foot-nine boy from Inyokern.

Boys from military families filled the roster. Boys with skill, determination, and physically strong.

We went undefeated, winning two tournaments and beating much larger schools from Bakersfield and beyond.

What I look back and see is that I can have no excuses. Blessed in many ways—doors always opened in front of me. I walked through them. I seized them. I worked. I found myself by the grace of God.

Thank you, Lord, Dad, and Mom.

My Job

Work—a job has been part of me from age ten. By age twenty, I had had twenty jobs.

Inyokern gave me a great job.

The man who owned the trailer park must have seen some hope for me, so he offered me a job.

Mr. Carter barked out, “Son, would you like to have a job and make a little money?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Okay then, here’s what you’ll do. Can you drive?”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

My new employer stretched his eyes.

Dad had let me drive his truck in 1956 in South Carolina at Granddaddy Simpsons. A four speed, I had ridden with Dad all these miles from move to move, so I picked it right up. Just a few days before Uncle LT had let me drive his ’57 Ford Convertible! So I was ready.

My job? Drive from garbage can to garbage can, picking up trash. Milk cartons, wet paper, coffee grounds, green bean cans, and all the things in a garbage can was my objective. I did it—on time. Every piece of trash, even diapers!

Then he added this, “Now, Larry, clean up my backyard and get rid of all the dog do-do.”

“What!”

So I did it. Twice weekly, I cleaned up his backyard for all eleven dogs he owned and got rid of it in a hole I had to dig. There must have been one hundred piles of “do-do” every third day.

Today I love the thoughts of that job. Thankful.

No excuses. Just do it.

Moving Away

Dad was headed back to our homeland just about as soon as we arrived in California.

March 1958 arrived, and Dad said, “I pulled up today. Let’s pack up. We’re going back to Tennessee.”

I was stunned and very sad. Moving now at age thirteen was getting harder. A basketball success story, a job, friends, and a girlfriend made it hard to leave.

We told our church family goodbye, our school friends goodbye, and I told my girlfriend of two to three months goodbye. I cried as we passed through Ridgecrest in the dark of the early morning. Heading up Highway 395 with my face wet and against the left rear door window, staring out toward Betty Jo’s, I thought, This is getting harder. Moving away was getting harder! I began to realize that strong attachments were now harder to let go of, as I grieved for two or three days. I hoped to see Betty Jo again, but we would be two thousand miles apart. Yes, it was getting harder.

But I had to do it. We were rollin’.

No excuses. A new adventure lay ahead.

Inyokern was a picnic.

Our God is in the heavens, He had done whatsoever He hath pleased.

—Psalms 115:3