The Life & Times of Jimmy Nelson
My true account of growing up on a storybook farm, experiencing
a killer tornado, surviving teenage confusion, an adventurous four-year ride on
a submarine, a skydive, not maturing into your regular adult, discovering the
world is not a bowl of cherries, a crash to the bottom, and, finally, accepting
that the only person responsible for me, is me. But first I had to descend into
the deep depths of the emotional chasm.
Following that is my most recent short fiction “Waiting to Die” a tale of today and the coming, feared, pandemic.
Following that is my most recent short fiction “Waiting to Die” a tale of today and the coming, feared, pandemic.
Chapter 4 in entirety "Hell's Island"
We must have crossed the bridge to Hell’s Island in the
night. I don’t remember the trip over, only that heartbreaking trip back
with the boy called Duerr (to start all over again at day one) after we thought
we had made it.
I don’t remember too many details of those weeks in boot camp. I was too
sleepy. Too scared. Too lonely. Too homesick. Many
times I felt like crying, but I couldn’t cry. For awhile I developed a
propensity for nosebleeds. My company commander, who really wasn’t a bad
sort of guy, commented once that if I “…didn’t stop having nosebleeds we might
have to send you home....” (Home, my god, I’d love to go home!) I even, considered—once—forcing
my nose to bleed, to at least not try stopping it—I wanted to go home!
We marched a lot, did calisthenics, did drills with our rifles, spit-shined our
shoes, did laundry on concrete tables with scrub brushes and a little soap,
hung our clothes on clotheslines without clothespins, pressed our dungarees,
etc., with our hands, and stood plenty of inspections.
Somehow I failed only three personnel inspections during my whole career.
I’ll touch more on them as they come up. Oh yes, and we spent plenty of
time in classrooms learning about the United States Navy. Especially the
new terminology: A floor is now a deck; ceiling, overhead; wall, bulkhead;
bathroom, head; rifle, piece; and a rope (and a whole host of other things) is
a line, etc., etc. I still use many of those terms today, especially if
I’m in a situation where I likely won’t get questioned about what the hell I’m
talking about.
For the first three weeks I excel in the weekly written tests. Then we
get to pack up and march over that bridge to where the regular Navy boot camp
is, where things are rumored to be easier. (Things are not easier.
I suspect Hell’s Island existed for the simple reason of
transition, a feeling of moving onward.) Because that bridge would most
certainly bring a feeling of moving backward.
The fourth week brought failure of the 3-5 day test.
Now I have to go back across that concrete bridge and start all over again at
day one. How could this have happened?
But I won’t be going alone. Duerr is coming with me.
We load up everything: Fully packed sea bag. Blankets and pillow.
Piece. Ditty bag. It’s more than I can carry at once. I just
know it!
Looking back at that day I have to wonder...did the Navy somehow realize what a
depressing, frustrating, ego-rending journey that would be? Is that why
Duerr and I were allowed to go not accompanied by some chief or upperclassman
who would
yell at us?
Did the Navy know we (at least I) would be close to tears? Did the Navy
have a heart? Even there and then?
It was hot. It was long. It was a struggle. Duerr and I help
each other, and we do make it. But upon arrival we’re split into separate
companies. I never see Duerr again. I think the name is somewhere
around the Hankinson/Lidgerwood/Wyndmere, North Dakota
area but I’ve never attempted to find him.
I wonder if he has memories even nearly the same as me.
So I’m alone again. I know no one.
Excerpt from Chapter 6 "Tornado"
Supper is mostly finished by twenty to seven. Anxious to console Pal,
probably still cowering under the hoghouse, and also to move my toys into the
garage, I am first to leave the table. But upon reaching the porch I see
a yellow glow outside. Unexplainable dread stops me.
The barn is about thirty feet high and sixty feet long. Beyond its peaked
roof the sky is pale blue. The barn is bright red against the blue; its
silver cupola is gleaming. The yellow glow fades. Outside begins to
darken, fast, yet the sky beyond the barn remains friendly-looking mid-summer
blue. Fears stabs me as I hurry back to the kitchen.
Everybody is already up, standing silently at the double kitchen windows facing
north, toward where darkness is spreading, covering the farthest treetops
quickly, as if a sky monster is swallowing the sun. It is so quiet.
Nobody is talking, and outside not even the sound of a bird.
Nothing. The quiet is so intense it’s becoming a pressure beginning to
hurt my ears.
A roar is becoming apparent from the west, like a distant freight train,
usually a pleasant sound but now insidious, rumbling, approaching nearer and
nearer, faster.
From where there is no railroad.
“Boy, we’re going to get an awful hailstorm,” Mother announces, “Hear that
roar?”
“I think so too,” Dad agrees.
But it’s more than a roar. It’s a sound I’ve never heard, nor imagined,
and it’s beginning to terrify me.
It’s terrifying all of us. We keep staring at the silence and calm right
outside, at the green of our farmyard, at the blue sky where ragged fingers of
black cloud are finally edging into view, looming over our thought secure,
tree-surrounded farmstead.
From the floor, Celi, sensing terror from the rest of us, begins to
whimper. Gerry immediately kneels and gathers the usually happy baby into
her arms.
“What’s a hailstorm, Grandpa?” Curtis asks.
BANG!
The crash is the east porch door, flung open. But there is no wind.
Outside is still absolute silence, stillness except for the intensifying
roar. Everybody gapes. Nobody knows what to do. Time is
passing too quickly to be able to do anything. Dad heads for the porch
door. Everybody watches him. Eyes wide, Curtis follows, “Grandpa,
look at your car!”
We press against the kitchen windows. Outside the house yard fence the
car is bouncing up and down. But it’s so calm outside.
We couldn’t know that fluctuating pressure preceding the storm is making
strange things happen seemingly without substance. Dad didn’t know.
Mother didn’t. Much too early in the century. The media blitz has
not yet hit, consumer weather forecasting is still in infancy. Our
communications is a radio not listened to during meals, a hand-powered
telephone not ringing.
But nobody in the community yet knew either, for the storm had first formed
several miles west in uninhabited pasture, then the tornado that came from it
had hopped and skipped causing little damage, to escalate a mile west of our
farm. There would be no warning. No time to get to the
cellar. One entrance outside, another under linoleum in the
kitchen. And still we have no realization we even need better shelter.
Like a balloon filled, the pressurized car pushes its weakest point, a poorly
latched door, and pops it open.
“Mother, you didn’t get the car door shut,” Dad exclaims, “Now it’ll blow open
and break!”
Dad does not leave the house to close the car door, for the unknown fear grips
us all, but he does step out slightly, grips the porch door, pulls it shut.
BANG!
It explodes right open again, harder, seeming to shake the house. The
roar now seems right on top of us. The trees north and west of the barn
begin straining, leaning east as if a mighty magnet pulls them, yet the house
itself still feels no wind. Little Becky stands among us, as in
nonthinking awe we watch the trees bending so far as to touch the ground.
Then the barn and other outlying buildings begin leaning east, again as if a
magnet pulling, not wind pushing. Everything close is still so
quiet. Farther away everything is happening so fast, and it’s so hard to
believe, and accept. We still have no full realization of a dangerous
wind. No realization we should do anything but stand, watch, in shock
believing that nothing so bad as what’s happening could really be happening.
Suddenly the unseen magnet is winning. Everything beyond the house yard
gate begins breaking apart, sending boards, shingles, branches flying around
and around. The terrible roar now sounds like ten freight trains about to
crash into the house. The pressure in my ears feels like I’m going under
water.
The car door blows open, then wrenches and twists itself around to the front
windshield, then it’s moving on its own across the yard. The 60-foot
windmill, like a matchstick, topples east. The barn and granary roofs
lift, and are gone, disappeared. The barn, like a stand of dominoes,
collapses to the east, its siding and insides erupting like a hail of
arrows. Like a cardboard box, the wooden granary rolls across the yard,
west, opposite everything else.
An animal, small and dark, hurries across the yard, toward the disintegrating
barn, looking for a place to hide. Pal! I know it’s Pal! But
my mind cannot concentrate, cannot conceive anything but recognition of my
beloved pet. The image of her, small and frightened, ingrains in my mind.
Pal disappears as dirt and other flying objects fill the air. Mindlessly
I run for her. Dad grabs me, returns me to where everyone has moved away
from the window. We’re now clustered in the center of the room. And
still we continue witnessing, dumb-like, the unimaginable disaster occurring
outside.
Suddenly the house is shaking, furiously. Dishes are falling from
cupboards, clattering, crashing, breaking.
“Everybody into the west bedroom!” Dad shouts, then begins guiding us
there. But I glance back. The east porch is breaking away from the
house. Wide-eyed Curtis is still there, engraining more memory, then
disappears into a curtain of dust and debris.
The rest of us crowd into the small bedroom, my bedroom, where I’ve
slept in safety all my life, awakening happily to birthdays and tooth fairy
visits. I look back once more. The kitchen linoleum has bubbled
halfway to the ceiling. The refrigerator is rocking back and forth as if
dancing, crazily. Everything, everywhere, is moving, falling, breaking.
The horrible sound outside is like a brutal sandblaster crunching the
walls. The only other real sound is Celi in Gerry’s arms, crying, not in
paralyzed shock like the rest of us.
Everything outside the west window is white, all white. The house groans,
cracks, moving and twisting beneath our feet.
“Here goes the house.” Dad says it calmly, resigned, for there is nothing
he can do to stop it, nothing he could have done. No time. No
warning. No prior experience.
The house is actually lifting into the air, doing the impossible...and breaking
apart. The west window shrieks as it bursts from its casing, smashes into
my back, ending my awareness for I don’t know how long.
****
Excerpt from Chapter 9 "Skydive!"
Now Chris. I pat the front of his right shoulder. He pats my
hand. It could be the last time we see each other. He knows it too,
and he’s scared too (he says later: “When I was out on that wing, I didn’t even
know my own name!”) but there’s a grin a mile wide on his face.
Some still-functioning part of my brain is recording these dreamlike events,
but I wonder what my face looks like.
Chris is away.
I’m alone, except for Pilot Ardell, and Jumpmaster Brian.
The plane begins another turn.
Jumpmaster Brian turns my way.
I’m next.
This skydiving sport can be dangerous. Even deadly. (Since my
experience I have read several times of skydivers getting killed, when, for
some reason, their parachute did not open, or maybe just opened
badly.) For six weeks the six of us have talked. Brad says, “There
is an element of danger here.” Has to be right the first time. At
least close. Of course there’s the emergency reserve chute, and the
automatic-opening-device, which pops the reserve chute at 1200 feet, if you’re
dropping at least at 80 mph, and...you know, not cognizant.
Just in case....
At 3000 feet, where all first-timers begin, if nothing goes right, you reach
the ground in thirty seconds.
But you don’t think about whether your equipment will work. You assume it
will. You put faith in it. You believe everything will go right,
and you believe in your instructor, Don, who we’ve just spent the last eight
hours with, learning and drilling.
And you believe in yourself. First you should believe you want to
do this. Then you must believe you can do it. Don had
us sign a paper too, saying we would hold no one else responsible if things
didn’t…you know, go right. That part was kind of upsetting to the old
stomach, but we all signed.
“Move forward.” The order comes from Jumpmaster Brian, with over 300
jumps. He has confidence in what he’s doing, and in himself. He
knows this sport is safe, and his confidence brims over to me.
I slide forward toward the open door.
I’m so scared. I’M SO, FREAKING, SCARED!
Yet the fear, the real fear, is somehow somewhere else, on a back burner, far
back in my psyche, because I am able to move forward.
Excerpt from Chapter 10 "USS Carbonero"
We are on the bridge somewhere at sea near Hawaii
Soon the OOD will say “Clear the bridge.” And we will be diving. I am
nervous about that. Not about actually going beneath the surface of the
Pacific Ocean with likely a couple of miles of water still beneath us (I never
worried about going down and not coming up; that was something one shouldn’t
think about if one wanted to be a submariner). No, what worries me are
those two ladders I have to get down, first to the Conning Tower (where the
periscope is), then on down to the Control room...with two other guys coming
down right behind me.
The starboard lookout goes first, then the port lookout, then the OOD.
Upon arrival in Control, the starboard lookout pushes the start switch for the
bow planes, then jumps left and pushes the start button for the stern planes
and becomes the stern planesman. And the port lookout becomes the bow
planesman. And the OOD stands right between us telling us what depth he
wants from the bow planesman and what degree bubble he wants from the stern
planesman.
“No problem,” Marshall
He comes back up. “Now you do it, Nelly.” Right.
Adrenalin already was getting its grip on me. Funny thing about
adrenalin. Suddenly you can do something you thought you couldn’t.
And if you do it wrong you don’t notice, and if you get hurt, well, you feel it
but it doesn’t really register as pain until later. And the really funny
thing about adrenalin is—at least in my viewpoint—you go into slow-motion.
The slow-motion part doesn’t happen on my trial clearing of the bridge. I
don’t even remember the trial part. I just do it, then climb back up to
the bridge to await the real thing. Which isn’t long in coming.
“Clear the bridge!”
RrrUuuuugha! RrrUuuuugha! (See? I told you it sounded like
somebody puking.)
List of chapters
Prologue
1 Many Beginnings
2 ICU Diary
3 Many Beginnings
Continued
4 Hell’s Island
5 Company 311
6 Tornado
7 Class A School
8 First Duty
9 Skydive!
10 USS Carbonero
11 Julia’s Story
12 Yokosuka
13 Travels & Philosophies
14 USS Archerfish
15 Test of Will Power
16 Sydney
17 The Bottom
18 Home Again
The fiction: Waiting to Die
Biography
Books by James W. Nelson
Samples of books & reviews
Winter in July
Callipygia
Experiments
Daughters
Boat Sailors
The Bellwether
The Light at the
End of the Tunnel
Strange & Weird
Stories
A Collection of
short Contemporary Stories
Contact
nelsonjim1@live.com
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004GW465S (Author page at Amazon. Read all the reviews)
https://www.facebook.com/#!/james.w.nelson2
All books available free at Amazon.com anytime with a Kindle Prime Membership.
Sunday, July 22, 2012, Dying to Live will be a free download from midnight on for 24 hours.
https://www.facebook.com/#!/james.w.nelson2
All books available free at Amazon.com anytime with a Kindle Prime Membership.
Sunday, July 22, 2012, Dying to Live will be a free download from midnight on for 24 hours.
James, you are quite a writer! Well done.
ReplyDeleteWow! thank you, Scarlet, I certainly enjoyed your short story "Code" too, and I will be back to your blog.
Delete