Dogs with physics books; farm fields in 2015

DOCTOR 

                   She is troubled by thick-coming fancies

    that keep her from her rest.

MACBETH      Cure her of that. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain 45And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?
DOCTOR      Therein the patient Must minister to himself.
MACBETH Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.

 Molly, Rita Henry's beagle, with the American Journal of Physics

Jessie, my former dog who died of acute congestive heart failure on 12 Oct 2015, with Intro to Cosmology.

 Clouds and similar looking ice on former rice field on Trulock Bros farm, Jefferson County, Feb 2015.

A different rice field on Trulock Bros farm, almost ready to harvest, Sept. 2015

Once upon a time in ... Austin

December 1999

Two Pine Bluff buildings 1976, 1980

At the top is the National Building, 2nd Avenue and Pine Street, circa 1976.  Next is the Jefferson County courthouse after it burned in April 1976.  It was restored with additional wings added.  Governor Bill Clinton was on hand to give a talk at the re-opening ceremony in May 1980. This was his first 2-year term as governor, and he was defeated in November by a Republican, Frank White.  The year 1980 was a tough one for Arkansas, for the U. S., and for the Democratic Party.  There was the failed and fatal attempt in May to rescue American Embassy hostages in Iran (George Holmes, a Marine corporal from Pine Bluff was among those killed), and the leaked-fuel-vapor explosion of a Titan nuclear missile silo near Damascus (Arkansas) that killed one worker and injured others while propelling the 9 megaton nuclear warhead several hundred yards away so that it was temporarily lost.  At least it didn't explode, but the Air Force wouldn't even say whether the missile in the silo was armed (at some time since then they acknowledged there was a nuclear warhead on the missile).  And Reagan was elected president.

Getting back to Pine Bluff:  after a fire in May 1996, the almost 90-year-old National Building was demolished, along with buildings shown next to it in the photo, because the owner(s) decided it wasn't economically feasible to repair it.  Probably he was (or they were) right, since so many businesses had begun migrating out of downtown in the early 80s.  The Donald W. Reynolds Community Center now occupies the block where the National Building was.  At least there's not a vacant lot there. Downtown Pine Bluff is now getting a facelift of sorts via a new "streetscape" project which seems to me like a good thing to do.

Me on 10th, 33rd, 35th, and 50th birthdays

My first birthday in the house on Cherry Street, August 1964.  We'd been living there about six months. Starting in the left foreground of the photo, that's the back of my younger brother Steven's head,  two unidentifiables next to him, then Trip Martin leaning in mischievously, Betty Trulock, me, and I think Jeff Jones with watch on, but don't quite recognize who the pensive one is (possibly Phillip Stone, Steven's age). Lastly, far right, Mark Davis, already looking like an attorney.

 Jim Kennedy (center, white shirt) added to group, others subtracted.

Glenn King (a first cousin of my mother's) and me at 205 Barton Street, Little Rock, on August 22, 1987, my 33rd birthday and the day I moved with Karen  Jo (after marriage on Aug 8th) to Austin.  Photo by Betty Trulock.  For details of that day, see August 28, 2017 entry in my Ink on His Face journal.

This is from my birthday dinner in 1989, at Mexico Chiquito restaurant in Little Rock.  I guess I'm drinking Dos Equis because they didn't have Negra Modelo, which now goes by the more grammatically correct name Modelo Negra. That was a year of divorce, depression (well that had been going on a couple of years at least) and my dad's death (May 24), so this is a pretty accurate photo for how I was feeling at the time.

On the deck at Bruce Somebody's house (Steven's friend) near the White River at Goshen, near Fayetteville.  Mike McKenzie, former guitar player and singer with a 1980s Little Rock band I was in, Nun Of The Above, brought the drums for me to play.  He also brought a friend, also named Mike, who played a keyboard, and Steven played his acoustic guitar, so we had some live music during this birthday celebration of mine 15 years ago.

Arkansas River at Little Rock 31 May 2019

Photos taken from pedestrian walkway on Main Street bridge. Broadway bridge, upstream and west of Main Street bridge, is shown in top two photos and is also visible in bottom photo taken from North Little Rock side of the river.  A small levee kept the river from flooding downtown North Little Rock.  Downtown Little Rock, shown from the NLR side of the river in bottom photo, is at a higher elevation and wasn't in danger of flooding, although some parts of the two Riverfront Parks (LR and NLR) did flood.

Buffet poolside San Salvador Hilton April '74

On our return trip, flying from San Jose, Costa Rica to New Orleans, from one safe haven to another, our plane touched down in what were unsafe places--mainly for the citizens there--that were about to become even more unsafe:  El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Security at the San Salvador and the Managua airports was controlled by soldiers with automatic weapons.* 

In Managua, walking out to the plane before boarding the flight, passengers were checked with a handheld metal detector.  My pocket knife set of the alarm.  The soldiers took my knife and attached a baggage ticket to it so that ideally it would have been sent along to New Orleans with my baggage.  Not surprisingly, that didn't happen. 

Our next connecting flight, in San Salvador, was delayed for some reason, and the airline had a bus or buses take us to the San Salvador Hilton for a buffet lunch, shown in these two photos. I'd lost the prism or viewfinder to the camera when I was briefly lost on Cano Island, so I took these photos not by holding the camera up to my face but by holding it at waist or chest level and looking down into it.

The infamous El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador took place on 11 December 1981.  Mark Danner's reporting on the massacre took up the entire 6 December 1993 issue of The New Yorker.  This buffet made me think of all the poverty I'd seen on the trip.

*By comparison, security at U. S. airports was only beginning to be taken seriously in 1974, after hijackings to Cuba in the late 60s and early 70s, but not seriously enough that I had to hand over my pocket knife before boarding the plane in New Orleans on the way to Costa Rica.  I don't think we even passed through metal detectors.

On the boat and on Cano island, April '74

I took the photo below on the way back from Cano Island, but I'm using it as a going-to-the-island photo because it's the only one I've found showing all three guides/cooks who went out to the island with us.  The guy on the left, I don't recall his name.  Jésus is piloting the boat, and the guy laughing is the cook, Pito.  There was also a man said to be a recovering alcoholic living in the one cabin on the island.  He had a fairly big puppy staying with him. The seven of us men were the only people on the island.  It's about 12 miles out in the Pacific from Costa Rica, and is now a national park, nature preserve, and popular scuba diving destination, but overnight stays on the island are not allowed. (Limited camping is now allowed.)

 
Above photo was taken as we approached the island. Below photo was taken after we arrived, at high tide. We towed a dinghy behind the main boat (shown here) and used it to come ashore.

This (above) photo provides a good view of the cabin we stayed in.  The sleeping room is just to the left of Mr. José Hardin.  To your left, not his left.

Joe Hardin with his red snapper and me with my mahi-mahi (also called dolphinfish and dorado).

 Jésus fileting a freshly caught fish on the concrete porch of the cabin.  The wooden porch of the sleeping room (in the background) is where I slept, on a hammock.  High tide came right up cabin.

I borrowed Pat Calkins' 35mm SLR camera for the Costa Rica trip.  I'd never used a good camera before and I took about 10 sunset photos changing f-stop and aperture, hoping at least one of my sunset photo would turn out good.  The above one is the best I took, if you don't include the one with puppy (see below).  The second day we were on the island I went for a walk around the perimeter of the island, thinking I'd go all the way around (math question: what's the perimeter--circumference--of a square-mile island if you assume the island is circular?). After getting about halfway around, I found rock cliffs jutting into the ocean prevented me from going any farther.  But in trying to go back, I found the tide had started to come in, and there was one rock tunnel that I'd come through that I couldn't get back through!  I was trapped with no place to go but up into the jungle, which wasn't so easy because unlike the side where the  cabin was, the other side of the island had cliffs overlooking the beach. Plus, although I'd heard that an island like Cano would not have snakes, I really wasn't sure about that, and I'd heard of several highly poisonous Central American snakes, such as the bushmaster. 

It was mid-afternoon when I found myself in this dilemma.  I'm pretty sure I took a photo of the "tunnel" of rock, with waves crashing on it, that I'd come through and I decided was too dangerous  to go back through after the tide started coming in.  It may be that I was only thinking that the camera would get ruined by seawater if I went back through.  Whatever the reason was, I decided I had to climb up the vine covered cliff overlooking the little beach where I was stranded.  It was steep enough that I had to use the vines like ropes to help pull myself up, crouching and kneeling as I went. Then once I was up and able to walk, I was in thick underbrush.  If I remember correctly, I found a stick that I could use to kind of beat the bushes in front of me to scare away any snakes or other, unknown, dangerous critters.

After I took the photo below with Pat's camera, the detachable "roof prism" or whatever it's called somehow got knocked off.  It's still there on the island unless someone found it and took it (unlikely).  The camera still worked without it, but I had to look down into it from above to see an image.

I encountered an old, rusted bulldozer in an open area--which had been bulldozed, I guess--on my little lost journey back to the cabin.  There had been plans to build a resort on the island, but for some reason that never happened.  I found and followed a stream in the jungle, remembering that there was a stream that flowed out of the jungle near the cabin.  It was almost sunset when I got back.  Daddy was worried about what had happened to me, and everybody else was surprised when I came out of the jungle behind the cabin instead of coming up from the beach.

The last two photos are ones my dad took.  When we were coming back into the mouth of the Sierpe river that emptied in to the Pacific, we had to wait for an hour or more for the tide to turn and the ocean waves to become calmer. But the waves didn't become much calmer and we nearly capsized coming into the river from the ocean. The rope holding the dinghy to the back of our boat broke during this moment of near-capsizing and the dinghy floated back out to sea--no way we could go retrieve it.