After OCS, June 1972 to August 1973, Maine and back Part Two

Henry David Thoreau wrote a book called THE MAINE WOODS.  While I had read WALDEN and ON CIVIL DISOBIDIENCE in college, I doubt I read THE MAINE WOODS before experiencing them first hand.

Bill's brother and sister-in-law owned a general store in Waterville.  If I remember rightly, Bill was an accountant.  And I believe they were all up and soon gone.  The first morning after I arose from the dead in that strange but comforting old house, I may have had some light breakfast, but I determined to get up and out the door to do a bit of exploring that first morning. The family had a big dog who accompanied me on my walk into the woods all around their home.  Spring was barely asserting itself as we two took a familiar and worn path.  The leaves of the previous fall were now exposed as the winter snows had all melted or evaporated, leaving puddles of mud and wet leaves behind.

I don't recall coming upon a stream or pond or lake in my first walk.  It was enough to feel the solid earth beneath my Marine combat boots, the one pair I took with me upon departure, along with my Marine cap.  (The second pair of boots I left in the barracks, only to find that they were quickly snapped up by one of the others guys who was staying with the program.  John Ormbrek had been long gone after the first six weeks.  So had Palms.  John Robertson left when I did, but he reverted to his Marine enlisted status and was transferred elsewhere on the Quantico base.) 

I don't even remember how I had gotten to the airport from Quantico, more than likely in another taxi.  And I am certain the Marines paid us enough money upon departure to get us back home, with me flying to Maine instead.

I cannot confess to any profound thoughts or reflections while the dog and I walked.  And I cannot say that I had any luck finding a job in Waterville.  The economy seemed none too vibrant in those days in Maine.  The War in Vietnam was winding down, and the Marines were no longer there.  (Part of the reason I joined the Marines was with the knowledge that they were to be gone by the time I graduated OCS and spent an additional 6 months at The Basic School, the follow-on training to OCS.  Marine OCS grads referred to its initials as The Big Suck and themselves as Lieutenidates.  They may no longer have been officer candidates upon graduation and commissioning, but they still did not feel like full Marine lieutenants either.  But that was all ahead of them and not me.)

I spent the next two weeks merely recharging, I suppose.  I road around town with Bill in his AMC sedan with the steel belted radial tires that always seemed noisy to me.  We made deliveries to more rural and infirm customers of his brother's grocery store.  Bill told me the story of a neighbor we encountered who was none too bright and who, upon felling a tree, miscalculated and whose young daughter's arm got so badly crushed beneath the falling tree, it required amputation.  I had some black licorice ice cream at a  Baskin Robbins store in town.  Spent some time in a house being built a few miles from his brother's house, listening to "Diary" by Bread.  I even remember being hungry and buying a cake of some kind in their store and eating the whole thing myself.

So while I still seemed to have a boundless appetite remaining from OCS, I was doing very little physically.  My weight in the next several weeks and months ballooned to either 180 or 190 pounds while I had always been a trim 160-165.  I was fat.  But I then caught a series of colds, lost the appetite, and managed to lose the weight and returned to 165.  

I believe that one day we drove from Waterville, through Portland and spend a couple of hours at a rocky shoreline.  And we seemed to have driven over into New Hampshire, briefly, so I got a look at Mount Washington in the distance (mentioned in the play OUR TOWN).  But that was about all I remember of my two weeks in Maine.  My destiny was not there but elsewhere, I believed.  And I had to get back to California to determine what I would do next.

But I had already decided to return to Marine OCS and see the guys graduate.  I had kept in touch with Dennis Zito, who had told me in a letter of their trials with "Lt Nickle Nuts", the platoon commander they had grown to dislike and even make fun of.  I told Air New England on the phone that I just could not take another Beech 99 flight and was changing my itinerary:  I would fly out of Portland, Maine, on a Northeast DC-9 Yellowbird to Washington National.  I stayed at a funky but charming and clean motel near Quantico and revisited the barracks and all of the guys before graduation.  I encountered Lt. Nickle at the barracks, and he asked me, "Do you regret your decision [to leave OCS]?"  I thought about his question momentarily and replied, "I don't regret it now, but I hope I never reach a time in my life when I do regret it." 

I had not intended the remark to be prescient, but I suppose it would become so in the next several months until Air Force OTS, and then after I was finally forced to leave the Air Force in 1979.  I had spent almost the entire decade of the 1970's either pursuing one military career after another (more about that later) or in uniform, living one military career or another.  The Marines had been the easiest to join.  Later that fall of  '72 and through the winter of '72-'73, I would have one abortive attempt at Air Force OTS (as a aircraft navigator candidate), Coast Guard OTS, and back around to Air Force OTS once again (as a pilot candidate).

A few months later, I was able to repay Bill and his brother for the kindness they extended to me in allowing my stay with them in Maine after OCS.  Their mother died, never a very strong woman, and they needed someone to pick them up at LAX for the drive to the Southland Motel, where Bill had lived when I knew him.  I was certainly happy to oblige.

The Southland Motel is still there in South Gate, CA.  But the pool I used to love swimming in during the summer of 1965, after I had met Bill in high school and we became friends, is long gone.  Apparently, it got filled in and covered over.  The last time Mike and I drove through our old neighborhoods in South Gate and I saw the motel, it was all parking lot where the pool had been, glistening aqua in the bright sunlight on those endless summer days of my youth.

I am not sure how long after his mother died that his father sold the motel.  I had often helped with the switchboard in the small lobby.  Watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" special on their TV when it debuted in the fall of 1965.  Helped Bill paint one of the motel rooms.  I remember at one point he handed me the paint brush over the glass shower door.  I dipped it in the paint can and proceeded to hand it back to him over the closed door.  For some insane reason he could not explain, he looked at it, reached up, and grabbed the soaked brush by the wet bristles, covering his palm with paint.  Another time, he regaled for me a story of one time when he was up in the attic of the main building, crawling around with a flashlight.  (I have no recollection of what he was looking for in the attic.)  Anyway, he saw something written on one of the wooden beams just above his head.  When he turned the flashlight on the writing, it read, "If you are in a position to read this, you are in trouble." 

Unfortunately, either later that summer '65 or the summer of 1966, I was told by Bill's dad that the insurance for the motel only covered residents of the motel using the pool, not friends of the family.  Were I to get hurt while using the pool, I could sue them and they would not be covered,  nor would my injuries be covered were I to need a hospital visit.  I was crushed but what could they do?  I still helped out at times on the switchboard and helped out around the motel now and then, but the magic of being able to use the glorious pool in summer was gone.  Summers never quite seemed the same when I could buy a Bubble Up soda (because it was cheaper than a 7-UP) and a Payday candy bar and head over to Bill's place because I did not have to work for a living and had the entire summer off, to just vegetate or the two of us play chess.  I think it was at the motel when I first heard Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", released not long after his tragic death at another motel elsewhere in the LA basin.  

The Southland Motel had semi-permanent residents besides guests passing through town.  One older couple I knew were so kind and friendly to me.  When they had to move, and could not take their beloved green parakeet with them, I offered to give him a home.  I had managed to acquire three parakeets then from others who did not want them or could not keep them.  One flew away one day to an unknown fate.  The cantankerous one Les Peters fobbed off on me used to constantly shake his cage to the point that it injured one of his legs and was forced to hop around on one leg after that.  Later, at different times, both that parakeet and the beautiful green one died before Marine OCS, so my mom, who never was a pet person, would not have to take care of them in my absence.