Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

We are Jemima and Easter Yeggs.  Lieutenant Yeggs wants his son to write these reports to keep in touch when we are out having our adventures, and Rev C.S.L., my Dad, doesn’t mind an update either.

In my last letter, I talked about how Mary and Joseph fell asleep in each other’s arms on our couch.  They have continued that type of dating.  Monday through Thursday, they meet in our apartment.  Sometimes Mary even stays awake long enough for Joseph to talk about his day, but after that first night, Joseph has figured out an exit strategy.  He slips out from underneath Mary without waking her up.  He then goes to his apartment.  When Mary awakens the next morning, she showers and changes into clean clothing and we ride the pink bus to school together, sometimes all four of us.  So, both virginities remain intact.  Although, technically, “they slept together that first night, just with their clothes on.”  And sometimes on Saturday night, Mary’s workload for the TV channel has diminished and she has had a couple of real dates with Joseph.

But now, it was Spring Break, and the Turtle needed a decent test run with a lot of new features that were added.  The old team was also back together with Joseph as our additional member.

Mary handed me the rough itinerary.  I read enough to point Easter in the direction of the interstate and then turn west.  I had not fully read the first day’s route before Mary said, “This is great!  We are off on a new adventure, and we definitely have the best team ever!  This is definitely the T.R.U.S.T. Dream Team.”

And Dr. Quinn grumbled, “And how do you get that?! I can give you three reasons why this team is not even a good team!!!”

Mary’s lip quivered.  “Umm.  What are the reasons?”

Dr. Quinn snapped, “We have someone who is redundant on this ship!”

Mary asked, “Redundant?  We are all trained to help the other people.  The redundancy is sort of designed into our school training.  Who is the redundant one?”

Dr. Quinn steamed, “I am absolutely needed with no redundancy at all.  If I am not on board, Easy would not be old enough to drive this jalopy.  Isn’t that right, Easy?”  He nodded since the state required a 25-year-old, commercial driver’s license to cut down on joyriding into an active tornado situation.  Being a school educational activity, that requirement was waved as long as a professor was onboard.  Dr. Quinn continued, “Is there anyone on board who has sold multiple time lapse photography sequences and other photographs to the major networks, including the weather networks on cable television?”

Mary said, “Stinker is the only one of us who has sold any time lapses that I know of.”

Dr. Quinn retorted, “How little you know!  I have sold one, but the Stinker in the front seat has sold four.”  I held up five fingers. Dr. Quinn retorted to me, “Ooooo!  Lah Dee Dah!  It’s five now.  And because we have some high-strung individuals on this ship, we need a counselor.  Joseph Jones is absolutely needed, and we have no backup or cross training for that!  Now, B.B., who is left that is redundant?!”

I turned to Easy, “She keeps calling this a ship.  Can the Turtle float?”  Easy shook his head with a firm negative.  In fact, he had even thought about equipping the Turtle with a snorkel for underwater rescues, shallow water only.  As we snickered, and Mary was thinking of an answer, Dr. Quinn growled in our general direction.

Mary was in tears.  “Ummm, me?  But I am the director, producer, and bottle washer for the television channel.  I am the on air personality.”

Dr. Quinn retorted, “Yeah, big whoop!  You could do all that except the last one, and probably more efficiently from the studio in Tracy.  And you were so kind to say everyone was cross trained.  I have years in front of a camera, a lot more than you, and I think Stinker is very photogenic.”  Her tirade was complete, and she was nearly spent.

But Mary did not know how to keep her mouth shut.  “But there were three reasons.”

Dr. Quinn summoned her reserves.  “The second point is that you need to count the number of members of this ‘dream’ team of yours.”

Mary swallowed hard, “I do not need to count, and it is why I called it a Dream Team.  Like that Olympic Team of old, there are five.  Five people on the court to play basketball or five in the Turtle.”

Dr. Quinn sputtered, but the original Dream Team had players on the bench.  They could not win if they played only five.  They would get tired, and since you are here with your boyfriend, and the two in the front seat who are snickering, knowing I cannot reach them due to the wire cage between compartments, those two idiots are married.  Who is then left?  Alone!!!!”

Mary tried to find a way out of a moving vehicle.  “You, Ma’am.”

Dr. Quinn chided, “So, you get someone to hold onto when the going gets rough, but I have no one and you think that is a DREAM TEAM!!??”

Mary muttered, “I retract my assessment, Ma’am.”

Dr. Quinn was not finished, “And your boy toy is not even a member of this team until he has a code name.  I am the only one who can assign code names.  Let’s see, how about ‘Joe Joe.’”

Joseph finally found his voice, “Ma’am, I hate anyone calling me Joe.  Joe Jones sounds stupid to me.”  Funny, but Jo Jones was Count Basie’s drummer, and he made the name work.

Dr. Quinn finally smiled, “Okay, ‘No Joe’, welcome to the team, Dream or Nightmare, it is now a team.”

Joseph was about to say, “Bu…”  Mary stopped him with a finger to the lips.  Dr. Quinn had spoken and until he screwed up in some way that gave him a more appropriate code name, “No Joe” at least reminded everyone to not call him “Joe”.

We had a required pit stop about an hour later.  Easy had to run diagnostics on the new modifications a few times each day to ensure that everything was ready to work when needed.  That gave me time to pull Mary aside to explain.

I said, “B.B., I was named Stinker because I used some innocent girl talk with Dr. Quinn to explain Christianity and she accepted Jesus.  She gave up her licentious lifestyle, cold turkey.  She had slept her way to the top at the television network, slept her way into the highest grossing salesperson at the network, and on and on.  Then nothing.  You know of PMS and premenstrual syndrome.  She gets postmenstrual syndrome.”

Mary asked, “But isn’t that when you can have sex without worry of getting pregnant for a few days?”

I nodded, “And what do you think Dr. Quinn did?  She took a day off to spend it in bed with as many as she could get to come over.  Every PMS since then, Satan tempts her, and she resists.  And maybe twice a year, the battle between the new Home Wrecker and the old Home Wrecker takes an ugly turn.  She has even kissed Easy and ground her groin against his thigh.  Easy just stood there and did nothing until she was satisfied.  An hour later she would apologize.  But this thing with Joseph not proposing to you, she has the same thing with Dr. Ben Casey.”  At that moment, we looked at Easy and No Joe.  They were whispering something.  It seemed conspiratorial but maybe Home Wrecker’s latest PMS issue had me on the edge of my nerves.

When we were back on the road, all new systems in good shape, Dr. Quinn apologized, as I expected, to everyone and to Mary specifically, but she gave no explanation.  Then she turned to me.  “Everyone, class is in session.  Stinker, give B.B. a grade on her storm tracking plan.  And give me the reasons for the grade.”

I said, “I will give her an ‘A’.  We are staying in the Colorado mountains tonight which keeps us north of the freeze line and at elevation, we should get a lot of snow from the atmospheric river that is blowing in from San Francisco tonight.  I hope to set up as many time lapses as possible to get an idea just from the photos what the snow accumulation is.  Then, if we don’t get snowed in, we go back to the interstate and head south past the remnants of the storm.  This gives us a chance to observe the transition conditions of wintry mix.  We should be safe on the interstate, but we can get off at exits in the cities and big towns to assess traffic problems and such.  And then as we judge where the extreme weather is developing, we can chase the tornadoes.  Then, as we drive to Tracy from the south, we will expect flooding from the snow melt and rain in the rivers south of Tracy.”

Dr. Quinn congratulated Mary on a good weeklong storm chasing plan.  Then she returned to me, “Stinker, are you being a stinker with this grade?  Mary is one of your best friends.  Why not an ‘A+’?”

I sighed, “I would change it to an ‘A+’ if I knew how she got us accommodations in Steamboat Springs.”

Dr. Quinn asked, “Steamboat Springs?  The Resort?  Their hotel prices are three times the price in a non-resort area!”

B.B. said, “No worries!  During the Christmas holidays, my parents introduced me to Aunt Flossie.  She gave me her number and said if we were ever near Steamboat Springs, we should give her a call.  If her cabin was available, it is ours for free.  After all, I’m family.”

Dr. Quinn asked, “Your father’s side or your mother’s?”

B.B. shrugged, “I don’t know.  Until Mom and Dad introduced me, I didn’t know I had an Aunt Flossie.  They are tight-lipped about family.  They just said, ‘Here’s your Aunt Flossie.’  Then one bit of conversation after another and all we have to do is go by the real estate office and pick up the keys.”

Dr. Quinn said, “Okay then, Steamboat Springs, here we come!”

The night’s stay was like a dream.  The city was beautiful.  But after we dined, we were all busy.  I was working hard setting up a time lapse on every balcony, and there were several.  It was more ‘lodge’ than ‘cabin.’  I was glad I had my camera and then all the cameras from the meteorology department.  Storm Chase One, being a fully functioning professional team, actually had the week off.  Home Wrecker and Easy were busy setting up snow gages, anemometers, and barometers.  We had the usual thermometers and humidity instruments also.  As the observer, No Joe was spending time watching each of us and asking questions.  To get college credit, he’d have to write a report on his experiences about what he learned.  After B.B. set up some video cameras, B.B. was in the living room where she had her computer and our portable server set up.  She pinged the various electronic devices to ensure that the data was flowing.  We would have all the data, her video and my photos stored on her laptop, our little server device, and uploaded to the cloud if the WiFi survived the storm.  Then, the only hand entered data would be the snow gages.

There was a fire pit on the deck, away from our instruments and plenty of firewood.  The guys summoned their caveman instincts and built a fire.  In spite of the cold, we gathered around the pit.  Dr. Quinn and Easy noticed that the fire was melting the snow that was coming down.  You could see this cone where the hot gases from the fire were rising, melting the snow, so there was this empty space where the hot gases were rising and snow everywhere else.  They got into a bit of an argument about sublimation, going from solid to gas and skipping the liquid phase.  Then the argument spilled over into how engineers and meteorologists see radiation heat transfer.  At one point, she reached over and kissed him on the head.

Home Wrecker whispered, “If Stinker had chased after Ben Casey and left you for me, I would be jumping your bones right now instead of freezing my tail off next to the fire.”

Easy said, “Home Wrecker, just weather the storm going on inside you.  Within a couple of days, you will be back to normal.”

She replied, “You are so understanding, which makes you even more desirable.  Oh, how I hate it.  I am going to go back inside and make sure the data is downloading in one direction and uploading in the other.  Then, I’ll call my two-bit boyfriend.  Don’t tell him what his nickname is.”  With that, it was the two couples by the fire.  I have no idea what No Joe and B.B. were talking about, but I am thinking that it was not about sublimation or the albedo effect.

The following morning, there was feet of snow everywhere.  We called the university with links to our videos and time lapses.  They got those out to the networks and both B.B. and I got sales. Of course, we reserved the rights to also use them within our programming.

Easy became like a caged lion.  He called the department of transportation, and he got the means to contact the plow operator plowing up the mountain on highway 40 from Denver.  Easy wanted to meet the plow halfway, but with steep slopes, the plow operator did not like that idea.  Easy talked about having done a lot of snow plowing in the past with the modifications he had made to the Turtle, but the operator made a different suggestion.  His route was to plow through Steamboat Springs and then turn around.  The plow to the west would plow into Steamboat Springs from the other side.  If Easy wanted to help, he could plow the main highway through the town and that would get the Turtle crew on the road a little faster.  They planned to meet at the Ore House, on the eastern edge of the town, so that we could have a photo op with the plow operator.  He got excited that the entire regular crew was here.  He wanted to meet Home Wrecker, B.B., and Stinker.  Besides he just wanted to get up close with the Turtle.  Easy made a media splash as he plowed the streets.  It’s not every day that you see something that looks like a big turtle plowing the streets of town.  He came back to the cabin and helped pack everyone.  We then moved to the Ore House restaurant to await the plow from the east.  The restaurant staff wanted pictures with the Turtle also, and they came out with complimentary mugs filled with hot chocolate.

Fred, the snowplow operator, soon arrived.  As we were taking pictures and swapping cameras so that everyone got to have a set, Fred said, “I guess you are Aunt Flossie’s latest victims.”

Everyone’s heart stopped.  Home Wrecker was getting angry.  Mary started to cower.

Fred explained that Aunt Flossie travelled to the hometowns of celebrities and introduced herself simply as Aunt Flossie.  She loved giving her house away to celebrities for the week or weekend.  The celebrities were duped into thinking she was really an aunt that did not visit much.  After the visit, Aunt Flossie would sell soiled sheets as being where Stinker and Easy’s baby was conceived, or maybe Mary and Joseph were not virgins after all.  But if you got your lawyers on the phone quickly, she hated publicity.  She counted on the celebrity thinking that any publicity was good publicity, even if it was all fake.  She sold over one hundred sets of sheets that had never been on the bed when the latest pop singer stayed there.  Aunt Flossie loved her scams and she had made a lot of money off letting people stay for free.

Dr. Quinn was already on the phone and Mary gave her all of Aunt Flossie’s contact information.  This was a near miss, but we had a long lecture on our way east to Denver and then south into New Mexico.

Driving across the northeast corner of New Mexico, past Capulin Mountain, we found minimal patches of icy roads.  Easy purposefully put us into a skid, in a safe place, just to illustrate how to get out of one.  Really, with the new safety features on the Turtle, it was pretty hard to get it to skid, but we got something that we could use for a public service announcement on the Storm Chasing Channel.

The potential tornado outbreak never developed into much.  We caught an EF1 ripping through a farmer’s field.  We would not have known the rating if it were not some damage to a shed and a line of trees, but No Joe got to see a twister from close up.

On the way back to Tracy, however, we ran into swollen streams.  The frozen weather went north of Tracy and the atmospheric river dumped a lot of rain south of the city and west of it.  Rain is a snow eater.  So you had the inches of rain plus the melted snow and the rivers were over their banks.

To get a good view of the flood and how it was spreading, B.B. suggested we pull over.  I was taking video and photographs, as was Home Wrecker.  Easy and No Joe were whispering again.  Something was up, but they had kept it a secret so far.

Then B.B. heard something no one else heard.  She ran to Turtle’s emergency gear locker and retrieved a rope.  She yelled, “Grab the rope when you float past it!”  At this point, we saw a little boy in the water.  B.B. threw the rope like a seasoned veteran.  The boy grabbed it and she held on tight.  She yelled for Easy to tie the rope off; the current was really strong.  Easy tied a bowline and then slapped it into the winch hook.

B.B. yelled, “He’s not able to keep his head up.  I’m going in!”  As No Joe screamed “No,” she wrapped something around the rope and dived into the water.  Gripping the rope with what we found out was a washcloth, she slid down the rope just in time to catch the boy before he went under.  If he went under, he would have let go of the rope also.  As B.B. emerged from the water with the boy, she yelled for Easy to winch her in, but the winch was fully retracted.  Easy and Joseph pulled with everything they had.  Home Wrecker joined them.  With one point fixed and B.B. working her way to the bank, they got them both to safety.

Home Wrecker cradled the boy in her arms and brought him to the Turtle.  No Joe wrapped his arms around B.B.  He asked, “What were you thinking?  You could have drowned with the boy!”

B.B., in the midst of shivers from the icy cold water, said, “I was all career through high school and college, but Mom and Dad thought I needed some fun.  For three years, I went to Rescue Camp.  It was all instinct.”

I got the hi-tech sleeping bags unzipped and we used them to wrap up the two soaked river rats.

Home Wrecker still had the boy in her arms, “What’s your name, young man?”

He said, “Michael.  Michael Rowe.”

She asked, “Like the song?”  And she started singing the song softly.

Later, with his clothes off, we dressed him in a pair of Easy’s pajama pants, far too large, and a Steamboat Springs T-shirt he had gotten for Blaise, again large, but not too bad.  Michael talked about how his family had just moved from Montana.  They were going across a bridge to their farm when the bridge disappeared beneath them.  His Dad got out of their pickup truck, and he followed.  The current was so strong, he never saw his Mom get out, but she was right behind him.

Easy was making a habit of calling the authorities.  He told them Michael’s story.  The sheriff’s deputies had already found the pickup truck.  The mother had gotten hung up on something.  She drowned without ever leaving the truck.  If the father did not survive, they might never find him.  Easy explained that in talking with Michael further, his parents were both only children and the grandparents were gone.  If the father did not make it, Michael had no one.

The sheriff’s deputy explained that the road north of them was washed out.  He suggested a route further south, back to the west to higher ground and then back north to reach Tracy.  It was highly irregular, but since they could not reach the county seat, they asked if the Turtle team could take custody of Michael.

Easy said, “That’s okay.  Right now, with a gun to her head and a pry bar, I doubt if you could separate Home Wrecker from Michael.”

The Deputy said, “I need more than Home Wrecker.  I watch your show, but what is her real name?”

Easy said, “Dr. Elvira Quinn, PhD.”

The Deputy asked, “Elvira?!”

Easy sighed, “Just a name, but she is making it a good name.”  Easy gave a few phone numbers since Michael would probably be at Lily the Pink while Home Wrecker was working, including storm chasing trips.  With addresses for both locations, the deputy said he’d contact us with information on the father.  That came a few hours later.  The swift water response unit responded to what was thought to be someone hanging from a tree limb, but Michael’s father had died, and his clothing was tangled with the limb.  Michael was officially an orphan. He was twelve and in the seventh grade. His birthday was in July.  With Home Wrecker holding Michael in her arms and the seatbelt wrapped around both, he might have found a new home, if they would accept a single mother adoption.

At one point, Home Wrecker told me, “Stinker, I heard about you saying Mary and Joseph slept together.  If you start talking about how Home Wrecker is ‘with child’, you will never graduate.  Got it?”

I snickered, “Yes, ma’am.  Loud and clear.”

When we pulled into the Lily the Pink parking lot where Dr. Quinn and Mary had parked their cars, Easy parked in the middle of the lane instead of a parking place.  He flipped on the high beams, and he positioned the spotlight.  With no one noticing, No Joe had left the Turtle and suddenly, he and Dr. Ben Casey were each on one knee in the highly lit area.  I now knew what the conspiracy was all about.  Home Wrecker and B.B. staggered toward their boyfriends.  Both men had rings with large rocks in their hand.  Joseph was dirt poor, but GrandPa had said he had a spare ring collecting dust.  They liked the double wedding in the Crystal Mountain so much that they wanted to make a double proposal.  The double wedding is planned for the summer solstice, 20 June at 3:50pm Central.  You know, meteorologists getting their geek on.  And somehow, Ben Casey knew all about Michael Rowe and he was elated that they would start out with a family.

Credits

The 1992 Dream Team was the first team of professional basketball players from the USA in the Olympics.  The Olympic team has been called the Dream Team since then, but the first team was the most memorable, catching a few greats who were about to retire and some of the greats of the game at that time.  The team, listed in order of how much they scored in the game against Croatia, were Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullen, Magic Johnson, Clyde Drexler, David Robinson, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Christian Laettner (the only amateur at the time), and Larry Bird.  Yes, B.B., there were more than five, just only five playing at one time.

Checking prototype systems is a must on a periodic basis.  Even when not in use, driving down the road might lead to something shifting out of place and it might not work when needed.

My choice of Steamboat Springs is accidental, just a place west of Denver.  The Ore House is a restaurant on Highway 40 southeast of town.  This is not a compensated plug.  And Aunt Flossie is pure fiction, but I have heard of such scams.

To an engineer, snow does not sublimate, but in dry environments under a clear sky and in the sun, the time from melting a single snowflake to evaporating is very short considering the size of a snowflake.  It just looks like it goes from ice to vapor in one step.  And thinking of albedo, meteorologist restrict the wavelength of radiation in their considerations, and they focus on the heat that is reflected (in percentage form – the albedo), but the engineer looks at radiation in general, regardless of wavelengths, and speaks of emissivity, the fraction (percentage) of heat that can be transmitted from the hot object or absorbed by the cool object, with the part of the heat that they do not care about being reflected.  To many this is two sides of the same coin, but the discussions can get heated, and Easter Yeggs is getting two majors, one on each side of the argument.  Besides, he wanted to see if Dr. Quinn was over her version of PMS – obviously, not quite.

If Michael had been stronger and not exhausted (exaggerated by the cold water), he might have held his head above water and held onto the rope.  With one end fixed, the rope and boy should swing like a pendulum toward the side of the river, and hopefully into more shallow waters.  Under the circumstances, Mary had to take the next step before Michael both slipped below the water surface and let go of the rope.  Energy in the body ultimately is related to heat.  In cold water, the available energy drops faster than in warmer conditions.

The situation with Michael Rowe’s parents driving over a bridge is a sense of false security.  Under normal circumstances, the bridge is sturdy, but the flood washed away part of the foundation that the bridge used to stay up.  With the weight of the pickup truck and a little vibration of the water flow and the truck movement, the bridge fell into the raging river, one span at a time.  I included this as a reminder to never drive around barricades.  And do not trust small bridges.  Never drive over water-covered roads.  And back to the barricades, I have had the experience of the flood being so widespread that the local police ran out of barricades and I made it home that day only by God’s Grace.

Here are the Highwaymen singing (on the Ed Sullivan Show), “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.”