Higher Learning for Higher Activities: A Search for the Law of Laws

By R L Bishop

Higher Learning for Higher Activities is the story of a young man who joins the military and, shortly after, loses his father. His life is changed forever from this sudden loss of the greater stability his father gave him, and his military career and his marriage go down in flames. Coping with life becomes more and more difficult. His only solace is the freedom the road gives him, and hitchhiking becomes a way of life and a search to find anything to fill the emotional vacancy in his soul. One day, through a series of unbelievable coincidences, he finds something that holds his attention and begins a four decades-long journey that eventually leads to an unveiling he never could have imagined. Only in retrospect can he see the steps that brought him to a place in his life he didn't have a clue he was headed toward. And when he arrived, he found the difficulty in his acceptance was his own intellect. His learning had been, as his teacher stressed, step-by-step, and so much had to be left behind to make way for the new. There were many times he thought he was a slacker, but he never gave up. His love of the search and his perseverance finally pay off, and he learns the truth of the Law of Laws.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781646282203

Book preview

Higher Learning for Higher Activities 

A Search for the Law of Laws

R L Bishop

Copyright © 2019 Lawrence Edwards

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64628-219-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64628-220-3 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This is a story of learning. Not a teaching. If it was a teaching, it wouldn’t fill a page. There are no teachers, but there can be many. There are no books, but you may try to read them all. No levels or ladders to climb with expensive, gleaming enlightenment, waiting at the top. No levels or ladders means no reaching for, only adding to. No one is ahead or behind. We’re all at the same place, waiting for whatever’s next. No steps, except the accepted knowledge that all learning is truly a step-by-step activity.

I’ll help the chronology and my memory with some mostly unedited excerpts from old journals and probably a few tangents here and there. My teacher and her teacher stressed simplicity and gratefully, so will I. I don’t want to use words that denote any kind of limitation, division, separation, demarcation, stratification, delineation, or words that suggest containment of something that can’t be contained. This story must build inclusiveness and not further the ingrained concept of something apart from us.

And then there’s the idea of dimensions. Just how many dimensions do we need, anyway? We have four, counting time, or five if we include the twilight zone, but what about all the other dimensions? For instance, I wonder which dimension that dude’s from? The other day, a friend told me that science has now proven there are ten dimensions. That’s fine, but why only ten? Maybe there’s more, but that’s all they can deal with right now. Sorry, dimensions, that’s your limit. And of course, now that they’ve been recognized, we’ve got to keep those dimensions under strict control. They better stay in line until we figure out what to do with them.

Some folks combine dimensions and time to talk about space travel using dimensional conduits—wormholes. I don’t know much about dimensional travel or time travel, and I don’t believe in wormholes, but I have been shown, very convincingly, that traveling outside time or where there isn’t any time is possible by manipulating matter with vibration, using electromagnetic energy. There are rates of vibration where time doesn’t exist. It’s also a means of traveling where the speed of light isn’t part of the conversation, possibly approaching the speed of thought.

A group of folks were doing pretty well with this concept that began over a decade earlier on the East Coast and finally came to fruition in southern California during the early sixties. They had developed a vehicle that offered a total break from oil. Most of their neighbors in the rural community were used to seeing the vehicles popping in and out around the valley, leaving their colored rings in the night sky. No one was freaking out, and the tests were quietly proceeding. Somehow, the word got around a little too far. The Feds rolled up one day with a couple of big rigs, one of them pulling an oversize trailer, escorted by a cavalry of black vans full of gun-toting G-men. They took everything. Our own government shut them down for allegedly attempting to overthrow the economy of the United States. The last I heard, the craft, their big three-seater, was nine stories underground at a military base in Arizona, being fitted with weapons.

Earlier, when the craft was a harmless, wondrous, beautiful dream come true, the group demonstrated a much smaller vehicle to General Motors. They flew a four-footer in a large conference room in downtown Los Angeles. At the end of their sales pitch, they were told by GM, You can put up as many as you want, and we’ll just shoot them down. Maybe GM called someone. Pants crapping fear of change. Oh no, how much money is this going to cost us? Too bad, change for the better can be tough. Any change can be tough. The economy could certainly adapt. It wouldn’t need to be drastic. If they had to, the car companies could switch over to producing these craft, just like they did when World War II broke out.

The entire automotive industry instantly went into wartime production. Airplanes, tanks, trucks, and jeeps instead of cars, and other industries rapidly adjusted to a wartime footing. It was for the country, a national emergency. Could we do that again if faced with imminent change for the whole world? This change has more argument behind it than any of us could ever read. An unbelievable choice between oil and worldwide, free energy, and the higher infrastructure needed for its implementation. There’s higher knowledge, higher laws, and higher action, that comes along with the kind of power these vehicles use. And it’s not just the vehicles. It would change everything, not just transportation. Free energy. The group was working with knowledge, personally handed down from Nikola Tesla, right before his death, to the man whose initials (OTC) appeared on the craft.

When Mr. C______ was a young man, working his way through college, he worked as an accountant at the same hotel where Tesla spent his last years. Tesla took a liking to him and apparently told the young man some things about vibrational frequencies that almost no one knows about today. If the government has any of Tesla’s knowledge, as they’re reported to, I’m sure they can’t figure it out. I completely believe this. I even understand some of it. It’s all about vibrational changes.

Unfortunately, there was a major problem for the passengers. Memory was shredded. One man said it took him ten years to completely remember a particular excursion. Three guys went on a test run. To the onlookers in the warehouse, they were gone fifteen seconds. To the guys in the craft, it seemed like nothing happened. Either that, or they had gone and come back in four seconds. Their boss tried to warn them of possible vibrational challenges. He said they needed to shift from brain up to mind because their own vibration would be changed, along with the craft. They knew what the craft did, but they had no idea what it would do to them. After their excursion, the boss had them come up to his office for debriefing. He told them to empty the pockets of their blue coveralls. The men experienced shocking disbelief, as they unloaded rocks, grass, various sticks, and pieces of wood on the desk. The boss told them they’d been gone almost twenty minutes. Why couldn’t they remember?

The first time I heard that, I was reminded of something called heightened awareness. I’d learned about it in Carlos Castaneda’s books. Poor Carlos, forced to remember what took place during episodes of heightened awareness due to the vibration involved. It sounded like similar reactions to the same thing, vibration. Carlos and the other apprentices were taught in normal awareness and heightened awareness. Over a decade later, they were forced to remember what they’d learned over the years while in heightened awareness. The difference being, the apprentices knew there was something to remember. All of it raised vibration. It’s too simple to travel outside time. It only needs a slightly higher vibratory rate. Required vibrational differences, provided by electromagnetic energy, were produced by spinning specially made platonic solids through multiple U-shaped magnets. An electric gyroscope. Like I said, it’s too simple. Just a matter of a little more vibration.

They’d even worked in the idea of floating houses. Science fiction becoming reality. Massive rockets, with their tons of solid or liquid fuel, wouldn’t be needed for the half hour trip to the moon. Be there now or very shortly. Automobiles would go the way of the iceman, the guy who used to deliver ice around town for people’s iceboxes until the refrigerator replaced him. The same way the automobile put the poor guy downtown out of a job, scooping up horse poop in front of the bank. Just like putting the logging industry out of its misery by growing hemp. And it makes sense coming from Tesla because, as we know, Tesla knew a lot about frequency and vibration. Maybe frequencies of vibration equal dimensions. They very well may be, in someone else’s language and perception, but I don’t care.

Science fiction uses dimensions to help move the story along with a quick fix to introduce a hero or an icky multidimensional monster through a galactic portal. But the best thing about dimensions is how they’re great for helping you get to one of those places you can’t get to from here. Mainstream science reluctantly dabbles in dimensional thinking because they don’t know how to use frequency or vibration, except within their own established parameters. Remember, only ten dimensions. They have the ability to measure vibration, but again, only what they’re allowed to. Even science is tied down by its own long-established dogma and doctrine. At least they’ve figured out that there are vibrations of light that humans are unable to see. Whether or not there are unlimited higher dimensions doesn’t concern us. It doesn’t matter and doesn’t apply since we can only work in the dimension we are presently occupying and there’s so much more to this one. We may have an experience that we swear could only happen on another world, and we’ll still be right here.

An eye-opening experience I had many years ago thoroughly convinced me that as far as I needed to know, there are only two dimensions. I was at home doing the dishes, when a couple of friends stopped by. They greeted me, sat down at the kitchen table, and continued their conversation. I continued doing the dishes. Shortly, I heard them talking rather poorly about a mutual friend. My next thought was, How the hell can people who are supposedly so hip, so enlightened, and so holy talk such shit about a good friend? Abruptly, they stopped talking. Oops, did I say that out loud? I turned around and saw their lips moving, but I couldn’t hear them. There was total silence.

Before I could start to marvel, a movement to my lower left pulled my attention down to the floor. The cat must want out. Below me, instead of the cat, were dark, menacing clouds in miniature. The foot-and-a-half-thick dark gray, black, and even blacker clouds were swirling and boiling all over the kitchen floor. They looked agitated. I tried to see through the clouds, looking for the floor. Where was this darkness coming from? Is it smoke? Is the house on fire? Something in my equilibrium screamed at me. If I leaned any farther forward, I was going to fall into that sea of darkness.

A quick shot of fear and adrenaline pulled my attention back up. I wanted to see if my friends noticed the new floor. Instead, my attention was grabbed by something that shouldn’t be there. The air above the dark clouds was sparkling. It reminded me of a few times skiing, when it got so cold the water molecules froze, causing the air to sparkle. The silver sparks popping in and out and flying around me now were much more energetic. They were everywhere, even going through me. There was a brightness in the room. I looked up. Where my roof had been, I saw the sparkling air in the kitchen converge with the sparkling sky and keep going and going, right past the treetops.

Apparently, my brain wasn’t ready for this glimpse of eternity, and I snapped back to my normal kitchen. I heard my friends talking again as if there hadn’t been any interruption. The dark clouds were gone, and the kitchen ceiling was back the way it should be. The show had only been for me. I don’t remember feeling any intensity during the vision, but I was certainly coming down from somewhere, standing there looking in the sink. Wow, that was interesting. Was I shown how little darkness there really is? A foot and a half against eternity? The darkness doesn’t stand a chance. Were the clouds human negativity and everything above it Divine? That’s what I saw. It could be that simple.

Whatever took place that day in the kitchen is the reason I’m completely content with only two dimensions. If there’s no dimensions, there’s no divisions. If there’s no divisions, there’s no separation. Most of the time, even giving something a name causes separation. We’re all looking for inclusiveness, whether we know it or not. I’m going to use Jesus’s words where I can because of familiarity and simplicity. When we apply the reality of vibration to his words, a new understanding comes forth after waiting two thousand years. I’m going to use simple words that make sense, words that anyone can claim as their own. And it’s okay if I repeat myself. It might even be necessary.

This is a story of learning. It’s also about the desire to learn and when that desire becomes a need. But first, the desire to learn needs a start. There’s always a memory of something we read or something we were told or an experience we had that set us on our spiritual path. It may have been a buildup of several factors presenting a question or questions that couldn’t be dealt with from the present frame of mind. Without the right frame of mind, the answer to your question could evoke, I don’t believe that, I didn’t really feel that, I just can’t understand that, That’s impossible, That’s not what it says in the Bible, or total dismissal and denial. Then what happens? A new understanding might be needed. It could be the beginning of your spiritual search, or it could mean the end. A common story. It’s also common to see a desire for the unknown goes back to our childhoods, lying in our sleeping bags in the backyard, looking for Sputnik, but hoping for a UFO. Or listening to bigfoot stories and ghost stories around a campfire. I was so obsessed with bigfoot, I spent a good chunk of my vacation money on two original homemade issues of On the Track of the Sasquatch, in Willow Creek. We stopped there for lunch on the way to the coast in the midsixties.

I read everything I could find that hinted at strangeness. I read about Betty and Barney Hill in sixth grade, and I still don’t like those little gray suckers. The older kids at church shared their newfound tales from the Bible of people taken to heaven by angels in their fiery chariots. One of those chariots was described as a wheel within a wheel. I remember the popularity. And it seemed like I was always into pyramids and everything else Egyptian. Also in sixth grade, I discovered Donnelly’s Atlantis, but when I asked my Sunday school teacher if Atlantis sunk at the same time as Noah’s flood, it was the wrong question. We would not be discussing it. The Atlantis question stayed with me my whole life.

During my childhood, we camped at Mt. Lassen several times a year, where I absorbed every bit of geology and volcanism all around me. I knew the naturalists’ talks as well as they did. I asked them questions they couldn’t answer. My love of geology also stayed with me my whole life. I had to know how Atlantis sunk. For my own convenience, and some kind of closure, I put everything I’d learned into a small book on neocatastrophism about twenty years ago. I found out in a college geology class in the late seventies, that my ideas on crustal movement had been in place for over a decade. Plate Tectonics. They finally accepted that the Ring of Fire was burning because it was turning. It would take decades, but I would discover several reasons for a continent’s destruction.

Without a doubt, stuff can really go wrong on this planet. I would always be a renegade, promoting the existence of a day when the sun went backward through the sky, the most powerful earthquake ever known shook the planet, oceans left their beds and marched across continents, a thousand-mile-an-hour wind shredded everything, and what wasn’t consumed by earth-fire was now covered by mud and ice. Humanity is returned to the Stone Age. However, the powers that be confine the crust to moving no more than two inches per year. Initially, I understood the argument was settled a long time ago, but my own meager research found it still alive and serious. I found out there were threats made to publishers that could’ve ruined someone, either academically or financially or both. Simply put, the idea of cataclysms throws a wrench in the accepted timeline of history that academics hold so dear. I became a staunch supporter of global, cataclysmic earth changes.

Once upon a time, scientific facts were decided by how many guys you could get on your side of the room. The Uniformitarians, the dudes afraid of change, got more guys on their side of the room, and the Catastrophists, champions of the obvious, were pushed aside forever. It happened during the birth of the science of geology, sometime in the late eighteenth century. The Uniformitarians argued that since there were no cataclysms occurring now, they can’t be real. However, they could see and measure the long slow action of erosion over time. I heard the vote was pretty close. It’s too bad because many more of the sciences could benefit from the concept of catastrophism. Ages upon this planet are designated by extinctions. For some reason or other, every era or age or whatever has an extinction level event marking its ending or beginning.

Over the years I found several causes, mixed and matched, for such an event, and it can happen quite suddenly. It’s almost comparable to a government denial, take your pick, where qualified people, in this case scientists, deny the 100 percent accurate record sitting in front of them. They can’t ignore the layers of history looking back at them, but somehow, they continue to deny it. Sound familiar? The stratification in the crust of the earth doesn’t lie. The real problem for the Catastrophists was the ability of the earth’s crust to instantly and completely recycle itself, while erasing everything of any previous age, including the cataclysm.

So many unanswerable questions in geology, archaeology, anthropology, climatology, stratigraphy, paleontology, and many other sciences are answered by applying the action and aftermath of a global catastrophe. I’ll keep it short and just say that layers of animals show cataclysms occurring around six thousand years ago and twelve thousand years ago. Creation myths around the world are actually stories of cataclysms. And wouldn’t you know it, it helps us look back beyond those twelve thousand years to the preflood civilizations. What’s so scary about discovering preflood civilizations? Probably afraid of finding something they don’t understand, but more than anything, they can’t have their long adhered to timeline screwed up.

How can there be advanced civilizations when mainstream history has man barely stepping out of the Stone Age? There are recent sites that require making that leap. Some folks noticed the erosion in the walls around the Great Sphinx and placed it preflood. Does that mean the pyramids are also that old? The hints of preflood civilizations are easy to find all over the planet. I’d rather side with a lot of folks, a lot smarter and more educated than I am, saying there are indeed cataclysms, and the crust can move much, much more than two inches in a very short time. I had to go to the extreme to find the truth.

In my last semester of high school, my senior English class had a single writing assignment for the entire semester. We could write about anything we wanted to. I wanted to write about all the cool stuff in the Bible, angels in vehicles, prophets going for rides with them, Stonehenge, the pyramids, and any UFO stuff I had for a genuine junior birdman, Ancient Astronaut term paper. When I presented my outline and synopsis, a couple of weeks into the semester, my English teacher told me it was too controversial. I couldn’t say Jesus was an alien or say he was beamed up. I didn’t write a paper, but my interest doubled or tripled in this area. Controversy struck a note in me, especially if religion was involved.

About a year and a half later, I came across Erich von Daniken’s book, the birth mother of all ancient space travelers who came to earth theories, and it pissed me off. He stole my idea. No matter, he was put in a position to do the research, and I think he did what was required, at the time. It would seem this knowledge needed to come through, regardless of the blowback.

Something else happened early that spring. I had an experience that would stay in the background until many years later, when it would become the driving force in my spiritual life. By the summer before my sophomore year, I had managed to permanently get out of going to church. My mother was the churchgoer. I think my dad was on my side. My excuse was, I had grown out of my nice clothes. This was true. I was already starting my eleven-inch growth spurt. My dad wouldn’t go because they were all a bunch of damn hypocrites.

It was the spring of my senior year when, quite unexpectedly, three friends who were still involved in the church asked me to sing with them, in a quartet, at the church, in front of everybody. They were serious. All of us were in the high school band or choir, those three were in the church choir, and one of the guys and I were in a garage band. I don’t know why they asked me, and I don’t know why I said yes. The experience happened at Wednesday night choir practice. There weren’t a lot of people there, but this was the first time we sang in front of anyone after working on the song for two weeks. It would be our dress rehearsal.

We were singing along, when I felt a strong jolt of electric energy fill my upper body. It didn’t affect my singing, but I was puzzled by the way I was splitting my attention between singing and this feeling. It wasn’t a lot, but if its intent was to get my attention, it sure as hell did. Most of the feeling went away when we stopped singing, but the little bit that was left managed to stay with me until that fall, when it apparently went into hibernation.

The following Sunday the song went fantastic. Later, we heard some secondhand grumbling over our song choice. It was about Jesus but carried the irreverence of being a top forty radio hit. I don’t think it had any drug references, but there was always someone to think so back then. I don’t remember the song, but we may have innocently pushed the envelope.

In the remnant of that feeling, which had its own way of quietly annoying me, was something I couldn’t understand. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going away. What was I feeling? I was sure I’d never felt it before. Where did it come from? Why did it happen while I was singing in church? What is going on? I had to ask. I must have asked someone at church, because by God, I was saved. I had opened my heart to the Lord, and I didn’t even know it. I sought counsel for the next step in my new Christian life. So what do I do now? Mainly, the advice was I should probably just keep loving Jesus, read my Bible, and pray a lot. I read and studied my Bible, probably more in that short time than the rest of my life. I even got baptized and became a good Christian boy and started spending more and more time in church activities.

Right before high school graduation, something else happened. I’m sure this incident contributed to my eventual dislike of organized religion. We were getting ready for regular church after Sunday school. People were coming in and milling around. I was standing at the back of the church, enjoying the warm spring breeze, blowing through the double doors. I was setting out a display of free Bibles, when I noticed people looking and pointing toward the far doors. I found the object of their attention, a long-haired hippie guy, standing just outside. He was barefoot and dressed as he would be any other day. The doors were open, but the guy was just hanging out and glancing inside, as if he was looking for someone. I quickly noticed people ignoring him as they came in, even though he appeared to be greeting them. Inside, they were obviously talking to their friends and looking back at him. What the hell, are they just going to ignore this guy? Aren’t we Christians? Shouldn’t we ask him if he needs our help? It really bothered me, enough to make me take action, while at the same time thinking, Who am I to do something? I tried not to look at the hippie guy, but I couldn’t help seeing what was going on right in front of me. I felt so embarrassed, along with the terrible angst I felt for that poor young man.

Something must have pushed me, and I walked over to the hippie guy and invited him in. He thanked me for the invite but declined, saying he wasn’t properly dressed and had only come to see if we could spare some of the Word. Spare some of the Word? Yes, we could. You bet your sweet ass we could. I went over to my table and picked up a big armload of Bibles. As I walked back to the double doors, I could feel all those people watching me and judging me and, even worse, still judging the young man, who only wanted some of the Word. As I piled the Bibles into his arms, I pictured a group of hippies sitting around a big kitchen table, with plenty of the Word for a Bible study group. Immediately following that thought, my stomach dropped, realizing I was probably the only person there that would’ve given him that many Bibles. He thanked me over and over.

I watched him walk away and saw some kids waving at him from their old and slightly smoking brown station wagon. My stomach lurched again when the thought hit me: those kids could have gone to Sunday school this morning. Now I was pissed. I knew all those people were looking at him as a dirty hippie, but after I saw his family and their car, it was obvious they were poor and probably didn’t have any Sunday clothes. I wanted to go back in there and yell at those judgmental assholes, but I didn’t. I looked straight ahead as I walked back across the open area, past my free Bible display, and continued on, right out the double doors on the far side. I never went back. Even though it scared the crap out of me, I really, really enjoyed giving that young man those Bibles.

That day, I think I finally understood what my dad meant about all the damn hypocrites. That was it for church. Oh well. I couldn’t know it back then, but that feeling I experienced during our song would become the spiritual backbone, the mainstay, and the guiding force of my spiritual life. It would become the essence of something called the Search.

Something else happened that spring. My GPA sucked. I never did live up to my potential, the theme song of my education, but either my ACT or SAT scores were good enough to get me into Chico State as a freshman. I’ve done plenty of what-ifs when it comes to going to college way back then. Looking back, I would’ve probably become a teacher, and with my addictive personality, I would’ve easily ended up with an in-and-out-of-rehab cocaine problem. Looking back in that manner helps add some small validation to my life.

High school life has a cyclical nature for young men, especially seniors. Every spring, armed forces recruiters came on campus looking for suckers. I had registered for the draft, but by 1971, I think it was starting to wind down. If you got your notice, you could always enlist. I had no desire to enlist anywhere until a close friend asked me to enlist with him on the buddy system, and we’d always get to be together.

Enlist with whom? The Coast Guard. I was familiar with only one small aspect of the Coast Guard, the guys on bar patrol we gave our extra herring to when I was working on the charter boat. Every time I saw them, they were fishing in their twenty-six-foot motor surfboat. Enlisting proved to be the choice that decided the rest of my life. We signed away the next four years and decided we would take the oath only six weeks after graduation.

Bootcamp would start in mid-July. Before that, I took about a ten-day road trip. The thing I remember well about that trip was how much I was looking forward to it. I packed and repacked my new orange nylon backpack with its aluminum frame. Before I went in the military, I was going to be a hippie for a few days. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to grow my hair out. I couldn’t have known it then, but that pack and I had many miles to look forward to. I drove to Coos Bay in my dad’s pickup, left it where I used to work, and hitchhiked to Seattle. I stayed for a couple of days with family friends and went back. After boot camp, I only saw my buddy once.

I survived boot camp. Eight years of playing trombone got me in the band. Almost every week there was a parade or some admiral retired, so we got to go off base all the time. We went to Seattle for a week during Seafair, where we got to play the national anthem at the start of the hydroplane races and be in a movie. We also spent five days in Dallas, Texas. Never saw so many bugs. We looked the best and sounded the best of any military band, and our drill team was unmatched. We always gave the Air Force band a hard time. We called them the bus drivers. I happened to see a Coast Guard Honor Guard the other day, presenting the colors at a sporting event. Sadly they had succumbed to the bus driver look. Gone was the signature flat hat, the white ascot, the white spats, and the canned pants. We actually had cans in our pants to keep our bell bottoms uniformly round. Being in the band turned into a lot of screwing around and time off from the day-to-day bullshit.

Four days into boot camp, I got my wisdom teeth pulled for free. Looked like a hairless squirrel. Graduated boot camp and after ten days of leave my orders sent me to Seattle. Boot Camp hadn’t been that bad. My own screwups earned me the prestigious title of Mr. Shit, and one of my best friends was voted, Brother Turd. I won’t say how that happened. A stint on Oscar Bad Boys for another screwup had me doing fifty push-ups before going in a door and fifty after I got inside, plus other demeaning and humiliating crap. After about a week, I faked I was hyperventilating after doing a few laps of up, down, out, in while yelling, Sir, I love my company commander, sir, and they let me off. I had given the guy a dirty look.

At the very end of boot camp, we were allowed to request to be stationed in a particular district. I asked for the Thirteenth, Washington, and Oregon and got it. I was to report to the Captain of the Port in Seattle at a particular pier. My interpretation of the orders had me working in customs, vessel traffic control, or handling environmental issues in Elliot Bay. This was going to be gravy. My family and I drove along the waterfront, looking for pier numbers.

When we finally found the right pier, at the far end of the bay, I thought something was wrong. It was already dark and foggy, which magnified the gloomy view of two long docks with two story warehouses. I saw the vague shapes of two large ships and two small pools of light. A tall chain-link fence, dotted with Government Property signs, funneled us down to a well-lit guard shack. My dad pulled up to ask directions. I was in my dress blues, including my flat hat. The guard noticed me and asked for my orders. He went back in the guard shack and checked a list. As he handed back my orders, he said, "You’re on the Staten Island."

The what?

"The Staten Island. See right here, WLM 212."

What is it?

An icebreaker.

A what!

The guard told my dad we could drive down the pier to the last boat. I had noticed those letters and numbers but never asked about them. An icebreaker? There were actually three boats. The first two, I learned later, were old Navy minesweepers used for training. They looked deserted. Almost two years later, I would be involved with setting training mines for those two old wooden ships. Two days later, we had to go back and pick up the mines. The minesweepers couldn’t find them.

We finally pulled up to a very long, very fat, and very, very white boat. In five weeks, we would sail for Antarctica on a six-month cruise. Stepping onto that boat turned a page that sent me into the real reality of life that never stops, and there was no way my Happy Days/Leave it to Beaver life could have prepared me for it.

Five weeks later, my family again drove the seven hundred miles to see me off. My dad loved road trips and passed his passion down to me. It wasn’t only that they came all that way. It would also turn out to be one of the last memories of seeing my father before he died about fourteen months later. I was allowed to bring him onboard for a short tour. I remember him saying how the smell in after crews reminded him of the troop ship that took him and his fellow Marines to the south pacific during World War II.

JOURNAL I Feb. 2, 1972

The question for today is, will C-POG bust me and N_____ or will he let it slide.

Well, C-POG strikes again. He only said we had to do a lesson in the QM3 course, but he still caught us. I’m sure that if it was just me, he would have fucked me over good.

And it would be pretty far out if all Hours were like that. You work but you actually learn something. Probably never happen that way again though. Maybe I’ll stop fighting it, get squared away, and start standing my own watches. I guess getting kicked off watches taught me a few things that I won’t