Thoughts of a Crazy Old Man

Ever been so scared that every muscle of your body tightens up and the adrenaline is pumping in your body so much that afterward your body is shaking? So it is with the pucker factor. I have a scale of one to ten, with one being the least scared and ten being where your sphincter muscles are so tight you couldn’t drive a number ten needle up there with a sledge hammer. Looking back, I believe certain requirements need to be present for a true pucker factor event. The most important factor is you have to have that split-second of time to fully understand that this event, if it occurs, is going to kill you. The fear factor has to be high enough so that afterward you can fully comprehend the fact and be able to say, “Thank you, God,” or whomever you’re going to thank that you’re still alive. I had met my first wife, Mechele, when we both worked the midnight shift at J. R. Simplot Company, west of Caldwell. This meant we had some of those good summer afternoons and evenings to do stuff before going to work. I had a 1974 Honda CB750-4 motorcycle at the time. One nice warm afternoon, we decided to take a ride to Jordan Valley, Oregon. It was about a fifty-mile ride down Highway 95 just across the Oregon border. There was a nice café I enjoyed, and the one dish it served I liked was Rocky Mountain oysters—fantastic! We could make the trip down, eat, get back, and catch a little nap before being to work at midnight. As I said, the weather was great. Driving through the Owyhee Mountains is something else. On a bike, you get all the smells to go with it. Also, with no restrictions, your visibility is so much better. Traffic at that time of the day was very light—mostly local ranchers or people going home, very few trucks. Most trucks were on the road either early in the morning or later in the afternoon or evening. The speed limit was sixty miles per hour, but you couldn’t do that all the time because of the curvy, snake-like road. It was a good biking road because of all the corners. I never really looked at my speedometer, as I rode by the feel of the bike and looking at the road surface. Mechele was a good rider, as she trusted me and was one with the bike as well. We’d finished the most winding section of the road and begun to straighten out as we topped a ridge. At the top, after a slight flat section, there was a long, straight, steep downhill part leading to the valley floor. From the top, I could look over the valley floor and see the road begin to climb out the other side and no traffic! This condition was made for speed. As I started downhill, I cranked the throttle all the way open. We came blasting down the hill as fast as the bike could go with the added force of two people and gravity’s advantage. I took a glance down to see how fast we were going—just under one hundred miles per hour—and we hadn’t reached the bottom of the hill. The speed was still climbing. I could feel Mechele hanging on pretty tight. We both had full-face helmets and eye protection on, so the blasting wind was having no effect on us. I also had a Windjammer fairing on my bike that broke the wind for me. We reached the halfway point of the flat valley floor, and I looked ahead and saw a large black spot in the road. Hmm, I wonder what that is, I thought—my mind no way keeping up with the speed of the bike. As I’m processing this information while we’re blasting down the road at over a hundred miles an hours, I finally realize what it is: a golden eagle! Oh, sh!t I thought. I have no idea why, but I never slowed down. The eagle takes off, and its wing tip just brushes the windshield of my bike. I was scared spit-less! My mouth was so dry, and I could feel my body shaking. If I’d hit that eagle full force, the two of us would have been screech marks on the valley floor. As far as I can remember, this was my first true pucker event, and I’d have to rate it as a nine. I know if I would’ve had to stop the bike, I never would have been able to hold it up because my legs were so weak. Add to that I had another human life I would have taken with me. I guess the next qualified event for a pucker factor I was driving truck for NACA. It was in the spring and warm days were coming, but nights were still freezing, and there was still snow where the sun didn’t shine. I was hauling a load of potatoes from Oregon to J. R. Simplot Company outside Caldwell, Idaho. I had passed Burns, Oregon, and was entering the Burnt River Canyon. This section ran alongside the river and followed every curve. The mountains were high on both sides so some places never got the sunlight. It was around midday, and I knew to watch for frost on the road—but you know how it goes, sometimes things just creep up on you. I was going about fifty miles per hour, which was a little less than the road would allow for the sharpness of the curves and the weight I was carrying. I had just entered a long, sweeping curve. It wasn’t so sharp, just one where you could almost set your steering wheel to an angle and hold it throughout the entire curve. I reached the point in the curve where I needed to straighten out a little bit, so I turned the wheel back a bit—no reaction. Holy crap! I guess the next phase took only about a split-second, but it seemed like it was happening in slow motion. I looked at the river. Ice was on some of the edges, so I knew the water was cold. The truck wasn’t turning, and I was headed toward the guardrail with seventy-two thousand pounds of potatoes, trying to make sure I’d take a bath. I turned the steering wheel a bit more, but still no reaction. Then I turned it back a bit. Finally, the right side steering tire caught some gravel just before I was to hit the guardrail, and my truck jerked clear across the two lanes of traffic. I was just lucky no one was beside or behind me. I got the truck straightened out, and both of my feet were bouncing up and down so hard I couldn’t control them. My heart was pounding through my chest. This pucker event I rated as a seven-and-a-half or an eight. I regained control of my legs very fast. I drove just a little slower after that. I’ve been in horse wrecks, motorcycle wrecks, and car wrecks, but I’d never achieved a pucker factor of ten until March 2003 when I was deployed to Iraq. We had been deployed to the Kuwaiti desert in February 2003. It was said that Saddam had bio-chemical weapons and was not afraid to use them. During the time there, we’d have practice drills for getting into our chemical protective suits and masks. At Camp Virginia, we had different alarms for different events. The one thing standard throughout the Army was the alarm for gas: three blasts of a horn, metal clanging, a bell, but always in a set of three. This had been drilled into me for twenty years. About the first of March, we all received the latest, greatest chemical-protective suits. We also received our personal injection kits, consisting of two preloaded syringes of antidote with a spring-loaded needle. What you would do is take the syringe and jam it against your leg. The needle would automatically stab into your leg. Once the needle was in, the antidote would automatically inject into your system. I had never carried the real ones before, always just the training ones with no needles or antidote. I was also issued the new detection kits for testing areas around us. Now I was carrying the real deal, and it made an impression in my head. Now I hated gas and bio warfare stuff. I could stand incoming fire, mortars and such, but gas and bio stuff are silent deadly killers. I’d been through training and saw what this stuff does to you—bleeding through your skin, crapping and pissing all over yourself, burning and boiling of your skin, coughing up blood from your lungs, and trouble breathing with uncontrollable twitching and shaking of your muscles. The fun factor is very, very low!