This Is Now, That Was Then

Thanks, Phil

Life does different things and takes different people different ways and different places at different stages, and I notice, with my mind’s habit of wandering off to visualize, where I was in my life when something happens in someone else’s life. The day Philip Seymour Hoffman was born, July 23, 1967, my Navy career, our twenty-year Navy life, was about exactly at the halfway point. We started in July 1957, with me in an OCS barracks in Newport, Rhode Island. Ten years later, Linda, Malinda, Jody and I had returned from overseas, three years in Japan, and were living on Wakefield Chapel Road outside the Beltway in Northern Virginia. Two of our family joys in life were Brucie, a shetland sheepdog who lived with us from a tiny puppy in 1966 until the Sunday morning in 1976 when we found him lying dead in the backyard of our second residence in Northern Virginia; and a small travel trailer that some weekends we towed up into the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a straight shot west from Annandale to Front Royal, where we got on Skyline Drive and headed down the winding scenic highway, to our campground.

I’ve done tent camping, both as a boy scout in the yard of an old abandoned house in Cromanton across St. Andrews Bay, with James Marshall, and Scotty, and Carl, and a couple of Bills and I think Robert, and Carl's brother Hank, and Parker, and Mr. Lindsay when he was our scoutmaster; and as a father, with both Joe and later with Tass. When Joe was here for Christmas, we remembered our scout winter camping trip in, I guess it was 1973, the coldest either of us ever remember being in life. Neither of us ever got warm that entire weekend, snow on the ground and bitter, bitter freezing cold. My camping adventure with Tass was a highlight of life for me, it was just the two of us, she may have long forgotten it. We woke in the middle of the night to the banging of pots as an animal of some sort -- may have been a raccoon or a bear, I don’t recall whether we got our eye on it or not -- went through our supplies looking for food. I do remember being cautious enough as we set up camp, to make sure the food supplies were at a safe distance from our tent.

A self-contained travel trailer beats tent camping any day, and we loved ours. It was small, a sixteen-foot model built by Norris, that we bought new from a dealer in Arlington one Sunday afternoon. Almost but not quite on impulse. With a load-leveling hitch, it towed comfortably behind the Dodge Coronet station wagon that we had bought the week we returned from Japan, summer 1966. Arriving and setting up on Friday evening at our campground on Skyline Drive, our Saturday adventure was a drive to Luray Caverns, which I had first visited the summer of 1944. Malinda and Joe probably have forgotten those trips. Even with a self-contained travel trailer, using the telephone booth size shower and toilet combo was never pleasant and always a nightmare to clean after we arrived home, so we always made sure to park near the shower/restroom building. In some prior posting here I recalled another camping trip, a year later, four hundred miles north when we were living in Newport, Rhode Island. Again on a Friday night, arriving tired and late, after dark. Setting up, then going into the bathhouse, the enormous spider waiting for me in the shower stall. On the other hand, at all camp sites the most wonderful memory is the coffee that Linda perked the next morning, just the two of us outside in the chilly morning as the children slept on in the trailer. Hot, black coffee perked in an old fashioned coffee pot over an open fire. We just had the travel trailer a couple of years, two places, Washington and Newport. Spring 1969 we got PCS orders from the Naval War College, Newport, RI to USS TRIPOLI in San Diego, California. Towing the travel trailer, the Dodge station wagon gave us four miles per gallon on the highway. With gasoline costing as much as forty cents a gallon, that was unthinkable, so we advertised it in the Newport paper and sold trailer and Dodge the very first day, $3,800 for the package. The buyer had never towed a trailer, and my final memory of it is backing it expertly down a very narrow driveway between two houses, into his back yard. Selling it was nearly heartbreaking, and we promised ourselves that there‘d be another one some day; but there never was.