Chapter 35 Crime, Canoe Trip Rules and Dale C.

We had one gal on our volley ball team report she was raped.  I never read about it in the papers.  Crime was something the powers-that-be in Bartlesville back then didn't like to publicize.  They'd rather have people victimized than let them be forewarned.  Heaven forbid that people should think crime existed in B'ville.  Two friends had their homes cleaned out by a gang of thieves.  They lived in the country just outside of town.  One off of South 75 one up in the Osage hills just over Nike Hill.  The gang would approach from the prairie side of the house and just load up trucks or whatever was handy and take everything they could.  They usually had all day to do it.

A friend and ring leader of our group of horny young people was a guy named Dale C.  His family was from over in Arkansas or at least that is where his mother was living.  He worked in the Catalyst Lab and organized canoe trips over on the Buffalo River.  We would drive over and camp on his mother's living room floor in Harrison the first night and hit the river the next day.  Imagine 20 people sleeping on your living room floor!  His mother would even get up the next morning and make ups breakfast.

Some of us would pair off with a partner on the trip, either female or male.  I had my own canoe so took a date along.  In my experience, if a gal got an invitation to go on a canoe trip and camp it was pretty well understood that there would be sex.  It is like inviting someone to go on a trip knowing ahead of time you were sharing the same room and the same king size bed.

I took a co-worker by the name of Kathy R. a very bright and sexy lab technician in the Geology Branch.  She was pixyish, short hair an impish smile and game for anything.  A months later after the canoe trip, we did a stint of field work in Paris, Texas.  We went to a restaurant in Paris, and I got some bad imitation crab, or maybe it was real crab they had driven up very slowly from the coast.  In the event I had severe Hershey squirts and was dehydrated to beat hell.  I was afraid to drink water for fear of leaving a trail of diarrhea across N. Texas.  We had to walk about 7 miles in the heat climbing fences and carrying shovels and samples.  I became weak as a kitten, but she soldiered on and carried all the equipment for me.  She was a real trooper.  I made it up to her later.

One of the other team members, who was pretty clueless, must have heard noises in the wee hours of the night and inquired at breakfast about what had been going on.   He must have been Mormon. No, even they know about that stuff, they have huge families.  I mean really, what did he expect me to say? "Oh, that was just Kathy and I boxing the compass last night on my bed..."   Cathy and I had a FB (that does not stand for face book), relationship for some time and personally I don't think it was his or anyone else's business.  Kathy left R&D to go back to school I think.  She was pretty lonely in B'ville, living in some apartments near down town; it was this square apartment complex, with a center courtyard, more like a motel.  Anyway, I don't know what happened to her we fell out of touch.

On the canoe trip we had some excitement, turned over at least once, camped at the first 12 mile takeout below Lost River and it started to rain.  We had a fun cozy night together.  I really liked that.  Didn't get too wet, not from the rain anyway.

The next day the river had risen to flood proportions and the rest of the group bugged out.  Left their rental canoes and booked.  I on the other hand had to get down stream to my truck, which I had already had shuttled to the takeout point.  It was the most exciting canoe trip of my life. 

 

I sent Cathy on in a car to the takeout point and another guy volunteered to be my second in the canoe.  We covered the 6 miles in a couple of hours.  You could not see the shore, the water was up in the trees so you had to stay in mid channel to avoid reall trouble..  We dumped once just upstream of a strainer, a flooded stand of trees.  I was able to get to shore with the canoe before we wrapped it.  Not having wet suits we were border line hypothermic.  The hot coffee we had helped.  We finally started following a guy in a solo canoe who knew what he was doing and had no further problems.  There were standing waves a good 4 feet high in some places and water would come over the bow and drench the bowman and fill the bottom of the canoe.  We were glad to make it to the take out point but were very exhilarated as well.

 

I went on more than a few canoe trips and took dates along, a single mom here, a single gal there, and we always had fun.  I tended to do the luxury canoe trip.  Cooler with food, beer, wine, it was rigged properly with no fear of loosing anything from the canoe in an upset.  Dinner might be cajun blackened fish or shrimp etouffe.  Dessert might be strawberries and cream.  Drinks, beer, wine and even champagne.

I even found a blind date; no she could actually see, for a friend from Houston.  He came up and we paired him up with her.  She was an acquaintance of my future Ex # 2 and the "Canoe Trip" rules applied and she was ready and eager to go.  Another friend and his girlfriend came along.  On the way over from OK to the river we were having a few drinks and on one stop, both Future Ex #2 and the date got out and had to throw up form the alcohol.  My buddy, he was the one who married the Indonesian gal, looked at me with a serious face, the cracked a smile and gave me two thumbs up.  He was like that.  He knew he was in like Flynn.

 

We three couples shared a cabin the first night at Lost Valley on the Buffalo.  My god she was a screamer.  My girlfriend and I lay awake half the night listening to them by the fire place.  The other couple had taken the loft and we settled in on a pull out bed by the bathroom. The couple in the loft, well the female half was so disturbed by it all; she spent the night, according to her boyfriend, with her pillow over her head. 

It was pretty humorous at breakfast the next night.  This same later on the river saw fit to pitch his tent next to mine, when I took great pains to camp away from him and the carnal soprano companion.  The next morning I got up to fix coffee and almost walked into a used condom hung from a tree branch in front of my tent door.  Those kooky crazy guys.  He was the same one who detested a pink tie I owned.  So on an occasion of me staying at his apartment, with said tie and my camera being present he waited till I was gone on an errand.  He enlisted the help of a friend, dropped trouser, tied my tie to his penis and documented it on film in my camera.

I got quite a laugh when I got the pictures back.  He though I would be appalled.  Not so, I still have the tie and the picture.  To be honest I don't' think I ever got it cleaned.  It is silk and you know how delicate silk is..

Dale hooked up with a troublesome gal from Dallas who played the jealousy card on him a lot.  She would drink want the attention of other guys, then have to deal with the consequences.  It jerked him around a lot.  He finally married her, which was not the solution, obviously.  She didn't stop or change and I lost contact with them before they flamed out.  Too bad.  She was a very attractive gal which was probably why he tried to hang on to her.  I think she had some problems though.  From a guy who married a bi-polar woman (Future Ex #3) I now know the symptoms by heart and run the other direction. 

I am sure the alcohol and drugs going around that part of the group probably didn't make things any better.

Update.  With Facebook allowing people to connect, I reconnected with Dale just in time to experience his death.  It was just a few years back.  Dale was always a trend setter.  It seems he had cancer, and just about knew the time of his expiration.  So he got on Facebook and posted a good bye to all his friends and then cashed in his chips.  It was kind of eerie, but nice in a way.  Everyone got to hear what he had to say about his life and the end of it and then if you were lucky, you had time to respond.

 

I lost another good friend and classmate to his excessive drinking and tobacco.  Sadly he did not heed nature’s and his bodies warning signs until it was too late and had a massive cardiac event that left him brain dead.  Facebook seems to have turned out to quasi memorials to people, which is fine.  We all posted pictures and memories of the guy and new and old friends got to see him in different periods of his life that they might not have known about.