Mountain Home, Arkansas - 17 March, 2006

We are parked in a heavily wooded clearing in the Ozarks. This is Paul's redoubt, heavily fortified and secure. Paul claims to have papers that certify him as insane due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We met in 1972 shortly after we both returned from Vietnam. We find time to sit in rockers on his porch and he explains his latest research.

Paul sells his research to the money changers. He is perhaps the foremost expert in the world on the credit and debit card industry. Paul spends most of his time flying around to interview corporate moguls and magnates so that he can sell his findings about new developments in this strange new form of money.

He talks to me about waving a cell phone at a cashier to pay for a cheeseburger. He speaks of RFID. This are the tiny rice-grain size passive chips that make the alarms go off when one walks out of the store without paying. RFID chips are being implanted in factory workers to eliminate time clocks, provide access to secure areas and aid in job cost calculations. This new technology, he tells me will soon speed airport luggage to its destination. These chips, with medical history are being implanted in elderly Washington, DC patients. Wal-Mart tractor trailers now are completely inventoried as they roll past a scanning device.

Later, Paul takes me to the local Wal-mart where we see the famous Oscar Meyer Wienermobile parked and serving hot dogs. Paul takes my picture with his cell phone standing in front of this incredible and artful piece of American culture. I buy a package of JB Weld epoxy and a Sirius satellite receiver for a total of $42, including tax.

My faithful companion and I drive Paul's 1982 Dodge Ram pickup truck into town. I have my best tennis scores ever and only lose 6-2, 6-2. At times I was close to making it 6-3 with lots of add-ins and add-outs.

The JB Weld has lots of testimonials on the back of the package. One man says he used it to patch a cracked block on a D-8 Caterpillar tractor and saved $10,000 and 30 days of down time. We pull the tank on the motorcycle, mix up the two tubes and try to patch the leaking gas tank. We also adjust the chain tension and apply molybdenum chain lube. The epoxy is drying overnight.

We watch Batman Begins in the evening on St Patrick's day after a dinner of corned beef and cabbage. This is the latest and best of the Batman movies. Paul has partially moved into the new house he and Diane have been constructing for three years. Tomorrow he plans to work on his front porch while his son-in-law installs a 24 port network switch and punches down the RJ-45 receptacles.

Visits here are always very interesting. Paul's new grand-daughter, Lena, arrives in the evening. She is four months old. The Epoxy patch on the leaking motorcycle gas tank works.

Mountain Home, Arkansas - 22 March, 2006

We spend a few days cutting and installing pine siding on the front porch ceiling of Paul's new home. He's been building it for three years now and just moved in during February. The weather has been cold and wet with the threat of snow. The Crocuses have bloomed and gone.

The new Wal-Mart Sirius satellite radio has a channel called 'classic radio' that carries programmes from the 40s: Jack Benny, The Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, Amos and Andy and The Shadow. I run it for three days and kill the van battery. I actually remember hearing one of The Shadow programmes called 'Sabotage'.

Paul's son-in-law, an IT genius, gives me three seasons of Boston Law and five seasons of South Park on DVDs. They're in an AVI format so I downloaded a free AVI player to my laptop.

The news in this small town (Pop. 11,012) is fascinating. The Baxter Bulletin comes each morning. A local man is being sought on charges of attempted murder (girlfriend) and arson. Coincidentally, his institutionalized brother attempted to break into the White House last year under the delusion that Clinton's daughter still lived there.

There is a nightly courtroom TV programme where local criminals are tried and sentenced on live TV. Most of them are convicted of passing bad checks. That's an automatic 60 days in this county. A few are sentenced to longer terms for cooking 'meths'. 'Meths' is a big problem in the rural parts of the US.

A man in a black dress, wearing false breasts, heavy make-up and high heels, was arrested in a local park. He was charged with felony possession of stolen license plates.

Eisenhower State Park, Texas - 27 March, 2006

We decided to stay in Arkansas a few extra days to help Paul with his front porch. The porch floor is made from 2 inch thick maple salvaged bowling alley wood. It's durable and beautiful. There are 6 x 6 posts every eight feet (twelve of them) which he plans to clad in cedar. We installed the last twenty 2x4 rafters for the porch to support the tongue and groove pine siding ceiling.

It was painstaking and slow work, making sure that each piece is exactly parallel to the next and that all pieces are level at any given height on the expanse, which has a gentle slope and changes from a ten foot to eight foot expanse and back again and negotiates two 45 degree turns. Here are some Arkansas pictures.

Paul has a geocache out at a place called Robinson's Point. He says I can get some nice pictures from there. A posting on his blog site says the disposable camera that he left in the cache is fully exposed so we take a 45 minute hike though the woods and change it out, after removing the rock hiding the cache. The camera is for people who find the cache to take their own pictures so Paul can post them to the geocache site. His hidden treasure site is called "Rock on Mrs Robinson".

Yesterday we left his house and drove though Northeast Arkansas on back roads and then down into Oklahoma and Texas to the Eisenhower State Park in Denison, Texas. This is Ike's birthplace. The park is on a big lake. They rent canoes and pontoon boats here.

Dallas is 80 miles to the South. We both want to see the Grassy Knoll, Dealy Plaza and the Texas Book Depository. That's going to involve driving the RV into a big city. I'm going to ask Mrs Phred where she was when she heard the news. We've been to his grave in Arlington.

The Day the Dream Ended

I program the GPS and laptop with a stop at the Texas Book depository and hand the laptop to my navigator, Mrs Phred. I met her exactly two years after the assassination.

When I heard the news, I was 'policing up an area' by field-stripping cigarette butts at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi. Back then filter tips were rare. You pick up a butt, tear the paper down the seam, disperse the tobacco, roll the paper into a tiny ball and throw the ball away.

I take a wrong choice on the downtown interchange and head toward Fort Worth instead of Waco. We park the RV at a Carniceria/Fruiteria six miles from downtown and call a Yellow Cab on the cell phone. We ask to go to the Texas Book Depository.

We step out of the cab and are accosted by a street vendor. We spend 15 minutes talking to him. He points out the 6th floor window, the grassy knoll and the blue 'X' on the parade route where the fatal bullet struck. He's convinced it was five-way crossfire. He thinks there were thirteen shots fired. There was a shooter in the sewer, on the grassy knoll, two in the book depository and another in the building to the right of the depository. He rattles off facts and ancient connections.

Whatever happened, it's a near perfect killing zone. I could have made the shot easily with my M-1 carbine with no scope. It's only about 50-75 yards from the window to the centre of the street. Several major streets leading from downtown converge and curve gracefully toward the underpass choke point. The photograph of the brick building is taken from the spot where the fatal bullet impacted. The window on the far right on the second floor down from the roof, is where a 7.62 millimeter Carcano rifle was found.

I ask Mrs Phred to stand on the grassy knoll and then ask her where she was. She tells me she was eating at the Florida State University cafeteria with her current boy friend. Here are some Dallas photos of Dealy Plaza and the Texas Book Depository.

We have lunch at a Mexican Restaurant and then pay for admission to the Conspiracy Theory Museum. I take copious notes. On reflection, I decide it's not important who did it. It's an act that radically changed history. Kennedy had just issued an order to withdraw 65,000 troops from Vietnam. These orders were cancelled by LBJ and things went downhill from there.

We take a taxi back to the RV and drive South to Lake Whitney State Park to camp for the night.

Pecan Grove RV Park, Austin, Texas - 29 March, 2006

The yellow 'Dillo stops at the front door. The 'Dillo is a reproduction of an historic streetcar design. It's free to ride and goes to all the places we want to see in Austin.

The Texas tower was occupied for ninety minutes on 1 August, 1966 by Charles Whitman. He killed and wounded 46 people from his perch in the tower. Local citizens brought their own deer rifles on campus to bring him down when they heard the first reports of the shooting.

The Colorado River runs through downtown. It's called the 'Town Lake'. The river is beautifully landscaped on both banks and filled with joggers. We are encamped just over the river from downtown.

Each day at sunset 1.5 million bats emerge as a black cloud from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge. It is the largest urban bat colony in America. We plan to take an umbrella tonight and watch them. Why the umbrella? Think about it.

Austin is famous for its music. The 6th Street and Red River Entertainment District Offers restaurants, bars, and live music after the bat show.

The State Capitol complex and Governor's Mansion are downtown, as is the University of Texas, the Lyndon B Johnson Presidential Library, the Texas History Museum, the George Washington Carver Museum and a huge Art Museum. Carver invented both peanut butter and mayonnaise.

Here are a few Austin photos. The bat pictures didn't come out. Bats pollinate the agrave plant which is essential for the production of Tequila. The Austin bats eat 20 tons of insects each evening. In November they will ride a cold front back to Mexico and then return in March to have pups. They fly the night storm at altitudes approaching 10,000 feet and speeds of 60 MPH.

Pilgrimage To The Ozarks Archive

Phred

06.04.06 Front Page

Back Issue Page