Breakfast With the Chief of Police

Somewhere in New Mexico - January 26, 2007

We pull into a small town in New Mexico. There is a small diner open for breakfast. We walk over an icy four-lane highway and go into the restaurant.


There are four patrons who warmly welcome us and ask us to sit at their table close to the heater. One of them is C_____, who is dressed as a working cowboy with jeans, a flannel shirt, and a faded jacket. We speak to them and exchange life stories. They all live in town. One-by-one, everyone leaves except C_____ and the cook who is the owner.

C_____ appears to be about 50 years old. C_____ asks me about my Pink Floyd T-shirt and expresses a love for the early Floyd albums. We discuss rock concerts we have attended. He ticks of eight or nine groups. I mention a few including the free “love-in” nude "flower power" 60’s concert we attended with Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary in San Francisco.

We begin to discuss Ken Kesey’s “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”. We both hint at a brief love of hallucinogens terminated reluctantly by impending maturity.

C_____ tells us about his trips to the Mediterranean on an aircraft carrier. I tell him about seeing the Pacific in a C-124. The cook comes out and tells me that C_____ is the Chief of Police and has been making several movies with a Hollywood film crew.

C_____ explains to us that there are 180 people in his town and it’s pretty boring. He says most of the people here are ranchers and haven’t really adopted big city attitudes. They have computers and DSL but are very old-fashioned in many ways. Until three years ago he was the elected sheriff of the entire county.

He has been working with film crews doing remakes of “The Hitcher”, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Birds”. The Hitcher is one of my favorite all-time movies. He tells me to look out for some surprising plot changes but offers no plot-spoilers.

We pay the bill and say goodbye. I tell him I seldom have an opportunity to discuss my history of drug use at breakfast with a Police Chief. He says that he would just as soon not have his constituents know about his.

Mrs. Phred and I fill the RV with gas on the way out of town. A blacksmith is shoeing a horse in the snow-covered convenience store parking lot. We both agree that breakfast in small-town America often provides interesting experiences and memories.

900 Tons of Rotting Tuna

Rockaway Beach, Oregon - July 26, 2009

It was sad when the great ship went down. It was 1976 and Betty M. was fully laden with a cargo of 900 tons of fresh tuna. She capsized in the mouth of the Columbia River. Local residents still talk about the stench that lasted for months. The diving here involves 50-degree water temperatures and 10 to 30-foot visibility. I think I'll leave the SCUBA gear in the basement until we get back to Florida.

This is a picture of the Tillamook Naval Air Station back in 1943. The Navy dirigibles photographed her are only slightly shorter than the 800-foot Hindenburg.

One of Mrs. Phred's online friends came to visit. Her name is Laura. Mrs. Phred and Laura go to "Garibaldi days" and have excellent fried oysters for lunch. I stay home and do paperwork. I'm pleased to be able to load Laura up with fresh fish. She drove a long way to meet Mrs. Phred. Laura works in the Oregon mental hospital where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed starring Jack Nicolson. The book was written by Ken Kesey who got his big start from having his brains jarred loose by the CIA during the MKULTRA project, which involved slipping LSD to unwitting citizens. Kesey's fourth child, conceived with another Merry Prankster, was appropriately named "Sunshine"...
Today we took a three-cape scenic drive along the coast. We both had that deja vu feeling that we'd been here before...perhaps we had. The Tillamook Air Museum is not bad. They had some very nice WWII airplanes and airplane engines on display. My own C-124 engine was there. It was the largest airborne piston engine ever deployed. It was used on the B-36 as well....a radial seven with four rows...28 cylinders...what a hog. 4,500 cubic inches...four engines...no wonder we burned 10,000 gallons of high octane on a ten-hour flight....about five gallons a mile...

The most lovely plane in the museum is a P-38 called the Tangerine.

I don't recognize it at first...light, flighty, lovely and bristling with 50-calibers. The engines rotate in opposite directions to cancel the effects of torque.

Lt. Ethell who flew one this made some kills. The people next to us gave us a plate of freshly boiled crab. It was good but it ruined our appetite for the sockeye salmon I had cooked so I made a sandwich spread from it with eggs, onions, mayonnaise, and chipotle sauce. It made about seven healthy sandwiches.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the air museum was the building housing it. They claim it is the largest wooden building in the world. It's easy to believe. They built it to house Akron Class Navy rigid dirigibles during WWII. They built two, but one burned to the ground about 20 years ago. It had been filled with hundreds of tons of hay. The building that is left houses a bunch of stored boats and RVs in addition to the air museum.

Tomorrow we move on to the mouth of the Columbia where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1805.
I think WWII dirigibles were very useful for convoy duty.


Rotting tuna, Ken Kesey, P-38s, the Merry Pranksters, Chipottle sauce, Project MKULTRA, the CIA, WWII dirigibles, the Oregon coast capes, fresh fish....it all comes together right here in Tillamook. It's interesting that Lt Ethell's son, Jeff Ethell, wrote a book called "Warbirds of WWII" and crashed a restored P-38 and died in Tillamook in 1997. Apparently he lost an engine, failed to maintain a sufficient airspeed and destroyed himself and one of the last of these lovely airplanes in a flat spin.

Sometimes I Get a Great Notion

Siletz River, Oregon

We've moved 120 miles North on the Oregon coast.

This spot is one of our favorites. The Siletz River is full of steel head trout, sturgeon and king salmon at this time of the year.

Just down the road is Depoe Bay. Last year I caught bottom fish and watched a whale rooting around for shrimp just outside the harbor.

Sometimes I live in the country

Sometimes I live in the town

Sometimes I get a great notion

To jump into the river an’ drown

-Leadbelly

The "Sometimes a Great Notion" novel by Ken Kesey came out in 1964. The movie was filmed here on the Siletz River. Henry Fonda starred as the patriarch of an Oregon logging family.

The following about Kesey can be found on Wiki:

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he worked as a night aide with Brian Samuels who later became his partner in a trip around California in a Volkswagen.[8] The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people.[4] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at a state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels by Frank Reynolds.

Kesey's most famous book is "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". However his second novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion" is considered by many critics to be one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

We were living in San Francisco when Kesey faked his own death:

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California,

In 1997 Kesey participated in a rock concert in which he repeatedly asked, "where have all the bozos gone?" You don't want to overdo the LSD.