Improbable cross examinations

 East Texas State Park -April 4, 2011

We moved 200 miles west into east Texas. It started to rain so we pulled in early, but the forecast tornadoes and severe thunderstorms have turned to afternoon sunshine.


ATTORNEY:  What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS:     He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY:  And why did that upset you?
WITNESS:     My name is Susan!
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ATTORNEY:  What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS:     Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
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It's probably still 600 or 700 miles to the Big Bend National Park in West Texas. I'm thinking that the cactus should be in bloom.

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  ___________________________________________

ATTORNEY:  Are you sexually active?
WITNESS:     No, I just lie there.
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ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS:     I forget.
ATTORNEY:  You forget?  Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
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ATTORNEY:  Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS:     We both do.
ATTORNEY:  Voodoo?
WITNESS:     We do.
ATTORNEY:  You do?
WITNESS:     Yes, voodoo.
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ATTORNEY:  Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS:  Did you actually pass the bar exam?
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ATTORNEY:  The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS:      He's 20, much like your IQ.
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ATTORNEY:  Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS:     Are you shitting me?
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ATTORNEY:  So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS:     Getting laid
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ATTORNEY:  She had three children, right?
WITNESS:     Yes.
ATTORNEY:  How many were boys?
WITNESS:    None.
ATTORNEY:   Were there any girls?
WITNESS:      Your Honour, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
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ATTORNEY:  How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS:     By death.
ATTORNEY:  And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS:     Take a guess.
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ATTORNEY:  Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS:     He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY:  Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS:     Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
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ATTORNEY:  Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS:  No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
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ATTORNEY:  Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS:     All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
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ATTORNEY:  ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS:     Oral...
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ATTORNEY:  Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS:     The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY:  And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS:     If not, he was by the time I finished.
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ATTORNEY:  Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS:     Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________________


ATTORNEY:  Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS:     No.
ATTORNEY:  How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS:     Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY:  I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS:     Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Social Hour at Betty's RV Park in Abbeville, Louisiana.

Camel Comanche Control

Big Bend National Park, Texas

Before dawn, the lime green and pink neon lights of the Cactus Café and Motel flicker on the dark desert highway. The headlight of a fast freight train can be seen approaching for fifteen minutes. Dawn breaks and light and shadow play on the surrounding mountains.

We pack ham sandwiches, bottled water and swim suits and head south 110 miles on the motorcycle. We will follow deserted Texas State road 435 to the Mexican border and the Rio Grande River. We're hoping they have a gas station at the end of the trail.


This road was built on the old Comanche Trail. The Comanche came down from the Fort Stockton area and crossed into Mexico to liberate cattle and horses. The US Army shipped 30 camels to this area in an experiment in policing the area in 1859. The start of the Civil War brought this experiment to an end.


The desert gradually changes. We begin to see green cactus with purple flowers. Then we see purple and pink cactus with yellow flowers and things that look like cattails with red flowers.

 At first the morning is very cool, but by noon the temperature is over 100 degrees. It feels like a giant hair-dryer is trained on us. Mrs Phred yells in my ear that this is like picking apples on an Israeli Kibbutz.

When you get older, your facial skin gets looser. At 60 MPH, with a 20 MPH headwind, everything flaps rapidly. The skin under my eyes flaps and stings my eyes like being slapped with a wet towel. My cheeks flutter like a southern belle's eyelids.

The Park ranger at the entrance to the Big Bend National Park tells us not to swim in the Rio Grande River. We take a nap under a tree on the river bank. We are alone, except for a buzzard. The water looks cool. I wonder what the problem is. Pesticides? Bacteria? Piranha? Little fish that swim up your urinary tract?

We ask a guy working at the camp gas station about the no swimming rule. He says there is an undertow, the water is not real clean and they don't want you swimming 40 feet into Mexico. He shrugs apologetically.



We return around dark, exhausted, with 225 miles on the trip meter and have a Margarita.

Big Bend National Park

Las Cruces, New Mexico

The trip though the Big Bend was a  little disappointing because the cactus plants were not in bloom quite yet and because all the pictures we took mysteriously disappeared.

I've stolen some Big Bend cactus flowers off the internet for your amusement. You can imagine that I might have taken them in a week or two.

We picked up a young French hitchhiker named Damien and took him to the Chiros section of Big Bend. Mrs Phred said "No" when I asked her if I could pick him up, but I stopped anyway. He was about 20 and taking buses and hitchhiking though America in three weeks. He had been to New York City, Miami and Lafayette Louisiana. Somehow he had focused on Big Bend and wanted to hike up and camp at a high peak. 

 I  admire Damien's spirit. When I was his age the US Air Force was giving me an excellent free tour of the Pacific: Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Wake Island, Midway, Taiwan, Hawaii, Guam, etc.

We really like the little RV park in Marathon on US 90 about 80 miles north of the Big Bend National Park. This morning we drove 300 miles to Las Cruces which has many attractions and activities. We might be here five days before moving on to Arizona.

The "Double Eagle" restaurant  in Mesilla has the world's best Margaritas. I should know. They also serve a mean steak.

Cruising West Texas

Fort Davis, Texas

We've been cruising the highways of the plains and mountains of West Texas. The picture below is a lobby of a hotel in Marfa, Texas. The cast of "Giant" stayed here while the movie was being filmed (James Dean, Rock Hudson). I saw Giant with my parents in the old Tampa Theatre before it became a historical relic.

We visited the Museum of the Big Bend in Alpine, Texas. It's at a very nice Texas State University. I could live in Alpine. Maybe I could resume my teaching career? This is a picture of the Rio Grande that was n one of the HDTV exhibits in the museum.

The roads here are my favorite kind: two-lane, well-maintained and light traffic. They have an elaborate rest stop on US 90 between Alpine and Marfa where you can see "mystery lights" every evening. I saw some of those myself back at Seminole Canyon during the thunderstorm. It appeared to be a phosphorescent bird of some sort flitting about between lightning strikes.

I had to laugh at this sign in the museum. It was certainly true for me. Viet Nam? Is that a real place? Laos? Cambodia? How about Cebu City in the Philippines? Johnston Island? Guam?

We enjoyed our visit to the McDonald Observatory, run by the University of Texas. They only do spectral analysis. One telescope has a 372 inch mirror and a very clever money-saving design. They've come up with a theory to explain the somewhat empty, fuzzy center of a number of brighter, larger galaxies. They think that in many cases, revolving binary black holes act like an egg-beater and fling stars away from the galaxy center with gravity waves. They're setting up for an experiment tonight to try to learn more about "dark matter".


We run across some strange plants on the desert roadside. There are two mechanical problems. We have a flat tire on the Toyota. The local gas station doesn't have my size in a new tire , but they sell me a used radial with lots of tread for $15. I love small towns they are so honest and basic.. My camera finally died. It was damaged in a fall I took at Gibraltar last month. I buy a new one in the Alpine Radio Shack. The clerk says I am the second person in three years to give her both ID and a credit card at the time of purchase. I ask her if Alpine has as much credit card fraud as Miami and she laughs and says she knows almost all her customers by name.


Here are a few cactus flowers.


We see a lot of open road as we cruise the Davis Mountains. My favorite place was Alpine, a small town with good food and a modern state university. Fort Davis is nice too. High, cool with Uncle Buck's liquor store and a public library that sells used books to gypsies like us.


We're leaving Texas in the morning. However we will stop in El Paso on the way out to get my new Z-coil spring shoes.

A Sense of Perspective

Fort Davis, Texas

It was cool this morning at 3AM. The Milky Way is out and bright, running from the horizon through the triangle formed by Deneb, Vega and Altair. Fortunately, we are usually spared the sight of the outer edge of our own galaxy. Otherwise we might always feel depressingly small and insignificant.


The Davis Mountains were called the Apache Mountains before Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, established the Fort to protect against raids by the indigenous hostiles. The fort was abandoned during the Civil War. In 1866 the Ninth Cavalry, consisting of black "buffalo soldiers" reopened the fort.


It's high here and cool this morning. Today we plan to see the University of Texas McDonald Observatory, drive a long wildlife loop and go to the Chihuahuan Desert nature center. Maybe we will get lucky and see a black, hairy Javelina?


We drove to the West of the Pecos museum yesterday. It's located in Pecos. The bar has real bullet holes in the wall where two men were killed in a shoot-out. The bartender, Jesse, tells the story when you trip a motion detector entering the bar.


The drive to Pecos winds about 30 miles though the Davis Mountains and then another 40 over tabletop desert. I amuse myself trying to photograph mirages in the desert. This is a shrub desert without much diversity. Yuccas and agaves, growing with grasses and creosote bushes, give this desert its shrubby appearance.


They filmed "Lonesome Dove" here, so I guess that we've accidentally found it.

The Law West of the Pecos

Langtry, Texas

President Obama just sent me another E-mail. This one is linked to a video about the new Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The President invites me to "Digg", "Tweet", or "Facebook" his video. How cool is that?

Meanwhile we cross the Pecos and I walk over some bridge construction from the West side to snap a picture of the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande rivers. Unfortunately, I've left my shutter speed at about a full second and the first few morning pictures are bright white.


Langtry is a few miles West of the Pecos, where another Judge, Roy Bean, held court. It's a very small, dusty town on the Rio Grande. My GPS doesn't know it exists. The Judge moved to Langtry with a tent and ten 55 gallon barrels of whiskey. The Texas Rangers asked him to serve as Justice of the Peace in this lawless area.


Many of his customers were Irishmen and Chinamen working on the railroad though Texas. He was trying an Irishman for the shooting death of a Chinaman, when his courthouse was surrounded by Irish threatening to lynch him if he found the defendant guilty. After consulting his one lawbook, he stated that it said that while it was against the law to kill a human being, the law was silent on the subject of Chinamen. The defendant was acquited.


In another famous legal decision, he ruled on a corpse found with 41 dollars and a Smith & Wesson revolver. He said that it was against the law to carry a concealed weapon, especially so for a dead man. Therefore, he confiscated the revolver and fined the corpse 41 dollars.


The Judge was infatuated with the singer "Jersey Lilly" Langtry, to whom he wrote many letters. He called his home above an "Opera House" in the hope of luring her to Langtry. Eventually Lilly did visit Langtry, in 1904, a year after Bean's death.


Once. financier Jay Gould was scheduled to pass though Langtry on the railroad. The Judge stopped the train with an emergency flare and Gould spent several hours drinking with Bean. This caused a brief financial panic when rumors circulated that Gould had been killed in a train wreck. We put some miles on yesterday. We're in Fort Davis, the highest point in Texas. We'll stay a few days. There's a lot to see here.

Seminole Canyon State Park, Texas

On the Border Northwest of Del Rio, Texas

It will be dawn shortly. The clouds offer the possibility of some good sunrise photos. This place is on the Mexican border a short distance from the Rio Grande river. You can hike down into the canyon about two hours to see some impressive Indian ruins on a guided tour. They cancel the hike when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, which seems very probable today.


We were treated to a fine display of nature’s fireworks last evening when a flock of heavy thunderstorms rolled over the desert. The rainfall approached four inches an hour in spots, triggering flash floods in the dry desert creek beds. Underground Weather has warnings of 60 MPH winds, flash floods and baseball-size hail. We were spared the worst of that. The storm did kill the Park electricity, so we are ran on batteries last night.


Before the storm, we were running both air conditioners, but couldn’t get the temperature below 87 degrees. We keep tripping the 30 amp Park breaker so I switched the refrigerator and water heater to propane and gave up on the ham hocks and beans in the crock pot.


We met Guy and Redding after we parked. They are a father and son who are bicycling from Georgia to San Diego in support of prostate cancer awareness. Guy is the 58 year old dad. The next 500 miles are steeply up and down in brutal desert heat. He seems a little surprised by the 60 to 80 mile distances between tiny Texas towns, many of which have no services. Redding is 18. I get the feeeling that this trip was a last minute father and son adventure before college, put together with minimal planning and research. They seem lightly laden with tents and a few other essentials. Out here, if they run out of water, they will die quickly.

After reading their blog , I realized they needed a computer. I took the laptop down to their campsite so they could do an update without having to find a library on this desolate stretch of Texas road.


I told them about a tent-friendly campsite 100 miles ahead in Marathon. Guy is a Urologist. I hope he is checked out on heat stroke prevention. We rode our motorcycle here a couple of years ago. It feels like riding into a giant hair-dryer.


The picture above was taken in darkened conditions with a long shutter speed. You can see Mrs. Phred's feet as she stares out at the lightning strikes. Mrs. Phred worries about Guy and Redding during the storm. The Camp Host told them to shelter in the Park’s bathroom.

Schlittenbahn

New Brunfels, Texas

Here is an idea I'm sure won't occur to anyone else. It's a hot Memorial Day weekend so let's go to the number one rated water park in the world. It's called Schlittenbahn, which means toboggan run.


Because of our advanced age, we get in at the same rate as children under 12, which seems oddly appropriate when you stop to think about it. It's definitely a place for young people with tattoos and children. We see thousands of people waiting in short and long lines with us, but no one else is close to our age. They may have only sold two senior tickets all day.


We go on a bunch of fun tube rides and down a variety of spiraling tubes and slides. At first we can't figure out how we can both ride, so one of us ends up holding the camera. Eventually we get smart and stuff everything we don't want wet in a rental locker.


The rides have names like Master Blaster, Soda Straws, Congo River, Wolf Pack and Black Night. They have a pool that generates big waves for body surfing. They have dueling water cannons and a five story waterfall. You can bring your own picnic in, but not if it includes and glass or alcohol.


This was one of my better ideas. We stop at a Sonic on the way home for a Sonic Blast for me and a hot fudge sundae for Mrs. Phred. A perfect summer day.


A short river runs though the park. The river originates in a spring and we see thousands of tubers taking the two mile float. They're almost wall to wall on the river. It's a warm summer Texas holiday weekend. Why not?

Step Away From the Computer!

San Antonio, Texas

I went though basic training here in the summer of 1963 and then Officer's Training School in the winter of 1965-66. Mrs. Phred flew out to join me and we bought a little green Triumph TR4-A and loaded all our possessions into it and drove to San Francisco for the Summer of Love and Navigator training school in Sacramento..


Today we take Bus 24 to downtown and then wander the River walk for a time. We go to see the new Terminator movie at the huge mall on the River walk. John Conner has his hands full and Arnold makes a short virtual appearance. As we exit the mall, the skies threaten a downpour so we duck into a Mexican Restaurant on the River walk for margaritas and lunch. There are a number of Airman Basics wandering the River walk. These kids haven't earned their first stripe, but they have two or three medals already. Apparently this is a policy change. We buy yet another umbrella and make our way to the bus stop for the return trip.


There is a water park 40 miles north called the Schlitterbahn. It's rated as the number one water park in the world. I want to go tomorrow. Pictures to follow.


Meanwhile, Mrs. Phred has taken over the laptop while I step outside for a smoke. "STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER, MA'AM", I tell her...I have things to share with my public.