Got a surprising email today.

An old friend of mine, Al Witt just had a bad scare. His son was in a bad accident about a week ago, but it turns out he wasn't seriously hurt, or I don't think he was at this point. What a horrific story! Too bad for the other guy and his family. Your heart goes out to them all. I've known Al off and on for 27 years, and even though we're not really close friends, we've been through a lot of good times together.

As I think I've said before, when I was starting out in college, at the South Campus of Tarrant County Community College (now Tarrant County College), I took an intramural PE class called Camping and Canoing. I loved it from the beginning, having never done anything like that before, and Al was one of the people I met there. He was older, in his mid 20s, and had been through the class several years before me. When I was there, he was basically tagging along and helping the coach teach the kids. This is a role I took up years later, after I'd gone through the class a few times and grown a bit older. That coach managed to gather several of us guys, sort of surrogate sons, who continued to show up and help him run the class for years, until he retired a few years ago.

At some point shortly after I met him, Al met a girl on one of the canoe trips and things got serious. They got married and she gave him a son. The marriage didn't last though, so before long he was single again, and bringing girlfriends on the trips. To my younger eyes he was a very cool guy. He'd spent a few years in the Air Force in the mid-to-late 70s, and was then working as a ground crewman for the Bass Family, taking care of their private aircraft. Later, apparently thinking well of him, they put him through flight school, and when I came back to the canoe trips years later, after I'd finished my Masters, he was piloting their private planes, flying them all over the world and having a great time.

I never heard much about his private life, and his son, until a little later. They were having all the typical issues that seem to arise from divorce. The boy was screwing up in school, and Al was trying to get more time with him from his ex. When we met up on canoe trips, he always wowed us with stories about the places he'd been, flying the Bass family to and from exotic vacations and business trips. He told me once that he'd seen Pink Floyd in Venice, sitting in a gondola with a lady and a bottle of wine. Another time, the Basses were going to Alaska on vacation. Al loaded his canoe on the plane (he's always had the coolest gear), and while the family was vacationing in some resort, he was being flown into the deep woods by a bush pilot and paddling out again.

Here's a shot of him, on the left, taken from the Goat Trail, or Big Bluff, overlooking the Buffalo National River. These bluffs are the highest points on the Ozarks, and a trip up from the river is a regular hike on that canoe trip.



This was taken in 2004, on one of the last school sponsored trips we were all able to go on. The guy on the right is another great friend of mine, probably my best friend. We met on one of these canoe trips in about '89, when I had returned after school and before I'd started teaching. We hit it off and have been best friends ever since. If you click over to the Flickr site on the left, you can see more of these shots from the Buffalo, and some of the shots of us rafting the Colorado River with his wife and a bunch of other folks.

Here's what it looks like looking down from about midway up the trail. The coach is the guy on the left, Al on the right, and the kid in the middle is the coach's son.



We've all watched this kid grow up, and he's a great guy. One year early on, when I was taking the class and he was about 10, he rode up to the Buffalo from Ft. Worth on the hump in the middle of the back seat of my '79 Firebird . We laugh about that to this day. Well, I laugh. I don't know if he remembers it as fondly. He knew I'd have the best music, so he did what he had to do. It was ether my car and that hump, listening to The Wall over and over again and Led Zeppelin full blast on the 8-Track, or some whiny country music in his dad's cool old Bronco.

Anyway, as far as I see things, Al has always been a real man's man. Lots of confidence. Lots of girlfriends. A cool job. Lots of cool gear, and a great life in the outdoors. I always used to watch him when I was younger, wondering if I'd ever be able to measure up to his example. I do that to myself a lot, latching on to older guys who seem to be cool somehow, or who seem to have figured something out, trying to learn or absorb some kind of knowledge about who I should be, or how to live my life. You ever see a kid without a dad, attaching himself to what seems like a happy family in a playground? What I can I say.

Don't know why I've spent my life doing that, but I'm mostly over it now. I've learned to be a lot more comfortable in my own skin in the last 15 years or so, to trust my own feelings about a lot of things. I guess I grew up a bit and found a way to be myself, and feel good about it. When you try to win some sort of approval from enough people, many of whom then turn out to be assholes, I guess you learn to appreciate who you are and the things that made you an individual. If people have a problem with who I've turned out to be, that's perfectly fine. I say live and let live, or fuck 'em if they don't like it.

Back in the late '80s, I used to look up at planes that were passing by, heading to or from DFW airport, and wonder what the folks on those planes were doing and where they were going. My life seemed to be on hold, and there didn't seem to be any odds of that changing. Then Central Texas College called, responding to a resume I'd sent them, and the next thing I knew I was being flown to Naples, Italy to start my first teaching gig on a Navy ship. After four years of those gigs, and a lot of exotic and exciting times, I stopped wondering about those airplane passengers. I knew all too well what they were going through. I remember distinctly sitting in my parents back yard in Ft. Worth in about 1993, seeing one of those planes and noticing that I didn't have that longing any more. In stead, I was thinking "You poor bastards. How much longer are you gonna be stuck on that thing?"

When I could, I always tried to schedule my teaching gigs between canoe trips in the spring and summer (ya gotta have your priorities). So, for a time, when Al and I managed to meet up on trips now and then, we'd always compare stories. His were always cool, but so were mine back then. It was fun, and we both always got a good kick out of impressing the young kids who were taking the class. We'd put some rookie in the front seat and make sure they had fun, and got a good ride in the rapids. Smooth operator that he is, somehow Al always managed to get some hot babe in his front seat. Meanwhile I always seemed to get assigned some kid or another, sometimes an older person, or , on one occasion, a girl who'd apparently just taken a Woman's Studies class and didn't think there was anything a man could teach her. Again, what can you do? I've always been happy if they just put the paddle in the water now and then and didn't grab a tree limb just before we went through a rapid. Hands and feet in the boat, if you please.

Eventually I stopped going out on the ships, and started working down here on the base. The canoe trips would come along a few times a year, but Al and I seemed to get together on fewer and fewer occasions. Our schedules always seemed to conflict. Of course, as we all got older, we all spent more and more time on our careers and families. Eventually, inevitably, the coach retired from teaching the class, and the old convenient access to the colleges canoes and gear went away. Most of us have our own gear now, but still the trips have became more infrequent. We saw each other last year for a spring time trip that was a lot of fun. Al was there, organizing the trip, and he had a new lady friend tagging along. Very nice, but the word was that his son was still screwin' around. So I was surprised to read the attached article, about the accident, and learn that the boy, now a man, had gotten a job driving big rigs.

Earlier this year there were rumors of an April trip to the Buffalo that Al that tried to schedule, but the weather didn't cooperate. Then there was an email from the coach a few weeks ago saying that the annual father/son trip scheduled for this summer had been called off. The old coach has had to go in to have back surgery, and he can't be paddling and twisting in a canoe so soon after that. Now I'm sitting here getting ancy, looking at 5 days off coming up over this next Memorial Day weekend. My buddy and I are thinkin' were gonna try to go, and ask Al and any of the old regulars if they want to make it like old times. We'll see what happens.

The times I shared with these folks have been some of the happiest in my life. They're like my family, and like most families we seem to have drifted over the years. Here's hopin' that we can coordinate our various schedules and get a trip goin', and that there's about 15 inches of air under the Ponca bridge when we get there. Anyway, anybody who thinks they might want to try it out, you're welcome to join us (that's if the weather is right and the trip actually happens). It's a huge load of fun, and not too dangerous the way we do it. Anyway, If we go, I'll bring back more cool pictures and share them with ya. If you want to go on your own, check out this site. These folks will take care of everything you need, for a price. They'll tell you about all the official hiking trails and scenic points in the area. Go to their site and click on "Things To Do" and it'll direct you to all the best trails and sights. This site also has great shots of the trails and river sites.



Here's a parting shot of me, leaning on a buzzard roost on the Goat Trail, a few days into a 3 day river funk, knee pads to cushion the aging joints in the rapids, when you have to brace yourself on your knees, and one of my favorite t-shirts. Nice view, eh?