February 16, 2005 – Passing Through

February 16, 2005 – Passing Through

On Tuesday January 21, 1966 when the USNS Michelson docked at Portland Shipyard, the entire ship began to move out. The Navy detachment on board had been assigned rooms in a downtown Portland Hotel and encouraged to take leave if you had some to take. For the next two weeks, the ship was moved to dry dock and it underwent repairs and upgrading. During the two-week period, companies with computer equipment on board sent factory engineers out to do the same for all the high-tech gear.

I was ambivalent during this time. Here I was in Portland, 150 miles south of Tacoma, where I enlisted in the Navy. But, there was nothing for me in Tacoma but memories. My family had moved back to El Paso, where my father had retired from the Army and had begun a new career working at American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO). My father has lived a charmed life, always finding something to keep him going. I take after him in that we both live in the moment—neither of us planned a great deal as young men. I’m different from my dad in that I continually look forward to the future, never comfortable with the present, and never willing to lament the past.

The present for me in January 1966 was Electronic Technician Petty Officer Third Class. The future was November 1966 when the Navy would have to discharge me from active duty and I could resume my life before the Navy. Being in Portland made me aware of the time I still had to do. Curiously, I also missed Japan, where the yen-dollar exchange rate allowed me to live better than I could in Portland. And the drinking age in Portland was 21, limiting me from frequenting the bars of the city, whereas in Japan, I was completely enfranchised; no limitation on where I could go. It wasn’t that I had a need to frequent bars, it was that I was prevented from doing so.

In Japan, I also had the sense that the world was happening—I felt the same in New York and San Francisco. Great events were taking place and I wanted to be in the midst of these great events, ideally contributing to and benefiting from them. In Japan, it was the advent of consumer electronics—stereos, tape recorders, TVs, consumer video cameras, every conceivable gadget an audiophile or audiophile wannabe could desire was on sale in Japan and they were affordable because of the exchange rate. Japan was a consumers’ paradise and it had the energy of a place that was on the move, growing out of its skin. I wasn’t part of that grand movement. Yet I knew I was part of the next one that would sweep over the world—the computer revolution. For the moment, the only thing I knew was I would have a job when I got out of the service.

There were moments that brought back fond memories of some good times in Tacoma. The hotel where we stayed prepared a great breakfast that brought back the experience of the early morning lumberjack platters I consumed when working for the junk dealer during the summer of 1963. The smell of the Portland reminded me of Tacoma, the scent of the sea mixed with the smell of diesel fuel, paint, and an assortment of other chemical odors my nose was never able to parse; all borne aloft by the ever present early morning fog. I loved walking its streets, watching people go about their everyday lives. As a kid walking the street anywhere, you’re an outsider, no stake in the world around you, no profession, no possessions, no ties that bind you to the place. If you’re the clever student, you’ll make your way to college somewhere away from where you are now. If you’re an average guy like I was, you’d join the service and spend four years learning about life.

The Military embodied that rootlessness of youth. The service moved you about every three years or so. Raised in a military family, I knew what it was to be without roots. My father planted roots of his own, in Mississippi where he kept the family homestead refusing every offer to sell the 40 acres just outside of Brooklyn. He had also bought our house in El Paso, which we rented out when the military had stationed him in Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, and finally at Ft. Lewis, just outside of Tacoma. But El Paso and Brooklyn where places we visited or lived for short period of time in between moves. I have never become attached to any place we ever lived. They were all like mistresses you slept with knowing that after some amount of time had passed, you would move on to find another place to sleep.

Portland also brought back the realization that like Tacoma, it was a place I had wanted to be away from as soon as I arrived. Perhaps it was the gloominess of the winters filled with weeks of continuous rain that gave me a sense of melancholy. When I lifted off en route to boot camp in 1964, I had experienced a weight being lifted from me. When we completed our dry dock and we began our half-day journey west along the Columbia River, I was once again jubilant. Portland had been a limbo, a taste of America after the Navy, but with the realization that ten months lay before I could savor that taste unencumbered by my military commitment.

Back in Japan, I could resume my life of labor at sea followed by my life of leisure ashore. It was a most pleasant way to spend the rest of 1966.