JoshuasTravels

I had roughly a week between the end of finals and my flight back to Portland, so I speed up to Des Moines, Iowa (the “s” are _ilent, _tupid). My buddy Iowa (his parents call him Greg for some strange reason) was born and breed there, as were as his parents (and probably their parents). So, for the second time this year, I found myself sleeping on a couch in a buddies basement and, all in all, I’m getting pretty fond of it. The basements, they’re so dark, that I just konk out pronto.

Anyway, Iowa is truly God’s County and I really enjoyed my stay, although it was a lot different trip than I’m used to. The biggest difference being that I wasn’t running around like a maniac, trying to photograph everything. Nobody ran around anywhere. A DM Tuesday felt like a Portland Saturday. And get this – they grow entire FIELDS of corn. Yeah, it just grows there. No, I couldn’t believe it either. It’s real relaxed, too – I mean, when the corn grows just the same whether or not you stress out, why stress out?

I feel I should mention a couple cool things that have come out of Iowa besides corn (it leads the nation in hog, corn, and soy production although its only the 26th largest state, almost completely average) – John Wayne, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Tom Arnold. The setting for the painting American Gothic is somewhere in Iowa. Like I said, we didn’t do to much. I got nine and half glorious hours of sleep every night. We took in a minor-league baseball game, the Iowa Cubs versus the Salt Lake Bees, which was a lot of fun. We toured the capitol, and just let me tell you about that:

Iowa, to me, is synonymous with the plain and simple and functional. I expected the capitol to be a plain brick building with a few offices. Nope. The thing must’ve been designed by Liberace, and it wouldn’t look out of place on the Vegas Strip. Everything – ceilings, carpets, location (perched on top of the biggest hill around and surround by cannons), the library, the senate chamber (complete with Jumbotron) was looking pretty gangsta. Took me completely by surprise.

But the end came much to quick, and we travelled twenty minutes across the mini-city to get to Stellas, a 50’s restaurant. Stella’s had been hyped by the Poppa ‘o’ Iowa – if you order a milkshake, they have a cute girl in a poodle skirt pour it into your glass from five feet up. The kicker? You hold the glass on your forehead while they do it. So you can believe the let down when I had to order my milkshake from a dude with dreadlocks. But the food was good, the company was better, and I was trucking back to Kirksville before I even knew it.

After that I was off to Sam A Baker State Park, down in southern Missouri. Me and some of the ROTC boys and some of their friends didn’t do much for a few days, but we did it real well – filling the days with floating trips down the local river, the nights with drink and talk, and all the meals were barbecued.

Then it was a long drive back to Kirksville, a short drive to Kansas City, and a long flight back to Portland, where I’ve been for a week and a half. And for a guy with nothing to do, I’ve kept busy – yard work, putting my room back together after my cousin moved out (it took four days), the daily exercising, meals with the fam (of how I missed them), meeting up with a just a fraction of the ORpals I need to see this break, etc. It’s been go-go-go.

But I’m planning on keeping this busy for the rest of my summer, which is a month. On July 1st I report up to FT Lewis, Washington for five weeks of getting compared to every other Cadet in the Army (every Cadet that plans on graduating next year, anyway). There’ll be leading and following and sweating and headgames and learning and teaching and planing and pretending to kill people and getting tear-gassed and never enough sleep and a lot of other stuff.

And after that, I go straight to FT Bragg, North Carolina, to job-shadow a few officers that do the exact thing I want to do (except I want to do it outside the Continental United States). And after three weeks of that, it’s straight back to Kirksville and my final, senior year. So, again, my summer pretty much ends July 1st and I plan on packing a lot of living into those 30 days.

pics

Joshua 1:16:
“And they answered Joshua, saying, All that thou commandest us we will do, and whithersoever thou sendest us, we will go.”

So Kelly, this girl I’ve been pal’n around with a lot lately, was up for an award from the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association. And since the banquet was in Lake of the Ozarks (just below the center of Missouri), we figured we’d make a trip of it. After Kelly (and Truman in general) robbed them of all the most important awards, we were off.

Branson, Missouri is billed as the heartland’s answer to Las Vegas. It isn’t. We spent the first night in that love-it-or-hate-it town and hated it. It’s about the most gaudy, hillybilly-entertainment thing I’ve ever seen. I’d wanted to stop in and catch a Ray Stevens show, because A) he’s sort of a childhood icon to me, right up there with Darkwing Duck and B) I heard he had a regular show down there. But when we got there, they told us that he’d retired last year. A bit nonplussed (I don’t think I’m using that word properly), we got some snaps in front of his theater and tore out of there like something really fast.

The next stop was Little Rock, AR, billed by Josh Fenton as “a fun mid-sized town.” I wouldn’t want to settle down there, but I sure wouldn’t mind living there for a few years. It’s relaxed, the weather’s warm, the people are friendly. Since my Australian travel guide served me so well Down Under, I grabbed an American travel guide at the local mall. The funny thing was that the travel guide didn’t really list much to do in Little Rock, except soak up the gee-are-8 atmosphere.

We stopped into the Clinton Memorial Library, which really wasn’t that exciting, then hit up the local Flying Saucer – a fairly well-respected chain of restaurants that specialize in serving excellent food and diverse brews. It thus occurred to me, whilst I was sipping one of them, that one of my life goals is to be one day referred to as a “beer enthusiast by someone who knows what they’re talking about.” I shared this revelation with Kelly and she laughed, then saw that I was serious and laughed some more.

But that’s the future and this is now; we were off to Memphis, Tennessee. For a while, we thought that we’d been in 3 state capitols over the weekend (driving through Springfield, MO and Little Rock), but it turns out that Nashville is the capitol of TN, not Memphis. It’s a mistake anyone would make, though – Memphis itself was named after the ancient Egyptian capitol on the Nile. See? Already my travel guide pays off.

So we hit up Beale Street, Memphis’s answer to the Strip, ate our fill of Huey’s Hamburgers and toured the night life a bit. I feel it’s important to mention the symbolic Mai Tai I had with dinner. Ever since watching Con Air, I’ve equated the south with Mai Tais and Yahtzee. And since Memphis is the furthest south I’ve ever been (I only ever just skimmed the top of Georgia), I couldn’t resist.

Graceland, by the way, sucked. They charge $25 per tour of the Presley house and you can’t turn around with seeing some over-merchandised Elvis crap. We had what fun we could and then struck out for the last stop before Kirksville – St. Louis. And we weren’t even in STL that long – just long enough to grab a few White Castle sliders, lose $20 (well, I did. Kelly’s a lot smarter than me) on the riverboat casino, gas up and skee-dattle.

It was a whirlwind trip, resulting in only 19 pics, but I’ll take what I can get.

the D.W.A. (Dane With Attitude)

pics, vids, a real good column and a link to a ROTCarticle

Spring Break came, went, and I took as many pictures as I could. We (Dave, Kelly, Mary Beth, and moi) spent the first weekend in Champagne, at the Illinois school system’s largest University. They snuck me into one of the bars and we had all sorts of good times that really can’t be translated or communicated via email.

Some of the stuff we did that weekend can, though – good eating being the first. We had some Steak and Shake (and I’m a man who loves his S&S), some Cozy Dogs (the original corn dog – they dip ’em in batter and fry ’em up right in front of you), and a Horseshoe or two (an open faced hamburger, smothered in cheese/ketchup). We got a little gluttonous there towards the end, but we all exercise pretty regularly and I’ve always tried to follow that sound advice of RA Heinlein: “Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. – moderation is for monks.”

Springfield, being the capitol of IL, makes a big stink about Lincoln. I think it’s bogus – he was born in Kentucky and spent the significant parts of his life either Sentoring or Presidenting in the DC area. But if you’ve ever met anyone from Illinois, you know they love their Lincoln all the same. So we wandered around and saw a lot of Land of Lincoln things.

I also had the misfortune of being in Springfield when all those tornadoes came through. Growing up in the NW, we go through earthquake drills quite regularly. I’m not going to lie – something about being smack dab in tornado alley, during tornado season, and hearing the warning sirens go off, well, it scarred the hell out of me. We were all there huddled in the basement, trying to play Cranium by candlelight. All my Midwest pals didn’t think anything of it, but man was it nuts – the winds got louder and louder, the lights flickered and then went out, the wind got even louder and then – all the sudden – things got real quiet outside. Too quiet. That was the worst. Oh man, was that the worst. Nothing bad really happened – I’ve still got full use of all ten fingers, but a few roofs got torn off four blocks away from the basement we cowered in (well, I did most of the cowering).

After that it was all pretty much downhill – we drove on back to Kirksville where we dropped off David and picked a whole contingent: my buddies Paul and Iowa, Iowa’s girlfriend and Iowa’s girlfriend’s sister. Also, Iowa‘s snowboard.

From there we drove straight through to Longmont, CO. My Pa grew up there, and we stayed with the grandfolks, which was nice. My Pa’s sister and her family live out that way, too, and we got to see them, which was also nice. Especially since we spent the whole day shredding (half of us skied, half snowboarded). It was real nice to eat some good food, hot tub it up, and relax with family. My hombres tell me they had a pretty good time, too.

For the short time we had in Colorado, we certainly kept busy – we spent two days sloping our little hearts out at Winter Park. At the end of our second day, we stopped in Idaho Springs (a litte town on the way down the mountain) and had good-good pizza at a place called Beau Jo’s. One of my ROTC bus also tipped me off to a microbrewery – Tommyknockers – two blocks away from Jo’s, so we checked that out and found, to our delight, that there was good-good beer to be had. And had it we did, because I turned 21 that very same day.

We also took a day to see Colorado without ski boots on, and trekked up to Estes Park (a charming mountain town) and the Rocky Mountain National forest. and since it’s such a beautiful state, we packed up a picnic and ate lunch right up there, among the peaks and trees and elk and Coloradoans. My G-ma told the story about my G-pa scarring off a bear that was after his new grill (a story I’ve loved to hear since I was a tot), and other fun stuff.

That’s about it – although we fit in more than we’re letting on – we packed up and trekked back to the MidWest, bellys full of good eating and quads aching from good slope’ing and ears popping from the altitude. On the way out of town we went by New Belgium brewery, the only brewery in the world which is entirely wind-powered.

Joshua 1:16
pics
and what I will one day consider the worst column I’ve ever written

The Mil Ball – ROTC’s formal dinner & dance – started off around 6.30pm Friday. It was a lot of fun, but there’s not a whole lot of fun things to say about it. I was in charge of the cake cutting ceremony, which was fun. I can’t really explain it in less than million years, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say it was purdee cool.

But it finished up around 8pm – that’s when the cadre (Officers and Sargent’s) left so the cadets could drink/get a little wild. We stuck around ’til about ten, then bugalooed out of there. You see, I had to be at Baldwin Hall at 1:45am. So I wound up getting a little less than three hours of sleep before I was at it again. From Baldwin we loaded up into two vans. There were 12 of us, not including a Major and two Master Sargent’s. That makes for 6 teams of two cadets each, which is good because we were driving to the up-tenth annual Kansas University Ranger Challenge Buddy Competition. But don’t let my flippant tone fool you, we’d been training for it since we got back from Winter Break.

The Buddy Comp, or the 2man, or whatever you want to call it, is a lot like the Ranger Challenge I do in the fall. The eponymous difference being that, rather than squad-sized teams, it’s 2man teams. There are other differences, but the other big one is the events. Here’s the break-down:

I competed with BJ Monson. He’s a year younger than me, tall, laid-back, not half as loud as me (who is?), and a real amiable guy. I’m not about to get all sappy here, but I couldn’t have asked for a better Battle Buddy, ‘cuz there’s not one in the whole Cadet Corp.

We stepped off for a 5+ mile ruck run (in all our going-to-war-gear: boots and rucks and mock M16s and all) at 7am. The route was tough as nails, but pretty cool. We ran on the hardball (MilSpeak for “a paved surface”) for a bit, then cut into the campus forest, then ran through a big ‘ol patch of mud, stuff like that.

Then we split into groups, and everybody round-robined to the separate events. Since there were 40-ish teams, this helped speed things up a bit. Me and Monson, team 27, rocked the Litter Carry first. It’s pretty simple: there’s a stretcher, with two sandbags on it, that you have to navigate around various obstacles really, really quickly. Things like sliding it under wire while you low-crawl, “jumping” it over a chin-high wall, and fishtailing it around a bunch of poles.

The next event is called the crucible, a term which serves well as both a describer and a identifier. It’s a 200 meter sprint that includes two wire pits (where you’ve got to low-crawl in the mud), a rope climb, a quick Land Nav bit, radioing in a medievac request, carrying four (two for each buddy) forty pound water jugs from this line to that line and back again, “stepping” planks across a grass square (there are two planks and you both have to balance on them while passing them back and forth – tough enough when you’re muddier than a pig, and you get DQed if you touch the ground-“lava”), and a sprint to the finish.

After that, a quick Land Nav course, then a grenade assault course. After all that, we had about twenty minutes to scarf some food, pound a Gatorade, and change our socks before the baddest event there is or ever will be: the buddy run.

On the surface, the only difference between the ruck run and the buddy run is that the buddy run is slightly longer, and you don’t wear rucks. But there’s a world of difference between that first run and that last one. Everybody starts out the day like Rambo, but not everybody finishes like Rambo. And the buddy run route was even crazier than before – about a mile and a half of it was through knee high grass and across three creeks. And they worked it out so that the last half mile was one big ‘ol hill. Believe me, it was tougher than I’d like to remember.

Did it suck? Yes, three or four times over. But it’s the kind of suck that you can love, you know? And for as much as totally sucked, they were selling BBQed hamburgers for a $1 about 20 yards from the finish line. It’s funny how it works, but the hamburger wasn’t too special at all. But it easily makes the Top Five List Of Hamburgers I’ve Ever Had. And that’s a list I take seriously.

About thirty minutes after I finished my burger, they had the briefest&best awards&closing ceremony I’ve ever been to. I’ll preface this by saying that there were originally around 100 teams signed up to compete. Tornadoes in Kansas pushed the competition back a week, and I think that cut out a lot of the “fluff” that were just there to “have fun.” I mean, team 27 had a blast, but we were also there to knock the dust off everybody else.

Around 40 teams competed, we finished up in 7th place. Another Truman team beat us by 9 points to take 6th place, and another Truman team beat everybody to take 1st place. And having three teams in the top ten is, by all accounts, pretty stinking impressive. Not to slight the other three teams from Truman, they all did very well. I chalk it up to a lot of hard work, a little luck, a ton of effort, and coming from one of the best ROTC programs in the region, if not the country. I knew there was a reason I choose Truman.

In other, more drastic news, I have not been re-hired as a columnist next year. I still don’t know quite what to make of it, but the new opinions editor is a bit strange and very politically correct (which, I think, explains a thing or two). Still, writing for the Index was something I enjoyed doing and I’m enough of an egoist to believe that at least few other people enjoyed – and I few more enjoyed to hate – the reading of my words. I’m not about to let it ruin my summer, but I do admit I’m saddened. Frankly, I plan on dedicating the second re-printing of my first best-seller to that crappy no-good editor.

One last little thing: at the house I lived in in Australia, there were two showers separated by a wall that didn’t quite reach the celling. It was a bit creepy at first, but you could talk to the person in the other shower and it sounded no different that if you were talking across the table over a bowl of Weet-Bix. It was through this that we invented the Beer Shower. Seeing it takes a roughly equal amount of time to a) consume a beer and b) take a shower, it was only a matter of time before we combined the two and added the singing of classic rock songs.

So, needless to say, my pallies were all pretty impressed with the concept when I imported it to Kirksville, Missouri. And it just so happened to inspire my roomie David Mannell – who is getting to be a really, really good on the guitar (check his myspace) – to write a song. This, in turn, inspired the music video available below.

most sincerely,
J. Kirk Fenton

the Music Video
the pics and my last column

I live with two guys, David and Tim. They’re both History majors – that’s not an important part of this story. What is important is that David hails from Kansas City, Missouri (There is a KC, Kansas but it’s across the river and sort of a ghetto).

Dave, being the stellar guy he is, said he’d show me around a bit. And two weekends ago I took him up on it. I know, I know, the two weekends ago turnaround seems a bit long. In my defense, I spent last weekend having fun (“fun”) with the Army and all the weekdays in between aceing mid-term after mid-term (“aceing”).

It was pretty quick trip, but I’ve always been told that it’s not how long your trip is, it’s how you use what you’ve got (“told”). Besides, any trip that you don’t have to spend the nights sleeping in your truck is a good trip.

The Nelson Atkins museum – one of America’s premier art institutes – was pretty neat-o. I’ve always had a thing for realism, so I checked out some of what I’m told are the greatest realism exhibits ever. I don’t say that to try win any Mr. Culture award, though – after the art, we went straight outside and jumped over the hedge-rows.

Of course, we were pretty hungry after all that, so we dropped in on a Steak and Shake, one of America’s premier dinning establishments. It’s a 50’s style dinner, and it’s delicious. After that, it was off to Union Station (made famous by the Kansas City Massacre of 1933) and the Liberty Memorial, KC’s two biggest touristy attractions.

Dave’s got a sister, though, and she’s a pretty good dancer, so we headed across town to see the State dance competition. I hate to be so brief, but her team took state. The next morning was a blur – I remember church, eating some great homemade lasagna, and then making our way back to Kirksville.

I’m still amazed at how much we fit in with what little time we had. And that was with all the best stuff off-limits, anyway. Kay Sea’s supposed to be the epicenter of real blues (to get any more authentic you’d have to go trouncing around the swamps and backwoods). And all that blues stuff is in bars and I’m not 21 (until next Thursday and I’m not even joking).

Which is ironic. As it is now, I only really drink, on average, around five weekends a month. Ha, ha. The follow-up joke being, of course, that the weekend starts on Wednesday. You’ve got to see the irony, though – I still get a kick out driving my mother up the wall, even though I’m days away from being legally recognized as a full-fledged adult. I guess I’ll never grow quite that far up.

the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico)

KC pics and
a column on profanity
and another column on manliness
and another on the University Baker
also, pics from the Saturday that I dressed up as the school mascot for the Admissions Office: SpikePics