a matter of timing

“the sailor, officially a stenographer, had been copying nsc documents and kissinger’s memos for ten months, making an extra copy of everything that went into the Xerox machine, working at night and searching burn bags…after Kissinger returned to Islamabad, Radford, went through his room and his briefcases taking notes…” “Kissinger figured the president was drinking too much, not so unusual when rebozo was around.” President Nixon: alone in the white house. richard reeves ________________________________________________________________ ________ august 8, 1974 was a thursday as I recall…summer work in the steel mills had drawn to a close and there were several weeks left before the fall semester started so we decided to go camping…in colorado…we left hobart at about eight in the morning and drove straight through to denver, arriving there at about two a.m. on friday the ninth…this would have put us somewhere in the endless wastes of nebraska when tricky dick took to the national airwaves to bid the presidency farewell…we caught a few hours of sleep in the car after we got to denver and when the sun came up we stopped to buy a couple of cases of coors and headed southwest out of denver towards woodland park and the mountain backwoods…we pitched camp by a creek and settled back to watch mule deer and get thoroughly buzzed…high as kites on mountain air…next day we were joined by a couple of friends ( bill and frank to be specific ) who had driven out in a decrepit fiat and were delayed by numerous mechanical woes but had soldiered on to the mountains...their arrival doubled the exhilaration delivered by the alpine climate and we lazed the next few days away hiking in the mountains, swimming in icy streams, swatting horse flies, and digging out ticks…70s style camping at its very best…the weekend evolved into a new week and by Tuesday thoughts of heading home intruded ( some of us had real world jobs )…bill and I headed into woodland park to find an auto parts store to purchase parts for a desperately needed tune-up for the fiat ( the primitive automobiles we drove forty years ago had such exotic parts as distributor caps, rotors, points, and condensers…all swept into the dustbin of automotive terminology by the advent of the computer and a systems deepening so complex that I believe you’d have to take the engine out of my pick-up to change spark plugs…it was a simpler time when you listened to an engine to diagnose a problem rather than paying ninety bucks to hook it up to a diagnostic computer…complexity equates to progress in the consumerist utopia )…it was around noon when we wandered into the parts store and pissed the clerk off by interrupting his lunch…bill rattled off a list of necessities and the grumbling counterman stomped off to gather the goods…the small black and white television ( electronic media were as primitive as the autos…if you look closely enough at photos of the era you can just make out the shadows of the dinosaurs that gave us so much trouble then ) was tuned to the “news at noon” which was on hiatus for a few commercials ( some things never change )…when the local news anchor returned he led the segment off by announcing that “president ford” would be holding a “televised” news conference that evening…startled bill and I looked at one another and I asked “wasn’t Nixon president when we left?”…in some suspense we waited for the clerk to return and when he did bill and I both said at the same time, “what happened to Nixon?”…the clerk affixed us with a look of combined pity and loathing he must have used when confronted by morons or strangers who were obviously deranged and said, “that fucker quit”…this ignited ( literally ) a celebration when we returned to the car and we celebrated all the way back to camp…which induced some forgetfulness as to the cause of the celebratory binge...the amnesia was temporary however, and when we recalled and recounted the news to the others it reignited ( again , literally) the celebration…content we retired to the tent and initiated repairs on the fiat in the morning, leaving to return home by around nine…the trip home took us through nebraska in daylight with a remarkable train of events at a truck stop outside lincoln…that is another president however…and a completely different story.