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    22 Miles North of Nowhere
    22 Miles North of Nowhere
    22 Miles North of Nowhere
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    22 Miles North of Nowhere

    By David F Eastman

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    My story is not unique. It reflects the generation of kids living in the 1950s whose parents fought in World War II and the Korea War, with battlefield scars still evident on their bodies and the nightmares of their friends dying and maimed still fresh in their minds. They came home from the wars seeking new lives in new places and just wanted to find a good job in a quiet town like Midland, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where they could peacefully lay down their heads at night, forget the terrors of the past and live simple, loving lives with their children.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid F Eastman
    Release dateSep 6, 2019
    ISBN9780463649664
    22 Miles North of Nowhere
    Author

    David F Eastman

    I am an avid reader and passionate writer. I have written eight eBooks and thirteen short stories and my genres include science fiction, horror, murder, political intrigue, conspiracy theories, fables and parables of life and love. I am currently working on two new eBooks, one about World War 2 and a second about a terrorist attack on the U.S.I am a retired life science and high technology marketing executive and currently mentor and guide scientists, physicians, medical students and engineers in managing their start-ups, developing their inventions, commercializing their products and building their businesses into viable, successful and profitable ventures.I have a Jewish heritage from both German and Polish grandparents, on my mother's side and an English, Native-American heritage on my father's side.I have one wife, one son, and four cats.I love to travel and learn about new cultures and people and just returned from a month long pleasure trip to Venice, Italy, New York City, Athens, Greece, Split, Croatia, Montenegro and Zurich, Switzerland. Next year I plan to spend three weeks n Italy drinking good wine.I

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      Book preview

      22 Miles North of Nowhere - David F Eastman

      22 Miles North of Nowhere By David F. Eastman

      Copyright © David F. Eastman All Rights Reserved. 2015 50 NE Village Squire Avenue Gresham, Oregon 97030

      22 Miles North of Nowhere

      By David F. Eastman

      For whatever reason, and now 61 years later, I remember every single moment of my life when I was five years old. I remember each hour, each day, each week and everything I did as a child almost as if it had happened yesterday. I do not know why this is. How can I possibly remember events six decades ago? Whatever the real reason is, I believe it is because I was happy.

      The time was 1954. The place was Midland, California; a desert mining town about 22 miles North of Blythe, California, which sat dead center between Phoenix, Arizona and Palm Springs, California on a cross desert highway called Route 10. Year around, the weather was fierce, scorching and sometimes downright chilly; 120 degrees in the summer plunging to cool, even snowy nights in the winter.

      Midland, unlike Blythe, where the Colorado River ran through the middle of the town and fed the green farmland surrounding it, was situated in the bleak, brown, hard scrabble desert with a hole in the ground where the U.S. Gypsum Mining Company extracted powdery white gypsum to make wallboard. My dad, Hank, worked at the mining company as a jack-of-all-trades—carpenter, plumber, electrician, or whatever was needed. But, then again, everyone in the town worked for the mining company or they didn’t work at all.

      Midland was truly 22 miles north of nowhere, in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the bleak end of a single dirt-gravel-paved always bumpy, dusty road connecting it to the rest of the world. Only about 200 families lived in Midland; most of the men worked in the mine and most of the women were homemakers. It was, after all, the 1950’s. The town was completely owned and run by U.S. Gypsum. There was a hardware/grocery store; a gas station; a kindergarten; an elementary/middle school; an all denominational Christian church; a medical clinic; a baseball field; a community center; a ghetto; a bar; rows of ramshackle wood houses for the miners, and; 1950s style middle class homes for the supervisors. The middle class homes were located right next to the school and on the other side of the school, divided by a tiny hill high enough to hide them, were the miner’s row houses, including ours.

      When the mine was depleted in the 1970s, U.S. Gypsum left and took the whole town with them, lock, stock and barrel. If you visit Midland today, it is a ghost town; just concrete pads where houses and schools used to sit, rotting railroad ties on the railroad bed that bordered the mine, a few rusted and gutted 1940s style coupes punctured with bullet holes, and tumbleweeds piled up high on the baseball field’s chain link backstop. Of course, unlike our home now just dust in the desert, my memories remain there too.

      My view of Midland, the view I vividly remember, was from atop the pitcher’s mound of the company’s baseball diamond located just south of the school, where you could stand tall and turn in all directions and pretty much view the whole town, the desert and surrounding mountains. Of course, I did not play baseball. My father was a pitcher on the U.S. Gypsum company team, and I proudly carried a galvanized metal bucket of cold water as the official water boy and brought ladles of water to the players as they sat on a hard wood bench in an uncovered dugout roasting in the frightfully hot sun. With pats on my back by the thirsty baseball players and always a happy, proud smile from my dad, it probably was the very best job in my whole life.

      From the pitcher’s mound looking to the East through the tall steel towers that supported the moving transit system of huge scoop boxes rising out of the mine filled with gypsum, you could see the Big Maria Mountains. When you are only five years old and a pipsqueak of a person, mountains seem taller and more majestic than they probably are. I always thought the Marias touched the sky, maybe all the way up to Heaven; at least that was my hope at the time. At night, when the sun settled into the West and appeared to sink into the desert like a shimmering mirage, the Big Maria’s would turn a soft purple color before the darkness came. And the sky above Midland would glow with fiery colors from the sunset that made the dull desert browns and yellows and taupes brighten. In the entire world, there is still nothing like a sunset in the desert!

      From the pitcher’s mound looking to the West over the rooftops of the miner’s row houses, and towering over the town like it was a Castle, was King’s Chair Mountain. Now that probably was not its real name; it is just the name my small gang of friends called the mountain because of a natural rock formation shaped like a King’s throne. A throne made of two giant slabs of stone bordering each side, one at the back and one stone that formed the seat. My friends and I, like my best friend, Robbie, would climb onto the throne and pretend we were a great King lording over the whole town of Midland, our make believe kingdom. From atop our throne we could see the baseball field, the houses, the schools, the downtown area, the mine, the mountains and far into the desert around us, and we felt proud as the kings of our domain. Sometimes, we would stand tall on the throne’s seat and shout out at the top of our lungs, down the mountainside, that we were the King of the Mountain and all of Midland must bow down to us! And then we would laugh hysterically at ourselves. Thinking back on it now, King’s Chair Mountain probably wasn’t a mountain but a very high, rocky hill made higher in the mind of a five year old.

      From the pitcher’s mound looking to the North through the rusting metal chain link back stop of the baseball field, past the school and the tiny hill, over the ghetto shacks and a dry, deep gully that divided them from the kindergarten grounds, and continuing on over old warehouse buildings used in World War II for ammunition storage, was the bleak, Mojave desert. I love deserts, but they can be cruel, hard places that are unforgiving, ungodly hot and dangerous with all kinds of nasty creatures like diamondback rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and, because we were close to the Big Maria Mountains, mountain lions. Of course, the desert had terribly fun creatures to watch and touch and laugh at that gave me hours of pleasure, like horned toads, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits and a whole host of other creepy-crawlies that only five year old kids can love. But back to dangerous.

      In recorded history, the Mojave Desert has reached some of the hottest temperatures on Earth, as high as 134 degrees, and without any remorse whatsoever could kill you within a few hours if you walked around in it without water. To keep us alive, my mother, Ruth, gave us some simple rules to follow knowing that my older brother and sisters and I would play in the desert.

      The rules were: Keep the town in view wherever you play so that you do not get lost and are close enough to get back before the heat overcomes you. And, Always come home when you are thirsty. And, Do not stay out after the sun goes down. The fact that I made it to 6 years old, and later in life to 66, illustrates that I followed those rules to the letter!

      Just to the west of the desert area where I often played, watching tumbleweeds tumble and roll on their journey somewhere else, and where a train track from the mine disappeared into the far distant mountains, was a water-filled rock quarry. Here I spent hours of fun with my friends jumping off the shear rock walls into water that was cool even in the fierce heat of the desert.

      My dad and I spent Saturday mornings at the rock quarry fishing for catfish which my father caught with liverwurst sandwiches my mom made for our lunch and that were still on the hooks in the mouths of the catfish when my dad smashed them over the head with a small wood bat to subdue them. The truth is I don’t remember eating those fish, just catching them. Maybe my dad gave them away. His real pleasure was just fishing for

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