The Long Escape by Jeff Noonan

Author:Jeff Noonan [Noonan, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Create Space
Published: 2012-01-17T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Great Lakes

I remember that trip, from Western Montana to the Great Lakes Naval Station as being one of the really pleasant times in my life. There was no interstate in those days, so all of my driving was on winding two-lane highways. I cruised across the states with the top mostly down and the warm breeze blowing around me. I had been home and everything there was as well as it could be. And, thanks to my sticker-picking job, I had plenty of money for the trip. I stopped every night and got a motel room. It was pleasant. Then the part of the trip that I remember best happened.

I was driving across the hills of South Dakota, almost to the Minnesota border, when I spotted a girl on a hillside above the road ahead of me. It was one of those classic pictures, with the girl in a long, flowing dress, walking along the hillside. The dress and her hair were blowing behind her in the breeze as she walked in my direction. She must have seen me looking, because she waved at me, and I waved back. I couldn’t help myself. I had passed her, so I stopped the car and backed up until I was a few yards below and ahead of her. I got out and walked over to the fence and waited for her to come to me. When she got there, I just looked at her and said, “Kiss me, please?”

She smiled and leaned over the fence and gave me a very tender little kiss on the lips. I backed up and looked at her.

I said, “This is magic. I’ll never forget this.”

Still smiling, she replied; “I don’t think that I will either.”

I got back in the convertible, waved, and drove on. I never forgot that sweet moment.

I often wonder what happened to the beautiful girl in that long, flowered dress.

Unfortunately, the magic had to end. Eventually, I arrived at the Great Lakes Naval Station, where I checked in a day early. I rapidly became inundated with the day-to-day make-work projects typical of any military base.

I received my class schedule as soon as I arrived. Much to my chagrin, it said that the first eight weeks of my school were totally devoted to mathematics! In eight weeks, going to school forty hours a week, we were scheduled to go from something called “Mathematics for Electronics” through Algebra and Trigonometry with the eighth week being totally devoted to Differential Calculus. This was foreign territory to me. I had not had a single math class in over nine years. Anything past eighth-grade arithmetic was totally new, and very scary, territory.

If I made it through this school successfully, I would be promoted to second class petty officer (E-5) and would be sent on to another school. But if I didn’t pass, I would be going back to the Fleet, and the possibility of a Navy career would be doubtful. I had to get this done if I was going to make that escape that I’d planned for so long.

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