My Career as a Boomer, Part One

It's time, folks, for a little confession. Rick has been guilty of living an "alternative lifestyle." No, no, not that!

I'm talking about my short career as a "Boomer." A boomer, as you probably don't know, is a skilled craftsman (pipefitter, electrician, sheet metal worker, instrument tech, etc.) who travels gypsy-like across the nation following construction booms. The holy grail of the boomer is the big power house, high-rise hotel, or manufacturing plant that needs a lot of hands and is paying overtime wages. If you're lucky you might hit a long-term job working 6 - 10s with the occasional double-bubble Sunday as icing on the cake. If you hit one of those just right, you can gross a six figure income in a year...but that's rare.

The more usual outcome is a series of short jobs lasting weeks or maybe a month or so, with timeouts for traveling between jobs. Sometimes you just have to wait - no work, no income, a lot of unease. When you finally find a job, you have to wait another week to 10 days for that first precious check. You'll just be barely breaking even, after sending money home. "I'm here to make money, not spend it!" is the motto of the boomer, so a Spartan lifestyle is de rigueur. If your afraid of fleabag motels and transient hotels in the heart of the crack district, stay at home.

My boomer career began modestly enough with a visit to the IBEW Local 520 in Austin (January of '07 ), just a short jaunt from my home local in San Antonio. Austin, at that time, was a thriving hub of the semi-conductor industry, and demand for skilled craftsmen was high. As an added bonus, it was within commuting distance...if you call a three hour round trip drive "commuting."

My first job was at a Cisco Systems server farm in the upscale Jollyville suburb of Austin. Great bunch of guys and nice clean work, but a slim forty hour check hardly justified the commuting expense. After two months, I ditched Cisco for the big time: the Samsung chip fabrication facility in NW Austin. Fisk Electric was hiring 400+ electricians for a multi-billion dollar expansion of Samsung's existing facility. The overtime was nice: a 6 - 10 schedule with the promise of an occasional double-time Sunday to sweeten the deal.

Working at a chip plant was a real eye-opener. The clean room protocols made an operating theater seem gross in comparison. The suit up procedure took place in a kind of air lock anteroom. Full suit-up took about 15 minutes, followed by an inspection from a protocol officer, who made sure not square inch of bare skin was visible.

Even the slightest speck of dust was equivalent (on a microchip) to an enormous bolder dropping on a highway. Drilling a hole in a piece of metal, for instance, required one person to hold the drill and another worker holding a HEPA-filtered vacuum hose at the tip of the drill.

Technicians with air-sampling devices constantly prowled the plant testing the cleanliness of the air. Workers who failed to abide strictly by the protocols were swiftly shown the door.

The money was good, no doubt, but the stress of working 60+ hours a week gradually wore down even the hardiest. Zombification warred with determination in a tedious marathon to make it to the end of the week. If a threshold number of accidents occurred, Samsung officials would stand down the project for one or two rest days.



Part Two, coming up soon.

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The Heart is a Lonely Hurter, Part One

My heart attack...

It's almost a friend now. I've lived with it for almost a year now and it's turned my life upside down in every conceivable way. An intimate friend, but a very tough and demanding one.

3/2/09 9:30am:

It's a brilliant Monday morning and I'm at work south of downtown San Antonio running steel conduit - work I normally could do in my sleep. But for some reason I can't concentrate. My mind is wandering, beads of sweat break out on my upper lip, and a nasty litlle nausea keeps nagging at me. I try to climb up a stepladder, and the room begins to swirl.

Wait a minute. I didn't drink last night, so why do I have hangover?

My new friend, Mr. Heart Attack , governs my daily schedule. M/W/F is cardiac rehab, alternate Tuesdays for psych counseling, Thursdays I upload (via modem) accumulated data from my LifeVest, appointments for MUGA scans, echo cardiograms, EKGs, bloodwork, and of course the cardiologist. I've set up an online calendar (thank you, Google) to keep track of it all.

3/3/09 9:30 am

It's Tuesday morning...24 hours since I started feeling sick. I have to hold a gun to my head to get myself out of bed. Feel rotten, but not particularly concerned - you get sick, you get well, no big deal. I convince myself to drive the 2 miles to the local minor emergency clinic. Feel like I'm coming down with the flu.

The doctor gives me a quick strep throat screen (negative), and sends me home with anti-nausea meds.

My cardiologist (a lovely Indian lady...or perhaps Pakistani...I don't have the nerve to ask) has returned from out of town, and should be in possession of the latest MUGA scan results. At issue is a quantity called the "ejection fraction," a measure of the fraction of blood pumped out of a ventricle with each heart beat. If the EF is too low, there is a danger of abnormal heart rhythms. Dangerous, and potentially fatal.

3/3/09 8:30 pm

It's now Tuesday evening. For the past hour I've been hopping around like a frog on meth. I don't know what's wrong but I cannot force my body to remain still. My wonderful wife is looking at me strangely, half in concern - half in irritation. "What kind of show is he putting on now?" she seems to be thinking.

Then the hammer falls with a vengeance.

A pain in my left shoulder, like the mother of all dislocations. My chest has an industrial strength vise clamped around it and is only getting tighter. I tell my wife to take me to the emergency room of our small town hospital.

They don't waste any time. After an EKG and an enzyme test, they quickly stabilize me and transfer me to a large hospital in San Antonio...it's a thirty minute drive by ambulance, just enough time for an interventional cardiology team to be assembled. I'm wheeled directly into the cath lab and asked to sign some papers. "Don't worry," the Doctor jokes, "the actual procedure will take less time than this."

It's around midnight.

I am sedated, but fully aware of what was going on. After several hours I'm really scared. There is no denying the tension and frustration in the doctors' voices. It's not going to work, I'm thinking. "You idiot," I tell myself, "You waited a full 36 hours to get medical help!"

Finally after last ditch action, some success. The doctors finally break through the clotting by forcing in enormous amounts of clot dissolving meds. After verifying that distal flow is established, they are able to successfully implant two stents.

My God, I'm alive!




Part Two

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Lost Maples State Natural Area

Sunday, 11/15/2009

"The Land That Time Forgot" might be an apt description of the Lost Maples State Natural Area in Texas. A holdover from the last ice age, the area is protected by surrounding mountains and has retained a colder and wetter climate than Texas desert, forest, and coastal areas. Lost Maples State Natural Area is located about 5 miles (8 km) north of Vanderpool, Texas and 71 miles (114 km) west of San Antonio. The park sits along the Sabinal River in western Bandera County and far eastern Real County.

The approach to the area is through steep passes carved through the Guadalupe Mountain Range, and enters into a high mountain plateau (elev 2100 ft).



Evidence suggests that the maples that give the park its name are relicts: remnants of a larger, more widespread population that flourished during the cooler and wetter climate of the last ice age. Today, soils and microclimate control their present distribution. Some of the flora and fauna are unique to Lost Maples.

In the heart of the Texas Hill Country, the 2,208-acre Lost Maples State Natural Area is an inspiring mixture of sheer limestone cliffs, deep canyons, dense woodlands, and numerous clear streams. Designated as a National Natural Landmark, Lost Maples State Natural Area contains the state's largest stand of bigtooth maples east of the Guadalupe Mountains. When conditions are right, the maple leaves put on a dazzling show of fall colors, attracting thousands of visitors to the park. Peak fall foliage viewing is during the last two weeks of October through the first two weeks of November.

Sandy and Rick decide to take advantage of the peak season (second week in November) and take a Sunday day trip to the Lost Maples reserve near Medina and Vanderpool.

Purple Sage meadow.

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Castroville, the Alsace of Texas

Castroville is a historic little town with a rich cultural heritage nestled in the Medina River Valley just 15 miles west of San Antonio. It is known as “The Little Alsace of Texas” because of its origins. The town was founded in 1844 by Henri Castro, for whom the town is named. The first European emigrant settlers in this area were mostly Catholic farmers from Alsace, a region of France, brought over to fulfill Castro’s contract to colonize vacant Texas Land. Calling themselves Alsatians, they were mostly of German decent speaking a dialect of German and French.

Henri Castro, founder of Castroville

A Childhood Friend

The year is 1958, the place is the southside of San Antonio. Midway between the ancient Mission San Jose and the abandoned Terrell Wells (a natural hot springs spa whose sulfuric rotten-egg scent wafted for miles) lay tiny working class tract houses, one of which was my childhood home. On lazy summer afternoons, the boys of the neighborhood would play baseball in the street or explore the woods adjacent to our subdivision...

Approaching dusk might bring out blinking lightning bugs, or if you were really sharp-eyed you might spot a horny toad on a tree branch or fence post. It wasn't actually a toad (the real name was horned lizard), but the crowning achievement of a summer day was to capture one of these creatures and drop it in your pocket.

I haven't seen a horny toad in 50 years. I suppose they're still around - some say they fell victim to the fire ant invasion from South America. Progress has its place, I suppose, but I'm glad not to have lived my childhood in the sadly depleted world I see around me now.

Take a look at:

Rick's Photoblog

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The Mystery Ranch

The Light of the World illuminates rural Texas.






If you take a spin on the interstate, cruising east along I-10 past Seguin, you will see something rather curious and unexpected. Off to your right, in place of the usual cow pastures, mesquites, and cacti, arises a bizarre vision. A Shrine Circus with minaret domes, perhaps? An Algerian village abducted by aliens and plopped down in the vastness of central Texas?


We've passed it dozens of times and had fun speculating as to its nature and origin. Finally I decide to investigate this mystery - armed with a single clue: an ornate sign along the highway proclaiming the Silver Wolf Ranch.



Information about the ranch is not easy to find, but I did run across an archived article in the San Antonio Express-News:


"KINGSBURY — Almost every day, at least a few of the 27,600 motorists who drive Interstate 10 through this speck of a ranching community pull over to check out a curious fenced ranch just off the highway.

Easily visible from the interstate, twin white domes of a massive structure poke up like mushrooms from the private 340-acre forested reserve. A giant bronze bison statue stands in plain view, as do live stick-legged emus and ostriches.

But tourists never get through the well-appointed limestone facade entrance that beckons them into the Silver Wolf Ranch. As they have for 10 years since the property came under new ownership, polite Spanish-speaking workers shoo away the camera-toting motorists with the same unrequited promise: The ranch is just about to open.

The land, a 40-minute drive from San Antonio, remains just as enigmatic to immediate neighbors left to ruminate — sometimes darkly — about relentless construction activity, howls of unseen wolves, reports of gun-carrying guards, and especially the tint-windowed SUV caravans for which the gates do occasionally open.

“I don't know nothing; I don't want to get involved,” said neighbor Jesse Weinaug, who owns a cattle ranch next door. “They don't come over here. I don't go over there. It ain't none of my business.”

The property, it turns out, is the private playground of a Mexican family that has grown immensely wealthy and politically powerful while ruling as a dynasty over the controversial religious denomination known as Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, or the Light of the World Church.



The Pentecostal-like denomination's supreme leader, the iconoclastic 71-year-old Apostle Samuel Joaquin Flores, is viewed as a messianic figure to be worshipped as a direct link to God and obeyed by church faithful in Mexico and abroad.

Some of Joaquin's nine grown children, themselves considered quasi-divine royalty, have transformed their Texas land into a lavish private zoo-themed family retreat for their father's enjoyment on the scale of some owned by American pop stars or Saudi oil sheiks.

The Guadalajara, Mexico-headquartered denomination, which claims 5 million members worldwide, a figure disputed by some religion researchers, is not without some tenacious allegations of wrongdoing against Joaquin involving abusive treatment of followers."

The Silver Wolf Ranch remains as mysterious as ever, but (at least so far) there have been no threats against neighbors or any hint of confrontation. Texans are wont to mind their own business, and the Light of the World people aren't acting like Branch Davidians or the infamous "Republic of Texas."

Image via Wikipedia

La Luz del Mundo headquarters, Guadalajara

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