Searching for a Dream

Climb every mountain,

ford every stream,

follow every rainbow,

till you find your dream.

           The Sound of Music

At some level I suppose everyone comes to know their kids. And if you have more than one, you know that what applies to one doesn’t apply to the other. And over the past several years, my two sons, Geordie and Andrew, have shown my wife, Jackie, and I their differences time and again. But recently, Andrew, the younger, has been bitten by a challenge bug.

A few years ago, an old high school friend of his Emil Iqbal, suggested they bike from Colonial Heights to Key West during Spring Break from their respective colleges. While such a journey is really not a bad thing to attempt, we thought it might behoove him to have at least ridden a bike for a few miles before attempting the 1000 mile trek to the most southerly point in the US.

“But mom, he said, I am a grown (up) man!” His choice of language was slightly more emphatic than up, if you catch my drift. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the trip fell by the wayside. But the bug was planted. Extreme sports, or whatever you want to call it, were now firmly implanted in his brain. We could only wonder what he would come up with next. It seemed anything was fair game, and we prepared ourselves for the next adventure whatever it might turn out to be.

It didn’t really take too long, but about a month ago, Emil approached him about climbing Mount Whitney. It was, Emil assured him, a relatively easy climb that was in fact more like a hike than actually “climbing.” Immediately, Andrew’s blood surged. Mountain Climber—yeah that’s what I want to be this week. A quick look at the Internet and sure enough there it was, Mt. Whitney, at 14,494 feet it was the tallest peak in the contiguous U.S. It is in fact a full 400 feet taller than Mt. Rainier in Washington.

No question about it for Andrew, he was all in. But first they needed to get a permit. The permit arrived quickly and easily. In the final week before he was to leave, he decided it was time to get prepared. Does anyone besides my wife and I see a flaw in this plan?

His flight was scheduled to leave Friday morning, and Tuesday night my wife had him out at Dick’s purchasing such necessities as boots, crampons (attachments for boots that help grip ice and hard packed snow), and a number of other necessities. She managed to borrow a tent, a sleeping bag, and a back pack for him to use. He also needed to purchase an Ice axe, but more about it later.

With all of that going on, he did think about borrowing a camera from me in order to record his alpine adventures. “Dad,” he said. “Do you have a camera I can borrow?”

The words sent shockwaves up and down my back. I could feel the follicles along my spine start to stand, and I know my hair turned a shade or two more to the grey side. My thoughts went immediately to my cameras. If you know me, I have some nice camera gear that I use to take all kinds of pictures. My cheap cameras are expensive, and his past history with electronic gadgetry made me worry.

I thought about his past performance:  how many phones had he lost, broken, drenched. It was too many to count. Once he got a new phone and ruined it the same day. Once we bought him a new laptop for college, and he shattered the screen in a week. Even when he was very young, his luck was pretty much the same and I remember him coming to me with a brand new GameBoy with a broken screen.

“Well, I think it would be best if we got you something more suitable to your quest,” I defended.

We went to Best Buy and canvassed the pocket point-and-shoots they had on sale. I found a Canon camera and a 16-gig SD card combination that came in at a bit over $120. As we checked out, the sales person asked if I wanted to purchase insurance with it? See the paragraph above. I immediately said yes, and gladly plunked down the extra money. Safe, I said.

So Friday came and off he went. We didn’t hear from him until the following Tuesday, when he called and said he made it to the top and didn’t we get insurance on the camera? At first, I thought he was kidding. But then I realized it was no joke. The camera, he said, was gone.

When he got back home, I found out the real story behind the now missing camera. It seems that while climbing up a 1,000 foot incline from Iceberg Lake to the saddle 400 feet below Mt. Whitney’s summit, he had to pass through some very tight bushes. When he got to the other side, they faced a trail covered in ice and fallen rocks. He reached for his ice axe, but it was gone. Lost somewhere in the dense brush they just passed through. And he wasn’t the only one. Emil, it seems, had also lost his ice axe. Back they went to find them.

At that point, Andrew moved the camera from one pocket in his jacket to another in front. He zipped the pocket closed and went on his way. A short time later and they were back with the ice axes, and that’s when he realized that the brush had pulled his zipper open and the camera was no longer in his pocket.

They finished the climb that day. At the peak, one of his climbing partners talked mountain-climbing philosophy and said that they did not climb the mountain, but that the mountain “allowed us to make the ascent.” That worked for everyone, but Andrew still thinks it cost him a camera. The bigger problem to me was that I paid for the camera. Oh well, at least I was able to get a refund on the insurance.

For sale: Dracula's Castle for a cool $85 Mil

The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success.

Bela Lugosi

Not sure how things work out around your house, but at my house the specter of retirement looms like Bela Lugosi on a bad night. In my dreams I see the castle, hear the mad flapping of bat wings, and watch as the dangling bat (strings attached) poofs into the visage of Lugosi, the first and truest Dracula. At least he is to me.

Back in those days, when the old black and whites made it to the TV screen, I was enamored. It was so real in its obvious un-reality. Sure, on the face of it you know it’s a movie, but in a child’s mind it is nothing short of today’s reality TV.

Hey, even the original Godzilla put the fear into me. One night while washing dishes with my older sister, Grace, we talked about Godzilla. That was in the days before we knew that a T-Rex didn’t walk up right, but he still had my attention back then. I was concerned that the monster might chomp right through the window over our sink to get me, but she assured me that the tip of his tail wouldn’t even fit in the window. Thank God for that assurance, because that’s when I knew I was really safe. Besides, my sister, who was older and bigger than me then, probably presented a more tasteful morsel.

Anyway, back to Dracula.

Apparently, the real estate market in Romania isn’t doing so hot either. With the downfall of communism in the country, Dracula’s iconic castle—and it is the real deal of a castle make no mistake, reverted to its original owners, the family of British Queen Victoria. The three siblings are all in their ‘70s and do not have the funds to support the fixer-upper. So they put it on the market. They offered it to the Romania government for a cool $85 million, but apparently the stakes were too high for the country.

To say there is history in this chateau would be an understatement. What Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes of the house Draculesti did to people along the driveway would put Daenerys Targaryen’s handling of the merchants in Meereen of the Game of Thrones to shame. For those who do not watch the show she had 130-odd “merchants” crucified for crucifying the same number of slave children as a warning for her and her army to stay away from their city. Rather Draconian when you think about it.

Anyway, for the mere trifle of $85 million one could open the best little castle in Romania. Just think all you would need to add is a few bathrooms—it has none right now or at least install a row of Vampiric port-a-potties. I mean, who wouldn’t want to tour the castle, spend a night snoozing in one of the keeps, or perhaps even run into the visage of old Bela. With today’s special effects technology it could be sort of a fun house don’t you think? On the other hand, maybe the place is rife with ghosts and we won’t need any help.

Word is the castle already turns a “pretty profit.” But of course, that doesn’t include the overhead of actually having to purchase the property and make repairs and enhancements. But if one were to do it, I mean shell out the $85 million, just imagine the fun you could have lining the streets with empty impaling posts and using them to carry power lines, cable TV, and an Internet connection?

Teach your Children Well

Now more than ever it’s time to hold your children close. Nothing brings those thoughts home faster than incidents like the murder of 8-year-old Martin Cobb, who was murdered attempting to protect his sister from a teen who was trying to attack her.

On the face of it the whole thing seems a bit of a twisted affair. The initial report was skewed, and when the truth finally came out it was apparent that a 16-year-old youth was the main suspect. According to reports in the Richmond-Times Dispatch, Martin was trying to protect his sister from an attack by the teen. At some point during his attempt to protect her, Martin was struck in the head, allegedly with a brick, which resulted in his death.

Shame and horror—that such a thing can happen to kids at any time is hard to comprehend. We know at some level that these types of incidents can and do happen, but some human quality makes us want to think that they happen in other places, big city places, like New York, Detroit, or Los Angeles. Certainly, a quick look at the crime logs in those cities would disclose all kinds of situations that rise to the level of Martin’s death. At some level, we come to expect such stories from other places, but not here in the RVA. Here in the RVA such things are not supposed to happen, right?

Wrong.

Such things have happened here for a long time. Sometimes they don’t peak quite as much as the one with Martin Cobb, but child murders are nothing new around here. They are, as my son Geordie put it, “Heinous.” Hatefully or shockingly evil pretty much captures the circumstances of this crime. No one, especially not a preteen child, should be killed in such a manner.

In an AP story printed in the Times-Dispatch, the police have only said the boy died from severe head trauma. As a parent, the whole thing is difficult to handle. To make matters worse, Martin was a student at my wife’s school in Richmond. Most teachers know that the relationship between teachers and their students comes close to that of a parent.

Such crimes and other accounts of child abuse exist right here in the Tri-Cities. At times, the incidents rise to the level of murder and sometimes to rape and abduction. But it’s not so often that such cases rise to the consciousness of the public. So many times I recall sitting in court rooms hearing the countless number of cases in which a child had been killed or damaged by child abuse is a sad testament to how some in this society treat children.

About 20 years ago, there was an incident not much different from the one with Martin. A 10-year old girl was abducted, raped, and murdered in Chester. Many of you may remember the Charity Powers story; I can’t forget it. At the time, I remember talking with members of the Chesterfield County Police Department, and I posed the question about who could have done such a thing?

In a Richmond minute the investigator told me that they had a main suspect, but that in reality there were six or eight people in the area who they felt were capable of such an act. While we know there is one fewer now, the other five or six remain. And, I am sure, that the roster of potential suspects hasn’t diminished any over the ensuing decades. If this teen is proof, and we have to wait for the court case to see about that, it means a new crop has arrived.

There’s little refuge in a world where people prey on little ones. It’s hard to imagine that such things can happen and yet they do. No one wants to keep their children under protective lock and key, but leaving them to play outside on their own is becoming less of an option.