Copper Run – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have been reading some of my recent posts, you are probably aware that I have been talking about some of my exploits and experiences after being assigned to the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.  My story today centers around a subject that is near and dear to my heart, but it is not hunting.  Sorry to disappoint, if that is a topic you were expecting.  Today, my subject is about running.  After I went through arthroscopic surgery on both of my knees and performed the required rehabilitation on both knees, I was ready to hit the running trails again.  I know that several of my friends from the Hash House Harriers had been asking where I had been the last couple of months, and I told them in excruciating detail the trials and tribulations that I had been through.  But I also enjoyed running throughout the week as well.  I had several options for roads and trails that I could take from my quarters on post for runs of various lengths.  I would usually get up and run early in the morning before I went to work.  One hot summer morning, I was out on one of those morning runs.  I could feel the heat building as the sun climbed in the sky.  I also noticed that critters of various sorts were out and about moving around.  I saw a small herd of antelope slowly moving and grazing over toward the golf course.  I was on the road heading out toward the sportsman’s center.  I am going to put you into a frame of reference to set the stage.  Back in the day, there were no streaming music services such as Pandora.  They hadn’t even been invented.  In fact, there were no iPods or MP3 players.  If you were a time traveler and you came back to that time period and you happen to ask a local where you might get your hands on such a device, that local might just look at you as if you had a few screws loose.  The locals might even think that your elevator didn’t go all the way to the top floor, if you catch my drift.  And if you walked into the local Walmart store looking for a pay-as-you-go cell phone service, you would be out of luck.  cell-phones were not widely deployed and commonly used yet.  The ones that were used were big bricks about the size of a Kleenex box.  You know.  The big one.  They want the kind that you could just stick in your hip pocket and look cool.  Like Joe Cool down on the corner.  Oh hell no.  Flip-phone cell-phones would not be commonly adopted and deployed for another 5 to 10 years.  And smartphones, those were way off in the future.  So, if you wanted to entertain yourself while you were out on a long one or two-hour run, you basically had to carry a Sony Walkman cassette tape player.  That’s what I did.  You basically had one of two choices.  You could listen to a cassette tape player or to a compact disc (CD) player.  The CD players came out after the cassette tape players.  But those were basically your choices for entertaining yourself.  To ensure that I kept myself hydrated, I wore the latest in hydration technology, a camelbak hydration system.  For ultra-long runs.  I also wore a dual set of canteens to ensure that I had enough fluids for the run.  If you needed to communicate with somebody when you were far from home, you couldn’t just pull out your cell-phone and hope that you had cell phone service and call somebody.  Oh hell no.  Remember what I said earlier?  You don’t?  Damn, you have an awfully short attention span.  There were no cellular telephones.  You were basically SOL (shit outta luck), unless there just happened to be a pay phone near you.  Oh, by the way, you also needed at least one quarter.  And you better hope to hell that you knew the number that you wanted to call, otherwise you were going to need at least two quarters.  One to call to directory assistance to get the number you needed, and one to call the number you needed.  And then you needed to pray.  Why did you need to pray?  Cuz the phone number you were calling was tied to a phone at some distant location.  If there was nobody at that distant location to pick up that phone when it rang, you were SOL.  Oops.  That calling process could get to be rather pricey, and that was only if there happened to be a pay phone nearby.  But out in the boonies, phone booths weren’t always nearby.  In fact, they were few and far between.  As a result, you had better not get hurt or bitten by a strange critter or befall some other calamity while you are out and about far from home.  But, of course, I never concern myself with small trifles like that when I would head out on one of my morning runs.  That particular morning, as I was running out past the sportsman’s center, I happened to glance down into the ditch alongside the road off to my right.  I noticed the bright shiny glint of copper in the ditch.  The length of copper that I saw was about five feet long.  I thought to myself, “I’m going to have to remember where this spot is so I can come back with my car and grab that copper to sell it for recycling.”  But when I looked down again, that goddamn copper was gone.  I thought to myself, “Shit!  Where in the hell did it go?  It was right there.”  But then I saw the glint again, but it was about forty or fifty yards ahead of me and moving quite swiftly.  I had to speed up to catch it.  After catching up to it, I realized that it wasn’t a copper pipe at all.  I realized that it was a very fast-moving snake.  I later found out that I had seen a Red Racer, which is a non-venomous snake.  Since the folks over at the wildlife management office liked to hear about critter sightings such as that, I stopped by their office later that day to report the sighting.  I did so without gain or experiencing any exercises in futility.

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