Episode 3 : Springfield

and welcome back to episode 3 of the Alaska Dub Chronicles. I'm your host Alaska Dub. We're talking about the pre-Alaska days, picking up where we left off. I'm 21, Springfield, Missouri, and had just moved into a converted frat house just outside the Southwest Missouri State University campus with a kind-hearted co-worker who had a spare apartment in this huge house and her two daughters. So as you might imagine that became a complicated situation in that she thought I would be a good influence slash catch for her oldest daughter who was super cool and everyone in this family was very attractive and man cool people but as she was she was out of my league I she became like a model and just like your dream heavy metal chick. I don't know, she was quite something and and her mom when I moved in my friend we were co-workers we worked with the big corporation RT French, the mustard fam, and they've got a big plant there in Springfield, large enough to have two complete warehouses and we worked in we each worked in one at the same job so we were constantly constant communication, struck up a friendship, you know, super cool lady and so when I needed a place all of a sudden she had a spare apartment. This is huge sort of Victorian but roughed out sort of house, huge basement, we all shared kitchen, there's an enclosed porch and then from this enclosed porch there's a set of stairs leading to the second floor where had a small small bedroom with a door that led into a shared bath there's another door leading out the other side that went out into the hallway in the main house, main part of the house and yeah we had we all had a cool time together like I said it's right right adjacent well it's between literally between the campus and the liquor store so it was it well trafficked and entertaining a great place that people watch sitting on the porch that's always been one of my my favorite things not to engage so much but just watch people and what and what's going on with them I think that's one way I've been able to cope in large metropolitan cities that I've found myself living in, a million people, not a lot, anyhow, a lot of people so that was my situation and she had she had and she had the coolest boyfriend when I look back the dude was an elevator repairman which is a besides being sort of dangerous it's it's very well-paying because it's a small cadre of professionals that have those skills so he was you know well paid and itinerant there in the Midwest so we'd go off on these jobs and come back and go off and come back and he has a collection of motorcycles I think he loved Ducatis but I mean like six or seven in this old this place had their when you drive off the street behind the house there's like a little parking lot but it was almost like a the old stable house because huge garage that he packed full of motorcycles but there's still plenty of room it's kind of an amazing place overall but an interesting feature of this house which I mentioned as a teaser at the end of episode two was in at the back of my closet was a door and when you open that door it opened into another closet and that closet was was the mom's room and I'm not you know memory doesn't serve so well exactly how it transpired but for too long the motorcycles were gone and I and she and I were a couple and met so many cool people through her and I don't don't know if I mean didn't I have not yet mentioned in this episode that I was 21 and she was 13 years older and yeah so of course she had a wide range of super cool friends the ones that really come to mind is this super hippie couple that lived at least an hour away I want to say I probably shouldn't say too much but they're in the Missouri Ozarks and a very European couple living out in the Missouri woods and they just were growing the best weed ever from Dutch seeds kind of thing and and they had the coolest friends too we go out there to visit regularly and they had a big party it was some I don't know the occasion but a friend of theirs was a mason such as stonemason and he had he had a project going on and on his property he had sort of this bluff if I remember correctly wood you know everything there is between the towns further south you get towards our Arkansas border it gets hillier and hillier steep drop-offs and winding curves and everything's wooded lots of lakes so this is a wooded I mean you walk along a wooded a wooded path sort of hugging the hill and then you get to the drop-off and around here he he was basically building a castle building his own castle and he'd been working I want to say a few years already and he had the most impressive fireplace I've ever seen if I recall had a like a dragon's mouth or if forgive me but I think I recall it was a three-headed dragon so three three hearths and and then you know building a chimney out from there and anyhow impressive cool people and at the same time I was also super into another friend of mine that through sharing the same last name and the same physical attributes I mean we were both 6'3 6'4 but totally fell into the metal musicians community in Springfield that time and always had a love of hard rock metal my first this so dates me my first 8-track was ACDC's Let There Be Rock I think I was 8 or 8'9 anyhow it started started from there and I've I mentioned my dad's musicianship and it's funny that I've sort of reenacted this I'm jumping too far that teaser jumps too far but he so wanted an accompanist he was like he dreamed of me being his bluegrass guitar accompanist and now I have more of an appreciation how you know a lot of bluegrass it's easy to think of it as acoustic metal with a high-level musicianship and fast playing and then there you know it rocks it rocks in its own rocks in its own right but I wasn't appreciating it at the time and come come to learn if you really want to if you really want to set the hook to put in the work to learn an instrument you got to be playing music that you love and that just wasn't that just wasn't click it didn't didn't click with the bluegrass at the time he played with my brother-in-law and he was he was a good really good guitarist and and so but hearing the two of them play on holidays I haven't spoke most about much about my sister but she ended up having a family in a town about an hour away from us and and so on holidays either we would we would join them or they would join us so it is accurate to say I'm a product of two black sheep both my folks were the oldest of large families and you know just a pretty much as soon as they could get their independence well they fell in love and then they they took off and and always of course maintain an affection for the family families but never got wrapped back up in the in the dramas nor really returned never lived very close to their respective families my dad being in Kentucky and my mom in California and and that pattern sort of played out too as you will find out as episodes go but I mean I mentioned that only because the holidays the coming the two families coming together about the only other relatives that were within that convenient driving I'm glad I mentioned this because something just came to mind but my mom's aunt so my great-aunt was in Arkansas Rogers Arkansas and we visited them a couple times I have really fond memories but for the weirdest reason we lived in a small town Rogers Arkansas I remember and not a modest home you know modest nice tidy midwestern ranch style home and I remember is on the same block as fire station for some reason so if someone wants to Google that but then I think the health of mother-in-law cottage or something to that effect or you have a small sort of like small one-bedroom apartment sort of built in the back corner of your of your lot my metalhead friend actually lived in his family's little and it was just full of speakers and albums and instruments was pretty awesome but I want to say a door somewhere in the closest city of this mother-in-law cottage were stairs that led down into a concrete bomb shelter so this is really the first exposure to like bomb shelters that and I guess you know this being the 70s you've got all that Cold War and there's a lot of there's a lot of nuclear nuclear war heads in the ground in the Midwest so anyhow the cool thing about that is the summers in Missouri and even worse in Arkansas are so hot and so muggy you'll it'll be 99 degrees and 99% humidity it's the swimming you're swimming through the air I've hauled hay where it's it's raining from the condensation it's raining from the tin roofs on a hot day from the condensation well if you're dealing with green hay so hot I got a heat stroke which is weird because you get cold and you turn white yeah I might almost almost blacked out doing that so heat stroke is no fun but before I rant too much about the brutal heat and and then the cold too I mean I'm living in Alaska now living in Colorado prior I would say some of the worst winter weather ever experienced was there Missouri granted I lived there a long time and you know impressionable youth but the ice storms everything being just coated glazed all the barbed wire fences of the horse farm big horse farm that was just across the road from us you know it's it's it's strikingly beautiful say the morning sunrise after an ice storm just everything it's bejeweled prismic rainbows coming off all the all the ice it's a super trip and I lived in a really beautiful setting it's just bottom of Holler and with a highway leading to a highway leading leading through it basically those are except our plateau a lot of limestone so it's a karst region so if you imagine sort of a you imagine the flat surface that just gradually gets eroded and you know worn down a lot of a lot of valleys you know that's where we live at the bottom between two hills but the Little Sock River is mainly a creek and I think this is actually a creek that led into the Little Sock yeah oh yeah so the highway bridge that the actual like trestle type on a small scale went over the Little Sock River which cut through my neighbor's property all this should have been in probably the prior when I'm talking about my my childhood back in Pleasant Hill but I've already started so you're gonna have to listen to all of them so it's a big I grew up on a five acre five acre corner plot it was the front of our property being facing this highway that I'm describing flowing the highway going from the the top of one hill down crossing the Little Sock and then curving back up and heading towards Springfield so it was one of the main thoroughfares between Springfield and Pleasant Hill there's basically three ways the other two being sort of big interstates and this was between the two more direct slower and really actually a great drive I'm probably overrating my skills but man I love driving that I drive it fast under control four-wheel drifts at times you know but anyhow they've since straightened it out some of the some of the best parts like through the swampy area by Crystal Cave so it's not quite as much fun it's got it's more sweeping so it's still good and you still of course have the same hills and everything but driving in driving in Missouri as I mentioned in episode two too frequently we were under the influence which kids don't do it's it was very poor judgment and and you know I want to admit that but driving in general can be really awesome beautiful in the fall I mean it's got foliage change that rivals New England not that I can say personally but from what I've seen what I've seen personally and those are some pictures I've seen so the area's got a lot to go for it has a lot going for it this is funny I'm just looking at the time and noticing that I had much my goals were to be much further down the road but I see that I was remiss in describing the area I lived I think before I was describing more the social-emotional landscape this time it's more geography but you know even though I started you know this is how it's gonna go folks sometimes it's gonna go forward and sometimes it's gonna stop and go back so you have an idea where I was at 21 and now we're filling in the blanks of earlier days and I was still living with my parents back in the country just about 15 miles north of Springfield so our little corner five acres was at the crossroads this highway and what started as a dirt road when we moved it moved into the place and and since that and we saw it grow from asphalt to being a you know paved but super hilly just going off into the off into the hills that's you know where I used to go play walk in the creek and and I wouldn't do any of that now I've got such a such better judgment when it comes to things such as water moccasins cottonmouth venomous water snakes and but at the time you know catching crowd ads just catching for fun but I know I know so many people are just now are shaking their heads at the waist you know but I'm gonna say here not a random killer and I haven't grown up to become a hunter even though I enjoy shooting not animals such a critter lover and and that theme plays out later too but my as described before my dad retired from the Air Force and then started working for a coffee company that ended up that through different acquisitions he that original company got folded into Hershey's own company I want to say it's the I don't know what it eventually ended up but the Wexler coffee company but then they ended up doing spices and they had a whole spice mill there on site and I'm sure it just killed the neighbors if it was something they hated because I mean I'm sure they did their their best to filter it my dad's clothes would always come smelling whatever spice they were working as I always liked it I can't think of them when I smell nutmeg but my neighbors are low off of probably the first entrepreneur I met had several related businesses to dump trucks and then dump truck parts and and heavy heavy machinery and stuff and the place they lived is a is a large this is just across the road from us and I want to say the house part was a maybe maybe like 20 acres a huge yard the yard was the yard was right on the corner and the house was set back a bit and the entire property was I want to say a little under 400 acres on both and it ended up it was on both sides of the highway so it was so it was wooded and pasture land and the other half the side on the other side of the highway that was cool because it was a not as large but a nice professional working horse ranch and the neighbor ended up having I want to say it's like four or five quarter horses and then he ended up building and I want to say I think it's just maybe just a two-lane track with the starting gates and everything and so that's sort of the level where my where my neighbors were working but that neighbor being an exception the rest being being you know common folk but speaking of the neighbors most of them were related we bought the corner place from the patriarchs of this clan has so many bad connotations this this family group where we're like the this is the mom-and-pop and they ended up building their dream house further that further down that dirt road not too far away but you know surrounded by by the relatives and of course we're the exception and I mainly go into such detail to sort of show in the microcosm of our neighborhood it reflected also like in the if the word macrocosm has ever been applied to Pleasant Hope Missouri which I say finally but it's a small town and but sort of the same way my my folks ended up living on that same plot for all 40 years and still considered outsiders because they're not three generations in within you know and living and having you know a dozen in-laws or living within three counties just sort of life experience and world worldview which is so radically different from from you know rural Missouri in the 70s you know I'm sure now with the internet and before much more broad-minded and and and please don't take this as being disparaging in any way just there's this different different personalities and experiences and outlooks and you know everybody is entitled to their but my folks were very much more accepting and and and global shall we say anyhow and that's a little fuller description of the cultural and physical landscape of my youth I guess when we resume it's back in that back in the frat house and the adventures that ensued with the older woman and the metalhead so thank you for joining me on this non-completely linear chronological journey and look forward to speaking to you again soon