The week that was

Courtesy photo

That was the week that was and thank goodness it is coming to a close.

The pain of waiting as a family member underwent needed surgery to resolve pending blood circulation to his heart. All went well in the six-and-a-half-hour procedure (for family it seemed like forever!) and the five bypasses were done by a skilled surgeon and his team. Now comes the patient, hopefully, process of recovery and rehabilitation. To date all reports are that he is coming along nicely on the route to healing. Fortunately, your old columnist has been there and done that a year or so ago. It will be so good to have our “patient” back home to help return to a more normal life.

It sounded a bit like a war zone here in McCook as darkness closed in the evening of the 4th. As far as we could see in any direction in our fair city the sounds of explosions and brilliant sparkling works lighted the skies and backyards. Oh yes, the smell of smoke drifted through the air and not a good part of the show for Grannie Annie. My great-grandsons loved it all as they lit the appropriate works purchased by their folks. Yes, their mom and dad kept a watchful eye and the only casualties were slight burns from carelessly held punk sticks. Fun, fun, fun, and the boys can hardly wait until next year.

Always when I enjoy watching a fireworks display around home I’m reminded of watching real explosions on the plains of Laos and jungles of Vietnam on Independence Day and more. I had an eagle eye’s view from around 25,000 feet or so looking down from my Air Force air refueling tanker. All was silence at our altitude silence broken by UHF radio chatter. Willie Pete our name for the white clouds released when White Phosphorus artillery shells hit their targets were obvious. Napalm releases a boiling red flame streaked in black. Bombs give off a rather white flash and if dropped from a B-52 the 80+ explosions streak in rapid order at about 500 miles per hour leaving distinctive “buff tracks”. At night isolated firebases sometimes called for illumination from brilliant flares suspended from parachutes to check on possible invading enemy troops. Independence Day fireworks are just fun but their genesis from actual combat is a much more sobering reality.

Cousins are family. My forebears the Hoyt clan bore lots of children and like many families in this country we younger generations like to keep in touch and occasionally gather together. Sometimes sisters marry brothers and such a circumstance has tied the Trail and the Hoyt clans together in my mother and father’s generation. It came time this past week to gather and celebrate the life of a recently deceased member James Lynn Trail of McCook. The service was rather special for your old writer so I’d like to share extracts from what other family members posted to Facebook.

“We laid a pretty good old flyboy to rest today. Cousin Jim, like every Trail for multiple generations, was born to fly. Second only to loving his family, Piper Cubs were his passion. All Cubs. J-3s, PA-11s, and Super Cubs. He flew them, restored them, and modified them. They organized his memorial service to take place at the Stone Church south of Culbertson, Nebraska. Our Hoyt ancestors not only donated the land, they quarried the stone, and then performed the masonry work to build the church in 1900. Pretty fitting tribute to hold his service there. In order to keep the tributes fitting, and salute a family flyboy in the best way possible, two Trail brothers of the next generation landed and parked right up front. Just like our ancestors have been doing since the 1930s.” Well said!

Technically whoever wrote that errored a bit and it was a Rebecca Hart. who donated the one acre of land for the church. Her descendants include those named Wacker in this area. However my own grandad, Lynn, recently widowed at the time, did marry one of Ms. Hart’s descendants, Ruth Householder, and so did gain title to the adjacent quarter section of land surrounding the Old Stone Church. In a sense that ties it into family.

Saturday was Culbertson’s 4th of July Parade. I cranked up my old Model T, now 96 years old and drove it the 11 miles west to participate. The old girl cruises comfortably around thirty miles per hour. I drove on the shoulder of the Dave Coolidge spec highway and the other cars whizzed by at twice my speed. For the trip through the parade route, I was privileged to have my daughter and two of her grandsons as participating passengers. Great fun honking the horn and waving at friends. Kids by the hundreds lined the parade route picking up lots of candy. Happy faces and that is what the whole village celebration is all about.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail