Do You Have Any Clean Panties?

 

My wife and I invited my friend Matt over for dinner last Sunday. He's been undergoing a number of medical procedures, and she had told him that after he returned from his stint at the hospital down in Seattle, she would invite him over for steak and cake. As it turned out, he didn't need to return to Seattle for further surgery, the gaping wound in his chest was healing nicely and at the rate he is going, he'll be in a position to qualify for a kidney in six months or so. 

 

I believe I had mentioned in an earlier post about him, that he had lost his second leg, was on dialysis, and had surgery to replace a valve in his heart. He'd had to go to the hospital in Seattle at least once to correct an infection in the mesh  that was used to repair his heart. He was anticipating having to return to the hospital  and have his bottom rib removed to replace one of  his clavicles  which was broken and not mending, and they were going to try to fix the hole in his chest, which wasn't closing up. Apparently at his latest check up, the hole was mending, the clavicle was repairing itself and the antibiotics that he'd been taking were finally working. He's still on dialysis, but if he gets a kidney, he won't need that anymore. Things are looking up.

 

Considering  all the issues he's suffered with, he's nonetheless had the best attitude of anyone I've ever met. Not only does he have a great attitude, he's one of the funniest people I know. When he came to the house for dinner, he parked himself at the counter and we proceeded to continue with an interview that I'm doing with him for a book in the future. He's got so many interesting stories to tell, and he tells them so well.

 

I met Matt on the farm at Game Creek back in the seventies. Even then he had experienced a number of very interesting, as well as troubling situations in his time on this earth, primarily as a result of having lived his short life on a number of communities involved in The Move of God.  He met his wife on the farm and  because they didn't want to wait for the elder's approval, they left the farm and got married. He spent time at a variety of jobs in Alaska, including being a dispatcher for large ships in Prince William Sound. He even met Joseph Hazelwood in a  bar in Homer or Valdez, I can't recall which. If you recall, Hazelwood was the notorious captain who was responsible for the environmental disaster in Prince William Sound when the third mate ran the Exxon Valdez upon Bligh Reef, trying to avoid ice chunks.

 

One of the many jobs Matt had was fighting fires in the interior of Alaska, in this case up near Delta Junction. Every year tens of thousands of acres of land burn in the interior. Because of the vastness of the area, and the difficulty of reaching so much of the state, they are allowed to burn. I believe it's primarily when property or lives are threatened that the US Forest Service gets involved. Matt and his brother, Mark, were working on a fire crew one summer, putting out fires in the vast wilderness. What many people don't realize is that the interior of Alaska can get really hot in the summer, in the eighties and beyond. The work is hard and dirty as you might expect. The men have to pack chainsaws and shovels and other tools in and walk through brush, up and down hillsides and across creeks all the while wearing boots and raingear which can make walking even more difficult and hot. At the end of each day they spend the night in tents for however many days it takes to control the fires. Eventually they end up at a base camp where they can get a shower and sleep on a cot and perhaps get a real meal and rest up a bit.

 

Matt and his brother were at one such  base camp and were getting ready to hop in the shower and wash off the days of sweat and soot and stink.  His fellow workers, mainly young, vigorous fellows, were walking back and forth to the showers in various states of undress, when  Mark called out- " Matt, do you have any clean panties?"

 

As you can imagine, all conversation stopped and the men looked directly at the two brothers, some grabbing clothes or towels to cover their nakedness. Of course you can't ask a question like that in on a fire line with roughnecks, without expecting there to be an explanation. Matt told his fellow workers that he grew up in a home where he had three older sisters before any of the boys were born. His mother would grill the girls every day to make sure they had clean underwear on. When the boys came along, she didn't adapt the lingo to adjust to the difference in gender. They grew up thinking everyone's underwear were panties. While this made for yet another interesting story, it was one Matt would have preferred to not have related. I understand completely.