Old Blue

My brother Johnny just finished up a grueling five months of intensive training to get certified as a Haz-Mat diver.  At forty-six, he is the oldest human being on the planet to ever do this physically demanding, and highly dangerous training.  I’m not sure age matters much to him, actually; he also has a one-year-old son (the youngest of three).  That means that I’ll be seventy when the kid graduates high school.

All the physicality of the training has my bro down to a mean, lean fighting weight.  The instructors at the Jacksonville training facility (these guys are twenty year Navy Seals) are old salts, but even they had to acknowledge the remarkable accomplishment of a battered old man coming through their system and proving that he can hang with nineteen-year-olds.  They call him, “Old Blue”, for some damn reason. 

We spoke last night, late.  For Johnny, Stephanie and the boys, it’s been a long, hard five months.  Our mother passed away as all this was going on and the strain of pressure and distance worked their little family over pretty hard.  I know I spent some time listening to vented anger and frustration over the situation, but to no one’s surprise, Johnny called me last night from his little pop-up camper (where he has bivouacked for five months) and I heard Steph in the background.  They both sounded happy, finally, that it was over and that Johnny can now move on to the work he plans to step into.   He also noted that they are both looking forward to simply having him back in his own bed for a little bit, at least long enough to rest up before he gets called out to a deep water rig, a water tower that needs inspection, a bridge with questionable support footing or a municipal water supply someplace that’s long overdue for maintenance.  Haz-Mat divers are the only ones who can take care of that sort of thing.  There are not many of them.

Despite the rough patch that the family has had to go over, I’m very proud of the man.  He went out there with men that he could have fathered and showed them all that he was still a force to be reckoned with.  When we spoke he kept going on about how he had been following our progress here with the book.  He’s not much of a facebook guy and most computer functions leave him scratching his big head.  But he was able to get his mobile phone to open the pages so he could at least see the progress we made, as he fought through pain, frustration and his own personal demons. 

“It made a big difference, Scott, just knowing somebody else was struggling too.  I just wanted to know I wasn’t just hanging out here all by myself.  Hell, you showing me how you were going to push that book made me get off my old ass and do this in the first place.”  He sounded tired as he said it.  Tired but it was a happy weariness; just knowing that he had accomplished something that most middle-aged men would have considered impossible.  But that’s my kid brother.

“I’m just another roughneck now,” he said chuckling, but the sound of it, the tone of his voice, told me he was absolutely serious. 

He said that, I suppose, because he knows I enjoy writing about those sorts of people:  the hard-working guys who live around me and make up a sizable part of the population of greater Houston/Galveston.  “I’ll probably need a place to flop when I come out there…” he added.

I moved out here a little over twenty years ago now.  Neither Johnny, nor any of my siblings has ever been out here to visit.  It’s not a quick drive down the road, like Atlanta.  But, this is the energy capitol of the entire planet and still bristles with jobs that require men like Johnny to do them.  Hell, he may just be right at home here—who knows?

More to come…

S