Say Willie Have You Ever Seen A UFO?

This is dedicated to my blog buddy, Old Horsetail Snake. I hope you like it as well. Its long but worth the wade.

When I was in college I was able to convince the mill in my hometown to hire me for weekends and summer work. I was married to Blaze's mom (Annie Hall's twin)at the time, both of us young and gliding through life with few worries and not the best grasp of reality. I was going to school with the dream of coaching pro basketball and writing Steinbeck-type novels. She wanted to save the world and play her guitar while singing, "One Tin Soldier". She was killing turkeys at the local Norbest plant and I was commuting everyday to the mountains to pull veneer off a conveyor belt and digging sawdust out of my shorts. We had one car which was a teeny little Datsun something with a name full of numbers that sounded more like a Star War's character then a car.

I was able to hitch up with a lifer at the mill named, Willie VanderHooten. Willie was in his mid-fifties at the time and had worked at the mill before, well, as he said it, "before you were a sperm in your old man's ball sack." Now that's an image. I'm figuring if I'm right with the math he had been at the mill since the late-1950s. Willie was a strange sort and the mention of my old man's ball sack may have been the only thing he ever said to me that was of this world.

Six feet and a couple of inches he stood with a kink in his back that gave one the impression of a walking question mark. He was forever donned in a furry-hooded-coat that appeared a size or two too big, leather boots with his denims legs tucked inside and topping off his millworkers uniform, a stocking cap that sat at a point on top of his head. Oh yeah, thick black-horned rimmed glasses and the ever presence of a five day shadow on his chin. Willie was far from an attractive fella, minus the ornriness and the green shade he looked a lot like Jim Carey's Grinch.

Willie would pick me up at "Ferns Corner" every day at 1:00 pm in his boat of a car where we would ride to the mill together to work the swing-shift. I think it was a LTD of some sort and built like a tank and rattled as bad. The car had to be able to handle the 20 miles of gravel road that was meant to stop an invasion by the Russians, with winding corners that obstructed any view of oncoming traffic, 100 foot cliffs and washboard moguls forever etched in the road base from the hundreds of logging trucks that took the trip many times a day and Willie's driving. Young and invincable I never put much thought in my daily commute with Willie and if I had I may have missed some of the most insightful discussions of my young life and quite frankly, some of the craziest stuff I'd ever heard.

It just so happened shortly after the two of us connected up as "commuting buddies", I was reassigned to a dryer feeder position where I was teamed with Willie for the next six months. So our long talks, which were mostly my inquiring mind digging nuggets out of Willie's head, were not only during our commute but now a whole ten hours of Willie and the young and inspiring Pirate talking about anything that came to my mind.

Types of discussions we would have went a lot like, "Hey Willie where'd you meet your wife?"

He would stop in his tracks, turn to me and while he dug out a piece of "Big Hunk" candy bar from a hole he had in one of his molars and lay it all out. "Ummm, I actually I met the missus, well, I met her through a mail order. Yeah hmmm, yeah she answered my ad."

This was long before Al Gore put together the internet so meeting strangers was a bit slower in that day. "You did? Man that must have been something. How many answers did you get from your ad?" I'd ask just curious why anyone would ever respond to anything this goofy fella could ever put in an ad.

"Oh, I had one other lady answer." He told me so proudly.

"Oh, yeah? What happened?" keeping the story going to pass the time and to avoid the boredom that comes from feeding veneer dryers.

He cleared the wad of white "Big Hunk" chunk from his tooth and tore off another bite,"This one beautiful lady had written me and we met for dinner and a night on the town. Listening to music and me reading her the poetry I had written about the lady of my dreams."

Thinking what type of poetry this fellow could have ever written and having the image of Cyrano coming up with the idea of using a proxy while he read his words of love from behind a bush. "How did she take a night out with a Casanova like you?"

"She seemed to have had a wonderful time that evening but she wrote me a letter the next day telling me that she had had a great time but believed we weren't meant for each other. She told me that we lived in two different worlds." He appeared to stand a little straighter then the usual hunched posture. "In which I replied, what is the color of the sky in your world? We never seen each other again. I guess she had other dreams to catch. Then my wife was the second woman to answer."

"I guess the two of you are of the same world?" I chided.

"Yep and the sky is the same color to the both of us." He smiled.

Our talks covered the whole gammet. We talked of world problems and he would answer many of my smart aleck questions I would ask just to keep myself from falling into the rut of a millworker.

One night on our ride home in the dark over the graveled road surrounded by nothing but stars and trees I asked him if he had ever seen a UFO? Willie lit another Pall Mall filterless cigarette pulled over slowly to a pull out section of the road which over looked the deepest of the canyons along the road. "Several years ago I was driving through this area. It was late like this and I saw a flying saucer circling the top of that mountain top over there." He pointed toward Laurel Mountain where SAC had placed a radar to keep an eye on them rascally Russians. "It was circling around that radar over there. I then drove around these hills until I found myself just out side of the compound and could see the UFO circling around the radar. When I got to the gate in the road that led to the radar I got out to see if I could get closer to the radar when I was met by three men. Soldiers with guns and they forcefully convinced me to get back into my car. I left and never said another word to anyone other then my wife. My wife and I have been taking lessons from a medium in order to see if we can communicate with them, the aliens." He lit another Pall Mall off the butt of the last and we drove the remaining miles to my car without saying much. I thought Willie was inhaling his smokes a little deep.

The commutes continued for several more months and the topics of conversation varied with Willie and my imagination. Then one day he told me that he and his wife had taken up witch craft many months ago and last night they had to cease because objects were flying around their house and they were visited by someone. He wouldn't tell me much about the visit from the strangers other then he thought they were connected with the radar and the UFO. I thought I sensed some fear in Willie when he told me about the visit.

Then one Monday afternoon Willie never showed up at "Ferns Corner". After waiting for a half hour I drove to work myself and again the next three days. I assumed that Willie was sick and hadn't bothered to contact anyone. On the fourth day someone from the mill office called me into the office to ask me if I knew anything about Willie. I told them I hadn't and headed back to work. The older lady in the office called me aside as I was heading out the office door and told me they had called the Sheriff's office and the Sheriff had went out to Willie's house and found no one there at all. No Willie, no wife, nothing. It appeared that the two just disappeared. They had left their house and left everything behind. Just evaporated.

All I could think of for the next several days was that Willie must have finally made contact with the other side and probably had been abducted by aliens. To this day I wonder about Willie and what color the sky is in his new world.