The lessons of Fort Carson

On a late summer day as warm and fragrant as new toast, the random cruelty of the universe came to visit and reinforced how good luck is more useful for survival than intelligence.

 It all starts with poking a sharp stick at an angry mob.

  First, you must grab some sense of what bad luck is and how the chaos theory is not a scientific illusion. It's a practical answer to most of life's vexing questions. There is always real chaos inside apparent order and also real order inside apparent chaos.

   In some cases, there is only one useful solution to bad fate. It's not logic so much as it is the proper urge to flee.

  That is, run.

   Run real fast. 

   I did once. And it worked.

  Some background first.

  My family was one of those that displayed its heritage at regular gatherings by repeating the saga of itself.

   It was our Oral Britannica. When more than three senior family members were gathered who were at least 40, the stories would start to unfurl. My recollection is that they were in some order. Each topic would seem to trigger the next one, and the teller was almost always the same person.

   There was the “Story of How Grandpa Cut Off His Fingers While He made Cherry Furniture.” The was the “Tale of Uncle Dewey’s Excruciating Trips To Florida.” And, of course, “How Aunt Ardith Got Such a Weird Name.”

   Then there was “David and Stevie’s Flight from Fort Carson.”

   Brother Stevie and I had built our outpost on the far edge of Grandma Pearl’s Southern Indiana acreage in Cynthiana. We had scrounged for old bird houses, boxes, crates and a few rusting mail boxes and strewn them into an Old West downtown with the obligatory dirt main street.

   There we staged gunfights and withstood the onslaught of angry aborigines, though we’d often take a metaphysical Sioux arrow through the chest just so we could sprawl in the dirt. Young boys invariably practice how to die nobly with a loud gasp of anguish.

   Then one day we had company.

  During a several-day lapse between our last visit, the big bird house on Main Street had acquired new tenants. It was a swarm of yellow jackets.

  Of course, we did what any young lads with an ounce of gumption and no sense would do given the circumstances. We found several twigs, and then we poked at the cyan wasps.

Poked insistently, relentlessly.

Why young boys do this at almost every possibly opportunity is a mystery. Why we did it eludes me. Boys often do stupid things for no apparent good reason. Or any reason, at all. Just ’cause.

Nothing happened momentarily, but at about our 10th poke, the yellow jacket forbearance ended. They arose from Black Bart’s Saloon as a single-minded force of 1,000, put 2 and 2 together and recognized the provocateurs.

  Being two years older than Stevie’s 5, I yelled “Run!”

  And we fled briskly.

  For some reason that I could not divulge at the time – mostly because there was no reason – I executed a tight left turn after 30 or so steps and bolted for the adjacent corn field. Stevie flew onward with a banshee scream.

   The yellow jackets did not follow me. They had Stevie locked in their little yellow jacket radar. And they bore down on him with righteous fury.

   When Stevie reached the house, he looked like he’d wrestled a hostile cactus and lost. He was punctured in places he didn’t know he had. He was feverish for hours, but survived.

   As it turns out, my detour into the cornfields is what yellow jacket experts suggest is the very best thing to do. The little evil buggers become confused and unfocused when faced with corn stalks and sort of give up.

   There are many lasting lessons a family might derive from such events. Because these events take on the historic role of Nordic sagas in some families, the lessons they contain are equally eternal. In this case, it could have been, “David didn’t save his little brother when he could have." That might have been one.

   Or, don’t poke at small, virulent bipolar flying insects.

  But the family reached an altogether different determination.

   Thereafter and forevermore, I was labeled the “smart one” for my move that day. Stevie was just as forever labeled the one “who needed to make smarter decisions.” Go figure. It was another permanently bound volume of the family Britannica, and the narrative hardly ever varied at its retelling.

 Stevie is gone now. When a man's younger brother dies first, it leaves an odd hole in the universe. We grew ever further apart. I fear it's a tear I can no longer mend by being his older brother.

  But where ever Stevie is now far beyond this world, I can offer only the advice I should have given 50 years ago had I been a better brother.

  Run real fast, little Stevie, and look for a corn field.

 And if you get there first, save a place for me.