In 1776, our founding fathers, wearing those funny-looking, white knickers and white, powdered wigs to match, were collectively smart enough to write a document that gives every American citizen amazing freedoms. However, as we all know, freedom is not free. It comes with a lot of hard work and dedication.
On Dec. 7, 1941 the world changed for every American when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on that fateful day.
I had borrowed my sisters’ car, driven to Malibu and spent the day surfing by myself. I did not know of the bombing until I heard it on the car radio on the way home. It only took a moment for me to realize that as soon as I turned 18 in October 1942 that I would have to register for the draft as did every other American male between the age of 18 and 42.
When it came time for me to register for the draft there was a Navy Officer’s Candidate program available, so on the same day that I registered for the draft, I enlisted in the Navy. I survived four years of a combination of officer’s training and overseas duty. As far as I knew, I was just a serial number among tens of thousands of other soldiers, sailors and Marines.
I am the first to admit that I get a tear in my eye watching a parade on the Fourth of July on our Orcas Island, or riding in one on nearby Crane Island where there are more people in the parade than there are watching it.
This year, the parade started with the familiar tune “God Bless America.” In the parade, the many different vehicles, including a rare, three-wheel golf cart lurched to the Clark’s house for a grand Fourth of July picnic. (My wife even rode her broom that a late friend had given her for her 50th birthday; still works well but the horn on the handlebars has disappeared.) Everyone brought something to the table to share. Lots of hot dogs and seven bowls of potato salad and enough brownies showed up for the picnic to last two weeks. There are not a lot of people in this part of the world who are old enough to have participated in World War II, but there are a lot of them that served in Korea or Vietnam.
As I sit in front of this computer I realize that during the war, when our ship started sinking in a typhoon, that any messages we sent between our slowly sinking ship and the other ships in our convoy was sent by dots and dashes with a blinking light. We had to maintain radio silence because of potential Japanese submarines intercepting the message and knowing we were out there in the process of sinking; an easy target.
Some of the messages were sent by signal flags, with each flag representing a letter of the alphabet and usually initiated by the most senior officer in the convoy. It is hard to explain the helpless feeling of being aboard a ship heading east from Guadalcanal to Pearl Harbor for four days, rocking and rolling in more than 40-foot waves but not really being afraid. I knew there were five other ships of the same size in the convoy and one of those five would pick me up, as well as the other 26 sailors on our ship. Plus I could swim, a skill not all the sailors had.
Since 1946, when I was discharged from the Navy, I have never participated in a Fourth of July patriotic parade except the one on Crane Island.
Probably in the final countdown on the Fourth of July I spend a lot of time thinking about how fortunate I am to have been born in Southern California when the Los Angeles basin had less than 1 million people living there, in an area stretching from Santa Barbara south to San Clemente. It was a wonderful place to grow up with the great surfing beaches only 20 miles away and the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains as high as 11,000 foot Mount Baldy less than 50 miles in the other direction.
When I was given my first bicycle by my grandmother at the age of 11, I called it my Freedom Vehicle. I don’t know how many miles I put on that bicycle, but I do know that I wore out quite a few sets of tires on the gravel roads that I traveled in the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Today, if a bunch of guys got together wearing white, powdered wigs and white knickers no one would pay any attention to them whatsoever other than a news clip on nighttime television. If you sit back, shut your eyes and think about the vision that those men had abandoning England, forming a new nation where everyone would be created equal, it was so far from reality anywhere else in the world. Luckily, the Atlantic Ocean provided the necessary separation so that this idea could grow.
Entrepreneurism is still alive and well in America and I really hope that my grandchildren don’t have to go off and fight in some war as I did. Opportunity is everywhere and the saying among college students today is that when they graduate they will have seven different professions, five of which have not even been invented yet.
For example, before the invention of the chairlift, it took me about an hour to climb 1,000 vertical feet. One year, we had a houseguest at the Yellowstone Club in Montana that rode the detachable quad chairlift and logged 73,000 vertical feet in one day.
He certainly has bragging rights for his achievement, but is the whole world speeding up to keep pace with him? I certainly hope not.
Maybe we need some white-powdered wig, digger clad politicians with strong integrity in Washington to straighten out America.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
