Climbafamilytree123: December 2009

or
Cry of the Hoochie Mama
[Starkey Family Christmas Letter 2009]

Dear family and dear friends, 6 December 2009

This letter has been waiting to be written for weeks. Forgive me. I simply couldn’t bring my fingers to pen it until the news was really true. A week before Kristen and Zach’s wedding last June, Val learned that due to his contractor status with Boeing, living in Utah (a difficult commute to the Puget Sound) and union mandates requiring of 10,000 laid off workers that contractors must go first, Val ended his 30 years of service.

We traveled for the wedding and came home. Val then started a PLLC (company) to begin consulting with compressed air in manufacturing. He also took a road trip to Arizona to document details of aging fuselages in an airplane graveyard. Then, revving up with an autumn Utah hobby, he invited my brother Steven to northeastern Utah, hunting.

When Steven and Val exhausted their tolerance for cold and elusive elk, I was inducted into service. It was the morning of the third day when a friendly roadside hunter

told us of an elk call certain to lure a bull elk, the cow call from a “Hoochie Mama” procured from a neighborhood sport store.

North of a cliff

and near a ravine north of Steinaker Reservoir,

Val suggested that talented teams split up. I wanted less talent than safety, but apprehensively agreed. (When this is over, we will celebrate!)

After looking at my trusty Timex Carriage watch, I consented to climb the south side of the draw downward and then up the other side for one half hour, to reunite in an hour. With arsenal of orange vest, orange hat, walking poles, leather gloves and handheld hymnbook, I commenced a downward trek, much steeper, much deeper than originally expected. About ten minutes later I looked at my watch: “1:35,” it read. After several hundred yards further of what seemed like a 60 degree angle down and an estimated 30 more minutes, the stationary watch hands still read “1:35.” A lecture in BYU’s Recreation Department teaches that when challenge and enjoyment meet, balanced on a grid, “flow” is created--a state when people no longer sense time. We must be having FLOW! A timeless experience!

My only challenge came with deciding how to meet the overdue deadline. Bottoming the ravine, I crawled north up the neighboring slope, pumping the “Hoochie Mama” to high heaven. I then walked an equivalent of four blocks; and deciding that enough was enough, scrambled back up the first slope, noting loss of one orange hat, a near loss of the Hoochie Mama and a need to re-track twenty yards to retrieve a tumbling hymnbook. Planting both remaining items inside my waist belt and high tailing as quickly as physically possible up the south side of the draw, I remembered Val’s reassurance that Grandpa’s truck key was under a bumper.

Emerging from the rough thicket incline, I trudged through a few hundred yards of sagebrush to view a welcoming blue vehicle. Upon examination, however, there was no orange clad teammate, and more alarming, no key. Thoughts of a BYU daughter’s 2007 helicopter escort out of Escalante flashed through my mind, but ready to calm any panic, I opened the non-locking back window, hopped through, and shimmied through the connecting window to discover a working cell phone. Working, long enough to tell the time, nearly 3 p.m., the battery promptly powered down when engaged to call out.

Ready to balance agitated nerves, I found a clothes basket in the truck bed, up ended it, pulled out a paper keyboard, and proceeded to practice, rehearsing two of the ten pages that needed memorizing prior to upcoming Saturday’s recital. Half way into the second page, a thought occurred that a horn honk might work as handily as a Hoochie Mama to attract my elk hunter. Another shimmy through and several blasts on the Ford horn yielded nothing. Into the rest of the next page of eighth notes, I looked out to see a hearty orange vest and hat appear over the brush laden landscape. Emergency rescue and unwritten will postponed, we compared notes. Val, hearing a Hoochie Mama at the ravine base, had been convinced that his hunting partner had received a second wind. No half hour deadline for her! After checking the car and not seeing an orange hat,

a herd of female deer had been driven to his hiding place.
The lost cow call had yielded results! After another good half an hour or so, he sauntered back, not hearing a horn, but seeing patches of orange enclosed in a Ford truck bed.

Upon our returning home to warm shelter and hot shower, I found myself humming something encountered on the mountain hillside. The phantom melody treading my tired mind I ultimately identified as Hymn 31,“The Happy Day At Last Has Come.” Val’s arching eyebrows met a defensive pointed finger: “Don’t tell me I am batty for reading a hymnbook Mr. Hunter!”

The next day, while hauling in gear and ice chest, we hit the home answering machine to find a Jeff B. on the line informing Val that Jeff had spent the past four months working to secure funds to invite Val back to Boeing to assist in Structures and that the funding was in place. The Happy Day At Last Had Come! Hallelujah! And six weeks of red tape later, the Boeing job has begun afresh. Manna rediscovered has lightened pressure on an alternate lunch lady or stressed junior high resource room sub to supplement struggling college students.

The family is rejoicing--one Caesar & Cicero-competing high school debate sophomore, Maria; a BYU freshman Amber and her soon-to-graduate sister & spouse, Kristen and Zach; Brent and Brianne, training a nearly two year old Kaleb to say “Big Brother” before July; and Allina furiously pursuing accounting degree, entertained by second-grade Riley reading Diaries of a Wimpy Kid. Tom and April applaud, while celebrating Tom’s breakthrough in bed sale quotas and April’s efforts to teach, love, and web-cam a verbal 2 ½-year-old Eleanor and “trying-to-run” Thomas Junior. Lanae and Patrick detailed recent description of construction projects and plans for a spring addition longer-lasting than deck or bathroom remodel. News of sister Jannette asking brother for ideas about employee motivation that apply to supervising a clinical lab validates the concept that we do need each other.

Grateful for grandchildren, a great employment invitation, for gardens, and personal growth, for great friends and constant family members, we are glad to be no longer stranded. Happy to have a Hoochie Mama to inform interested onlookers of any lost members of the herd…we invite you to reply anyway you choose--honking included. May the season be one of uniting and peace…may your hearts feel to look above the thicket to see some light and a ghost of a melody glimmering through—