THE JUICE PUSHER

Bruce came down with food poisoning - most likely bad muscles from the night before.  I had the crab cakes.  With such a sick pilot, we were not going to fly anywhere. And, it started raining. My hopes to visit the tranquility of the Outer Banks were fading. Pushing fluids to avoid dehydration on “my patient” at every opportunity, I stayed in the hotel to look after Bruce.

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATIONS

The previous night walking to dinner, we noticed that the lobby of the hotel was filled with secret service agents – very fit men in suits with ear pieces looking alert. We speculated that the hotel had someone either on President Bush's cabinet or maybe his opponent, John Kerry, to warrant this many agents. This day, I learned that the agents were guarding Vice President Cheney. Now it became clear why the hotel had so few rooms available and why they were so hush-hush about the reason. So, Cheney’s secret non-disclosed locations were not military bases as I had previously assumed. They were five star hotels.

MY WHAT BIG HOLES YOU HAVE

Across the street from our room was a construction site. They were digging a very large hole. The hotel provided a notice to ignore the "explosions" at 11:00am and 2:00pm Monday through Friday as they came from the construction project – not terrorist activity. Folks were still jumpy after the 2001 nine-eleven attacks.

Men with red hats spent most of the day setting the charges. Before an explosion, one deft operator used the big orange bucket like a mechanical limb and snagged a metal ring on the edge of each blanket of tires then gingerly lay the bundles over the explosives. At the appointed time, a horn sounded, police stopped traffic, the diggers were parked, all the men went on a break, a horn sounded again, then WHOOMFF! Our room windows shook. The bundles of tires flew into the air and back down in a cloud of dust. The men returned and continued loading dirt into a line of dump trucks.

WHAT ARE THOSE ORANGE DIGGERS CALLED?

Taking a break from pushing juice on my patient, I had lunch in the hotel restaurant. Watching the huge orange Hitachi machines load dirt into trucks at ground level, I found their repetitive mechanical motions surprisingly soothing. I wanted to ask the gentleman at the table next to me if he knew what the orange Hitachi digging machines were called.

A small group stopped by his table and I overheard the gentleman introduce himself as Connie Mack (US Senator R-Florida). No secret service for the senator, but he seemed to favor this undisclosed location nonetheless. The group commiserated that this presidential election was not a "slam dunk" as they had thought it would be and speculated on who Kerry would choose as a running mate.

I figured a US Senator was used to questions from the public, so I decided to ask my question. When the Senator was alone again, had finished his she-crab soup, still waiting for his pasta of the day, and flipping through the sports section in the paper, I interrupted, "Excuse me sir, do you happen to know what these large orange Hitachi machines loading dirt are called?" He smiled, seemed relieved, looked out the window and said that he thought they were front-end loaders, but that was probably not right. He seemed genuinely distressed that he did not know for sure. I thanked him for the effort.

Months ago, Bruce and I had watched a “Modern Marvels” show on the History Channel trumpeting America's innovation in the development of these machines, now made by Hitachi. They were developed to dig silver mines and refined to reroute the Colorado river and build the Hoover dam. The US had used them to build the Panama Canal where the French had failed to do so before. I wondered what had happened to US manufacturing that we bought the diggers from the Japanese. Who had the "gun ships" now?

As I needed to find out what these machines were called, I sent email to family and friends. Henning had the right name, "Toys!" He wrote that Hitachi calls it an excavator, but real construction guys call them diggers or shovels.  Furthermore, a company in Wisconsin designs these diggers for Hitachi.  Well, at least the US still had blueprints for those "gun ships."

Bruce’s family had the definitive answer to this mystery:  "Those are called excavator backhoes. Had I not known what they were, I would have called Jake, my consultant in these matters," replied Bruce’s Pop. Jake, Bruce’s five year old nephew, had been studying heavy equipment intensely for at least three years. Two years ago, Jake took a liking to flying once Bruce flew him over the city dump where he could see heavy equipment at work.  A true connoisseur.

UNDISCLOSED PRODUCTION STUDIO

While pushing fluids on Bruce all day, I made many trips to the floor’s complementary snack area with bottled juices. A suite on my way had a piece of white paper hastily affixed with duct tape that read:

Hotel guests please be quiet.
Video taping in progress.
PJ Productions

I noticed that different people were in and out most of the day. My first thought was that someone was taping a product testimonial for some company. Then, I recognized ABC News anchor Peter Jennings walking out of the suite. He had been taping the ABC News special, “Ecstasy Rising” which aired that night. Watching the special, I recognized one of the experts on the show as a woman leaving earlier in the day. She had on the same clothes and smiled in the hallway.  None of the guests on this floor smiled back to me.

The "Ecstasy Rising" news special reported that the drug "X" was less of a danger than the government claimed. The fallout was that young people, who claimed to know the truth about X, were losing trust in all the government's claims. One teenager asked, "If the government lies in one area, what stops it from lying in others?"  Freedom of speech as a starting point.  Now, if we could just get those darn journalists to investigate...