It's Gonna Get Cold In The Bakken (50 Degrees Below Freezing): Home Of Economy/Carhartt Is Gonna Be Busy; Maybe Time For A Little Bob Dylan?

The temperatures are going to keep falling through this next week. By Saturday, the temperature will be down to 17 degrees. Below zero. The mean for this time of the year is about 20 degrees. Above zero. 

 For newbies, this is "Fahrenheit." It freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. So 17 degrees below zero is about 50 degrees below freezing. Before the wind. 

One almost wishes there was more flaring to warm the surrounding air. Wanna bet where deer and antelope are gonna be hanging out next weekend?

Great weather forecasts at this site, my favorite weather site for quick look at the current weather and the forecast. It will be interesting to see the new records set due to all this global warming.

A Note to The Granddaughters

I was listening to Ian and Sylvia's cover of This Wheel's on Fire, written and recorded by Bob Dylan in 1967, when I received a note from Don relating to the Vietnam War. I recalled the Julie Driscoll cover that became a hit a year later, 1968:

This Wheel's On Fire, Julie Driscoll & Brian Auger, Trinity
When I received Don's note, I was listening to the Ian and Sylvia album and reading a book review in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: Wil S. Hylton's Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World of War II.

Not one thing, I suppose, would connect those three "things" (Dylan's song, a note from Don regarding the Vietnam War, and then the book review about finding final resting places of aircrews lost in the Pacific during WWII).

Except somehow all three "things" ended up co-located in one of my medial temporal lobes.

From the WSJ's book review:

Nearly 50 years before, on Sept. 1, 1944, the 11-man crew of a B-24 Liberator that would come to obsess Mr. Scannon tumbled from the Pacific sky over Palau, their heavy bomber's left wing blasted off by Japanese antiaircraft cannons.

Mr. Hylton's compelling "Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II" tells the story of that B-24's crew and the six decades of anguish that MIA status inflicted on their families.

But it also relates the tale of Pat Scannon and the epiphany that changed him from a scientific squint into a committed "wreck chaser," infused with a sense of "duty and responsibility" to ferret out the stories of the lost men, find their crash sites and repatriate their remains. As Mr. Scannon wrote in his journal: "I am interested in how individual crews, albeit in a lesser campaign, came under intense fire, lost their lives, and have, by necessity, been forgotten. . . . It is time someone acknowledges their efforts and perhaps lays to rest the outcome for their family members."

Later:

Mr. Scannon came back from his first trip to Palau, Mr. Hylton writes, and "disappeared into his home office to pore over old mission reports that oozed from his fax," determined to understand the air fighting over Palau that spanned the last 18 months of the war. He would return to Palau in 1994 hoping to find the wreckage of three missing B-24s. Within 48 hours he had located two of his target aircraft. The third eluded him, and as he left Palau, he swore that "he would scour the [ocean floor] for as long as it took to find the last plane."

And finally:

It took him 10 more years to fulfill that promise. As he set about his task, he collected data from books, archives and veterans themselves, and he developed a fascination with the Palau missions of the B-24-equipped 307th Bomb Group, "the Long Rangers." (This was the same unit that Louis Zamperini, the hero of Laura Hillenbrand's best seller "Unbroken," served in.) The 307th suffered crushing losses while prosecuting their attacks against Palau. In just one week of missions, in the late summer of 1944, they lost five planes—and more than 50 men.

One of those was Jimmie Doyle, the 25-year-old Texan who was the tail gunner of Mr. Scannon's third B-24. Officially missing in action, Jimmie Doyle had left at home a young bride and son, Tommy, who was only 15 months old when his father went to war. The pain of that loss—and the cruel family rumor that the MIA tail gunner had survived the crash and was living in California with no interest in his Texas family—haunted Tommy Doyle's life. "Tommy pushed the questions down, but they were always there," Mr. Hylton writes. "The slightest mention of his dad would bring [him] to tears."

I assume there is no comparison, and somehow looking for final resting places of those who gave all for their country is much more noble than looking for oil, but I suppose, for me, Harold Hamm's success in the Bakken is due to the same passion and "sense of duty and responsibility" that Pat Scammon possessed.

I don't know. Maybe that's a bridge too far.

If your memory serves you well
We're going to meet again and wait.
So I'm going to unpack all my things
And sit before it gets too late.

No man alive will come to you
With another tale to tell,
And you know that we shall meet again
If your memory serves you well.

 -- Bob Dylan and Rick Danko

As good as anything Emily Dickinson ever wrote.