the Walnut Diary

Sometimes the best yarns come from quiet guys.  Paul’s a prime example.  A polite, fastidious gentleman, well-liked by everyone on the dock, he nevertheless has a good side, I discovered.  When fishing, Paul likes to get into the muck.  He’s worse than I am, and if it were left to him, we’d have the boat mired in mud every time in our search for largemouth bass in shallow water.

When around civilized society Paul goes out of his way to appear steady and conventional.  I guess it’s the training.  Paul’s a pilot.  Until they bought him a surplus 747, his favourite  was an old Boeing 707 which his employer, Pratt and Whitney, bought in Saudi Arabia.  “They patched the bullet holes and turned it into a test bed.”  The techs placed an improvised mount beneath the cockpit for engines under development so that Paul could give them 3 ½ minutes of negative gravity as part of the test protocol.

“How do you do that?”

“We load twenty laboratory people and their equipment into the plane with the test engine mounted on the front, fly up to thirty thousand feet, point it at the ground and hit the throttle.  They do their tests.  I pull out and repeat the process until we have the 3 ½ minutes elapsed, and then we land and go for a coffee.”

“So, you fly a vomit comet?”

“I guess you could say that.”  He showed me a photo of the 707 with a huge jet engine mounted below the cockpit.  At rest the engine only cleared the runway by 3 ½”.

One weekend Paul was a bit grinny, so  I could tell he had something to say.  He waited until we were well away from the dock and then mentioned that he discovered another 707 in his parking space the other day when he returned from a test flight.  He thought no more of it, and headed on in to the coffee room, where he encountered the owner of the plane, a civilian in a leather flying jacket who clearly wanted to talk 707’s.  Paul chatted willingly away.  The other guy seemed smart and enthusiastic, and was quite taken with Paul’s account of the extra engine on his plane.

After they’d had lunch and parted ways, everybody descended upon Paul at once.  “Did you know who that was?  John Travolta!”

“He’s an actor, right?”  Groans from his colleagues.  Paul sometimes seems a little out of it, but I don’t think he misses much.

Taxes on Canadian air space drove them south for their test flights, so for the last few years before Paul’s retirement Pratt and Whitney flew out of an abandoned nuclear missile base in Plattsburg, New York.  Paul asked someone about the herd of goats grazing in an open-air compound within the maximum security section of the airport.

“Those critters are worth $1.5 million dollars each.  They’re transgenic goats, with a spider gene added, part of a U.S. Defense Department black program.  Spider silk is way stronger than Kevlar, so they’re trying to get the goats to produce the fibre in their milk so that they can harvest it and use it for superior body armour for soldiers.  The Defense Department is worried a terrorist group will get access to the goats, so they’re farmed under maximum security conditions.”

I had a great laugh about this bit of whimsy, but kept quiet about it until two years later I saw an article in The Ottawa Citizen headed by a photo of a guy in a lab coat with a goat perched on his shoulders, chewing his ear.  A Quebec firm had gained possession of the goat technology and were going public with their story to raise interest in their I.P.O.

This article was too good to be true, so I gave copies to my OAC English students and asked them to write a response.  As usual, I didn’t quite know what to expect.  That’s the fun of teaching English.

I won’t soon forget the rewrite of “The Three Billy-goats Gruff” which a clever young woman named Anna wrote, though.  These three transgenic Billy-goats lived in peace in a brick house at the edge of a river until a nasty troll set up shop under the bridge.  The confrontation came early when the troll tried to capture one of the young goats and eat him.  To his surprise, the troll became entwined in a strong, sticky web which at first restricted his movements, but eventually disoriented  him to the point that he fell off the bridge into the river and drowned, all the while subjected to a relentless spray of goat milk from the intended victim and his two brothers.

To this day Anna doesn’t know why I found her story so funny, and she grew up on a farm, too.  I guess sending the city kid to the barn to milk the Billy-goat isn’t quite as current as some jokes anymore.

Ten years later, the group trying to develop the spider/goat technology has become Nexia Biotechnologies, and according to their website, biosteel development is still a key part of their asset list though they’ve acquired some pharmaceutical companies and some oil interests, as well.

And to think I’d accused Paul of making the whole thing up.