by Lloyd Foster
After being out of the Air Force for three months, I re-entered and was sent back to Ajo, Arizona where I had worked before.
We learned soon after I started working on the Hill again that someone I knew was close by. I had a very good friend in Greenfield that had joined the Navy and was in San Diego. His name was Jerry Mac Carlton. He had married a Greenfield girl named Patricia Gamble. We visited them very often for the year we were there. It was always good to see someone from Greenfield, especially Jerry and Pat. They actually came to Ajo and we drove back to Tennessee together. What a trip that was! Going across the reservation from Ajo to Tucson, Jerry pulled up close to my car and Pat handed me a half quart of beer out her window. At seventy miles an hour I retrieved the bottle like it was nothing. Jerry and I were crazy Tennessee boys. We both had Harley Davidson’s in high school and did crazy things. Once we were riding our bikes from Bradford to Greenfield and Jerry drove off the road and started riding down the shallow ditch. I stayed on the road amazed at him. What was he doing and why? I could see the ditch was smooth and shallow and almost followed him. Almost, but I did not. I could see the grass getting taller ahead of him. That means one cannot see the ground so I thought he would come back to the road. He did not and he did not know that some farmer had built a road across the ditch to drive to his field. He struck that mound of dirt and gravel at about forty miles an hour and became airborne. He passed me in the air like he had picked up speed coming off the bike. He barely missed a Telephone pole before he hit the ground. He was a little bruised up but his bike looked worse. I picked him up and brushed him off and took him home. Finding someone you know and really like so far from home is so special.
