By MARK MEDLYN, guest columnist
I am not “spontaneous” in any manner. Everything that I do is calculated and for a reason.
Partly that is due to the fact that for 38 years I worked a job that was “spontaneous,” as I did not know from minute to minute what I would be doing. I measured my life expectancy in minutes and sometimes seconds. I would think as I left the building with my bag slung over my shoulder starting my shift, “I wonder what the person that is going to shoot me before the end of my shift is doing right now.” Not exactly how one should start the work day. One learns to make sure that everything is in order before you started your squad.
So then this summer, as the virus raged in the Southwest, my wife decided that we should not visit Tucson for the summer, but rather be spontaneous and not have a destination in mind.
This started the first dilemma: Which direction do we leave the neighborhood, north, south, east or west? My wife finally admitted that on her bucket list was to go to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. So I made reservations to ensure that we had a place to stay.
My wife owns a 2018 VW Beetle that has the plate JUN BG. (June Bug) It’s orange with a black roof. How exciting, we thought, cruising to South Dakota in a Beetle. It would rejuvenate us, or so we thought.
Imagine being strapped into a space 18 inches wide that you cannot move from. Even reaching items in the back seat was problematic at best. Combine that with the fact that we forgot or refused to turn on the subscription for the satellite radio, which meant that we were in for long periods of silence or good conversation. There are very few radio stations in the Plains states, it seems.
For the first time in 35 years, we had no children to deal with, no parents whose health was on our mind, just time for her and I to discuss the events of where we have been and where we are going. I managed to get away from the issues in Champaign, Illinois, including the recent murder of a Champaign police officer.
For the next 12 days, I was forbidden to use my cellphone. If people wanted to call, they would have to reach Debra and then she would pass the message along to me. We even managed to not watch television except for the Discovery channel or a movie. It reminded me of going camping in the Grand Canyon during the Falklands War. I had no idea what was going on, nor did I care.
We packed two sets of clothes, winter and summer, as the weather in the Black Hills is unpredictable. We should not have worried. With temperatures in the 100s, we were hot.
The good time of going this time of year is that many schools are still in session and people have not started their family vacations just yet.
We saw the sights that she wanted to see: Devil’s Tower, Mt. Rushmore, Deadwood and Sturgis, The Corn Palace and the Badlands. We only missed the Custer Battlefield, as it was still four hours away in Montana and we were not that interested in making a two-day trip for that.
On the way back, the verse out of “America the Beautiful” with its “fruited plains” came into mind. For hours, we saw nothing as we traveled down the back roads of South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas.
It would have been even more majestic if the “check engine” light didn’t come on as we began our journey back. Fortunately, a quick call to a local VW dealership indicated that unless it was flashing, we could ignore it until we returned back to Champaign. For the next 12 hours, the engine purred like a kitten, and with each passing mile closer to home, my concern lessened.
But despite my best efforts to avoid the stresses of the shooting, reality hit my square in the face on our final night on the road. My wife had read that the Back the Blue group was going to meet at the city council meeting, in part to protest the mayor and two city council members who refused to stand when the widow of the officer made a very impassioned speech. Five hundred police officers and 250 family and friends were stunned by their lack of civility. They are woke so they thought that they should take a stand in this woman’s moment of anguish. Wrong.
The meeting went as well as to be expected, but as I slumbered off to sleep with my Ambien in my system, I was suddenly jolted awake by my wife saying, “Hey, they are mentioning you at the city council meeting.”
Really. A simple government pensioner asleep in Kansas has a council member mentioning me by name and a person speaking quoting me? I really am in the twilight zone, I thought. So, my vacation ended. I was jolted back to reality.
But as was mentioned in a recent issue of the News-Gazette, it is time to take a stand rather than take a knee. Rather than listen to the city council berate, as they have the men and women in law enforcement, it is time to stand up for those who chose to make us safe at night. In the past three weeks, 16 officers have been killed in the line of duty, leaving behind 12 children who were without their father over Father’s Day.
My promise to the men and women of law enforcement is that while some may be silent, an old man with government pensions will be there behind you every step of the way.
Mark C. Medlyn of Brown County is an occasional community columnist. A graduate of Bloomington High School South and Indiana University, he has worked as a police officer and an adjunct college instructor, authored a textbook on the Illinois vehicle code, and became a substitute teacher in Illinois upon his retirement from full-time law enforcement in 2007. He and his wife, a retired university instructor, have been Brown County property owners since 2015.
