Friday, January 26, 2018

The Freezer

 Not everything at White Oak was fun and games.  We did some serious stuff, too.  One afternoon, we were entertaining some missionaries who had come back from their foreign assignments to spend a year back home.  One of those people was a doctor from Hong Kong who had treated Bruce Lee right before he died.
 The reception was going well.  We needed to get more ice for the punch, and I volunteered to go back to the walk-in freezer in the kitchen to get more ice.  I was wearing a short sleeve shirt and long pants.  When I got to the freezer, I swung open the steel door and went in to get the ice, which was toward the back.  The door swung back and shut with me still inside.  There is a steel rod on the inside of the door that one can press, which will open the door.  I pressed it, but nothing happened.
 I didn't know what to do.  There was a vent at the upper left of the door.  I yelled for help, but the vent had iced over.  I banged on the door with my fist, but no one heard.  I started kicking the steel rod, and I kicked so hard that the rod bent, but the door still didn't open.  I was getting pretty cold at this point.  I saw two fans at the back of the freezer, and I thought that they were blowing out cold air, so I unplugged them both.  I didn't know that they were on to circulate the air.
 The reception was no more than 50 feet away from where I was, but no one knew of what was happening to me.  The oxygen was being used up fast, so I began to slow my breathing down.  I remembered from Boy Scouts that the air at the floor is the last to breathe, so I got down on the floor trying to breathe.  By now, I had been in the freezer for about six minutes, and I thought I was going to die.  I was about to pass out from lack of oxygen.  I managed to sit on a box of produce, and I prayed.
 I asked God to deliver me from this situation, because I didn't want Mamie (our cook at White Oak) to find me the next morning dead, because she would go crazy and run out on I-77.  I mustered up enough energy to try the door one more time, and it opened.  I fell out onto the floor of the kitchen, gasping for air.  Once I could walk, I stumbled out to the reception and told them what happened.  One of our staff workers was also an EMT, and she realized I was suffering from Hypothermia.  Her name was Amelia.  She took me to the first aid room and began working on me.  When I asked her why they hadn't come to check on me, she said everyone just thought I had been in the bathroom.  They didn't think I would be too stupid to lock myself in the freezer.
 For about three months after this incident, I felt light-headed.  I also had a problem with my vocal chords from screaming so much, and I had a bruise on my hand from pounding on the door.  As time went on, most of those problems slowly went away, although my vocal chords were damaged somewhat, and remain so.  A few months later, I was talking to a building contractor about what happened to me.  He said that when a door shuts like that, it creates a vacuum seal.  No matter how hard one tries, the seal can't be broken.  Then after six minutes, the seal gradually starts to release.  He also told me that most freezers have about five minutes of oxygen in them.  Prayer works.  I am living proof.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Tournaments

 As I have stated earlier, there was some downtime at White Oak.  The staff had to be on call in case something was needed, but we also had to pass the time to avoid total boredom.  So, we did a lot of things.  Two of them involved tournaments.
 During the summer, there were at least three or four staff people that hung around at night to handle things, while the director and his wife slept.  One of the things we did was to have Scrabble tournaments.  We would usually do two-person games, and the winner would play someone else, until we had a Scrabble champion for that night.  Some of the staff would try and cheat by making up words to get higher scores.  This practice bothered me, so I bought a Scrabble dictionary.  It came in very handy, although some of the staff didn't like the idea.  For them, cheating was more fun.
 The other tournament was one we invented.  The administration building had several rooms.  There was the main area; a first aid room; a canteen; a bookstore; the director's office; and a storage room.  We got bats and whiffle balls, and we put together an 18-hole golf course inside the administration building.  18 spots within that building.  Each spot was a hole.  Some of them were more challenging than others.  For example, one hole was in the sink in the first aid room.  You had to loft your ball into the sink.  However, you could hit your ball against a wall and get it to bounce into the sink.  That was the easier way to play that hole.  The golf game had to be nixed after one night, when the director's wife came up to the canteen to get something to drink.  We had not expected her.  She saw us playing the game, and she hit the roof.  She found dark spots on the walls, where our balls had hit.  Let's just say that the golf game ended that night.  Thanks to White Oak being a Christian assembly, no cuss words were spoken by her, but the look on her face said quite enough.
 So, we went back to playing Scrabble.  Golf was more fun.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Sherman's Road

 One summer night at White Oak, John (the Eagle Scout) said he wanted to show us Sherman's Road.  Apparently, when General Sherman's Army left Columbia, they moved north past Winnsboro toward Chester.  Highway 321 had not been built yet, but this road sort of paralleled what is now 321.  It was a dirt road that had mostly disappeared over time, but there was still a portion left intact, which ran from White Oak to Blackstock.  It was history and some of us wanted to see it.
 Suzanne, Angela and I piled into the front seat of John's pickup truck with him behind the wheel, and off we went to Sherman's Road.  It was night, because it was the only free time we had from work.  We started out down this dirt road with no lighting other that the truck's headlights.  We came to a ravine that had two boards across it.  John lined up his truck to the boards and drove across.  A pretty easy task, except for one major problem.  The two girls and I were SCREAMING!  The boards sagged, as we drove across, and the ravine was deep.  What is the truck slid off?  We would all be killed.  John thought our fright was funny.  We got over the ravine and continued on our way.  Until we came to another ravine and another two boards.  We begged John to turn around.  The truck got over the ravine, and we kept going.
 It was getting darker, and we were afraid that John didn't really know where he was going.  After some choice words said to John, he finally agreed to turn around.  There was a house along the road, where we could turn around.  It was also obvious that the home owner did not expect anyone turning around in his front yard.  After all, there was probably a reason why he wanted to live way back from the main highway with no neighbors around.  As John was turning around, the man came out of his house holding a rifle.  If we hadn't been freaking out about the boards over the ravines, we were now.  This man was going to shoot us trespassers.  John sped off in the other direction .  We didn't care about him lining up the wheels to the boards.  We shot over the ravines.  I had never been in a flying pickup truck before, and hopefully will never again.
 My suggestion to anyone interested in going down Sherman's Road is:  DON'T.  Maybe look at it on an old map, or better yet--take Hwy 321 and imagine just off in the woods is where Sherman's Army was.  You don't want to be mistaken for a revenuer.

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Cameras

 Each summer, we would have youth camps at White Oak.  Those weeks were the busiest of the whole year.  There were always more to do.  As one of the jobs I had was washing dishes, it became increasingly challenging to separate the trays from the dishes, cups and silverware, especially if all 250 kids decided to return their trays all at once.  It took a real skill.  There was also a lot of bad words said under one's breath.  You had to put yourself in a zone and not think about the gross stuff you saw on their trays, but one guy left his retainer.  We had to clean it and return it to the owner.  That was pretty gross.
 Another job I had was running the canteen.  Usually, I had two or three helping me.  I shudder to think how many kids got sodas that sprayed in their faces, when they opened the cans.  Things moved pretty fast in there during youth weeks.
 During one week, John and I were asked to build a bonfire near the lake.  John was the Eagle Scout, so he knew more than I did about how to build a good fire.  We also had these large water containers that we carried on our backs to put the fire out, once the kids finished their fun.  So, we built the fire and were ready for the kids.  We waited quite a while.  The camp's director came down to where we were and told us that the kids had decided they didn't want to the bonfire after all.  More bad words under our breaths, and we proceeded to put out the fire.  Unfortunately for us, it was burning pretty good.  Had the kids gone with the bonfire, we wouldn't have had so much fire to put out.  Our backpacks full of water were not sufficient to put out the blaze.  We had to go to the lake and fill up the tanks to continue putting out the fire.  This went on for almost an hour.  Moral of the story is don't let an Eagle Scout make your bonfire.  It was too perfect.
 One job I had was great.  I had helpers as we would change the sheets and towels during youth camp.  The kids would be in meetings, as we would go to their rooms and make everything nice for them.  A lot of the kids would bring their cameras with them to take pictures of the woods and other stuff as memories of their time there.  Their cameras were left in their rooms, while they were away.  We would go into their rooms and take pictures of our feet, the ceilings, the floor, and anything else that folks wouldn't normally take pictures of.  The reason was that when they got home, they would show their friends the pictures they took, and their friends would ask, "Why did you take a picture of the ceiling?"  I know that was rude, but we had to find fun where we could.  I am sorry if the kids didn't share in our humor.