Salty’s Note: I wrote the following coal story at the request of a friend who had heard the story. While it’s not about prepping, I think it does share a couple of important prepping lessons.
- It’s a miracle that any of us survive the stupid things we did as children to live to be adults.
- It’s a good idea to keep reminders of our past failings about, not to punish ourselves but rather to remind ourselves to not do dumb things moving forwards.
- Honesty is always the best policy.
Now, the story.
The Lump Of Coal
A somewhat true story of a bad boy named Me.
Once upon a time in a place far, far away lived a naughty, naughty little boy who got nothing for Christmas but a lump of coal.
That little boy was me.
As I look across the room to the shelf where a walnut-sized chunk of Hokkaido mined bituminous coal sits, I can remember the horror of seeing a lump of coal in my stocking, and feeling the well earned shame of knowing why it was rightfully there.
It was the late 1960’s, when the world was torn apart in so many ways… the Vietnam war was raging, and as a child growing up in off-base housing of a medical evacuation airfield in Japan I was getting to see a completely different slice of life than most American children of my age.
When we head the sound of approaching piston-engine transports, we would hop on our bikes and ride down to the runway approach and watch the C-140 or other transport make their ponderous slow way onto the runway.
The airplanes would fly onto the Air Force Base and unload their cargo of injured soldiers from Vietnam as my friends and I watched through the rusty chain-linked fence. We’d stand there and watch as the ground crew members would come out and service the planes… they would pop open the fuel tanks in the wings and fill the planes back up with 100/130 avgas from giant bowser trucks were filled at the tank farm.
For some of us, these were the men their fathers would take care of and minister to body and soul. My friend Bobby’s father was a doctor, and my friend Yitzi’s father was Chaplin.
We three were inseparable except in December, when Yitzi’s family was doing family Hanukkah actives after school, so Bobby and I were on our own to do the sorts of things naughty little boys sometimes do.
Like, say, shoot fireworks.
Fireworks were readily available in Japan, and you could buy a gross of bottle rockets at a little shop in a store way down the street on the other side of the bengo ditch. What’s a benjo ditch, you ask? Well… let’s just say Japanese plumbing wasn’t quite up to suburban western standards in the 1960’s and leave it at that.
One day Bobby and I decided it would be fun to shoot off some bottle rockets. We were off base, but there were some Japanese workmen over on base going about their business doing their jobs.
One of the two of us little monsters said “why don’t we shoot them at those guys working on the train over there?” The other little reprobate laughed, grabbed the RC Cola bottle launchpad, pointed it towards the workmen and launched our first rocket.
Off it went, over the top of the barbed wire topped the base chain link fence, and it hit the side of the train car with a BANG!
The men, in abject terror, took one glance at us getting the next rocket ready to go and jumped off the train and took off running like they were fleeing for their very lives.
Bobby and I laughed and laughed, we had both been hit by bottle rockets and although it might burn you a bit it probably wouldn’t even do that. Those Japanese workers were such scardy-cats to be afraid of bottle rockets!
But, as it turns out, there was one small trick to the twister… these workmen knew one thing the two of us little punks didn’t. They knew they were unloading 14 tanker cars full of 100/130 avgas into the tank farm, and the vents on the top of the cars we were bouncing the fireworks off of were wide open.
Needless to say, it was minutes before the MP’s sirens were wailing. The two of us beat feet to my house, which was the closest safe harbor. We went into my room and stood looking at each other in wide-eyed wonder.
Then father came home.
“Son,” he said, “were you one of the two boys who were shooting fireworks at the fuel train? Were you one of the two boys who just about blew up a hospital base full of wounded soldiers and half of suburban Tokyo?”
Of course, I confounded my mistake with a denial.
He looked at me, shook his head and started unbuckling his belt. My father was not a “spare the rod” kind of a man, his belt knew my bottom side quite well. “Your sister saw you and Bobby doing it,” he said. “And now you made it worse by being dishonest.”
This debacle was about a week before Christmas. I took my punishment, and the grounding that basically went without saying.
That Christmas, my oldest sister got the guitar she had been dreaming about, and my middle sister a new Barbie with some Barbie outlets.
I got one lump of Hokkaido mined bituminous coal.
The guitar? Long gone. The Barbie doll and my sister who owned it are both gone as well. Father and Mother have both long since passed. Bobby and Yitzi? We all moved and lost track of each other.
The railroad and tank farm and the base it’s self are all history now, gone and mostly forgotten.
All that is left from those days are my other sister, the one who ratted us out (I did eventually forgive her for being a narc), our memories and one lump of Hokkaido mined bituminous coal.
Wow! Great story!
Preppers seem to forget about coal. I’ve heard tales of folks that had small coal seams on their property and planned on using that for emergency heat. It lasts a long time and burns hot. Unfortunately it requires a very good stove to burn it in. Almost the same kind as a waste oil burning stove.
It doesn’t smoke very much so it would be a great stealth heat source for urban folks.
The Place actually is in coal country. There’s an old ground disturbance we suspect was a test dig to see if that spot was worth mining. Apparently it wasn’t. The local coal is very low quality, soft and sulfurous, which is why it’s no longer mined. We’ve thought of trying to find a seam for emergency use, but I doubt that project will ever seem important enough to be worth the effort.
Coal if burned very hot *might* be less smoky but I’d not call it stealth by any means. You can smell coal for quite a distance. Coal comes in many forms some far cleaner than others. The only knowledge I have of waste oil stoves is the JP4 fueled tent stoves in the Army. They burn HOT. They also reek. But in the frozen winter on the DMZ of Korea they were welcome.
The extreme heat of burning coal compared to wood burning requires a stoutly built stove. Also while wood is fine with air flowing OVER IT, coal requires air flow from underneath it. Thus the coal grates to keep it off the bottom of your stove and the need to clean out the burnt up clinkers that build up under it.
Some folks I know put some pea coal on their wood fires just before they go to sleep to keep the cabin warm all night and makes for an easy wood fire in the AM. Some say that’s a great way to die in your sleep.
Personally I’d be thrilled to find a coal seam I could mine.
And Salty I KNOW a bit about the Belt, seems all young men back then needed adjustments 🙂
Your mileage might vary.
So, Tachikawa Air Base? Was stationed at Zama 90-93 and saw the remains of the hospital at Sagami Depot that was used during Vietnam.
I can neither confirm nor deny that there was a railroad spur ending leading to a discharge pipe entering the northwestern part of Tachikawa Air Force Base just across the base fence line, south of an area inhabited by off-base Americans and not far from “American Village”, the on-base housing area accessible via the famous “don’t ask, don’t tell” unofficial “hole in the fence” base entrance used by children of all ages.