PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Dale L Bailey & Associates was an architecture firm in Stone Mountain Ga., my first professional position, 1988-89. We were in an office park below the Mountain. Geologically anomalous, it’s a granite knob about 900 feet high. Stone Mountain Park was across the street. Next door, a software development company, US Mapping; there were seven computer geeks, one of whom was David. David had the unfortunate experience of being run over by a tractor-trailer in a parking lot at Ga. Tech while a graduate student. He spent a year in the hospital, finished school, and went to work. As part of his physical therapy, he exercised in the morning before work, usually a longish walk and some calisthenics. He and I became casual chat buddies, the notion of climbing (walking up, really) Stone Mountain in the morning came up and we did it. We’d meet at the base, walk up, walk down, go home to shower, and be at work by 8:30. The first day we went, there were 5 or 6 Ford Tauruses parked next to each other in the parking lot, and a ceiling of clouds lower than the top of the mountain. We reached the altitude of the clouds, while coming out of the fog, there was wonderful white sunshine. And Singing. Hymns no less. Mormons preceded us and were having a sunrise service, very colorful for all involved, no doubt. We went a couple of times a week for a few weeks, when he stopped going, I went alone.

Some of our conversation entailed the nature of our work, and David had me to his office, explaining about rasterizing and vectoring digital signals from satellites. This is an averaging process, getting things as precise as possible, with various uses. One day, he mentioned a sales presentation his boss would be giving in Atlanta, and would I and my boss like to see the presentation by way of a practice run. We went at lunch and were enthralled by the examples they outlined. The most poignant to me was the demonstration of how to locate the epicenter of a pine bore infestation in a State forest. The information was gathered and processed, colored for density of infestation, and precisely located on a satellite image of the park. The boss said : “…when we hit it rich, I’m going to buy an island in the Bahamas…”

It turned out that the Atlanta presentation was given to Casper Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense under the Reagan Administration. When I asked how it went his response was simple: “A direct hit.”

I congratulated him and went about my workdays next door for a couple of weeks. Then came the day that their space was empty, everything, overnight. The sign was down, the curtains, plants, furniture gone, no one parked in their spaces.

Skip forward about 10 years, and I reconnected with a woman I went to high school and college with. She wrote technical manuals (English Major) for the Federal Government on all kinds of projects. One thing she’d been involved with was an operations manual for satellite imagery; her compatriot on that project was in Texas, he was involved in the programming and launching of observation satellites. Somehow, in conversation, I mentioned my experience with David, she told her colleague, and he had the reaction “Hey- I know that guy!” David’s infirmity is what clued him in.

David, now a private consultant to the government, was living in Texas. He was wealthy, worked for awhile, then wouldn’t be around for awhile. Further, David had a colleague who owned an island in the Bahamas. When the government, in particular the military, buys a product for their use, they pay all projected profits, salaries, certainly a copyright/patent value, etc. They had to sign an agreement to not share the information, use the software, etc., then they all rode out of Stone Mountain office park with a big check. And I’m sure a smile. US Mapping hit the jackpot. Small world.

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St. Croix, USVI, has a Naval Tracking Station and practice site located on and off the island. Some sort of tracking grid was laid on the ocean floor to the west of the island. The floor there is unusually flat, 30-60 feet deep for six miles, then a massive shelf drop-off. Many times the Navy brought submarines, destroyers, once a battleship, etc., to ‘do maneuvers’ and practice things; Fredriksted was a shore leave location as well. I once saw 2 helicopters, flying fast and low to the water. They slowed, then hovered, and out jumped scuba divers. Later I found out they were practicing underwater rendezvousing with a sub. The Tracking Station, as it was called, is a compound of buildings to the North of town, and several people in the area worked there. It’s secretive, they aren’t supposed to talk about it, etc.

Larry owns a house between town and the Station, he built most of it himself. He ran into a couple of visiting Station guys at a bar. They were on island for a few days, and wanted to see the place. They were obliged such that their St. Croix introduction was blur of strip joints, whorehouses, and a cross-island bar crawl. They thanked him with a curious favor.

A week or so later, Larry walked in and put this thing on the bar next to me. Little bigger than a coaster, it was square & flat, a dull, even dirty light gray.

“Guess what that is.”

No idea, I said; “…sheet metal?”

“No, it’s a satellite image of Fredriksted and my house. Here’s what it looks like printed out.” He put down two black-and-white 8 ½ X 11 photographic prints on the bar next to the plate. One was a picture of town, all trees and roofs visible, we could see the rows of tombstones in the cemetery, I could see my house and driveway, I wasn’t home when they took that one, so no car. The other was Larry’s unfinished house. At this scale, we could see portions of construction that were done, chairs he had in the yard, and, yes, the top of Larry’s head and shoulders. We remarked about seeing the opening in the top of the can; not clear, but there it was.

What I found most interesting is that the plate is organized on the molecular level, a teeny tiny scale model electro-statically constructed using radio signals from satellites. The scale of the print is determined by a frequency.

I heard a story about an assault that took place on island. The guy was caught because of a satellite image of the area at the time. There were only two cars parked in the lot, and the bad guy’s make and model - and color - were determined. After that, it’s easy…one can neither run far nor hide long on an island.

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