Wyoming Speed Limit

Back in the last century the speed limit in Montana was 'whatever is reasonable an proper' and in 1995 while driving with my mistress in a rented car I passed a piggy back truck at 110 on I-90 east. A Montana Statie hid about five car-lengths before the Peterbilt. Barbara told me to slow down.

"No, if I step on the brakes, the officer will know I'm guilty of something."

I maintained the speed. Nothing happened.

Four years later Maybe 1999. I was on a road trip with my father through Montana and Wyoming. My mother had passed two years previously and we both loved the road. My mother had loved the road too.

Someplace desolate and flat north of the Wind River Mountains on 120 I was driving ten miles over the speed limit. A state troopper car was coming in the opposite direction. The car passed and u-turned with lights flashing. I hadn't seen a car in twenty minutes. I pulled over to the breakdown lane and rolled down the window.

The green-shirted trooper asked why I was speeding at 75. He pulled down the brim of his campaign hat, as if to indicate he expected the truth.

"In other states you can drive ten years over the speed limit." I was a good citzen. At least I hadn't had anything tio drink at lunch on Thermopolis. that was the truth, not an explanation.

"Wyoming isn't other states. This is a warning. Kept it to 65."

I thanked the officer and time seemed to stop at 65. When my father took over, he leadfooted to 100. "They aren't any other police out here."

And he was right all the way to Cody.

Etaples France 1917

Accoriding to Wilipedia the major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by researchers as being at the center of the Spanish Flu. The research was published in 1999 by a British team, led by virologist John Oxford. In late 1917, military pathologists reported the onset of a new disease with high mortality that they later recognized as the flu. The overcrowded camp and hospital was an ideal site for the spreading of a respiratory virus. The hospital treated thousands of victims of chemical attacks, and other casualties of war, and 100,000 soldiers passed through the camp every day. It also was home to a piggery, and poultry was regularly brought in for food supplies from surrounding villages. Oxford and his team postulated that a significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.

Marion, my grandaunt and Edith, my grandmother, were nurses along with her future husband, Frank A Smith, served as a surgeon with the Royal Canadian Medical Expedition at Etaples through 1916 into 1917. Edith was transported back to the States in 1917 and I often wondered why until I read the above passage. I phoned my Aunt Sally in Marblehead and asked a question about a story more than one hundred years old. Sally pondered my query for several seconds and then said, "I do remember something about that, but not much."

Global anyplace from seventeen million to fifty million lost their lives to this killer influenza.

Thankfully my grandmother survived into the early 7Os.

To this day she remains one of my favorite people in the world.

Then, now, and forever.