Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire It's a small world,

After a long work week, my wife and I went to dinner and sat in a quiet area, not wanting to deal with any noise or commotion. In comes a group of young, loud school kids and they sit all around us. With my headache growing, we're trying to get through our meal when I notice one of the kids standing next to our table, staring. I look up about to blow a gasket and the kid (about 12 years old) says "I think I know you." It was a cousin - son of my favorite uncle - on a 6th grade field trip to Gettysburg from upstate New York. He'd spent 10 minutes convincing his teachers to give him permission to approach us. They were then good enough to let us take him around town for a bit.

Yep a couple of times, 3 actually and all while I was in the Air Force. My first duty station was Ft. Hood and I was at a Wal-Mart in Killeen or Copperas Cove and ran into a guy I played HS football with. He had joined the Army and was stationed there and about to ETS out. Third time I was PCSing out of Keesler AFB and ran into my old elementary buddy while outprocessing the legal office. Last time was just here in AK, another guy I played HS worked as civilian on base here and I had to work with him to write a new job description for our civilian hires.

Just yesterday. 200 Mi from home in a gun shop, I ran into a kid who worked @ a restaurant 20+ yrs ago that my buddy manages. I heard/recognized the voice, asked him "did you used to work @ XX restaurant?" Sure enough, same guy, now an officer for BIA.

The wife was born in a small Colorado town in which only 2 babies were born that day. Thirty-eight years later on her birthday we shared a conversation with a man in a burger restaurant in Beverly hills. He was the other baby born that day in the same hospital. There was an instant bond. I came back from the restroom and overheard him commenting that he didn't recognize her with her clothes on either.

Yep, in Key West 30 feet from the zero mile marker & my bud says; look that's John & wife by the marker, a couple we'd ridden with on a couple motorcycle runs in KY..

The weirdness really set in was when I saw John the next time, 10 years later. Back in Ky. I was working for a rigging company & John was the crane operator on the jobsite.

Funny you mention Hawaii, in 1974 I had just started working for the company and dealt with salesman, I was walking down a street in Wakiki and happened to look across the street for some reason and there was the fellow Al, he was with Acklands, small world.

Your grandparents are still alive?


Wow

Long, long ago, in another life, I had a thing going with a Yup'ik Eskimo Shaman gal that lived in a tiny Bering Sea coast village in S.W. Alaska.
She was an educated type, held politcal office, very respected.
She was also the executive director of the Bristol Bay Native Association's Qayassiq Walrus Commission. That position put her in charge of Walrus Management on Alaskas Round Island which is a tiny little island off the South West Alaska coast.



It's a pretty cool gig, she and her crew are on-site every summer over seeing the goings-on with the Walrus haulout there.



So anyway, the time had come for me to end our relationship and move on.
I was never good at that kinda stuff am I'm still not.
All I knew was I didn't wanna pizz off a Yup'ik Shaman type that was politically connected and carried clout and then hang around, she had all of that going on..

I decided I'd just go, I got everything I needed stuffed in a duffle bag and stashed it in my truck without her taking notice.
First thing the next morning I grabbed the garbage and told her I was going to the dump. I drove straight into town, jumped on a plane and made my escape.

That was the end of that...

A year and a half later, a million miles away, I was camping along the Everglades coast in Southern Florida.
We were on a 125 mile paddle journey somewhere between Everglades City and DeFlaveville.



We had to camp at Chickee's because there was no dry land.



This particular Chickee was built for two, it was in Sunday Bay.
We had only reserved half of it, we got our camp setup and started dinner when another group of kayaks came into view and they were headed our way.
The closer they got I could see it was all women, cute college aged women, good score if ya gotta have neighbors on a remote Chickee they might as well be attractive.

As they neared, I could tell straight away, these were Alaskan girls.
The had Alaskan gear, they looked Alaskan and one of them was wearing XtraTuffs.
There was something eerily familiar about them but I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.

They busyed themselves setting up their camp as my friend and I watched, the longer I watched the more familiar they seemed but I was at a loss for remembering where I'd seen them before.

After they concluded their chores introductions commenced, I immediately stated, 'you girls are from Alaska aren't you?' and of course they replied that were.
But they lived on the Kenai Peninsula, which wasn't my turff.

I told them I was from the Bristol Bay region an to that they said 'we work in Bristol Bay'.

By this point I knew damn well I'd seen these girls around so I asked, 'exactly what do you do in Bristol Bay?'.

To that they stated 'we work for the Bristol Bay Native Association's Qayassiq Walrus Commission'.

That's where I'd seen them, they worked for my Shaman women on Round Island, It was her crew, I'd seen them bouncing around there on one of my visits.

My Shaman woman had surely sent them looking for my azz,
there had been Ravens following us for days.

All in all it was a pretty good encounter, I got to send message to my Ex wishing her well. Idunno if that really took the heat off me for dumping her the way I did, big storm swept through and took that Chickee out, without a doubt she had something to do with that. Park Service never rebuilt them, to this day there's no Chickees in Sunday Bay...

A Shaman women will find you no matter how far you go or how well you hide.

One of my more awkward meet-ups...
While I was TDY to Torrejón AFB I met a WAF who was from Northern Michigan, also an assistant crewchief on a 135 out of Plattsburgh. We hung around together some touring Madrid and partying at the NCO club. Fast forward about fourteen months I had gotten married and PCSed to Mildenhall. Wife and I went into the base post office one day to check our mailbox, there was a card in the box indicating that we recieved a package. So my wife says she will go get it. I was waiting by the mailbox when my ole friend from Spain comes around a different corner, walks up to me and gives me a big hug and a kiss. We were still in an embrace when my very pregnant wife came back around the other corner catching us hugging. Kathy had crosstrained into being a dental assistant and just got assigned to Moldyhole... 😳 😁

It wouldn't have been bad except one of my "friends" told my wife about a couple of rumors that were spread around from the Torrejón trip. 🤬

I was in a remote part of Northern Nevada hinting Jack rabbits when I encountered an old friend from my home town . he was hunting jacks with his bow.
Another time my next door neighbor was in the same SLC air terminal as me delayed by a snow storm.

Was a friend of our crew, we called him ‘Harpo’. He always had all the good dope and pills.

He worked for me off/on doing bitch jobs like gutting a bathroom or kitchen, stripping shingles off.

Me and some other buds were in Panama City beach, one night about 10pm in the dark. I see a stumbling, falling person walking towards us. Ho lee sheeeit, out of the darkness….DUDE!!!!! lol

Said he been down for several days, just got out of Bay County jail. Sparky the K-9 ripped his back seats apart in his Mustang GT. haha

Out on $3500 bail or some chit. Drunk. we let him pass out in our barka loungers.


Same thing happened, same guy at a Hank Jr show. Seen a dude face down, passed out on a picnic table during Marshall Tucker. DUDE!!! Wassassuppp!!! 😂😂😂🤣🤣

And if you’re wondering…he deddt now

His hookup on the killer weed was some guy that had a sawmill, we were always given cryptic info which pile of sawdust your package would be under. Had to know your hardwoods 💀

Had a customer in my shop a lil while back. Guy keeps looking at me, then asked if I was Mike's boy. Turns out he was dads roommate in college

went to a coffee shop i normally dont go to. followed a lady out and she was heading to a car with ND plates. I asked where they were from and she said a small town that you wouldn't know. What is the name, she told me Olga ND. i Said my Dad grew up there...so she said I had to meet her mom that was in the back of the van they were driving. Well, long story short....her Mom would pick up my dad with a horse driven sleigh in the winter to go to school. The coffee shop was in Colorado and they were headed to Colo Springs. That fall my Aunt was sitting next to a lady at a funeral and the story of this elderly women meeting someone in Colorado that turned out to be her my Aunts nephew... Small world...

Got off a train in Xian China in 2004 and a big wig CCP member walked up to me and said I know you. You helped me in Hawaii in 1999. I lived in Hawaii in 1999 but didn't remember it. He said he was taking his only child, his daughter, there to go to university. He said he was very worried about his daughter going to an American school and very fearful about America boys being around his daughter. He said I helped his family find their way around campus and I was very kind to him and made him worry much less.

He took me to dinner later that week with what was equivalent of the governor of that province. We had a great conversation and they told me openly about the 50 year plan and how they were determined to overtake the US first economicly by 2020 and to have a stronger military than us by 2030. They took me to their economic development area where the building was astonishing. Large buildings going up 12 at a time of 1 floor plan 10 of another etc.

It was going pretty well until one of them pulled me aside and said I made a mistake at dinner and offended the governor or whatever his title was. We were eating dumplings and they had about 20 different kinds on a rotating thing in the center of a large table. I knew I was supposed to let him go first but I didn't realize that applied to each plate. If he hadn't taken a certain type of dumpling yet I wasn't supposed to either. They had one plate of them that were folded to look just like little ducks. I grabbed one before he did. They told me it showed I was of low class. I said where I come from low class is making your guests feel uncomfortable. It got a little awkward towards the end.

Bb

Was assigned to CINCPAC at Camp Smith Hi. Got on the elevator going down and there was another USAF Lt Col going down. He looked very familiar but couldn't place him. We went through the drill ... where were you assigned, military schools attended, Temporary duty assignments. Nothing matched. I was an AFROTC instructor and thought he may have attended one of the student gatherings as another instructor so I asked if he was ever in AFROTC. He said yes so I asked where ... University of Akron he answered. Then I asked where he was from originally ... Stow Ohio he replied. Then the light went on. He was the kid always sitting in the back of the school bus during 7th and 8th grade.

Wow, crazy stories it's a small world after all.

Wife and Ì were in Lake City CO wife met a lady she worked with in Wichita Ks a few years after we were running around working Rv Parks.

Not me that I can remember anyway but several years ago, my wife and her mother were on a cruise up the Inside Passage. After everyone was a little more talkative, She got to talking to a girl who turned out to be a classmate of mine.
To this day, she swears that she can't remember the lady's name.

I can't for the life of me believe that my wife doesn't remember every detail about something like that.

Shortly after we bought our house, I met one of my new neighbors at the mailboxes and he introduced himself as Steve Williams. A pretty common name, really, and I didn't think much of it at the time but after a while I began thinking the guy seemed familiar somehow. I looked the guy up on one of those sites that reveals things about people, and sure enough he had some history in El Paso and was the same age as me. The next time I ran into him he confirmed that he was the same kid I used to pal around with in the second grade. He went to another school the following Fall and I never saw him again until 42 years later, and he was living about three houses down and around tbe corner.

Walking down a street in Koza Okinawa in 1970- - - - -ran into a guy from my high school graduating class 7 years earlier. Only 39 people in the class of 63, and I meet one of them halfway around the world. Both of us stationed at Kadena AFB.