I came upon this impressive shrine as I returned from Jalama Beach out near Point Conception and Lompoc, California.
It was erected aside a roundabout, one avenue leading to the city proper, the other up to one of California’s storied if questionably ethical landmarks, La Purisma Mission, and then the Lompoc suburb of Vandenberg Village beyond.
This descanso honors one Ryan Osler, who appeared to be a firefighter stationed in Moorpark, who was on his way to a fire torching the outer environs of Vandenberg Air Force Base. That’s the same military facility where my own father worked most of his career as an engineer. He worked on the delivery systems for Minuteman and Titan missiles, constructed for space exploration and other less moral applications.
Osler’s memorial is one of the more dressed up markers I have seen in recent memory, replete with ground cover, stepping stones, a pair of boots, a hat, several potted plants, a trio of American flags, a metal silhouette sculpture of a kneeling firefighter, a photo of the decedent, a basketball, and a big teddy bear adorned in a fire department helmet. It was crafted with care and love.
Apparently Osler passed away in the line of duty, in a vehicular rollover right there at the roundabout while transporting water to the Canyon Fire of 2016 at Vandenberg. Osler was stationed in Moorpark, about 100 miles south of Lompoc. In California, fire departments traverse the state far and wide to help out other districts suffering megafires, of which we have many. More despairing news upon researching Ryan Osler was reading some articles which relayed the vandalizing of his memorial and its subsequent repair. That was a new one on me. Who might vandalize a descanso? Fucking humans, that’s who. The guy was caught not long after, walking down the road in a drunken state with a firefighter hat on. Whether he had a beef with Osler or if he was just being a drunken fool, I don’t know. Either way, that’s bad juju. The same is true for vandalizing cemetery stones. Pissing on the dead almost certainly will invite karmic forces to your location, ones that you might not appreciate after time.
I don’t have much op-ed commentary for this one, I admit, other than to extend my gratitude to Ryan for his dedicated service. Though Ryan was not a local, I’m gonna indulge a brief segue in this segment about the Vandenberg community, the locality where he perished.
My father was a card-carrying member thereabouts, and so I can dip into that pool briefly, near as my childhood recall will allow me. The base itself did indeed impact me, not the least of which was, it was the federal institution which ultimately provided my father’s bread and butter, which by proxy became food in my belly, shelter over my head, and rendered a college education for me to boot. For that, obviously, I am grateful.
That said, I’m also well aware the base, despite being a primary space exploration hub on the west coast, also worked on a good number of nuclear weapon delivery systems, several of which my father probably worked on. He never discussed with me at length any of his doings out at his job, presumably because much of it was classified or a dark project outright. To this day, I haven’t a clue how much my father may or may not have tendered or upgraded nuclear ordinance, a subject with which, longtime readers of The Dogs of Generation X know, I have some fair sensitivity.
Vandenberg Village itself isn’t really close to the base, by the way. It’s just called that, but it’s basically Lompoc North, a side suburb adjacent to the Pacific Coast Highway, which if followed upstate will take one straight up into the central coast, Santa Maria, Pismo, San Luis Obispo and beyond. I am pretty familiar with that area because my dad’s best pal lived up there and we visited a lot from our more rural digs in the valley eastward.
What I remember vividly about those visits to that family, aside from my dad’s buddy being a demonstrative, cantankerous bear of a man, a former tank commander in World War II, were his trio of sons, who were about ten to twenty years older than me and each of them, near as I could tell in my impressionable youth, faced a variety of challenging issues in their lives. I bring this up because Vandenberg Village was near the site of one of those boys’ less than easy ends, and I admit, upon learning the news, despite being out of touch with that family for decades, long after my parents passed, I still found his end rather unsettling.
I heard that man, I’ll call him B. here for narrative purposes, had passed and in a bad fashion. B. was saddled with significant family dysfunction and addiction, and had lived rough, often unhoused and drifting across the central coast. He frequently called my parents for help, having been exiled or refused by his own parents, and sometimes my parents did help out, as they were oft known to do for a greater portion of their local yokel network.
Actually, my parents helped out a lot of folks. That’s absolutely the greatest gift my parents ever taught me…the application of generosity, as unconditional as we can give it. Even after both my parents were gone and I inherited their old place, I would get calls from B., as I also inherited my old childhood phone number for a time, and he’d forget they’d died, and he often asked for help or a ride, and I’d have to choose to do so or not, and I’m afraid to say I did not. Not because I didn’t help out plenty of people on my own, (I did), but because I saw him as a component of my parents’ sphere and not my own, and honestly, if I’d carried on all my parents’ varied sources of charitable projects, along with my own I’d already established, I’d have to have been a lot wealthier philanthropist than I had the resources to back up.
In any case, it was reported B. died in a a fire, living unhoused in the wild at an abandoned trailer somewhere in the woods around Vandenberg Village or Purisma. All I could think about was how much it bummed me out that so many people pass through the gateways of this world to the next without having found redemption here in this life first.
It really does still bum me out. I know, I know, so many people do fall short in their personal redemption arcs before the end of their tenure here on Terra Firma. It’s a rare life that finds peace and resolution in totality, or even to a negligible percentage, before we shed our mortal coil. I know. But the thought of how much B. had to endure throughout his tumultuous, painful, misunderstood life, how much time he spent lost, only to meet an unceremonious and rather brutal end…it irks me.
It provokes my sweet little existential nutshell of hope and higher spheres and emotional evolution and all those metaphysical spiritual platitudes I try to exercise and abide by, but the random unfairness of corporeality and the muckity-muck of humanity really does challenge all those truths…what I hope to be truths…what truths I’m near positive are actual truths beyond my perceptions. It is difficult to retain a certainty of higher sphere existence when faced with the despair and misery our collective has created for themselves, isn’t it?
See, that’s the thing about Lompoc. It’s kind of a central Californian coastal Bermuda Triangle of sorts for your author, existentially speaking. It’s got the military hub and a good amount of agricultural workers both documented and undocumented. It’s got one of California’s more ‘luxe Catholic missions. It’s quite easily one of the districts in Santa Barbara County with the lowest income per capita. So it’s a trifecta for me personally…you’ve got the nuclear adjacent stuff at the base (I’m staunchly anti-nuke), you’ve got the colonial conquest and decimation of Indigenous tribes with the mission nearby (I’m all about the dismantling of the ruling class pyramid and reparations for all conquered peoples), and you’ve got the impoverishment (I’m all about basic universal income, socialized medicine and education).
On top of all that Lompoc represents in terms of our failing American society, it’s got mad sentiment for me nonetheless, because of my father’s connections there and how often I cruised its mean streets. In fact, I saw my first movie in a movie theater ever there (my redneck of the woods didn’t even have a movie theater until I was a junior in high school), at a dilapidated screening house called the Gemini. It was The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, in 1978 (not good, the only Bears movie worth a damn is the original of course). My mom n’ pop dropped me and my brother off there for two hours of late 70s day care while they were doing something or other in Lompoc.
I think I may have consumed my first ever Taco Bell meal there as well. Lompoc is also known for its annual Flower Festival, which sports a carnival and a parade, but it’s not exactly a Carlsbad flower level spectacle. I bowled my first bowling game ever there, in an alley long gone, a place most notably remembered for high school after-class activities fueled by wine coolers and cocaine and general debauchery. There’s a gun range out that way where my father taught me to shoot.
Lompoc is kind of a no man’s land. Were it not for the base, it probably would’ve dried up and blown away in the gale force winds of Point Conception. Nonetheless, same as everywhere else in the world, people fall in love there, they have families, they get married. Babies are born, Christmas joy is had, the unhoused and the mentally ill are forsaken, and firefighters die in the line of duty.
B., I’m sorry you were given a short roll in the craps game of life.
I really am, brother.
And again, Ryan…thank you for your service, brother.
What happens to one of us, happens to all of us.
If you don’t feel that yet…you will.
It’s inevitable.
