Bienvenido a California, Part 6

As mentioned previously, I grew up voraciously reading science fiction. Hardcore sci-fi, like Asimov, Bradbury, Niven, etc. Fantasy literature, on the other hand, was almost completely unknown to me. We had to read the Hobbit in English class one year, and I voluntarily read the Lord of the Rings trilogy...but that was about it. I don't know why, but it just never really interested me. I did grab a copy of one of the Shannara books while waiting in an airport for a connecting flight out to DLI, but I never got through it...The Elfstones of Shannara...and I remember the title only because we jokingly referred to it as The Stoned Elves of Shannara hehe. Neal and the gang though changed all of that. These guys were hard-core fans of Fantasy, and turned me on to many excellent writers, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Piers Anthony, Robert Lynn Asprin (and the whole Thieve's World crew), and Roger Zelazny. They also turned me on to roleplaying games. (Images are again from teh Internets, not taken by me. Note that the rpg images are from more recent editions than the ones we played back in 1984 and 1985.)

Now I was familiar with D&D from high-school, where various dorky kids would carry around their D&D monster manuals, but I never saw the appeal of it, and those kids were kind of weird and creepy in my school hehe...so that's yet another fad that had passed me by. Neal had been DMing (dungeon-master-ing) for years, and with the strength of his personality, twisted all of our arms and got regular rpg campaigns going. And I must confess, I had a great time playing. Neal didn't play D&D though, he used different rulesets. Our regular campaign was based on Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer books. Though he ran some other games to mix it up some when we got tired of that. We also played a Call of Cthulhu campaign, based on the horror novels of HP Lovecraft, a Villains & Vigilantes campaign, which was superhero themed, a Paranoia campaign, which was a darkly humorous game set in a futuristic world controlled by a computer that had gone slightly crazy hehe...kind of 1984 meets Logan's Run, but funny! We also played the silly Toon rpg from time to time, where you got to be cartoon characters. Another guy in the barracks ran a military rpg which I forget the name of...let's just say that when you're in the military, role-playing being in the military is not particularly fun :)



Rob and Mike introduced me to the world of war-gaming. Unlike the military rpgs, these were great fun. We played Risk, which I had played before, but more often more involved games, the ones with hundreds of little counters and pieces. We got a bunch of people together to play Diplomacy too, which is kind of a war-game, and which quickly became my favorite. And I was pretty good at it too! There's a lot Diplomacy info available online now, and in fact people have been playing Dip by email forever apparently, but having tried a few games, it's just not the same as the face to face game. Mike was of course pressuring us to play chess with him, him the guy with his official chess ranking. He would spend his free time studying chess books, trying to get better. While I liked chess and had played some, and had even glanced through a few books, I was nowhere near his level of play hehe.

One of the other things I did in Monterey was scuba diving. Doug and Dan had found a local instructor, but needed a few more people to get a class started so that they could get certified for diving. You can't just go to a shop and rent equipment, they actually insist that you get certified, so that you don't kill yourself underwater. They knew I would be interested, because I had gone on and on about wanting to go diving sometime during Basic Training. Oddly enought Rob decided to go along with us. Rob! The non-physical wargaming, lazy, always rumpled-looking Rob! And he really seemed to be enjoying it too. We went to the class every Sunday morning for a few months, until we got certified. The training was actually pretty cool too...though I did have a problem with the part where we had to take our goggles off underwater, and put them back on. I had almost drowned as a kid, and while I wasn't afraid of being in water, even deep water, the sensation of water rushing up into my nose while trying to get the mask back on and get the water out freaked me out a bit, and I had to try it a few times. But after that, we were certified, and could go diving on our own.

We ended up going pretty often actually. Monterey proper was terrible for diving...it was all sand underwater, and there wasn't much to see. Nearby Pacific Grove and Asilomar had the best diving, and that's where we usually went. The water was remarkably clear, even quite far down. Not Carribean clear, but we had no trouble seeing anything near the shore where we were diving. We saw the usual underwater things...kelp, starfish, fish, sea cucumbers, more kelp, yet more kelp hehe. Kelp underwater was beautiful. However, during storms, pieces of it would break off from the kelp forest and wash up all over the nearby beaches. And phew, does it reek when it's rotting on the beach! We usually had a sea otter or two following us around, at discreet distances. According to our instructor, they were actually quite friendly to divers, and quite curious, they even were known to come up to divers and pull their masks off! I can't confirm that myself, as it never happened to us hehe...but that's what the instructor said. One dive I saw a flash of grey out of the corner of my eye, felt a sense of panic, and just assumed it was a shark and I was about to die. Fortunately though, it turned out to be a dolphin following us around. It got pretty close to us several times, but never close enough to touch. One funny thing was Doug. He was always lugging along an underwater spear, and kept trying to spear fish while we were diving. We'd watch him trying to move through the water in slow motion at the fish, and the fish just calmly swimming out of his way hehe. We were more afraid of him spearing us than the fish I think!