Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Recommendations

Info

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 192 creatures of the planet. I can’t tell which site is more beautiful or exciting because I liked them all and all of them are worth revisiting. Being totally submerged in a viscous fluid that can make a person buoyant and moving through it without motorized help is a most curious experience. It produces sensations difficult to explain. When one is floating in neutral gravity in absolute silence except for one’s breathing noise, the world becomes eerie. The environment is further modified by the fact that water absorbs the red part of the light spectrum faster than the blue, thus changing the hue of every color to tones not seen outside the ocean. Sometimes unseen currents that move a person around like a leaf in the wind make it hard to retain spatial control. The adventure is completed by the abundance of marine life, some of it literally within reach at arms length. To top the changes in environment, the lens effect of the snorkel mask makes everything look a little bigger and closer than actuality. Exploring marine fauna and meeting creatures larger than oneself can be unnerving. My son Cid has a knack for dealing with sharks, so far successfully. One night off the coast of Khona, big island of Hawaii, I rode an eighteen-foot wingspan Manta Ray. My daughter Lis, who was barely 14 at the time, was my buddy but I don’t think she knew how scared I was. In my first attempts it looked like I would be swallowed Jonah-like by the gigantic mouth coming at me. Eventually and still shaking from fear in my wetsuit, I finally caught one by the upper lip. The ray took off like a rocket ship carrying me piggyback. I almost swallowed my regulator and the mask was violently pushed against my nose. When the gigantic mouth closed and my fingers got caught in the bite, I panicked and pulled my hands off, leaving my gloves trapped in the ray’s lips. By now Lis had lost sight of me and I was lost in the deep darkness of the ocean. I shook for a long time afterward. Both my daughter Kim and my wife Susan on two different occasions got me out of harm’s way when I couldn’t disentangle from octopus body-embraces by myself. Swimming with dolphins and turtles, jewfish, hammerheads, tiger sharks, Eagle Rays and other pelagic nomads is not only educational but also enriches a person’s life. They truly are majestic! Night diving is fascinating due to the many luminescent life forms shining around. Without exaggeration, the ocean’s interior is another world in our own planet - a world whose top fringes can be leisurely visited and explored by land-based humans. It is a world about which much has been written by consummate explorers and that I am happy to be familiar with. The lessons I learned from this exploration range from a renewed awe for the immensity of creation to the power of knowledge and selfdiscipline. More than once, diving gave me the opportunity to overcome fear and reject panic, thus helping me strengthen my spirit. Though a more specific and longer justification could be developed, I also would like to state that my involvement with scuba diving has been an indirect but powerful force to make me appreciate even more the opportunities America gave me. Autobiography.doc 192 of 239
Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 193 Mastering skills such as scuba diving can also make it possible to do a few less conforming things. After being single for five years to the date, on October 5, 1983, I married Margo Hess. She was an athletic and beautiful young lady with whom I had been sharing a physically very fit life and participating in marathon and triathlon races for about a year. She learned to water ski and made a good member of my family’s water skiing group, which was led by Cid and Lis. I introduced her to diving and she readily took to the sport. We decided that getting married under water would be a real adventure. We sent our minister to scuba dive school, selected other diver friends, including my children and sister Vivian, as wedding attendants. Cid was my best man. We held several practice ceremonies in a deep swimming pool and devised the necessary waterproof tablets to conduct communications. My marathon running friend Lane Stephenson was at the time head of the public information office at Texas A&M. He thought the idea was newsworthy and put out a press release. The news agencies picked it up and our wedding became an internationally publicized event, since Mexico also used it to promote tourism. We flew a party of more than 30 to Cozumel and held one of the first underwater weddings in history. The event took place in the famous Palancar reef, at the formation called Horseshoe, which was shaped a bit like a large altar. Big media newspapers and specialized tourism TV made it famous. We all had an unforgettable time. As some things in life go, unfortunately my marriage to Margo lasted only four months. But thanks to her exceptional understanding, we will remain good friends for the rest of our lives. Another urge for adventure with perhaps parallel attraction as swimming in the ocean is flying through the skies. As I recounted earlier in this chapter, flying held a fascination for me ever since I was a young boy. In 1983, when my son Cid was in college, he and I decided that it would be fun and useful to learn how to fly small planes. I had the ulterior objective of flying myself to small towns in Texas where I might do some development work. We took ground school together and went to flight school at the same time. After I completed my required flying courses and accumulated the necessary hours to get a license, I realized that it would take me too long to learn the art of flying well enough to be my own pilot. At that point in my life this effort was really incompatible with the concentration I needed to apply to my business priorities. Therefore, I decided to continue chartering a plane with pilot rather than one without a pilot. I did, however, enjoy the thrill of flying in a small plane very much. Years later I repeated the experience in gliders, riding thermal currents in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, one time accompanied by my wife Susan. One day in early May 1992, Cid called me from Austin where he was attending graduate school at the University of Texas, to inform me that the following Saturday, May 9, we were going to go jump out of an airplane. Needless to say he took me by surprise, but I rose to the occasion. He had made arrangements for us to take a short course at the Bryan jump school where we were given a choice of how to start. We could do a Autobiography.doc 193 of 239
Page 1 and 2:
Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERIC
Page 3 and 4:
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46:
Page 47 and 48:
Page 49 and 50:
Page 51 and 52:
Page 53 and 54:
Page 55 and 56:
Page 57 and 58:
Page 59 and 60:
Page 61 and 62:
Page 63 and 64:
Page 65 and 66:
Page 67 and 68:
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74:
Page 75 and 76:
Page 77 and 78:
Page 79 and 80:
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83 and 84:
Page 85 and 86:
Page 87 and 88:
Page 89 and 90:
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142: Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERIC
Page 191: Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERIC
Page 241 and 242: Bernard Bailyn, THE IDEOLOGICAL ORI
Page 243 and 244:
George Fuermann, HOUSTON LAND OF TH
Page 245:
Council for Natural Cooperation in
show all

Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?