Traffic Light

Fred had done a lot of traveling in his wayward youth, and now that he'd moved back home, to central Illinois, he could hardly help thinking of some of the wild things he'd done. That was because now, living in a small town with a wife and two young children, he was out driving on the streets of the town a lot, and there were a lot of traffic lights. He'd moved here from the mountains, where there were virtually no lights, but just endless windy gravel roads and cliffs, so now he was happy with less responsibility on his mind, but he had these lights to sit through. Even a couple of seconds of sitting at a red light, in one of the town's many intersections, and his mind would go off into the crazy things he'd done as a youth.

Once he'd made a bunch of money, in illegal ways mostly, selling pot which was illegal at the time, and he'd found his way down to the beaches of Belize, where there was a community of like-minded people hiding out from the law mostly. Marijuana was part of every conversation for him at the time; whole days went by with nothing else but a bunch of smoke, and it was pretty powerful smoke, as he would tell his friends later. But one day his friend Mattie talked him into driving this old car 500 miles through the jungle to get to some old ruins that Mattie was sure held the secrets of human history. Fred had no doubt that he was right. But what he should have done was check to make sure the car was up to the trip. They both knew that 500 miles would take them about ten hours, driving tortured mountain gravel roads where anything could happen.

What they couldn't have foreseen was that the roads were not only gravel, but also terrible. At one point they hit a pothole so big that the car's transmission broke. They were something like 180 miles into the trip; they'd been on the road almost five hours, and they were deep in the middle of some jungle where it seemed not another soul was anywhere for miles around. They opened up the hood and messed with the car, but neither of them had any sense of how you could fix a transmission out in the middle of the jungle. It was pretty sure, they knew, that no one was going to come by, at all. No help, no neighbors, no village nearby, nothing, just the jungle sounds of birds and frogs and other loud animals that seemed to be giving them unwanted advice. They stood there in the early afternoon, and then, it started to rain lightly.

The car still wouldn't go forward. It wouldn't go into first, or second, or third. Finally to their surprise they noticed that it went into reverse, though. That was their only option. Although they were prepared to camp, they didn't want to camp, not knowing what kind of animals there were in the area, and besides, there was absolutely no place to pull over. They wanted out of this little jungle place with a terrible gravel road through it. So, they got back into the car, and put it in reverse.

Progress was tedious. They were going backwards, over the same terrible roads they'd come in by. Fred was driving, and he drove by putting his foot on the gas and at the same time twisting himself around and looking out the back window. That road had a lot of twists and turns, and a lot of potholes. What took them four or five hours to get in, took them more like eight to get home. And the pot hadn't helped. He and Mattie kept up a steady smoke, all the way into the jungle, but when they tried to think straight and drive backwards, it was really difficult. He swore that night to ease up on the pot.

But he wasn't really able to live up to his word. When he got back to Illinois, he got a job as a truck driver, doing long haul trips across the midwest carrying all kinds of things. They set him off in this huge truck and on one of his first trips, he almost sliced off the top half of his truck going under a bridge that was too low. They told him to use his GPS to get on the right highway, and he did, but here he was driving down this one highway, and along comes this bridge with a height about a foot or so below what he was carrying. Fortunately he saw it, and stopped just in time. The front of his truck was right up against the bridge itself and he knew there was no way he could fit under it.

It was night-time, and again he was alone. He got out of his truck and looked around; no traffic going in either direction. He was hoping somebody would come by who would help him, directing traffic if nothing else, but there wasn't a soul around. Worst of all, the road had pretty steep ditches on both sides so it was impossible to simply turn around. He had a fairly long truck and would need a wide driveway to turn around, but he hadn't seen one, and had no idea how far he'd have to go, backwards, to get to one.

Still, it was the middle of the night, and he was carrying what, a few thousand pounds of someone's valuable merchandise, and he was responsible to not run it into the ditch, or just stop and give up for the night. He put it in reverse and slowly, slowly backed up until he could find a crossroad.

As it turned out the nearest crossroad was about six miles, and he'd never seen another car coming either way the whole time. He'd only been going about twenty, just like it was when he was in Belize, and he was shaking in fear that the truck would jackknife or get turned in such a way that he'd be unable to maneuver.

That was another night that went on forever. He'd had to turn around and go back, and find a better way, and somehow it took him almost all night, and at the company they weren't that sympathetic, even though they had set him along on the wrong road. It was almost as if it was a test. If he lost his cool out on that lonely midnight road, he wasn't fit for driving.

Now, it was a blizzard. He had a wife and two young kids, and was responsible for the kids' transport across town to the daycare. He had finally kicked the pot habit: it hadn't helped in Belize, hadn't helped in the trucking business, hadn't helped at all, in general. Now he had children, and wanted nothing more than for them to grow up and not have to live through any of that stuff. When he was out in his car, on the city streets, he prayed; sometimes he prayed hard, or through the entire trip. But the town's traffic was incredibly predictable. People kept to the order of the law and the road. They stopped at reds, or soon after it turned red, sometimes flying through those things. The walk/don't walk signs would flash downtown and people would actually use them, and everything worked out fine, unlike some of the crazy cities he'd seen. Overall he had nothing to worry about. Still, his past came to haunt him, and every time he went out in the car, he'd have visions of broken transmissions or low bridges, impeding his progress or forcing him to back up and start all over again.

At this particular stoplight there was a blizzard, but cars were lined up in all four directions; he was first in his own lane, going straight and waiting for a green. The light going the other way turned yellow, then red, and just for a second there, cars in both lanes were stuck behind their red while the delay that they'd timed allowed for him to get his green and go. In that second, he prayed. May I only go forward now, and only go where I'm going, and may everything work out. May none of these cars come flying through their red smashing cars in the intersection to smithereens. May all the things I can possibly imagine, please, not come true, and let order prevail on this earth. Amen.

Jimmy and the Skeletons

 

The last night Jimmy had walked Laura home, it was just a few days before Halloween. The neighborhood was very well decorated and thousands or orange leaves were falling all over the decorations and in the street, making noise when they walked. It was impossible not to walk on orange leaves everywhere, as even the people who raked assiduously could not keep up with the number that had fallen.

But it was the decorations that she remembered the best. Skeletons with blood on them, a bride-scarecrow with blood on her wedding gown, a Santa with his head cut off. People were going all out. There were a lot of the balloons - balloon ghosts, balloon dragons, balloon vampires, that kind of thing. But the scarecrows, handmade people, were a lot more realistic. And whatever they were using for fake blood, or the red blood-appearing subtance on all the clothes, it worked. These exhibits were getting more sophisticated every year.

Jimmy was depressed; she already knew that. It wasn't just that she'd just broken up with him about a week ago. They'd gone over that, her reasons, her need for some space, her need to not be taking care of him just at this point of her life; she was trying to graduate from high school. He was depressed because his parents had apparently failed him. They told him that since he was nineteen, he had to either go to college or get a job, and as he'd made it clear he was pretty much unable to do either one. He couldn't take college, couldn't study, couldn't sit in another single class. As for jobs, yes there were plenty around, but those terrified him. He couldn't bring himself to even apply. Just thinking about it gave him terrible panic attacks.

So his life had become quite uncomfortable, and he didn't quite know what to do about it. He had moments of happiness. He would smile at Laura and tell her she made him laugh. He would say that the days they went together as boyfriend and girlfriend were the best days, the ones he'd always remember. He said that the best thing about high school was the classes they'd been in together though there were only a few of them. As they walked he kicked a few branches in the street and sometimes she'd see in him that boy side of him that she'd known just about forever, and she wondered, what happened, did life take most of his spirit away? What does he mean he can't get a job? Of course he could! He was just terrified of the next step, growing up.

As they walked up the brick street, through the leaves, a car came along facing them and stopped. They recognized Vern, a friend of theirs from high school. Vern was joining the army and leaving in about a week, he said; he'd stopped noisily and rolled down his window to talk to them. He'd decided that his girlfriend, Gwen, would just have to wait back here for him to finish; he'd be in the Army a couple of years. Maybe he'd be able to marry her and bring her along with him, but that was a long shot, he said, and he felt like he was too young to marry. He asked Laura about her plans, but her plans hadn't changed: she wanted to finish high school and go on to be a nurse. He asked Jimmy about his plans, though, and Jimmy was stuck in his tracks. He had absolutely nothing to say. He had no plans. Vern tried asking him if he wanted to join the Army; they could go off to boot camp together. No, the Army held no appeal to him.

To Laura, what she remembered best was not Jimmy's absolute refusal to have a plan, or see any hope, or see anything in his future, but rather the dancing lights on the skeletons in the yard nearby. This particular house had set up a moving light display so that all the tombstones, and the skeletons with their blood and their poses, would be bathed in moving light, and the moving lights danced around them all evening apparently, making a kind of light show for passersby like Laura and Jimmy. Even Vern for a minute seemed to appreciate the amount of work they had done to fix up their yard; it seemed much more elaborate than the Christmas displays of yore or the other kinds of displays that had been a running feature of the neighborhood. Laura wondered if they were trying to get more trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en night or something, as if the light show might somehow draw them in.

On Hallowe'en night Vern's little brother Adam came around trick-or-treating and told Laura that Jimmy had killed himself, jumped off the Commander Avenue bridge over the interstate, just as Vern was driving by, and Vern himself had hit him. Vern was pretty shook up about it, said Adam, but everyone knew there was nothing he could have done and besides, it was unlikely that Jimmy had even known that it was him coming, as he'd jumped off the bridge. It was a cruel thing to do, the night before Hallowe'en, but Jimmy had done it and Laura hadn't even heard about it until Adam had come around trick-or-treating. She quickly made some calls and found out that it was true. Somehow she'd been left off the "inform immediately" list and the family was still dealing with the shock of the tragedy.

Vern eventually got over it and went off to the Army in three or four days as was his original plan. The problem was, he'd had Gwen with him in the car, and what they'd seen was a horror that they would remember forever. It did some damage to his car, but not much; his car would be alright in the end, and fortunately, traffic on the interstate had not accordioned up and killed anyone else, but it was still a frightening image that Gwen would never be able to live down. Gwen really didn't know Jimmy at all; he was just a guy who fell out of the sky while she was driving with her boyfriend at night.

Laura and Gwen became fast friends, but after a few weeks they stopped talking about it altogether and talked about other things. They each held their last memories of Jimmy close and they had that in common, but the rest of the world seemed to go on as if nothing had happened. Finally snow came, and the leaves blew away or were raked out of the way, so that the town had a peaceful wintery feeling. But the Christmas displays didn't hold a candle to what Laura had seen at Halloween. It was like people just didn't have all the decorating inspiration for the displays, or maybe they were worn out from having gone totally overboard at Hallowe'en. By Christmas and Hannukah, it seemed more like they were ready to hide in their houses until spring, and just keep the light shows to a minimum.

The fall is at its peak right now; the colors of the leaves on the trees are stunning, thought it's nighttime. It's night, and I'm out on my front porch as a storm blows in and brings drizzle, leaves, pollen, you name it, whatever is blowing around in the countryside, that storm is bringing it right in to my porch. But it's not too cold. Halloween is in about a week, but it's a mild storm; if it's bringing in one of those bitterly cold fronts, that is a little further out in the countryside.

The raging winds actually make a kind of rhythm, with all the falling leaves and flags and such flapping around. Someone has a wind chime somewhere - not us - but it goes off in the background as the wind is so intense it's knocking everything around. In my mind I hear these drummers outside a Sox game. They had this gig, and it was a good gig - they set up a bunch of drums on the sidewalk from the parking lots to the stadium, where hundreds of people had to walk right past them, and they got going. There were about four of them, but they knew their drumming. They'd done it before. They were quite good at it. They were fast, and you had to appreciate that.

A good drum exhibition is something to remember. Nowadays my hearing's not great, but I remember more than one drum exhibition. You get these people who are really good at it, and some might just be like those four black kids outside of Comiskey Park. Maybe they get paid for their efforts, maybe not, or maybe not nearly enough. But if they're filling the air with intense rhythms and getting people all stirred up - I for one remember this even forty years down the road.

There was one when I clear the cobwebs from my head, one that stands out from all the rest. This was at a Rainbow Gathering in Enterprise Reservoir, southwestern Utah, summer of maybe 1974. I'd been hitchhiking around the southwest and had found that the heat was overwhelming as it was late June early July. I got to this gathering right around sunset on July 3rd. or maybe it was the 4th, but I was close to heat stroke so someone guided me to some caves where I could get back in the caves, roll out my sleeping bag, and sleep, and that's what I did. There were lots of hippies around but none seemed to mind me and in fact I think they kind of kept their eye on me just to be sure I wasn't tripping out or something. I was just exhausted from traveling, no drugs in the picture. They made sure I had water. I slept for like ten hours.

When I woke up there was this drum circle going on. I'm not sure what time it was. All the hippies were gathered around this big circle out in the center of the caves where there was plenty of room, and they had every imaginable drum out there, and they were all remarkably enough pretty good at it. The drums were intense, and ongoing. It was how I woke up.

Sometimes a drum exhibition can tell you that you've arrived, you're here, you're where you're supposed to be. That's how I felt on that day. Or maybe it was night. I was a little disoriented. But I do know, I was in the right place.

The world is a hostile place. I learned that from hitchhiking in intemperate places like the deserts of southern Nevada and black-slush on-ramps of the northern industrial states. When you get a little companionship, refuge from the hard life, a place off the street, out of the sun, with plenty of water and a bite to eat once in a while, that's all you need to keep going. But you need inspiration too. That's what comes from the drums. The drums reach back into your heartbeat and connect with other living things, so that lots of heartbeats are going at once, and the drums tell you that all life is connected and all heartbeats are really part of the great heart beat. When you feel connected, you have your inspiration, and then you're truly ready to get back in the game.

On this porch I hear the distant train, now. We're in a small town that has trains going in every direction, but they're actually not all that far from my house. The wind has been ongoing; the leaves stirred up by it but, getting wet, they're getting that feeling like they might just be pressing into the grass for the next week or two. When they're really wet, they're less likely to be flying around.

The next-door neighbor's wind chime is odd, though. I'd never even heard it before tonight, but it has a kind of sing-song voice, a little off, not at all in harmony with the wind, kind of like a baby who keeps asking as nice as she can to be picked up by her momma who is way too busy doing some kind of flirtation or something. The wind is a serious pressing urgent business. The wind chime is a kind of irrelevant tangent.

The hot summer days of Enterprise Reservoir are distant history now. The Rainbow people couldn't even remember where they'd held that third of all Rainbow gatherings and placed it somewhere more toward the center of Utah's canyonlands, but that was probably because either they'd had two gatherings that year, and forgot about the one at Enterprise, or more likely, just forgot about its exact location and didn't write down where that gathering was until many years later. I remembered it, very clearly, though, as I've never really been to any other gatherings, and it really was quite unique. This I'll say for those hippies though: they were welcoming, and generous, and gave me what I needed to sustain myself.

Devour That Spaghetti

Devour That Spaghetti
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He Barked

Mary knew Ingrid from work, but didn't know her well. The time she figured out what had happened to Ingrid was a time she had gone over to Ingrid's house to pick up some documents for work. She had been to Ingrid's house three or four times doing the same thing, but this was the time she knew Ingrid was in trouble. It was a clear day in April. Ingrid answered the door and let her in. Her husband, Mark, stood behind her in the living room, and Max, their dog, was right there to make sure Mary was ok.

Mark was very controlling. It was hard for Mary to figure out how controlling he was, but there were definitely signs that he was too controlling. For one thing, he stayed near Mary and Ingrid at the door and never let Mary get out of his sight. He got Ingrid to bring her the documents without Ingrid and Mary being alone together. Mary had a bad feeling about this. She sensed Ingrid was being held prisoner in some way; the room was very tense. But she was here for a reason, and it wasn't her business.

Mary did not see any bruises on Ingrid, or any signs she was being physically abused. But there was that strange sense that Ingrid would not tell her the whole story, was not free to be honest, and that they would be unable to talk in private. So, at one point Mary looked into Ingrid's eyes questioning whether everything was ok; Ingrid, however, met her gaze without emotion, and didn't say a word. Of course they were being watched.

Mary thought about consent. If this Mark was controlling her, and that was ok with her, and she didn't give any indication that it was a problem, what business was it of Mary's? She had a bad feeling about Mark, and about this situation, but that was just her feeling. Maybe she was superimposing some kind of "problem" onto something that wasn't a problem for Ingrid.

Ingrid spoke German to her dog, Max. Usually it was simple things like "come here" (Kommen Sie) or "get down" (runterkommen) but occasionally she would say other things. One thing Mary had heard her say in previous visits was "He is an evil man," (Er ist ein bosser mensch), but even this was not surprising to her. In previous visits, Ingrid would say that as if she was just expressing herself. Mary was used to this, as she had come by the house several times, and this running conversation with her dog was part of knowing her.

The reason this was important was that Ingrid didn't know that Mary knew German. Ingrid kept up this running conversation with her dog, easily assuming that things she said were for Max's ears only. Even Mark, her husband, probably assumed that she was calling him a boss, and not calling him evil. But Mary, who had actually spent a semester in Germany when she was in high school, had just enough German to know that she was saying "evil," not "boss." She had never told Ingrid that she understood, but she did. And she was generally amused by the conversation, since she liked Ingrid and liked the dog too, and thought this kind of conversation was interesting. She wondered how much of the German the dog actually understood.

As Ingrid spoke to her dog, Mary could see that Ingrid was very isolated. The dog, Mary, Mark, that was her whole world. If she wanted to express herself to anyone, what choice did she have? She went on work-from-home duty at work about six months ago, probably at the urging of Mark, and as far as Mary knew she did not go out much. But since then, the tension in the household had gotten much worse, in Mary's opinion. Things were not good at all, she could tell.

The breaking point on this day was when she said to Max, "Er ist ein bosser mensch! and Max actually made a shrill, quick, loud bark as if to answer "Yes!" Max's response was what actually surprised Mary. Mary knew dogs and knew that dogs had some sense of what you were saying, but were especially sensitive to tone. So in the end it wasn't so important whether Max knew the translation of bosser, but Max did know that this was his opportunity to say something, to make a move, to get Ingrid out of this situation. It worked. Mary noticed. Mary knew when the dog was upset and she knew she had to do something.

Mark, for his part, knew something had gone bad too. Mary figured that probably Mark was beating that poor dog too. Violence is the refuge of the weak, she thought, of those who have the physical or emotional power to commit it, but don't have any other way of asserting control in their life or getting what they wanted. Mary decided right then and there to do something about it.

She told her boss, and her boss decided to call Ingrid in and talk about it. Under pressure, alone and away from home, Ingrid admitted that she was being beaten and needed a way out of the situation, and it was arranged. A women's shelter and a midnight ride to another town were involved. Mary knew very little about it.

Much later, Mark would end up in jail, for some other kind of offense. Ingrid, back in town for another reason, called Mary up, met her for coffee, and thanked her for helping her get out of a terrible marriage. Mark had been like most abusers, she said, nice at first but then increasingly controlling and fixed on violence as a method. She would also admit that the dog had saved her life. Poor Max, she said, had died a short while later, as dogs don't last as long as we do, but if there was one good thing that dog had done, that was it. It was unclear to Mary whether Max had had to be left behind in the midnight escape, or if Max had come along, lived in Ingrid's new home, and had some trouble adjusting. Ingrid had loved Max, though, who was very loyal, and at least seemed to understand every word she said.

Downpour

It was 1999, in a remote Amazonian village where Werner was making a movie. The movie was the story of Juliana, the only survivor of a plane accident on Christmas Eve of 1971, 28 years earlier. Juliana had had a horrific experience, dropping two miles from the sky, but somehow miraculously surviving, and Werner was making a movie about it. Now, after their longest day of filming, he was taking her to dinner.

Dinner, however, was a rustic affair, with the rain pouring down on the tin roofs of the small restaurant in a small Amazonian town. The food was good, and they were both used to Amazonian fare; Juliana in fact lived not too far away and was comfortable in the environment. He had chosen tonight to tell her his secret.

Making the movie had been hard for Juliana, and the rainstorm, or the downpour, was hard on her too. As it happened, it was a combination of being strapped in her airplane seat, coming down through the canopy, and landing right-side-up that had allowed her to live. She had woken up in the rainstorm with numerous broken bones and was entirely alone in the forest for over a week. The hardest part, the part they had filmed today, was the day when she came upon the body of her mother, who had been sitting next to her on the plane. All the other passengers, who also had fallen from two miles strapped to their chairs, had met a much crueler fate than Juliana. It had taken her a while to figure out that she was the only survivor.

Werner knew that, as a filmmaker, he had to handle the situation very delicately. She was in fact very emotional about the whole experience. He had promised to pay her well, and did, as she gave a very useful account of how she felt at each point of the journey, a journey which took her from the forest where she landed, to a small clearing, and from there to a stream, and then to a river landing where some fishermen were able to save her. His movie would show every step, every painful move she'd made.

The rain pounded on the roof of the restaurant and the servers seemed to know that they had something important to discuss, so they backed off a while, having ensured that they were well fed and had plenty of Amazonian coffee. Juliana was actually tough; she had come back to the rain forest to finish her parents' work as a biologist, and had made their base into a kind of reserve. She had been dealing with the psychological trauma of the accident for twenty-eight years, and told Werner that making the film actually helped her deal with the trauma and process it.

There was no real romantic attachment between Werner and Juliana; they were just very good friends, having worked together now for several weeks. Both had families and lives that were somewhat incompatible with each other; Werner, for example, traveled the world making films, while Juliana rarely left her base in the jungle and didn't even really want to. Werner thought, as he looked out the window at the pouring rain, that this might be the most memorable moment of his entire time in the Amazon. Juliana, as he looked at her, was beautiful, strong, and steady; she was the Amazon. She was entirely at home.

His secret was this: on the day of the crash, back on Christmas Eve of 1971, he was due to be on that plane, but he had canceled his flight, by chance, and wasn't on the plane. Of course he'd been riveted to the news when it came out that the plane had been struck by lightning, had blown up two miles up in the air, and had, in the end, only one survivor. He'd been somewhat fixated on the story for much of his adult llfe and now, being successful as a filmmaker, had a chance to explore the whole terrible mess that he had somehow, purely by chance, avoided. He told Juliana this story right as they were eating dinner. He told her how he'd imagined the crash for years and only now had a chance to really find out what had happened.

Juliana looked at him somewhat quizzically; it had never occurred to her, at least in the last twenty-five years or so, that there could be anyone else who could consider themselves a survivor of that accident. But Werner, in a sense, had survived the accident also. True, he had not suffered the way she did, crawling through the mud, getting extremely hungry, following the stream to the river. He had only experienced that much vicariously, by making the movie and by asking her numerous questions about what had happened. But now she had insight into why he was so interested, and it seemed kind of dark to her; like making the movie was laying out the elements of his subconscious fear of what could have been.

There was no question, her week-long ordeal was the worst thing that could have happened to anyone, not to mention a young girl, still attached to her mother, who woke up next to her mother's empty seat in the rainforest and in the rain; then had come upon dead bodies in that rain forest when, starving and depleted, she was trying to walk to safety. People had been staring at her and whispering in her presence, for years, as she was famous for what she'd gone through. Yet she'd come to live with that, and now most of the people in her circle of friends and other biologists, knew not only what she'd been through but also what it had done to her. It was just part of her life and of who she was.

As she talked to Werner, she realized that, for him, it was more of a secret - that he'd barely talked about it at all for twenty-eight years - so that msking the movie was hard for him a completely different way. She complimented him on his ability to bring difficult emotions out in filming. She also told him that he was very good at portraying the Amazon as it really was, without making it worse or better than it was anyway. It was remarkable, he said, watching as the rain died down a little, that she could get so used to its extremes.

Yes, she said, but the hard rain would always make her remember that day, waking up in the chair with all those broken bones. And nobody would ever appreciate a tin roof, or the ability to sit under it, as much as she did. Werner paid their check and they prepared to leave, both, in their own way, thinking of the scenes they had filmed earlier in the day.

(8-22)

I used to take real news stories and turn them into esl exercises. This is the same, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it. It is based on real life, though I have no idea if Werner actually met Juliana in a cafe; the particulars are fiction.

Wheelies

I was moving and had a van full of random furniture - an old table, a couple of chairs, whole sacks of clothes, that kind of thing. This particular move was across our new town, but I wasn't thoroughly versed in the layout of the town, so I got stuck by a train that was going right through the center of it. This train was quite long, but I didn't mind; I looked absentmindedly at the graffiti on the boxcars, trying to read it when I could, and checked my phone. The trains made a very loud noise of metal on tracks such that you couldn't hear anything else. It was like three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and it was July; it was plenty hot.

A couple of kids were also caught by the train; they were on bicycles, and they were doing wheelies somewhat recklessly in front of.me, using that little flat part of the tracks that isn't technically road but is part of the railroad itself. I felt the arrogance of youth with every one as invariably the wheelie would be right in front of my car; mine was the front car. I felt like telling them it was dangerous, and it would be easy for them to get hurt, and hurt badly. A wheelie is when you go up on the back wheel of your bike and just ride on that wheel alone for a while. I wouldn't want to have a bike go the wrong way right into an oncoming train any time; I did a lot of reckless things in my youth, but that wasn't one of them.

Much as the boys were reckless, and purposely taunting me, I felt, practically daring me to yell out the window something about being careful, as I was in fact the adult on the scene, they were also taunting each other. One was slightly older, maybe fourteen, showed signs of a rough home life, and was especially vicious to his younger partner. He called the younger kid some name like "weasel face" although they were clearly friends riding together. He clearly felt he was better at wheelies since he was doing so many of them, so close to the train, and he was egging the friend on to do more in spite of the obvious risks.

The friend, about twelve with red hair and freckles, seemed like he had a slightly better disposition, but was clearly irritated by the older kid's ruthless taunting. He'd scrunch his face and try to do wheelies that were each slightly more risky than the previous one, although pleasing the older boy was clearly impossible. Somewhere, I thought, these kids have parents who wouldn't approve of this. Somewhere out in the neighborhoods behind me, they would be worrying about their boys out here doing wheelies by the train.

It was an unusually long train, coming from the east, and somewhere in the middle of it were four more engines and another train, all attached, so it was really two long trains, whether those engines were running or not. I watched as car after car, with colorful graffiti displaying urban art and free expression, passed by with deafening noise. The boys continued doing wheelies, mostly parallel to the train going either east or west, as cars piled up behind mine; those other drivers were witnesses, albeit indirect ones, of the wheelie show. On the east side of the road was a sign that said simply "Look," with an arrow pointing both ways beneath it; its message was clearly intended for the drivers.

The older boy, doing a wheelie going east, got to the sign, and leaned in to the far post of the sign, grabbing the sign with his right hand, and bringing his bike back around to go west again. It was really quite a trick, since you can't really steer a wheelie except with your own weight, but he did it, and then shouted, "Try that, weasel face!" at the younger kid. The younger kid, to my right, scrunched his face again, getting ready to try something daring.

But just then, the train ended; the last car crossed and headed off into the west, and it seemed like the loud noise would subside. The younger boy, now right in front of me and on both wheels, pivoted to cross the tracks as fast as he could, and started across. But just then, an eastbound train was arriving at the intersection, also going about thirty miles an hour, and hit him head on. We could hear the metal brakes on the eastbound train as the conductor tried to stop, but it would take him half a mile or more, and the damage was done; he'd killed the boy. That conductor would never live it down; neither would the older boy, probably. It was a mess. Ambulances were called and traffic was bottled up for another several hours while we drivers had to find another way around.

While I was unloading furniture I thought again of the parents of the red-headed boy, and whether they would ever hear the truth about how he came to be in such a hurry to cross the tracks. I felt guilty, of course, for not at least saying something to the kids to put them a little more on guard. Kids tend to think they'll live forever, and aren't any more likely to read a sign than to use it as part of their exhibition. I myself, though, will never see that sign the same way again.

Tornado

The weather was pleasant, so the large window in the classroom was open. But as the class progressed, we could sense trouble out there. Clouds were passing through quickly and there was a kind of electric current in the air. If you live in the midwest you know this is a sign of trouble; the sky becomes the color of a day-old bruise.

My ESL students were from around the world, but they too knew trouble, as if we have a built-in survival instinct; they cast worried glances at the sky and the increasing wind outside the window. Mohammed and Maya had brought some kind of quarrel in at the beginning of class; they were snapping at each other and seemed to be on the edge of a fight. Mohammed was an older guy, from Saudi Arabia, with a wife and two daughters over at the student housing across the woods; Maya was a young Israeli woman, not backing down from any argument. At all costs I wanted them to refrain from a political argument about Israel's right to exist, or anything related to that, as these things got so volatile so quickly and there was really no solution. Instead they were snapping about some story we had been reading about a mixed-race marriage. The question concerned what kind of preparation a couple would have to do to make a mixed-race marriage successful. Some class members had already maintained that they weren't in the market for marriage anyway, so it didn't concern them. I told them, you can still answer the question, if you want to practice your English. I glanced nervously at the sky out the window; things were getting worse.

A guy named Nawaf arrived breathlessly, late for class. He was a young guy from Yemen; he'd been delayed in arriving due to some war activity at his airport, and then been placed in the wrong reading class, so he was just now arriving in our class where we would study intermediate reading. I knew he was fairly good at speakng and I guessed that he'd been held up by talking to much to some young woman in the hallway or somewhere as he loved people and was pretty good at just striking up conversations. He had curly hair and powerful, intense eyes, and I think Maya noticed him right away, as she was sitting near the door. He noticed her, too. I could tell it was the beginning of some kind of something, as from that moment on, they were very aware of each other's presence.

Soon after he arrived, though, some guy came by to tell us to move our entire class down to the auditorium on the first floor, because it was a tornado warning. A warning meant that one had been seen in the area, and I knew that we didn't mess around; if someone told us to find a safe place, we'd find a safe place. I told everyone this. There's a tornado in the area. Class is dismissed. Stay with me and we'll go to that auditorium down on the first floor. During a tornado you want to be downstairs, away from windows, with good solid walls around you.

Maya had again locked eyes with Nawaf, and they were now talking as we walked down to the first floor. There was another man, Diego, in the class; he was trying to catch up to them and be included in their conversation. I tried to keep track of everyone, but couldn't; some were already out of my sight. When we got to the auditorium there were other classes there, maybe about thirty or forty people altogether, and somebody had put on the overhead projector, which was playing a news reel but silently. Maya and Nawaf sat together in a back corner so they could keep on talking, and Diego joined them; I could tell this wasn't their choice but something they had to allow. Mohammed was explaining to me that he had to go home to his wife and children, as she was not permitted to talk to anyone outside the family, and she would not know what to do. He planned to walk straight across the woods, about half a mile, to get to his home.

Absolutely not, I told him. A tornado was spotted in the area, allegedly coming toward us, and the last thing you want to be walking out in the woods with huge trees out there, not to mention panicking animals. We just don't do it, and I'm sure your wife will figure out the best sthing to do with her kids and herself, to find safe shelter. He was not pleased with my answer. She is not allowed to ask for help, he said, or just go to a shelter where there are others, if he, her husband, is not around, he said. To him it was a matter of life and death for them, regardless of the danger of the woods.

The other problem concerned Erina, whose elderly parents were visiting from Japan for her older brother Taru's graduation. I was amused at the mention of Taru, who had been my student maybe six years ago, hadn't learned much English, but somehywheow got through and even graduated, or was about to graduate, by some kind of miracle or perhaps cheating which was always a possibility. In any case this elderly Japanese couple were visiting the U.S. for the first time and what should happen but a tornado come through.

And it was a whopper, from what we could tell. The wind raged outside the door and a huge tree fell right in front of the door. This mean that no emergency vehicles could get anywhere close so hopefully we wouldn't need one. Some guy who vaguely recognized addressed the auditorium and implored us to just stay calm, sit still, the auditorium itself was safe, with no windows and concrete walls on three sides. The pictures on the overhead showed a kind of weather radar which had a moving tornado literally passing right over our town. We could hear the wind raging outside and the sounds of other trees falling.

There was another problem in the form of a guy named Menk, paid by some mafia gang in Chicago to "deal with Maya" and get her "out of the picture." Menk is as close as it gets to a real bad guy in this story, although he had some redeeming features, and I didn't know about him at that time; he had simply found the auditorium, found Maya, and was disappointed that she had two men near her at the time. He had in fact had sinister motives starting with killing and rapidly coming down to kidnapping or some such thing, based on the fact that he too was taken in by her. It involved some shady business her father was involved in and, given the fact that the father was going to visit in the coming days, that's why it was urgent that she be "dealt with" in his bosses' words. He, though he was Russian, had never seen a tornado like this one. And, though he was not afraid to use weapons, he did not know if he could deal with two men, Nawaf and Diego, as opposed to just one, or perhaps Maya alone. Keep in mind, he looked distressed, but I didn't at that time know any of this, or know even who he was.

There were several classes, altogether maybe fifty people, in the auditorium, and another teacher, Adam, was taking a kind of provisional authority over them, telling them to stay put where they were safe, don't venture out, the tornado is upon us, that kind of thing. I was more than happy to just let my students know that Adam was right, listen to Adam. I tried to talk to Erina and a few other people who were curious about tornados in general. I felt the best thing was to sit still, let it pass, however bad it was, and then worry about getting home.

When I turned around, though, Mohammed was gone, and I was upset about it. Erina said he just waited until I wasn't looking, and left; at least he had told me that he was leaving. Huge trees were falling all over the woods and our biggest fear was that one would crush the building, but so far that hadn't happened; nothing stopping them from falling in the woods, though. The tornado was intense, but it was over in about twenty minutes. It was what they would call a derecho, a straight-line tornado, with eighty-mile-an-hour winds, damage to trees, power lines and houses all over town; it would change our town forever. The graduation plans were a shambles. Power was out through town and would stay out for weeks. Everyone's lives would be affected.

I got the sense that Maya and Nawaf would be an item from that time forward. Diego sensed that also and was sticking to Maya like glue knowing that if he let them be alone he would lose her altogether. He was possibly a distant cousin of hers, maybe related to the aunt at whose house she stayed, but his interest in her was brotherly; as an Argentine, he felt that she too, being at least part Argentine, should be watched over and protected. He was older than she was, and that was one reason she couldn't just tell him to back off and leave her alone.

Maya was off to Harvard soon; she had some kind of scholarship there and had to be there by a certain date. She was not a typical Israeli student; in fact, someone questioned whether she was even Jewish, if her father had lied about being Jewish in order to get out of Russia, and then, from Israel, had apparently come to the US himself. She was Jewish, she maintained, her mother being an Argentine Jew, but she would have no idea what to do about a Yemeni boyfriend.

Nawaf, for his part, was planning on moving to Michigan with his relatives, though again I wouldn't find this out until later. He was an intense kid, and also had relatives in town, and also, like Maya, had not even considered the consequences of falling in love with someone of another culture. One learns this the hard way. One loves who one's heart loves. I could practically watch him reconsider his choices, or, readjust his life to wanting this new, beautiful woman who he'd just met.

Menk, desperate to split up the three so he could get Maya alone or somewhere where he could enact his plan, started yelling at everyone to get up and leave. This was irrational and desperate, especially given the fact that the tornado was still just dying down and possibly not gone, so it was destructive and dangerous as well. Adam got quite upset that this guy who nobody knew would just yell at everyone and tell them to leave, and Adam yelled back; there was a shouting match. I signalled to my students not to go anywhere. It was a tornado, the last thing you want to do is stroll out the door for any reason.

But finally, we observed Ying, who snapped; she was one of my students as well. A young, pretty Taiwanese girl, she'd been coming unhinged recently and had started snapping at Erina, but at this moment, with Adam and Menk yelling at each other, and the picture of the tornado clouds on the weather radar moving and changing shape on the overhead screen, she started dancing at the front of the auditorium. She was silent and not trying to attract attention, but her dance was eerily reflective of the picture of the storm moving and she was clearly in a trance, like she was at one with the tornado and the picture of its cloud moving on the screen. Anyone who saw it, like me, was stunned and amazed at the way they fit together. Some, like Maya, Nawaf and Diego, possibly busy talking about other things, may not have even seen it. But it was truly incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.

I don't mean to make a drama about whether Nawaf and Maya actually got together, how, or when; in fact, there was no way even I could keep track of such things, outside of asking, and they might not tell the truth. Menk, with his dark intentions, was not going away, but she was safe from him as long as the boys were with her, and he finally left, I think, though Adam may have needed help to get him out of there. In any case I ran into both of them, Maya and Nawaf, sitting in the hallway of the building not far from my office, early in the morning, when I returned to gather up some of my things to leave town. My family was leaving town because we had small children and no generator and had no idea how long we would be without power. Maya and Nawaf, and the rest of my students, had no such luxury, with nowhere to go, but they told me they'd survived the night with no power and were doing fine. They were concerned about Mohammed, who they hadn't heard from, and also about Ying; they were well aware that Ying had gone over the edge mentally, and that was dangerous in a foreign country that had been struck by a tornado and had no services.

"And did you see all the trees fallen all over the place, all over town, on houses and cars, crushing everything?" Nawaf asked. In that sense, in awe of a derecho or powerful tornado, they had something in common. We all had lived through probably the most powerful storm ever in that town, in that area, and we were lucky. The grace of God, we agreed, they sitting in that hallway, out of sleep, and me, their teacher, just gathering a few things in order to clear out of town. Diego, they said, had a dog to tend to, who was panicking and causing trouble, and that was the only way they could get him to leave them alone; they smiled and laughed at that. The stories of Ying, Mohammed, and even Menk and Maya's father, I would find out later, all in good time, and it can only be described as unbelievable. Everyone whose car had been crushed, or dormer window, or was in the hospital when its power went out, had a story to tell, and we heard stories for months; some I'll tell. We all had to just take a break and let life return to normal a little.

the following is an experimental kindle vella chapter. let me know what you think!

The Barrel

Vince and Sophia were from Michigan and decided one night to go to Niagara Falls. It would be a little more than four hours driving, straight through Canada, on deserted roads in southern Ontario, but they would arrive in the middle of the night at Niagara Falls since they were leaving Michigan at about ten.

They had been engaged, and were talking about having a honeymoon there, but recently their engagement was on the rocks; Sophia had decided that marriage might not be such a good idea. For one thing, Vince was chronically depressed and couldn't control it. He'd get so down he'd talk about killing himself, and that scared her; she didn't want that kind of possibility hanging over their marriage. In fact it made her very nervous that she was trying to break up with him, as clearly he could kill himself now, too, especially in Niagara Falls itself. But she trusted him, and felt that at least going to Niagara Falls would be the least she could do before they split up. She thought about all the trouble back in Michigan - getting a few days off her job, his getting a week off from his job, his brother splitting up with his wife - they both took a deep breath as they crossed the bridge over into Ontario. The Canadian authorities didn't seem to have a problem with letting them in.

In Vince's pocket, he kept a ring in a dull pink case; his strategy was to try to change Sophia's mind by talking through it, then give her the ring. Through the dark, deserted roads of southern Ontario they talked about their life dreams, and why marriage could or couldn't work out. It became clear that Sophia was not inclined to marry at the moment. Vince fought against dark thoughts: often he felt he could never make it without her, if she left him he was finished, he might as well go over the falls in a barrel. Slowly a plan developed in his mind, since he sensed, through talking with her again and again, that she wouldn't change her mind about the marriage, at least not right away. Just from what she said, he felt it was over. And look what happened with his own brother! Even marriage seemed futile sometimes. He started envisioning a barrel and a plan to climb inside it.

When they got to Niagara Falls, it was about three in the morning, and they were still on the Canadian side, where you can get right up against the water as it goes pouring over the edge. It's incredibly powerful water, and a lot of it, and it was the middle of June with a number of tourists around, but the tourists' park was really relatively empty because of the time. People kept using flash cameras on the falls but that seemed kind of futile, like there was no way the light from the flash cameras would reach across the gorge. A Canadian policeman looked at them warily from the edge of Vinnie's vision, but they just leaned against the railing watching the water for about an hour. They had run out of things to say. Vince suggested a nearby hotel room and Sophia agreed, since she knew something like this would happen. It wasn't that big of a problem, really; they'd been engaged, they slept together often, whether they would marry or not was not the kind of question that could be resolved in a single night anyway.

But in the room, which was on the Canadian side but had a good view of both falls, Vince was unable to sleep. Sophia told him she loved him and to stay safe, having some premonition of what was to come, but then fell sound asleep very quickly. Vince got up pacing as the sun began to rise, and he was still struggling with his demons.

Finally he went out to his car and took off driving, upstream along the border of the river, about half an hour up the river toward the Peace Bridge and Buffalo. He stopped at a liquor store, surprised that it would be open at six in the morning, but it was; it was probably open all night. He bought two six-packs of beer and two bottles of whiskey, challenging himself to drink the whole thing. He always could hold his alcohol, and would sometimes drink this much at a shift at the factory, though it didn't help much, as the bad thoughts not only didn't go away but also got worse. Nevertheless he sat down not too far from the river and started in on drinking. He made it through an entire bottle of whiskey and one of the six-packs, and was starting in on the second bottle, when he noticed a hardware store off in the distance. "There's my barrel," he said as he stood up, noticing that by now he was quite drunk, and was slurring the words. He couldn't walk a straight line, and his words were unclear, even to him, but the mere fact that he was talking to himself and judging his own drunken rambling made him know that the whiskey was having its effect.

Nevertheless he was able to drive over to the hardware store, park, and go in, and he was right, they had several kinds of barrels. He hadn't quite worked out how he would get himself into a barrel, put the top on, and then push himself off of the banks of the river, but once he saw the barrels in front of him he began to see how it would work. He picked one out that he knew he could fit in. It was wide in the middle, with metal rims at the edges and around the center, and an old-fashioned look but apparently water resistant inside. He bought it. The cashier seemed to know he was drunk, but probably had no way of guessing what he wanted it for and didn't ask. He was out of the store very quickly and trying to figure out how to get the large barrel into his small car.

On the banks of the river everything went remarkably smoothly: it was in fact possible to get in a barrel, push off from the side, and then put the top on the barrel, which is what he did. Surprisingly a young kid came up and watched, joining him. At first the kid, who was about four, just threw rocks in the river, watching out from the side of his vision, but then the kid walked up to him and just asked what he was doing. He said he was trying to get into the barrel to go floating down the river. The kid would have helped him, but Vince asked him not to; he didn't want the kid also to be swept down the river. After a while the kid backed off and went back to throwing rocks.

Once he was in, and managed to get the top on, the barrel rocked a lot, but pretty soon got into the part of the river that was moving pretty quickly, and he was on his way. He threw up, with the rocking of the barrel, because of the fact that he'd pretty much finished the second bottle and the rest of the beer before he took off, but he was determined to go through with his plan, and did nothing about it. The bThe top of the barrel, which didn't fit so well at first, came to be pretty smug with the movement of the river and he noticed that now he probably couldn't even get back out if he tried. He squirmed around a little, made himself as comfortable as he could, and settled in for the ride. It stunk in the barrel, but he was drunk, and couldn't reach the top, let alone open it, so he relaxed.

Around Goat Island the barrel had to go either down the Canadian falls, or down the American, and it chose Canadian, though the choice had been made already based on the water it was in. Right past there, though, the barrel hit a rock, and the top sprung off; Vince was thrown out of the barrel and suddenly into the water. He didn't know what to do, but was so drunk, it didn't matter. There wasn't much he could do. The water was going so fast, whatever movements he made would be entirely futile.
At Goat Island someone alerted the authorities that a barrel was going over the falls, and the rescue boats set out from the banks below the falls to pull it out the minute it went over. Gerard and his partner, Adam, had done this before. There had been a barrel incident five years ago; barrels attracted the public's imagination because of historical memories of celebrities who had gone over in a barrel, some of whom survived. Really it was just a matter of chance, whether they survived or not. If they went over the rocks, and landed in water, their chances were better.

Back in the hotel room, Sophia woke up both angry and drained. She knew in the bottom of her heart that Vince was in trouble, because he'd been gone a while and hadn't come back or texted her. She was angry because, if this were to be their honeymoon or anything like it, it was a bad way to start. She was drained because she felt his depression was just taking everything out of her. She was a counselor, and more than familiar with this kind of problem, yet didn't feel like she wanted to apply counseling skills to someone she'd been in love with, and was just getting to know, but who was just now telling her he couldn't live without her. It made her personal life too much like a counseling session. She knew what to do to treat it, and did it to some degree, but it was painful and it was not how she wanted to spend her life.

She made a cup of hotel coffee and sat by the window watching gallons of water go over the falls every second, thinking that well, lots of things were like water under the bridge, or water over the falls, so to speak. Down the gorge she could see the Rainbow Bridge in the morning sun which, to her, reminded her that she was in another country, and would have to find a way back to the USA if Vince never returned. As time went by it occurred to her that maybe this was just the best option, to find a way home, and forget the whole thing, and leave him behind with his depression and whatever else he was dragging with him out of her life.

She knew that he was torn up about his brother's marriage breaking up, as there was a little girl involved, Vince's niece Iris, who was about three, and who would now have to split time between the two. It seemed like there was nothing anyone could do about it. When two people were diametrically set against each other no amount of counseling could even change their minds, and the poor little niece would just be a victim for life. Nobody, it seemed, got out of childhood unharmed.

She went for a long walk down by the falls and came back for another cup of coffee, figuring that she would just sign up for another night no matter whether he returned or not. This time she got the coffee from downstairs, made it large, and put plenty of real cream in it. As soon as she sat down at the little table by the window, and got herself comfortable to start drinking it, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a barrel and a man going over the falls. The man was a little behind the barrel, by maybe two seconds. She couldn't really tell that it was a man, couldn't even be sure it was a person, but it looked like one. Somehow she knew it was Vince.

Word spread pretty quickly that someone had gone over in a barrel and that they were busy pulling him or her out from beneath the falls. Within a half hour came news that the man was saved though the barrel itself was long gone, down the raging river toward the whirlpool. The whirlpool was the reason you had to pull people out as soon as possible - if you let them drift down the river, they wouldn't last long, even if they lived, because the whirlpool would suck them in and make them impossible to retrieve until it was too late. But they'd gotten this guy somehow, pulled him straight out of the water below the rocks. They were working on identifying him.

Sophia rushed out of the hotel room and down to the docks of the boats that patrolled the water beneath the falls. It took her a while to find it, as she was on foot and it was a little hike from the hotel, but eventually she stepped in to the lobby of the little building to find it full of newsmen and authorities all eager to find out more about Vince and get his picture up on the news. He was already a celebrity, but he was clearly still drunk and disoriented; he hadn't intended to live at all. He recognized her and was glad to see her, but she was angry enough that she almost slapped him for doing what he did. Somehow she contained herself and just played the part of a grateful girlfriend, glad to have him back and glad that he'd lived through his ordeal. She seethed when he'd make a little smile at his obvious celebrity, as if making depression and suicide into news bite was a clever idea that only he had thought of. But really, he was smiling because he didn't know what else to do. Everything had worked out so bizarrely; he had no idea what to do next.

She spoke for a few minutes with Gerard, who had actually pulled Vince out of the water, and who had a playful smile, proud of himself for saving another life. Gerard, in that short period of time, maintained that being drunk is what actually saved Vince's life, because landing hard even on water from such a height, was tough to survive if you were all tensed up. Gerard was somewhat philosophical about it, which was helpful to Sophia, who at this point didn't know what to do except to tell Vince to meet her back at the hotel.

But when he got there, she made it clear that she couldn't take this kind of ongoing celebrity - he was being interviewed by news people almost every hour - and, though she had paid for another night at the hotel, didn't want to stick around any longer than she had to. She had already made plans to get back to Buffalo and fly back to Michigan assuming that he still had his car and would keep it. And that's what she did; she arrived in Michigan the following day. When she got there she learned that Vince's parents had died in a traffic accident, and Vince hadn't been told. Iris, the brother's daughter, told her (Aunt Sophia) that she would love her forever and didn't ever want her to leave. It broke Sophia's heart.

She spent a couple restless nights worrying about Vince, but finally convinced herself that it would work out ok; he would either have to find a better reason to stay alive than marriage, or choose not to stay alive. She needed space from the situation and came home to get it. Within days the story virtually disappeared from the news, though it had had a good run for a while, and he was a celebrity to some degree even in their social circle in Michigan. He was "the guy who went over the falls in a barrel."

But about a week later came news that Vince had in fact killed himself, by more conventional means, and Vince's brother asked Sophia to go back and attend to the body and getting it back to Michigan, and dealing with the car and whatever else. Both would be a little complicated due to the fact that there was an international border involved. Nevertheless Sophia agreed, took time off from work, and did it. It was not easy being in Niagara Falls and she knew that every time she saw that water she would remember the body going over it.

One day though while she was getting something to eat at a convenience store, Gerard walked in, and agreed to sit with her for a minute as they ate small convenience-store lunches. He was in a good mood, again, and remembered her well, and was also familiar enough with Vince to know that he had just died. He said he was sorry and expressed condolences. He also asked her out to lunch the following day, promising a slightly better venue than the one they were in.

He was handsome and charming; she was attracted to him. But where would this go? She would be leaving town in a day or two, and had no intention of hanging around near falls that would always remind her of Vince tumbling over them. He at least gave her a different perspective. He was used to pulling people out of the water and, though he couldn't prevent Vince's suicide, he could at least make sure it didn't happen on his watch. He was comfortable in his own environment. There was mist in the air, and she commented on it, but he said there always was, though only the breeze would decide if she felt it. She turned down his lunch request finally and he was a little disappointed, but he took it in stride. He again expressed his condolences, and left.

On the plane home, she got a chance to reflect on everything. She'd sold the car relatively easily. The family was devastated by the losses; only the brother was left, besides Iris. She had at least helped them out. She would not be manipulated into believing it was her doing. If she wasn't ready to marry, she wasn't, and that shouldn't have cost him his life. From the plane she could see the mist rising from the gorge, as, even on a clear day, the falls created an incredible amount of mist.

Down the river, about three quarters of a mile from the whirlpool, a boy noticed a barrel coming up upon the shore, and went out a few feet into the river to retrieve it. To do this he had to take off his socks and shoes, but this was no problem, since he was now about four. He was the same age as the boy who had observed its launch, but in a different spot: he was down the river, while the first boy was a ways up the river from the falls.

He pulled the barrel out of the river and up onto the shore. It had no lid; that was long gone. But when he looked into the barrel, he saw a dull pink box at the bottom, which had somehow stayed in the barrel through all its bouncing along in the waters. It was partly because the barrel had rims that blocked the box when it could have flown out, but the rims obviously hadn't blocked Vince when he went flying out. In any case, the ring was still there. And it was the boy's surprise find, and made his day; he went home to show it to his mother, who was, in fact, very pleased.

Siri the Temptress

My friend Randy the trucker admitted to me one day that he was falling in love with Siri. He'd been driving too long, I told him, too long alone in the cab with that voice. I myself couldn't stand her, and stopped using her. What especially bothered me was the way she'd say things more forcefully if I missed the turn she wanted me to take. Usually this happened because I wanted it to happen, for example, I was driving around the block of my destination. But she'd say Turn right at the next street with a kind of attitude, and I'd think, I don't need that kind of attitude, I'll use another way to find my destination.

But my wife is a lot like Randy, she relies on Siri entirely, because she doesn't really have a clear idea of where things are in space. So when her Siri, which is a man with an Australian accent, told her to go off on this country road the other day, she really wanted to do it. I could see that the country road was going to be a little out of the way, and probably slower than the divided highway we were on, so I told her I was opposed. But she was driving, so I said ok, might as well see where this road takes us. There was no way that road could be quicker.

Of course it's easy to get mad at a male Australian Siri who doesn't have a clue about a country road. But I thought about why it could have happened. Did he think there was some kind of construction on the main road? (there was, but it merely slowed traffic, not stopped it, and the main road I thought was still faster)...was he being fed wrong information somewhere?

Randy's Siri apparently sent him on this one road south of town where there was a bridge with eleven-foot clearance, and he and his truck needed thirteen-foot clearance. Fortunately he saw it coming and stopped his truck in time so it didn't have the top two feet of its load clipped off. But the problem was, there was no place to turn around. It had rained a lot in the last week, so it was very soggy right off the shoulder - there was no room for error. He had to back up - straight, in his own lane, with his blinkers on - and he had to keep it straight for quite a ways until he found a place where he could pull over. It was quite a ways, and he wasn't sure he would make it. He turned Siri off; he couldn't believe she would get him into this kind of a jam.

Next time I saw him, he had cooled off on Siri quite a bit. He never really was in love with her, he said, he'd just been kidding. Well, one one level, I knew he'd been kidding - he knew she was just a computer connected to some source creating and giving directions - if it got things wrong, there could be all kinds of reasons. Maybe she just didn't know about the low bridge or they failed to program into her a simple warning, be careful if you're driving a truck. I'm sure he has to learn that she's not infallable, that someone somewhere is sending him down the wrong road.

With my wife's Siri, the Australian guy, I found myself glad that I'd proved him wrong, that his way was longer than mine. Somehow the mere fact that he had an accent had led me to not quite believe him in the first place, as if it was obvious that you shouldn't let some stranger send you down the wrong road. But my wife had come to trust him implicitly, so she still hasn't figured out where he might have gone wrong. I still do it the hard way - stare hard at the map before I even set off, write down the directions if necessary, keep them right by me as I drive, and, if I miss a stop, pull way over so I can start the whole process again from the beginning.

Council Bluffs, ~1897

My latest book also deals with ancestors, in this case my great grandfather and his sister. Will and Belle were 4th and 1st in a family of six surviving children, with Belle's older sister dying on the windswept prairie of southeastern Nebraska before Belle was born. Another child died after Will was born; they were living on a farm in central Wisconsin when that happened.

Belle and Will ended up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, working for a bank that her husband had bought controlling interest in. Council Bluffs was a thriving town up until 1893, when, after the Chicago Columbian Exhibition, there was a severe crash and then three-year depression. The crash most strongly affected the Dakota Territories, because the railroads had extended partway into the Dakotas, and the railroads were the first to crash. Settling the Dakotas was contingent on railroads being able to serve the market, and now they not only stopped what they were building, but the ones that were there shut down. People had to give up and move back out of the Dakotas.

In addition, winters were brutal, and the price they could get for their wheat crashed. It was not a winning proposition.

The banks in Council Bluffs were affected, even though the Dakotas were up the river a ways. Money dried up and there was a depression for three years, 1893-1896.

The First National Bank, where Belle's husband was president and Will worked, suffered with the other banks. But it had another problem - one teller was actively working against the president. He managed to make it so that her husband had to sell out at a huge loss. The buyer was a local guy, involved in another bank, who was widely disliked. It was generally considered a terrible thing to have to sell out at a loss to a local rich man who, nevertheless, was very unpopular.

His selling out had a lot of lasting consequences. The husband was dead within a few years, heartbroken probably as his life work and hopes for a prosperous future were all dashed. His father, who had come to live with him and Belle, had also died. Belle was left alone with their two sons in Council Bluffs, and had to make it on her own. She had no one to turn to, though her brother Will was still in town. She took to writing for a living.

The local newspaper sent her out on assignments, namely writing sketches of famous worthy people who passed through Council Bluffs regularly. They were just getting used to the idea that if you came right through at Council Bluffs/Omaha, and kept right on going, you would eventually make it all the way out to California, if you weren't set upon by angry Sioux or terrible weather. Since Council Bluffs/Omaha was the last civilization for something like 500 miles - if you could call Denver civilization - people got good and stocked up before they set off across the prairie and so they would often lay over in Council Bluffs or Omaha until they were good and ready to go any farther. Of course, this being the Wild old West, sometimes they would get good and drunk or shoot up some bar before they had a chance to leave also. Things happened. It was a lively river town, and one could do a shrewd business if one could sell alcohol, or guns, or some other kind of useful supplies.

Things weren't that great for writers, though. At least the newspapers paid good money for content, and that's because people actually used them; they read them; they wanted to know what was happening in the area. It was a different time then, than the ones we have now. They hadn't even really mastered cars yet.

The Transmississippian Exhibition was in 1897 in Omaha, and the depression had lifted. But all those years of hard times, of banks going under, had taken a toll ont he people of Council Bluffs and Omaha. It was not as grand and smashing as the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago had been, back in 1893. The world did not come out one step farther from Chicago, and out across the Mississippi and out to the Missouri, to see the new center of the world. On the contrary, Omaha-Council Bluffs had already proved that just beyond them, it was pretty wild and unsettled, and that the high northern plains would get settled and farmed much more slowly than, say, Indiana and Illinois. They just weren't ready to be the center of the world out in Nebraska yet. And they may never be ready. Even today, the wind howls, and it gets mighty cold, and the tribes are still mad that they got run out of their buffalo-hunting country, not only that, but they got totally cleaned out of buffalo. Transmississippi, my foot, some people would say. No wonder nobody's heard of that exhibition today. It's all gone in the dust, just like all those herds of buffalo.

A true mountain tale

I was coming back to my home in the mountains one night with my little girl and a puppy, when we saw a truck stopped above on the switchback turn - he was stuck, and he was outside digging out around the tires. He had taken that huge truck around a sharp switchback, but the road was a little icy and at some point he'd drifted back until the back of the large wagon he was hauling was up against the cliff that started at the edge of the road. He wasn't going anywhere. Somebody was already out there helping him.

Wanting to get my daughter, my puppy and me home, I considered taking the long way, which meant going back down to the highway a few miles, down through a nearby tiny town, and then out another gravel road maybe about ten miles until it got to the valley where my house is. That gravel road is also full of treacherous switchbacks, and would also be icy on this cold winter night, but the real problem is it's isolated - you go off the road out there, nobody might come by for days, because nobody has any need for that road outside of hunting season. So I hesitated and decided to see if I could help the guy.

He had a huge semi-trailer kind of truck but the bed he was carrying was actually empty. Usually people are bringing heavy equipment over the ridge I live on the other side of - bulldozers, things like that to do some kind of project or building or something. Why he would move anything over that ridge on a winter night was beyond me - it seemed to me that maybe he was trying to sneak over there, doing it on a snowy night and all - but I never found out. I asked him if I could help him as he seemed to be pouring sand or something under the large wheels of the bed. But he just mumbled in response, and, worse, I got the slight impression that he was drunk. You'd have to be drunk, I thought, to bring a semi like this over this ridge on this cold night.

At that point I gave up and decided to go the long way around. It was a remote road, full of switcyhbacks and dangerous, but at least I'd make it home. The problem as I saw it was this: most of the people that could pull him out were on my side, the town side, but couldn't reach him, because he was blocking the turn. They'd have to get past him just to put a chain on him and start pulling him out, and they couldn't get past him because he was blocking the whole switchback. If there was some mountain road you could take to get through the forest and up to the ridge around him, and then come back down, you could do it, but I didn't know of any such road or maybe I would have considered taking it myself. I couldn't get around him, and I didn't want to wait until he figured out how to get himself out of that jam.

Fortunately my neighbor was a car or two behind me - by now there were about five of us waiting on him - and she rolled down her window and we talked. I told her I didn't trust his ability to get out of that jam so there was nothing for it but to go back down and go the long way around. She agreed to follow me. It would be safer if there were two of us going gingerly over those mountain switchbacks. And sure enough it was. She followed behind me, or rather her son did, as he was driving, and slowly we did that ten miles of mountain gravel and came back down into our own valley where some of the roads were real slippery but we knew the way and could get home one way or the other.

Now this did not answer the question of how that guy got up there in the first place, or how they ever got him out. It turns out one of our other neighbors went and got a fire truck and pulled him out from above him, on the ridge side of the switchback. That's what I noticed, I said, you could only get at him to pull him out if you were above him, so only someone from our remote isolated valley could have done it. But this guy did it. He took a fire truck up that ridge, and a chain, and used it, and yanked him out. I was impressed. But I knew it must have taken him half the night. Any of those other people in the other cars would have had to either sit there a few hours, or turn around and go back to town. There was no getting around him until he got his truck yanked out of that slippery patch.

People are more resilient than you think. Even in his drunk and confused state, if he was in fact drunk, he had friends, and he must have been able to contact that neighbor to get him to go pull the fire truck out of the bay. Of course he'd been carrying sand, and other things that he might have needed in that situation. And what was more remarkable to me was that the guy who pulled him out had the time, and was able to just go grab a fire truck and do it. Maybe he wasn't supposed to do it, because it wasn't an official call or because that's not what fire trucks are for, but he did it anyway. That's because on a cold, snowy night in a remote valley, if somebody needs help to get out of a jam, you go and help him. People rise to meet the needs of their neighbors and help each other out.

The truck driver, as it turned out, had been on one of the local fire departments at some point, and that I think helped. They knew him. It didn't matter if it was bad judgment to take that truck up that mountain in the first place, we're all guilty of bad judgment once in a while. Look at me for example. But on that night, I apparently did the right thing. The neighbor told me later that it was her birthday - she and her son had gone to town to celebrate. Well, I led her home over that back route, being myself more concerned with the little girl and the puppy's safety, but you never get out of winter without at least one of these stories. And this winter, this was mine.

One Woman's Voice

"

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One Woman's Voice:
Biography of Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (1852-1939), elocutionist, patriot, women's rights pioneer

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This is a story of a woman who wanted to be an elocutionist, on the cusp of the nation's Centennial (1876), when women were not permitted to speak on important topics of the day. A gifted reader and orator, with a beautiful voice, she went into reading war poetry to reunions and encampments of Civil War veterans. She also inherited an insurance business when her husband got sick and died, becoming one of Toledo (Ohio)'s first women business owners. It's the story of using one's voice when one can, and getting one's voice when one is able. Her life corresponed with the rise of elocutionists as a united group, and the rise of the woman's suffrage movement, which ultimately gave women their voice in the political arena also.

Tunnel Vision

I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a rainy night when we came to one of the tunnels, and the three children in my car all at once started screaming as loud as they could. I have no idea why. The rain of course stopped though the windshield wipers didn't; suddenly I saw something so chilling I'll remember it the rest of my life.

In an oncoming, or westbound, car, greenish if I remember correctly, a man had a gun pointed at the woman driver. Someone else was in the front passenger seat, but knocked out, asleep or dead, and he had pushed himself up between the front seat to get the gun pointed at her head. SHe had a look of abject terror in her eyes but kept the car going straight; she was going highway speed. I could see it clearly but only for a split second. My concern was whether the kids had seen it but they were screaming so loud I kind of doubted they could.

When I was out of the tunnel I looked for a place to pull over and call nine-one-one, but I was shaking and almost couldn't stop when a place came up after a few miles. Still shaking, I got out of the car in the rain and put a jacket over my head and the phone so I could make the call. I told the police what I saw. The signs wouldn't tell me which tunnel it was but I figured they could deduce that from my location. All I could say was what I'd seen. I didn't remember much, as it turned out, except that the car was a greenish color. It had all flashed by pretty quickly.

The kids were all somewhat concerned that I'd bolted out of the car in the pouring down rain out in the middle of the turnpike right after we'd gone through a tunnel, so I told them everything was ok and we got started back on the road as soon as we could. Little Jummy was right behind me; he was the one who wasn't mine. We were taking him to live with his grandmother in Philadelphia as his mother had died unexpectedly back in Pittsburgh. Bobby and Jane were mine, 5 and 3 respectively; Bobby and Jimmy were kindergarten buddies. I had left my wife and a smaller baby home. I had somehow been roped into this due to association with a church that Jimmy's mother had attended for a while. Somebody had to deliver this kid to his grandmother. The father apparently was not part of the picture.

The image of what I'd seen disrupted my driving all the way into Philadelphia. It had been dark when it happened, though it was only about six, but when we got into Philadelphia it was still raining and I had a lot of trouble finding that grandmother's house even though I had GPS and all the modern ways of doing it. It just seemed like a very scary world where a guy can hijack a car right in the middle of a tunnel on a cold and rainy night, and get away with it. I somehow figured that woman would end up dead one way or the other.

The grandmother was very nice to us and insisted we stay for the night. She put all the children, plus one she had named Chloe, on one huge bed that was hers, while she insisted on sleeping in another, and put me on the living room couch but insisted on making tea first. I didn't want to burden her with the cold facts of what I'd seen and what made it such a disturbing journey. Instead we talked about Jimmy and what he'd need growing up.

She admitted she'd made mistakes bringing up her daughter, Jimmy's mother, who had had a rough life before she had just apparently committed suicide by jumping off the Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh. This had happened in the middle of the night and poor Jimmy had been found the following day afraid and left an orphan. Poor kid, no wonder he had nightmares and even now he was babbling to his grandma about his aunt and some guy with a gun. I thought of the situation in the tunnel once again wondering if he'd seen it and thought, if the kid had seen that it would trigger all kinds of unpleasant nightmares. Grandma was soothing to him and assured him that everything would be ok.

In the morning the kids and I got packed up and ready to go on the long haul back to Pittsburgh. I didn't look forward to those tunnels but there was no easy way around; you pretty much had to shoot right through them day or night, rain or not. The grandmother got a call from her other daughter who was apparently stranded somewhere out in the boondocks of Pennsylvania, no car, no money, no nothing but a horrible story which I didn't hear because I heard only the grandmother's voice. The grandmother agreed to send her bus fare to get her back to Philly as soon as she could. After she hung up she told me she was already keeping that daughter's child, Chloe, and that was the girl, about four, who entertained her cousin Jimmy and my two, and of course they'd all had a pretty good time though Jimmy had one of his nightmares. Grandmother didn't tell Chloe what had gone bad with her mother - how much can children take?

It rained again all the way home and I practically shut my eyes in the tunnels hoping not to see anything as bad as what I'd already seen. The grandmother agreed to stay in touch as people in the church all wanted to know if she would be ok with Jimmy and if she needed anything. She was a pretty tough lady and would probably be fine, but Jimmy appeared to be somewhat damaged by the chain of events. It turns out it was his father in his aunt's car, holding the gun, and that his mother didn't just jump off the Warhol bridge. The father had just stolen the car, though, and didn't actually hurt Chloe's mother; he wrecked it out in Ohio somewhere the following day in a crash that involved a semi and a police car. By the time I heard this though I was back home safe and sound, with the baby sleeping in the main bed, and my wife worried that I would roll over on her. I now had nightmares too, but it was always the same one, what I'd seen in the tunnel, and I never did find out exactly what Jimmy had seen.

Amateur Night

It's St. Patrick's Day at Murphy's Pub, in a small town in Colorado. Because Murphy's has a shamrock on its sign and is easily identifiable as the Irish place, it's crowded, and is selling a lot of alcohol.

Jerry O'Brian is Irish and is a regular at Murphy's Pub. He doesn't like St. Patrick's Day, which he calls "Amateur Night," because there are too many non-drinkers at the bar and too many of them are drunk. He himself holds his alcohol - he can drink whiskey all night and not do anything rash or violent, but these people, one or two beers and they start yelling or punching each other like they'd been holding it in all year.

One of these so-called amateurs is named Jake, and he has been hitting on Rose, another regular at the bar. Jerry, like many guys at the bar, is somewhat protective of Rose if only because she's a regular. They've all hit on her too at some point or another and who knows who she has actually ever gone home with, not Jerry for sure. But Jerry gets in Jake's face at one point because he's being too forward with Rose. He tells Jake to bug off and go find someone else. Jake takes a swing at Jerry. But he's so drunk he ends up falling on the floor, the swing missing Jerry by a country mile.

Now people rush in to keep the two separated. They make moves to get Jake out of there; he's the guilty party. Jerry watches Jake with a hardened eye - it's hard to tell whether he is memorizing his features so as to pound him later, or whether he simply doesn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to take such a wide swing at him.

Rick the bartender has played the biggest role in trying to get a fallen Jake out of the bar, tossed out onto the curb and told not to come back tonight. He hasn't gotten very far because the bar is so crowded. With a man on the floor everyone has to jostle around to get their drinks and take them to their tables. One guy, Scott, actually spills his scotch onto Rick while Rick is dragging Jake across the floor.

This is the last straw for Rick, who stops what he's doing and just tells Scott to leave the bar also. "Just leave before I pop you one," he tells Scott, but Scott is also drunk beyond his usual limit, and doesn't take him seriously. Besides, he'd just bought a Scotch and was now eager to drink part of it. He swigs what's left in his glass and looks seriously at Rick. It's like he's trying to figure out if Rick is serious or not.

But Rick is dead serious, and he knows he should never back down from a demand he's made of any customer. If he thinks Scott should leave, Scott should leave, and he'll stare Scott down until he does, and get back-up help if necessary. There are at least four people working the floor, three of them big enough to help him in a pinch. He wants Scott to leave and he's not backing down.

There's an Irish band over in the corner. This is quite unusual for a small town in Colorado, but this bar found the band, and employed them, and they're busy playing lots of Irish music. The fiddler, Seamus, is out front and he knows he needs a lot of elbow room to do his job. He's not happy that people keep spilling drinks so near to their cords and mics and electric equipment. He's somewhat superstitious about losing all the power just because people are so drunk and so crowded they can't hold a drink upright. He's got his eyes on Rose who for some reason got his attention the minute they started playing.

Rose for her part has stayed close to Jerry, thinking that if she stays close to him, he won't pound that Jake guy who is drunk on the floor and being dragged out of the place by Rick. Jerry puts his arm around her and gives her a big wet sloppy kiss. They are old friends if nothing else and it's St. Patrick's Day, maybe they feel it's their way of celebrating to just let go and enjoy the situation. Seamus steams a little as he watches but he's busy fiddling; there isn't much he can do.

The bar has degenerated a little into a fight with lots of pushing and shoving. This started because Scott took a swing at Rick the bartender, and missed and hit some other guy, who then jumped into it like it was his opportunity to let go of a year's built up stress and tension. It was an accident, for God's sake. But this guy doesn't care, and goes swinging at everyone, Scott, Rick, whoever is anywhere near him.

When the police show up he's the guy they're after, because he's already decked three or four guys and he's not afraid to do as much damage as he possibly can. He's all dressed up, but strong underneath all those fancy clothes, and nobody's ever seen him before, like he just popped in out of nowhere with an agenda to beat everyone up. At one point a gun appears, in the hands of some guy that got popped in the jaw, but cooler heads prevail and this is just before the police arrive, so in that situation it's best to keep the gun out of sight and out of the fight. Jerry at some point goes over to deal with the guy with the gun and after that, to explain to the police a little of what happened, and he gets drawn into the argument about who started it all.

This is Seamus' opportunity, and he offers Rose a ride home, which she accepts. The night is over. Too much damage has been done already. The band takes down its equipment and gets ready to go home; it's at least midnight anyway. The police are now swarming the place, having called for backup, so no one is going to have a good time from this time out, unless you count those who have slipped out the back, like Seamus and Rose. It's another one for the books. The management of Murphy's just wants to close the place and have everyone go home. Out on the street, police are patrolling for drunken drivers, who are plentiful, so it's best just to walk home, if you live in the town.

Two guys are friends. Actually one of them is the former lover of the other's girlfriend, but they are friends anyway. They both are in and out of the woman's house, and she doesn't seem to mind or find one's presence a problem for when the other visits. They have fallen into dealing drugs as that's the best way for their vagabond souls to stay in plenty of money and be able to live the life they want. Sometimes they work together, sometimes not. One of the guys has a deal going in this town and is about to get a large chunk of money.

Two kids have come up with the money and hope to get a large drug score with it, and with that they'll turn it around and come into big money, at the same time having plenty for themselves. They are kids, about nineteen. Really, it's the idea of one of the kids, the other is along for the ride. The other, however, owns the car, a small sleek car that does well when he wants it to, over the sand desert, accelerator to the floor. His parents got him this car as a graduation gift. Little did they know there would be a drug deal in it.

The two older kids climb in the back of the car to complete the deal. They are both armed, but so are the kids in the front. The kids in front turn around to see that all the drugs are as they said it would be, and they hand over the money, all tied in piles, in a single small suitcase, plenty of money. We can assume that they collected this cash from earlier deals as kids don't generally go into the bank asking for large piles of cash held together by rubber bands. Anyway the older kids assume that the money's all there, and the deal appears to be ready to go through.

But something happens, and on cue, the two guys in back pull out their guns and kill the two kids in front. Their heads are literally blown up by the guns at close range. It makes a loud sound, two shots close together, and neighbors are alarmed. But the two older boys, the shooters, are out of the car in a flash and running down the street. They have both the money and the drugs.

Some security cameras in the neighborhood catch them running, but nobody can figure out who they were. In the car, along with the two dead boys with severely blown-apart skulls, are some cartridges that can help them track down the weapons, but no luck there either, the weapons are gone with the shooters. There are traces of drugs in the car, but no evidence to show that it was a drug deal, as both the suitcase with the money and the drugs themselves are also gone with the shooter. Neither of the dead boys has a cell phone.

In fact the cell phone of the young boy who seems to have arranged the deal is never found. But it doesn't matter, the older boy who arranged it on his end, is found eight years later, and his cell phone has all that information. He was texting the younger boy, eight years ago, on that day, arranging the deal. His cell phone also has GPS data that show he was at that very spot of the murder. He and his friend are arrested and brought to justice.

You would think they would scrap all the cell phones and start over, rather than leave any evidence at all around their person. Somehow they got away with it for eight years; nobody came to check their cell phones. The other boy, arrested also, in prison for life for murder, didn't seem to have a cell phone at all. It's a wonder, though, that a cell phone can still be in this world, with all that evidence on it, and basically send two kids on their way to a life in prison, if they're lucky. That's not much of a life, but then, they weren't living much of a life anyway.