The last thing you ever need to read about UFOs

     Sunday was the 66th anniversary of the Roswell Incident—July 7, 1947 —when something unidentified crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, probably a weather balloon or secret Air Force project. Whatever it was, it was hailed at the time and since as a flying saucer piloted by space aliens. 
     On Monday, Google celebrated the event with a Doodle—one of the cute interactive graphics it swaps for its famous logo. Click the Doodle, and you could help a little alien find parts for his crashed flying saucer. Mainstream news outlets dutifully reported on the Doodle, and Roswell, and UFOs. 
     Harmless fun, in one sense. But also indicative of the credulous free pass the media extends toward UFOs, echoing and amplifying the baseless belief that they are visitors from outer space. 
     They're not, though the media very seldom bothers to explain why they're not, and why it's important to defend that reality.  I did so nearly 20 years ago in my book, "The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances," an argument that, alas, is as necessary now as it was then, and needs no updating.  This essay is quite long—a chapter in a book—but compared to the endless attention the press gives UFO sightings, year in and year out, it is brevity itself, and will put the phenomenon in a new light.  If you read it with the open mind that UFO believers are always demanding, you'll never view flying saucers or the people who believe in them quite the same way again. 

     Pick a premise: (a) there are billions of people on earth and a surprising number of them are capable of spectacular acts of deceit, gullibility, greed and idiocy; or (b) space aliens have been hovering around the periphery of human affairs throughout history, kidnapping people, conducting strange experiments and delivering messages of monumental urgency and importance.
     No one who believes the first statement—and I don't think a more self-evident observation can be made—can possibly believe the second. The belief that Unidentified Flying Objects are some sort of shy emissaries from outer space—bees from Mars, preinvasion scouts from Alpha Centauri, whatever--is just one of the many clods of pseudoscientific nonsense regularly flung into the face of the public. Time travel, reincarnation, telekinesis, ESP, numerology, astrology, and a variety of other carny tricks and cargo-cult delusions are embraced by an ignorant few and then widely disseminated via the credulous modern media.
     Belief in UFOs represents the epitome of these misreadings of reality, however. No other folk belief, except perhaps astrology, gets such serious play in the mainstream press. No other cooks up so much ridiculous nonsense and serves it as scientific method. No other group of adherents is so vigorous in promoting its worldview of unexamination and ignorance.
     I was compensated for the chunk of my life wasted studying UFO literature by the number of howling boners liberally scattered throughout it. There was the "noted metallurgist" in Robert Loftin's book, Identified Flying Saucers, who examined fragments of a UFO and pronounced them pure magnesium ("a laboratory rarity," Loftin pants). This certainly sounds impressive, and magnesium is used in aircraft parts, because of its lightness. But always in alloy -- pure magnesium, just like pure anything, is not structurally strong (that's why you don't see 24-karat gold rings). Pure magnesium also melts at 1200 degrees F. and has an affinity for bursting into flame. All told , probably not the material a clever space alien would use to build a craft to go hurtling higgly-piggly through the atmosphere.
     Then there was the unnamed scientist who told Frank Scully, in his Behind the Flying Saucers, that the crashed UFO he had personally examined was 99.99 feet long, with all other dimensions being multiples of nine feet. The aliens obviously had a 9-based system, the scientist concluded. Neither the scientist—if he existed—nor the author questions how this alien 9-based system happened upon the anachronism of English measurement, however.
     But this is digression. The danger in dealing with the subject of UFOs is the constant temptation to address specifics, to slip into the mire of UFOlogy, a field as graceful as its name. There are so many claims, each one spurious in its own unique way—whether a vision, a hallucination, a lie or some other thing—that the moment they are challenged, individually, one is overwhelmed and defeated.
     "Proponents of such claims compile almost endless files of UFO sightings and other UFO-related phenomena," writes Terrence Hines, in his valuable book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. "The skeptic is then told that unless he can explain away every single report, the theory that UFOs are extra-terrestrial craft must be true."
     No matter how many specifics are disproved, there is always more evidence. Prodded by the persistent, fearful mooing of the public, the United States Air Force examined 12,000 reported sightings in its Project Blue Book. Over 90 percent of these sightings were found to be the results of various prosaic causes. Yet the ever expanding UFO community pointed hysterically to the cases that couldn't be readily explained as proof extraterrestrial spaceships are real.
     To provide a metaphor: it is as if I set myself the task of finding out what sort of entity leaves behind the beer bottles discarded on my block every week.  With hard work, fingerprinting, surveillance and the like, I might be able to track down many of the various bums, college students and bikers who dropped them in a given period. But there would always be a few bottles I could not trace to their source. Would I then conclude: (a) these bottles were left by bums, college students and bikers whose identities I cold not discover or, (b) since I could not tie them to human sources, these bottles obviously were not left by earthly agency but must have been planted by the Zygorthian Space Raiders from Rigel 7?
     Ironically, the very massiveness of the evidence presented by UFO apologists is what undermines their case. To accept their testimony, the UFOs are spheres, discs, cylinders, doughnuts, cubes, crescents. They glow or are dark. They are any color of the rainbow or translucent. They have jets of flame or none. They roar. They are silent. They are inches wide or hundreds of miles across. Their occupants are short, tall, human, not.
     Again, the choice is one of two conclusions.
     Perhaps a vast armada of spacecraft of every known geometric shape and possible physical configuration piloted by a galactic United Nations of infinitely varied life forms, is sniffing about the planet in a way that is both ubiquitous and subtle -- the answer the UFOlogists heartily endorse.
     Or, gee, maybe people are imagining all this. Perhaps the entire thing is due to innocent fantasy, brain fever and mendacity—the answer the makes sense to the rest of us.
     UFOlogists howl that this is impossible—that any phenomenon attested to by so many people has  to be real. But as Hines points out, the millions of children who believe in Santa Claus do not, by weight of numbers, wish him into physical being.
     The most annoying thing about UFOlogistsis that, even if their premise were true, their approach is moronic. If I believed in the existence of visiting spacemen, I don't think my mind would be absorbed with the specific dimensions of their ships and what color the running lights were. UFO literature might betray a whiff of charm if it occasionally paused to contemplate the stupendous philosophical ramifications of intelligent life from outer space pressing its face against our windows all the time.  But instead, the field is given over to paranoiacs and frustrated engineers, conjuring up conspiracies, drawing schematics of nonexistent propulsion systems and compiling pointless data, like those lunatics one sees carrying little pads and writing down the license plate numbers of parked cars. Speculating about the exact form of a spaceship glimpsed in the sky is something like critiquing the plot of a porn movie—a possible path of inquiry, yes, but missing the point entirely.
     So we must try to keep to the big picture. Though UFOs are a dry well for scientific insight, they are a rich source of societal study. Just as predictions of the future are valuable, not for their success as augury, but for how they reveal the cultural fears of a given moment, so UFOs are not a view of the galactic but a peek below the rock of humanity.
     The current fascination with UFOs began in 1947, when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine strange objects he described as flying "like a saucer skipping over the water" near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Usually overlooked is the fact that Arnold had penned an article on UFOs for Fate magazine the year before, establishing a suspicious progression common to UFO fanatics: (1) first becoming interested in the subject and, (2) then encountering UFOs.
    Soon people were seeing UFOs all over the country—hundreds of reported spacecraft. The immediate dilemma then facing UFO supporters was, given the frequency of UFO sightings, why weren't they being quickly accepted as commonplace normality? Why was something so manifest to those who believed so rebuffed by a chunk of the population?
     The answer, maintained then and now by UFO advocates, is a secretive and coercive government. Fearing "panic," the government, in league with the scientific establishment, conspires to suppress and discredit the mountains of evidence proving that UFOs flit about the globe like so many Luna moths.
    UFO books of the 1950s usually begin with elaborate declarations about governmental conspiracy, a thread that remains unbroken to this day. Five of the six headlines on the cover of the spring, 1995, issue of Unsolved UFO Sightings refer to governmental cover-up.
     One can only yearn for a government as swift and effective as the one inhabiting the lush dreams of the UFOlogists. The CIA that dithered blithely while Aldrich Ames was spooning Russian caviar from the ashtray of his Jaguar is transformed into a finely tuned Gestapo, dispatching mysterious "men in black" to swoop down on UFO crash sites, confiscating evidence and terrorizing witnesses. NASA, whose top brass can't even work out a system to inform its own upper echelons of the agency's multitudinous blunders before they appear on the front page of the Washington Post, suddenly has the discipline of the Illuminati, concealing the ancient ruins discovered on the moon.
     And geez, not to get into rebuttals again, but why? Given NASA's current state—lashed to the block, listening to the ax being honed—if it had a shred of evidence, a funny-shaped rock, a bit of metal, anything to imply that a civilization had once been on the moon, as many UFO fanatics insist, NASA officials would be in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee in a heartbeat, waving the artifact like a flag.
     (Of course, the nimble paranoid mind will point out that these outward signs of incompetence are only further proof of conspiracy. How could such ostensibly vital federal agencies be so consistently inept, if not to conceal their ruthless efficiency regarding their real interest, UFOs? The only cogent reply to this line of thinking is to place your thumb against your nose, wiggle your fingers and go: "Phbblffbblft!")
     The skeptical UFOlogist, were such a thing possible, might also ask himself why, if the government is so closely guarding UFO secrets, do those secrets always seem to fall so quickly in to the hands of UFO magazine and its advertisers? Why are they able to hawk costly books, pamphlets and videos exposing the verified reality of literally any inane premise the human mind can conceive? (My favorite is the joint Nazi-Japanese UFO flight to Mars during World War II. As if they didn't have more pressing concerns at the time.)
     Given the energy spent debating what the U.S. Government knows about UFOs, I would be so bold as to suggest that it is anti-government paranoia, and not any deep interest in extraterrestrial life, which really is the driving force behind the entire UFO phenomenon. Howard Blum, in setting his premise for his 1990 book Out There, unconsciously reveals his priorities when he asks: "Was the government back in the UFO business? Had they found anything? Was there life in the universe?"
     UFOs can be seen as a poignant symptom of frightening political times, meshing nicely with the Red scare, McCarthyism, polio, the H-bomb and other dark cultural markers of the 1950s. "The next war will be an interplanetary war," said General Douglas MacArthur in 1955, a statement which at the time was an expression of optimism. Mac noted that, after the arrival of doom from the skies, "nations of the world will be forced to unite."
     More than anything else, belief in UFOs is both a tiny rebellion against a menacing system and a terrified bleat of hope that some responsible party will show up quick and fix everything before it's too late. UFOs are the equivalent of the naval officer in white who appears at the end of Lord of the Flies—civilization and authority arriving at the last moment.
     "Now that science has run amok and is threatening us with atomic annihilation it does seem reasonable to expect that if ever another intervention was needed, the time would be now," writes Desmond Leslie betraying the wish fulfillment common to UFO believers. The Venetian who George Adamski said contacted him in 1952 was there out of benevolent concern over radiation which, coincidentally, was worrying people on earth too.
     "On his face there was no trace of resentment or judgment," Adamski writes. "His expression was one of understanding, and great compassion; as one would have toward a much beloved child who had erred through ignorance and lack of understanding."
     How nice—here to help, and not a touch of blame. Adamski, a California handyman, was the first person to report contact with an extraterrestrial, and he set the stage for the thousands of claims that would follow and—incredibly—be given serious consideration in our day by those who should know better.
     Adamski unknowingly reveals the giddy mindset in which people start seeing saucers:

     Winter and summer, day and night, through heat and cold, winds, rains, and fog, I have spent every moment possible outdoors watching the skies for space craft and hoping without end that for some reason, some time, one of them would come in close, and even land.

     And then they came! How coincidentally cool! Adamski later claimed to have traveled with the UFOs to the moon, Venus and Mars (those who believe most fervently in UFOs have the convenient ability to summon them like faithful dogs).
     While believed at the time, Adamski is dismissed by current UFOlogists as being overly fantastic for modern tastes. Looking back on visitation reports of past decades, the accounts of alien contact do seem strangely culturally specific. Aliens never land and warn us that we must save string. Rather, their concerns always resonate with earth troubles. By the 1970s, the aliens were worried more about pollution than radiation, and their homilies were about saving the environment. In the 1990s they are hot to conduct sex experiments, as if advanced cultures would cross intergalactic space to cop a feel. Soon the aliens will be reported delivering messages about the unstable dollar, and that, for a while, will convince certain people.
     The idea that UFOs represent some sort of mass psychosis was suggested fairly early on by Carl Jung, the psychoanalytic pioneer, who was so taken by the UFO question that he wrote a charming little book about it, published in English in 1958 as Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
     Jung called UFOs a "visionary rumor" and compared the sightings to crowds witnessing the Virgin Mary at Fatima. He is an example of how the sharpened mind and the slack-jawed believer can view the same evidence and draw completely different conclusions. UFO proponents comb history of anything they can use to prop up their sagging premise, dragooning vague Aztec paintings and super-heated Vishnic mythology to prove that UFOs have hung around in the shadows throughout all history.
     Jung takes the same material—the tales of floating eyes, burning orbs, hovering bloody crosses—and sees, not documentary snapshots of unfiltered extraterrestrial reality misread by the yokels of the day, but evidence of a deep human yearning for signs and reassurance from the skies, a need now dressed in modern clothing.
     "It is characteristic of our time that the archetype ... should not take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of mythological personification," he writes. "Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man."
     In other words, while a lonely sheepherder in the twelfth century might interpret the visions he's been having as "angels," nowadays those circles of light and voices from trees are apt to be mentally repackaged into glowing mother ships and chatty alien homunculi with big heads.
     Tying UFOs into the rich tradition of human self-delusion also explains how the phenomenon has outlived Cold War paranoia By constantly upping the ante—first sightings, then discovery of crash sites, then face-to-face encounters, then trips to outer space, and finally the present carnival atmosphere of sex probes and Nazi saucers—the UFO cult moves forward by sheer momentum, building on the popularity of former claims, a formula eerily reminiscent of previous spasms of unfounded belief.
     Consider the evolution of UFO culture in the light of philosopher Loyal Rue's description, in his book By the Grace of Guile, of how public desire for Christian relics exploded midway through the first millennium:

     By the early fifth century, however, the demand for relics had gone upmarket as reports circulated about remains from more distinguished saints, such as the head of John the Baptist and the body of St. Stephen. Response to the "discovery" of these relics was so intense that even more spectacular finds followed: the staff of Moses, manna from the wilderness ... Jesus' milk teeth, his umbilical cord, the foreskin from his circumcision, and so on. The only limitation on discoveries appears to have been the imagination of the discoverer. Inevitably, of course, problems of duplication arose. At least three churches claimed to have the head of John the Baptist, and eventually there were enough fragments of the cross about to build a battleship, and enough of the virgin's milk to sink it. 

     As with UFOs, there was a fierce debate about the authenticity of these relics, with pesky questions popping up, such as how Mary Magdalene came to be buried in France.
     One asset unavailable to the fifth-century Catholic Church but enjoyed now by UFO faithful are the media, which do much to keep the myth of UFOs alive.
     Jung has a valuable insight about the press. Noting how a distorted news account claiming that he believed in the extraterrestrial reality of UFOs "spread like wildfire from the far West around the earth to the far East," Jung expresses quaint nineteenth-century amazement that his measured denial of the story garnered almost no notice.
     "As the behavior of the press is a sort of Gallup test with reference to world opinion, one must draw the conclusion that news affirming the existence of UFOs is welcome, but that skepticism seems to be undesirable," he writes. "To believe that UFOs are real suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged."
     Bingo. We hear so much about UFOs—from patently false Weekly World News photos of the president shaking hands with little green men to unsubstantiated claims by the unlettered—because UFOs are news.
     "Where UFOs are concerned, it is almost impossible to distinguish the editorial policies and ethics of the New York Times or the Washington Post  from those of the National Enquirer or the Midnight Star," writes Hines, citing embarrassing examples of gullible press sensation. "The most absurd UFO reports are accepted at face value and published as news stories. Attempts are seldom made to verify the truth of the report or to seek comment from skeptical investigators."
     This is terrible for several reasons. First, most people, in their secret hearts, wish these stories were true—that we were indeed being visited by our benign brethren from other worlds. I certainly do. If nothing else, it would cut the ennui layering our lives. To spark even a brief, irrational hope, based on the warblings of fakes and psychotics, is cruel.
     Second, these reports tend to reinforce belief in UFOs among the unscientific and the impressionable. This can't help them, and makes the world seem even more dismal than it already is for the rest of us. One likes to take pride in one's fellow citizens, and not be reminded that they are, in the main, dupes and boobs capable of believing anything. It bodes ill. If a significant portion of the population is willing to discard the known scheme of the universe based on some odd lights somebody else saw at night, what hope do we have that the population will—oh, for instance—cling to its civil rights in the face of the coming storm of conservative reaction? Not a lot, I'm afraid.
     And finally, UFOlogists are insulting. Nonbelievers are accused of being a dull herd grazing contentedly on the status quo, unwilling to look up from our feedage to acknowledge the wonders streaking by in the sky, despite the frantic pleadings and pointings of our intellectual betters. The scientific community, which at the advent of UFOs was burying its head in the sand of nuclear physics, electronics, computer science, genetics and space travel, is constantly tarred by the UFOlogists, smug and secure in their private phantasm, as reactionaries, in league with those who doubted the reality of meteorites, bacteria and heavier-than-air flight. UFOs give open-mindedness a bad name.
     Like many annoyances, the UFO funhouse is an endless maze that one could become lost in, if it weren't ultimately so tedious. This observation, the most elegant and compelling refutation of UFOs that I know of, comes from Dr. Frank Drake, an astrophysicist who spent thirty years straining to hear an intelligent peep out of the infinite cosmos through increasingly massive international radio-telescope efforts. To his credit, Drake's lack of catching so much as a "Hi" from outer space has neither dimmed his belief that one day the greeting will come, nor inspired him to start manufacturing faux greetings, as so many others seem so eager to do.
     In his book on the patient search for extraterrestrial life, Is Anyone Out There? it takes Drake less than a paragraph to neatly demolish the entire mass of UFO literature over the past half century:

When I talk to contactees who claim they're been given information by occupants of UFOs, the material turns out to be totally uninteresting. It is never anything that we didn't already know, and usually consists of blandishments of friendship and goodwill. This is what makes every story ultimately unbelievable, because if a civilization could master interstellar travel—something that is beyond even my wildest dreams right now—wouldn't they have the most striking news to report?

      Should the day come when an alien spacecraft lands on earth and its occupants emerge to tell us things, the things they tell us, whatever they are, won't be boring. What they have to say will come as a surprise, and a bigger one that can be cooked up by the arid imaginations of housewives in Nebraska. The aliens will not have crossed the vastness of interstellar space to shake hands and wish us a good day.
      If not—if the arrival of alien life will offer nothing new, but only serve to reflect back at us our own neuroses, social fears and sexual anxieties—then what's the big fuss about? If space aliens are going to turn out to be the same ooo-scary monsters we've been watching in the movies all these years, they might as well stay home.

                                                             

In praise of Oliver Sacks

     The world is filled with fascinating things.
     But since most of us are busy shuffling a rut from home to office and back, filling our hours with the quotidian crap we must endure to pay our bills and keep our children from becoming methamphetamine addicts, we usually don’t have the time or energy to sniff out fascination for ourselves.
     Thus it helps—a lot— to have a guide, someone whose job it is to find marvels and tell us about them.
     For the past 40 years, amazement-hungry readers have had no better friend than Oliver Sacks, the British-born neuroscientist who has turned his tireless curiosity with everything from the mind to music to metal to ferns into a dozen books that challenge, frighten, entertain and enlighten.
     Sacks, whose 80th birthday is today, provided you are reading this on Tuesday, July 9,  was well into his career as a doctor when he realized—during an amphetamine binge, he recently admitted—that he could carry on the tradition of the erudite Victorian medical writers he so admired, presenting his case studies, not to a narrow audience of fellow physicians, but to the general public.
     And so he did, starting with his first book, Migraine, published in 1970, which set a pattern for combining the personal (Sacks suffers from intense migraine headaches) with the scientific.
     It was his second book, Awakenings, that brought him wider public notice in 1973. Awakenings is about a group of patients Sacks treated at the Bronx's Beth Abraham Hospital in the late 1960s who had been stricken during an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica— sleeping sickness—in the 1920s and remained in near-comas for almost half a century. They were brought back to consciousness, awakened as it were, by doses of L-DOPA, a chemical normally produced in the brain which had just become available artificially. It return them to awareness for increasingly shorter windows of lucidity, and made for a deeply weird and scary book, the frozen post-encephalitics, their heads tilted back in mute screams, as unsettling an image as anything found in Stephen King. Only they were real.
     If you are looking for a place in Sacks’ canon to start, I’d say begin with his fourth book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a catalogue of bizarre and, to most readers, heretofore unimagined neurological woes—strange voids and ticks, people who lose the sense of their own bodies and are, for instance, unable to recognize their own legs, and so keep trying to push them out of bed, believing someone has tucked a corpse limb under the covers. A patient who lost his sense of leftness, and could only clean the right side of the plate. The man who saw his wife and thought “a hat,” then tried to snatch her up and put her on this head.
     These case histories cut to the cold reality of the biological nature of our minds, and had Sacks done nothing else, he would have added greatly to the public understanding of the weird electro-chemical glop brewing between our ears. But Sacks then wandered the world, like the explorer/scientists of old he so admired, to places like the atoll of Pingelap, a speck in the Pacific, to study a population where one in three people have the colorblindness gene, an adventure documented in his book, The Island of the Colorblind.
     While science is his goal, there is always a humanity, a sweetness to Sacks—he notes being met at Pingelap by children waving banana leaves. In addition to all the fantastic facts he marshals, he proves the most delightful companion and guide, the caring, competent, deeply knowledgeable doctor we yearn for all our lives and seldom find. His only pure memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood presents that rarest of literary accomplishments—an interesting story of a happy childhood (mostly, except when he is sent to a Dickensian boarding school during the Blitz) in his case spent among eccentric scientific relatives in London and parents who were both doctors happy to call the boy in to help with an operation. Here is a lad who, turning 11, tells people he is now sodium—the atomic number of sodium being 11.
     Sacks grew into a strange guy—painfully shy and solitary, celibate for decades, living alone on City Island, a dot in Long Island Sound. His writing is not perfect–he sometimes forgets that his readers do not share his deep range of medical knowledge, and can toss off a sentence like this one, in Musicophilia: "The tumor, her doctors felt, was malignant (though it was probably an oligodendroglioma, of relatively low malignancy) and needed to be removed.” That sends the diligent reader scrambling to the dictionary to piece together whatever "an oligodendroglioma" might be (a tumor in certain cells of the nervous system, as best I can figure out).
     Most authors start to coast as they age, taking refuge in the safe and the familiar, becoming parodies of themselves. But as Sacks has gotten older, he has gotten better, more personal, more candid. Fearless even, writing about his own oddities, his own neurological conditions, why he has great difficulty recognizing faces and navigating his own neighborhood. He also details his own youthful experiments with drugs, going back to 1953 when he and a fellow Oxford biology student wrote to Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and ordered 50 micrograms of then perfectly legal LSD, which the company dutifully mailed to the students. This dabbling grew into heavy drug use, which he describes in his most recent book, Hallucinations, writing in frightening detail about both the downside, but also the value of his experiences, a balance refreshing in our straight-laced, Just-Say-No era.
     This isn’t the venue to give Sacks full justice—he is a man of many parts. But it’s a beginning, and given that I constantly encounter— to my amazement—people who have never heard of Sacks, never mind read him, I thought that his 80th birthday is an appropriate moment to wish him well and, more importantly, to tip readers off to the treat awaiting them. Start with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—trust me, you won't regret it.

                             Human brains stored at the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois, 1540 S. Ashland Ave.

Every traveler needs a piece of good luck

     My elder son first appeared in my Sun-Times column in 1996, in a somewhat unhinged piece mocking Republican Al Salvi for dragging his family into his political commercials. The lad's picture was tucked beside the column, which begins:

     Meet my 10-month-old son. His name is Ross, and well, I hope you'll excuse a proud father for saying that he is the most handsome baby who ever spat milk.
     Take a look at his picture. Am I right? Cute? Of course he is. Other babies look like folk dolls in comparison; their eyes all skewed, their hair sticking out like a maniac's.
     Now, I'm not ashamed to say that I write this column entirely for Ross' benefit. Other columnists -- no names, please! -- write for other, less noble reasons. Fame, money, easy sex with strangers.
     That's their right. It's a free country, unfortunately. They are the kind of people they are, and I am the kind of person I am: a pro-family kind of person. A loving dad person. A sensitive guy person.
     Look at that picture again -- Ross', not mine. Kiss it. Go ahead. What's the matter with you? Uptight? Can't give a baby's picture a little kiss? Go ahead. Mmmmmmm-whap!     There, doesn't that feel good? Now say "Ross, I love you." Go ahead, say it! "I wuvvvvv you..."
     Sorry. I'll stop. It's just I was watching television one morning last week and up pops Republican senatorial contender Al Salvi -- whom I had forgotten existed -- showing off his family: four spunky kids, perky wife/mom and his self-proclaimed "newest reason" for running for the U.S. Senate, an infant Salvi.
     The singularity of the ad's message jarred me. I couldn't help but wonder how that gambit would fly in my own line of work. Not too well, judging from the above.

     Since then, both of our sons have popped up in the column from time to time. I try not to write about them too much, so as to avoid trying readers' patience. Though, to be honest, they're the one subject that I don't hear complaints about. Nevertheless, in recent years, as they've become teens, I've drawn the veil. There's just not much to say about teenagers that wouldn't embarrass them, or me, or both. But Ross went to China in late June, and one aspect of the trip seemed worth mentioning. The column appears in Monday's Sun-Times, and begins:

     “Do you want to take some kind of talismanic good-luck charm with you?” I asked, as my son prepared to leave for China. He looked at me blankly. “It could provide comfort in times of duress.”
     That sounds a little robotic, now that I write it down. But it is what I actually said, or close to it. I don’t talk that way to everybody. But my oldest boy — now 17 — well, he has a pilgrim elder’s formality; God knows where it comes from. Not from me, surely. He addresses his parents as “mother" and "father.” So, talking to him, I tend to slip into a kind of mannered decorum myself, which is surprising, since I’m in no way like that. Part has to be that I’m choosing each word precisely, since he’ll leap to correct my grammar if I don’t (note to proper fathers who raised their sons correctly: yes, yes, I understand that you would have put him over your knee and tanned his butt with a hickory switch the first time he did it. But he was very small, it was not my way, and I was too taken aback. We fell to discussing whether it is “who” or “whom” or whichever fine point of language he was chiding me on, and now it’s too late).
     He wasn't completely against the lucky charm idea, so I fished a little medallion out of my briefcase depicting a Cracker Jack seaman in a peacoat: "Lone Sailor - U.S. Navy."
     "Here," I said. "I got this aboard Old Ironsides. "There's a poem on the back I like."
     I started reading:


Eternal Father
Strong to save
Whose arms hath bound
the restless wave
Who bids the mighty
Ocean deep
its appointed
limits keep
Oh hear us when we
cry to thee
for those in peril 

on the sea.



     But he waved it off. No poetry. "OK," I said. "How about Ugly Dog?"


     If you are familiar with the fine line of Uglydoll comfort objects, they range from enormous, pillow-sized stuffed creatures to little, soft, keychain figures. I'll be damned if I recall when I got this 4-inch, rust-colored cyclopean dog hanging from a clip. At least four years ago, because it was dangling from my backpack when he and I climbed Avalanche Peak in Yellowstone in 2009. Lately, it has been guarding a lamp in my office. I jiggled the dog between us. He appraised it, then put it with his passport and wallet.

     "I'll photograph it at the Great Wall," he said. I waited until he was out of the room.   "Keep an eye on him," I whispered to the dog.

     The joke I always made to my wife when she was pregnant was, "At least we know where he is." I tried not to hover — you can damage your kids that way too. And in the main I haven't. But a good-luck charm, well, I've always employed them. As did my mother before; she took a dime-store glass elephant with her to Europe when she sang with the USO at 17, and my father — Mr. Rational Nuclear Physics — toted the thing around the world, from Auckland to Zaire. Regular readers might wonder how this descent into magical thinking jibes with my vaunted reasoning, and the honest answer is: I have no idea. Chalk it up to being human.


     We tracked the plane on the American Airlines website — technology does shrink distance. He had asked for my laptop, and I extorted a vow: He would write every day.


     The first email can stand in for them all. It began:



Mother and Father. The first day was nice, we visited the Jade Palace (Qing Summer Home), went on a short boat ride, had lunch, saw our pen pals, learned about traditional Chinese medicine and got foot and shoulder massages, had Peking Duck for dinner, took lots of pictures, and saw a Kung Fu show. Great wall etc. tomorrow, and hope all is well. Regards, Ross



     Ignoring that run-on sentence, it wasn't exactly the printed itinerary, but close. Both his mother and I wrote back: But how are YOU? How are you feeling? Send photos!

     
Nothing beyond more itinerary. Though true to his word, a daily bulletin did arrive. A dozen days flew by — that was the most surprising part. We were OK — son No. 2 got extra attention, the house was very clean — no pile of papers on the dining room table, no nest of blankets and books on the sofa.

     "This is what it'll be like when he goes to college," I told my wife, and we agreed that it was not bad. It isn't that I'm eager for him to leave, so much as his wings are formed and the time to fly nears. China was a dry run.


     Suddenly, he was in the driveway, wearing cool Chinese sunglasses, his pal's father having picked the boys up at the airport. "Jacob lost eight pounds," he announced.

     Inside, he handed out the riches of the Far East, like Marco Polo returned to Venice: chopsticks for me, a model terra cotta warrior and jade bracelet for my wife, even a Mao hat and a bag of gooey rice candy for his little brother, presents bought of his own volition, my wife and I noted. Growing up.


      Attached to his suitcase handle was the orange Ugly Dog. "Job well done," I said softly, unclipping the inert little thing and returning him to his regular duty post in my office.

A journalistic dilemma

     So here's a journalistic dilemma you can comment on in real time. Usually, the comments are shut off after my column, because it's a full-time job to kick the wackos off -- not my call, the paper's. But today's piece on Muslim prayer and Ramadan (posted below) is not a column, it's an article, and the comments section is in full cry, from haters and head cases, denouncing both Muslims ("Muslim = Terrorist") and myself (drunk, wife-beater).
     My first thought was to ask the paper to take the hurtful remarks down -- why should Muslims, reading a nice piece about their big holiday, be subjected to this poisonous spew?
     But then I considered: Muslims certainly know those sentiments are out there, and maybe even common. This isn't news to them. So maybe it isn't they who are really being shielded, but we, non-Muslim readers, who would prefer not to gaze at the nauseating bigotry of our fellows.
     So I thought, "best to leave it up. Let 'em look at it."
     This problem is nothing new -- more and more news sites shut off comments, because people are vile will ridicule a 6-year-old hit by a bus. But these comments are up, at least for now, and leaving them up is a conscious journalistic decision. Right call? Wrong call? What do you think?

"Ramadan Rocks!" -- Holy month unites Chicago Muslims

     For a long time I've wanted to explore Chicago's Muslim community, both out of curiosity for a religion I know too little about, and as an attempt to help others overcome an even deeper, fear-inducing ignorance. I made a point to illustrate that Muslims are not a uniform block of zealous observance, as those unfamiliar might suspect, but, just like everyone else, also struggle individually over how to manage their relationship with God and the expression of their faith. The start of Ramadan, which begins Monday, seems the perfect time to take an all too brief look at this dynamic community, which appears in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times.

     Syed Ahmed Quadri is late. “Overslept,” he explains, hurrying into the darkened prayer room at the Muslim Education Center in Morton Grove.
     But only a little late: it’s 4:15 a.m., sunrise, time for the first prayer of the day. Quadri, the mosque’s muezzin, whose job is to chant the call to worship, flips on the lights, then stands facing Mecca — northeast in Chicago — and utters holy words.
     “Allah akbar. ...” he begins, a call heard five times a day in the 100 mosques in or around Chicago, plus uncounted homes, offices and public places. “God is great."
     In Muslim-majority countries — 17 in the Middle East and Asia — the call to prayer is broadcast from minarets. Here it isn’t, in deference to sleeping neighbors and municipal code, one hint of the challenges Chicago Muslims face. Not only must they meet the stringent requirements of their faith — five daily prayers, plus halal dietary laws and fasting during the month of Ramadan, their holiest month, which begins Monday — but Muslims also need to navigate the path of Islam through a city that still only vaguely understands this growing, 1,400-year-old faith. Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis once described the common outsider’s perception of Islam as “based on ignorance, sometimes varied by prejudice.”
      This, despite Islam being a religion with 1.3 billion global adherents, several hundred thousand of whom live in and around Chicago.
     Daily prayer is one of five "pillars" of Islam, along with charity, fasting, pilgrimage and declaring one's faith.
     "This is the first prayer, this is how we start our day," said Hafiz Ikhlas, the Morton Grove mosque's imam. "This is the first social event, the first union, the community coming together and saying everything is fine and collectively trying to establish its relationship with God. This is obligatory prayer."
     It's 1 p.m.: 250 men fill the fifth floor of the Downtown Islamic Center on South State Street for the midday prayer. Just as Christians flock to church on Sundays and Jews to synagogue on Saturdays, so Muslims make a point of getting to the mosque on Friday. Up to 600 people pray here any given Friday.
     The men kneel, touching their foreheads to the carpeted floor, and then hear a brief sermon by Dr. Mohammed Kaiseruddin, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations, a group of 63 mosques and service organizations in the Chicago area.
     "Ramadan is a great month, a blessed month," he says. "Any good deed you do in Ramadan gets a reward 70 times as in another month."
     During Ramadan, all healthy adult Muslims are supposed to abstain from food, drink, tobacco and sexual activity from sunup to sundown. The holiday shifts throughout the year, due to the lunar Islamic calendar, and when it comes in summer can be a particular challenge. Observant Muslims eat a meal before dawn - Suhoor - and one immediately after the sun sets. Known as the Iftar, this break-the-fast meal often is festive, at mosques or gatherings of friends.
     At the Islamic Center, a variety of Muslims - Asian and Arabic, black and white, Sunni and Shiite - join together, a benefit Kaiseruddin observes is not found much in their home countries.
     "The Muslim community in Chicago is pretty unique," he says. "Nowhere in the world would there be an assembly of Muslims like any metro area of the United States: Muslims from Europe, Muslims from the Middle East, Muslims from throughout Asia and Africa, from Malaysia and Nigeria, all sorts of Muslims are here in Chicago. You will never see that."
     Not that all is harmony. Sulaiman Mujahid, one of the men at prayer, says that, as an African American, he sometimes feels unwelcome by his fellow Muslims.
     "There is no racism in Islam, but there are racist people in Islam," he says.
     The Chicago Muslim community is about 30 percent Arabic, 30 percent Asian, 30 percent African-American and 10 percent white. The community was very small, at first, and didn't take root until immigration laws loosened in the 1960s.
     "It's grown so rapidly," said Kaiseruddin, estimating there are 100 mosques here. "When I came here in 1973, there were three or four."
     About 5 p.m. it is time for Asr, the third prayer. Some of the 50 staffers at the Council on American Islamic Relations are not Muslim, and some who are keep working. As with any faith, it's a mistake to view Muslims as a block of uniformity. Some pray five times a day, some once a week, some only show up for major holidays, some not even that. At CAIR, Those inclined to pray gather in a conference room of its 15th-floor State Street offices.
     The council organizes outreach and keeps an eye on how Muslims are viewed in the media.
     "The media tend to look at us as a case study," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director in Chicago. "I don't wake up thinking, 'What am I to do as a Muslim living in America? How different am I? How similar am I?' It's just second nature. You don't really approach everything through your Muslim prism, you really don't. You have certain guidelines: You love your faith. You respect your faith as part of your life. But it's very rarely at odds with your everyday life as an American. I like Jon Stewart. I don't say, 'What does my faith think about that?' If you're a person who appreciates comedy and likes exposing hypocrisy, you're going to like Jon Stewart. That's just the way it is. It's not always a question of what would Mohammed do."
     Mahgrib is the sunset prayer, falling at about 8:30 p.m. in early summer. The Ahmad family gathers in the living room at the family's elegant Hyde Park ­home - Amer Ahmad, his wife Samar, their daughters Sasa, 6, Marya, 5, and son Reza, 15 months, the children each with a kid-size prayer rug. The girls don head scarves but also lead the prayers, which would not be found in more traditional homes.
     "I've not always been someone who prays five times a day," says 38-year-old Amer Ahmad, who grew up the son of Pakistani immigrants in Ohio. He credits the process of getting married, growing older and - most of all - going on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, in 2005 with increasing the connection to his faith.
     "One day my mom says, 'I'm going on the hajj and one of you' - here she points to my dad and me - 'is going to take me.' And my dad says, 'Not it!' And I thought, 'Ah, I'm taking my mom to hajj.' It was amazing, a transformational journey."
     Chicago's comptroller, Ahmad sees Ramadan as a time for him to step back.
     "For us, it's a time of community and family and just a lot of reflection on our blessings," said Ahmad. "We are so lucky. . . . My dad grew up in a village in Pakistan. He lived his first three years in a refugee camp. He sent his son to Columbia and Harvard, and now I help run the third-largest city in the United States. I spent a lot of time during the month reflecting on, being really thankful for all of my blessings."
     The last prayer of the day comes at 10 p.m., and on this night Nabeela Rasheed misses it.
     "I am negligent about my prayers," says the 46-year-old patent lawyer.
     Her relationship with Islam is complicated. "I ran away from Islam and stayed away for about 20 years," she says. "In my mid-30s, I began to pray again."
     When Muslims stray, they tend to see the flaw not in their faith but in themselves.
     "Absolutely," agrees Rasheed. "Last year, I tried and tried to get back to my routine. There are times I just get lazy."
     She corrects herself. "Laziness isn't the right word. You get so wrapped up in everything else you're doing in your life. I do feel it is a failing on my part, that I strayed from my religion. I know I should be praying."
     For Rasheed, despite her struggles with faith, Ramadan is a time to again embrace Islam wholeheartedly.
     "I love Ramadan," she says. "I absolutely love connecting with the community. Love it. It is a time for me to reconnect with my faith. It is about fortifying your faith and fortifying your relationship with God. I believe it sets me straight spiritually for the year. Ramadan rocks."

Saturday activity # 1 -- Squinting at tomorrow today

    When I was a little boy, I got bored on Saturdays, since there was no school. I would beg my mother for "an activity," and she would dig up a puzzle or a project, something for me to do. In that spirit, as a reward for listening to me all week, I thought I'd come up with an activity for you, something fun and relaxing. This is the first:

     The future is not a real place; it exists only in our minds. Or did. We used to have a fantastic future ahead of us. Limitless. Or so we thought. We'd live forever in colonies on Mars. Once -- in the 1960s, 1970s -- we had a distinct image of what was to come, half "Jetsons" mechanical miracle, half "2001: A Space Odyssey" voyage of adventure. Enthralled with the Apollo program, we figured, if we could go to the Moon, imagine what might come next. We weren't exactly sure what that would be  -- nutrition pills and medical miracles, lots of flying, lots of robots, lots of artificial fabrics -- but we knew it would be incredible.  "They'll be Spandex jackets, one for every one," in the immortal words of Steely Dan.
     Now it seems that nothing comes next, or nothing good anyway. The only notion of the future we seem able to conjure up is a bleak one -- zombie apocalypse dystopias of ruin. Plague and disaster on a global scale. Environmental and social cataclysm. 
      Since predictions of the future always say far more about those making the predictions than they do about the actual future -- it's only an accident when predictions mesh with something that actually occurs -- it worries me that when we squint into the years ahead and can only conjure up our stale dreams from 50 years ago, or imagine destruction, or see nothing.  Have we lost our optimism? Or have our technological wonders so outraced our imagination that we can't conceive of anything that Apple doesn't already have in production? Maybe the future is now -- that seems unlikely, because people were declaring that everything was already invented in 1900 and, needless to say, they were wrong.
     Maybe we're just more realistic, and understand that you can't predict what's going to happen and there's no point in trying.
      Since you've spent the week listening to me, I figure, on Saturdays, I should listen to you. We should try a special project together: this is your chance to put on the pundit's cap and say what you think the future will be like in 50 or 100 years. It could be argued that this is more than idle speculation -- we can't build a world if we can't imagine it. It is a worthwhile exercise, if only to provide fodder for future pundits, assuming there are any (projecting my own anxieties into the world to come) to seize upon our woefully mistaken notions and laugh at them, as we do the shortsighted auguries of the past. 
    So in a sense, this is a chance for immortality, at least of the sort represented by being dredged up and smirked at a century from now. Think hard, give it your best shot and  share your thoughts here, and I will maybe use them in a column in the not-so-distant future about our changing ideas of what the world to come may be like.

Burning down Nevada

                       

     Another day done at the newspaper.  Fourth of July weekend about to begin. No rush though. A bit of desk straightening, then on with the jacket -- chilly for summer. Flick off the light, shut the door  to my office. G'night Nicki, g'night Barbara, have a safe and sane holiday. Linger for some friendly chat.

    "Are you going to shoot off fireworks?" Barbara asks.

     A pause. A wistful smile. I open my mouth to explain. But it is a long story.  Too long for conversation. 

    "No," I say. "No, we won't."

     This is an excerpt from a book I wrote,"The Quest for Pie," about the trip taken with my boys out West in 2009. It hasn't been published — maybe it never will be — so you're the first to read this. These passages fluttered in the back of mind with every other firecracker pop over the Fourth of July holiday, and explain why, no, we didn't set off any fireworks ourselves. This was the last time.

           

     There isn’t a lot between Salt Lake City and Reno, Nevada, a 500 mile shot straight west, flanked by military testing ranges and desert. My first thought was to drive it in one very long day.  But Edie was worried that to do so would be “too much” — we had been on the road almost two weeks.  She sniffed around online, dug up a way station — a Super 8 Motel in a place called Battle Mountain,  300 miles from the Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City — and phoned us with the details.  
     That sounded like a plan. The town’s name had a certain historic, Civil-War-ish sound to it. “Battle Mountain.”

        We did not know when we pulled into town that in 2001 the great Gene Weingarten at the Washington Post had set out to find the most bleak and godforsaken town in the nation, the one, true, official “Armpit of America” and, after an exhaustive search evaluating hundreds of nominees, had settled on Battle Mountain, which turns out is not associated with historic battles of any kind. We did not know the town's major cultural institution was a low-rent brothel.

     We had not read the column where Weingarten described the highway leading into town this way: “The road to Battle Mountain is flatter than any cliché — even pancakes have a certain doughy topology. On this route, there is nothing. No curves. No trees. It is desert, but it is lacking any desert-type beauty. No cacti. No tumbleweeds. None of those spooky cow skulls. The only flora consists of nondescript scrub that resembles acre upon acre of toilet brushes buried to the hilt.”

     Yes, that sounds about right. We pulled into Battle Mountain and found the Super 8 — it was hard not to, right off the highway, right next to an enormous fireworks store — “ROLLER COASTER FIREWORKS.”

     The boys were bouncing up and down — could we go to the fireworks store, huh, dad, could we? I might be tarring myself as a sheltered fussbudget, but I had never been inside a fireworks store.  Edie had a childhood friend who lost an eye to fireworks.  And I remembered a Scholastic Book Club book about fireworks I had read as a kid — Follow My Leader, its cover showing a blond boy in dark sunglasses with a German shepherd seeing eye dog.

     But we were here. And we had to do something. If ever there were a place where fireworks might be less of a bad idea, it was here, in the enormous expanse of nothing that is Nevada.

     “Maybe boys,” I said, softening. “We’ll see.”

                                            

                                                       *

                                             

      The only public place to eat in Battle Mountain, Nevada is a curious joint called the Owl Club, whose sign is a riot of red neon, an ornately cursive “Owl” with “FAMILY DINING” in big block letters and a beaming cartoon owl in a chef’s hat hoisting a plate of dishes.

     It was dim inside, and we sat around the table, assessing the trip. Two weeks on the road. A long, suddenly wearying, time. The first leg of the trip coming to an end. Mom would be meeting us the next day in Reno.  Had the boys accomplished all they hoped. Did you eat enough pie? Are you happy with how things were going? For the most part, yes, they said, though they wouldn’t mind visiting that fireworks store. The implicit bargain was: take us there and we'll be satisfied. That seemed like a deal.  

    After dinner, we visited Roller Coaster Fireworks.  The boys’ attention was drawn to the giant mortars and cannons and rockets, heavy professional quality ordinance two feet high that cost $50 apiece and looked like they could down a jet airplane. That wasn’t going to happen. Not on my watch.

    “We’ve never shot off fireworks in our lives, boys,” I said. “Let’s start small.”

     After a bit of negotiations, we ended up with a bag full of Black Cats, smoke bombs, sparklers, a device that looked like a tank and something called a “Barrel of Fun.” Puny stuff, but I just couldn’t see taking the risk of the larger fireworks.  I tossed the white plastic bag filled with fireworks into the back of the van and headed to the Super 8. 

                                                               *

     The drive from Battle Mountain to Reno is only 200 miles, and by mid-morning we were approaching the outskirts of town. As the minutes passed, we ticked off the miles before Reno, and urgency to pull over somewhere grew  — it wouldn’t be prudent to set off the fireworks in the city itself.  Once Edie showed up it would be too late, she’d lay down the law: no fireworks. Ross began to pester me — don’t forget the fireworks. Let’s get set off those fireworks. The time was now.

       Just before Lovelock, Nevada, seemed promising — it made Battle Mountain seem like Manhattan. I eased off the highway, following a one-lane road that passed over the hump of a single railroad track and turned into light gravel over hard packed beige dirt.  The road cut through scrubland — a crinkly light gray clumped kind of plant, and cacti. We stopped at a galvanized metal gate, padlocked, that cut off the road — somebody’s property, no doubt.

    This seemed the perfect place. I pulled the van over to the side of the road — there wasn’t really a shoulder, with a hill sloping sharply up. But it wasn’t as if there’d be a bunch of traffic either. I fished the white plastic bag containing the boys’ cache of fireworks out of the back of the van.

     “Let’s start with the tank,” I said. Ross and Kent stood a few feet off.  I lit the fuse and set the little cardboard tank down in the middle of the road. It crawled forward maybe half a foot, spitting sparks out of its cannon barrel, then stopped, sagged and caught fire, burning harmlessly in the middle of the road.

    “See?” I announced, in full Polonius mode. “A lesson, boys.”

    Then the Black Cats, small firecrackers, as thick as a pencil and ¼ as long, a dozen on a fuse. Did the boys want to light them? No. They were happy watching.  The Black Cats pop-pop-popped satisfactorily, the clump flinging itself this way and that as it blew apart, until the last cracker burst and the remains sat motionless, a slight tang of gunpowder in the air.

     Then the Barrel of Fun — the size of a ping-pong ball, with its ends flattened, like a barrel. I set it carefully in the middle of the road, held my lighter to the fuse and then ran over to the boys, standing by the van, maybe 10 feet away, to see what would happen.

     A cascade of sparks, yellow and red, leaped five feet into the air, hissing and spitting, a festive Roman candle effect. The vibration of the stream of sparks must have unsettled the little device, however, and it tipped over on its side, so that the sparks shot, not into the air, but across the road, just touching the scrub at the side, setting it on fire.

     For one second, I looked at the scrub beginning to catch with bovine incomprehension. By the time I reacted and ran over to it, the fire was a yard square and spreading fast. I tried stamping on it but it raced away from me, up the hillside. I bolted back to the van and tore open the back door.

     The fire extinguisher, remember, was still in the laundry room back in Northbrook.  I grabbed the big red cooler, in both hands, thinking I could use the melted ice inside, but by the time I returned with the sloshing plastic box to the blaze, it was five feet across and a yard high — I could feel the intense heat on my forearms.  

     “Get in the car!” I screamed at the boys.

     Panicked, I threw the cooler into the back, hopped in the driver's seat. “Get in the car, get in the car!” Kent urged to Ross who stood there for a moment, mesmerized by the flames, then the two clambered into their seats and I pulled the van back a safe distance, the sliding doors still closing, the warning bells pinging. We all stared at it. The fire wasn’t going out — it was spreading, 10 feet across, marching up the hillside. Black smoke pulsed off it, deforming the air.  It was an obscene, incomprehensible sight. The choice was obvious — stay, being unable to stop the fire, and accept the consequences, or flee.  I fled.  But we didn’t get far.                                                

                                                                    

                                                                         *


    I was going to leave you hanging, but I figure, people will want to know. I got back on the highway, but immediately realized that we couldn't do this, couldn't continue on the vacation leaving whatever disaster we had sparked behind us. I got off at the next exit and doubled back on the highway, heading the way we had come. Driving east, I kept seeing a low cloud of black smoke sitting on the horizon, and imagined the lives that would be lost battling the nightmare wildfire we had created, and the jail time awaiting me. But when we returned to the spot, it was just a scorched patch. The smoke filling the sky had been a guilt-induced illusion. The fire had gone out on the bare scrub. I uttered a silent prayer to the indifferent cosmos, and we continued on our way. We never did shoot off the rest of our fireworks. The white bag with the sparklers and smoke bombs sat in the back of the van for the next three weeks. At the end of the trip, I threw them away.