Big Montana

My Paradise

This is the morning of September 11, 2001. The World Trade Center has just collapsed. Someone flew a passenger plane into one of the towers. A while later another plane crashed into the second tower. Eventually both towers crumbled to the ground as if they were being demolished by a professional wrecking company.

I watched the news on all the different TV channels while I sat in front of my TV in California. It was a full-circle version of what had happened earlier that day. It was circular the way the OJ Simpson trial coverage was circular. What I mean is that there was nothing new to be said, but someone still had to say something. It was like a vigil at a funeral where there's nothing to do or say, but you stay and log the hours simply out of respect for the dead and the families of the dead. All there was to do was to re-state the obvious, over and over.

I skipped between channels 2 and 4 over and over. I couldn't help but compare the tone and style of these two television organizations, each unrleated, each saying exactly the same thing, but each trying to say it in their own way.

On one sweep from 2 to 4, from 4 to 2, I stopped at channel 3. Channel 3 is the Discovery Channel, oblivious to current events.

Today there was a documentary about WWII. There was carnage on that channel too. It was in black and white, though, and in this case, it was war-related. I mean an actual declared war.

It made sense. People had actually pointed guns at each other and shot them at each other for the purpose of fighting for a bona fide cause. Airplanes full of bombs actually flew over their targets and then dropped the bombs. The enemy was very aware of the mission of the bombers, and they knew they were going to eventually be bombed. It was like a football game: There were teams and there were rules. Both teams knew the rules.

The World Trade Center? You mean some team just showed up and decided to have a game but didn't bother telling anyone else? What about the rules? Not only did I not know that there was going to be a game that day, I didn't even know what the game was. It was a sucker punch. If I'd known, we would have at least put on a uniform.

I switched to channel 4, to channel 2, then to channel 3 again. The Discovery Channel documentary had ended. The credits rolled and soft, thoughtful music played as the names of the filmmakers rose up from the bottom of the screen and disappeared at the top. It was nice on channel 3. The background music was sensitive, and whatever had happened on that WWII documentary happened a long time ago, and now it was only black and white and in 2 dimensions on a TV screen. Whoever lived through it or had been hurt by it had certainly healed by now, or had died. Many of the dead had been long forgotten unless of course they were famous.

From my living room couch, if I hadn't know what was going on already, there would have been no way of knowing that anything at all was happening anywhere else in the world at that moment. For all intents and purposes, my living room was its own private universe, a perfect hiding place. It was a 1960s housewife's Valium world ... just me, my TV... my electrical tele-window to the world. Peaceful and calm. Nothing going on. I might as well have been floating on an inner tube off a tiny Pacific island somewhere, reading a book, sipping a drink.

I changed back to channel 2. My trance broke. Smoke. Fire. Panic. I switched to channel 4. Smoke. Fire. Panic. A thought came to mind: Today I know exactly what people are doing all around the world. They're in front of the TV changing from channel 2 to channel 4, to 5, to 7, hoping that one of them would say that it was all just a joke. It could just be another War of the Worlds hoax. No such luck. The forcast for tomorrow would just be more smoke, fire, panic.

The World Outside

I left the house eventually. There was business to attend to, but more than anything, I needed to know if there was even a world left out there. Were the banks open? Were the banks even there? Was there chaos in the streets? Were people weeping over dead bodies as tanks rumbled down the freeway ramp?

No. I was surprised to see traffic still flowing and ATMs still giving money. People seemed oblivious as they went about their business, but they knew. They also knew that they had to do something other than recalculate the facts as they knew them. No amount of calcuation seemed to bring a satisfying solution.

Occasionally I'd see someone stop dead in their tracks and put their paml to their forehead and say, "My God. My God," when the calculation replayed in their mind. When people would pass, they'd look at each other and shake their heads and say, "My God. My God."

The Expanding Heavens of Montana

The day passes. It's later in the evening now. I'm leaving the store after buying a couple of bottles of wine for dinner. The sky looks enormous at 7:30 PM. Sinuous stratus clouds make horizontal zebra stripes against the pink and orange dusk. Something about it is unusual, though. It reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where a man and woman find themselves on a street in a strange town not understanding why everything seems so oddly artificial.

"There are no birds," the man said in the episode. It turned out to be, in fact, an artificial world that they'd been dropped into by some cosmic puppeteer.

Here, in my world, there's an unexplainable strangeness too. I can't hear any birds, just like the man in Twighlight Zone. Maybe I can andI just haven't been paying attention. My mind's ear searches for any kind of clue. Then I realize what it is. I can't hear any airplanes. I don't see any airplanes.

The sky is so eerie and broad in front of me without airplaines, a dozen times its normal size, absent of flying life. No flickering dots of light sailing across the sky and no vapor trails. It's amazing how big a sky can be when there are no planes in it, I'm thinking. Bigger even than a Montana sky where there's nothing but sky to see.

Bare-naked but for the setting sun. Stretched all the way across America, past Montana and on past Utah. Hovering over me right in my own backyard, and hardly a bird, and certainly not a plane to be found.

Biggest sky I'd ever seen. Welcome to Montana.