(Refuge Farm triptych: porch rails, back table and trees. Images Socotra).
It was Saint Patrick’s Day eve as the late winter snow began to smother the Capital of the Free World, the mysteries continued. I am choosing to view them as farce, since no one can take this stuff seriously, right? Where have the grown-ups gone?
It was an apropos question, since I was time traveling anyway. I chose to get snowed in at the Farm, in the interest of being away from the Capital and the usual snow emergency nonsense. The time traveling thing apparently is one of those mental fugue states that transitions from occasional in middle age to permanent as the aging process continues.
I was sitting on the couch half-watching the basketball game and feeding Kodak slides through the scanner. In the process, I had been back in the late fifties and early sixties as I went through the contents of more of Raven’s archives, mechanically noting dates and the rare amplifying information from the little cardboard squares. Dad had been better about noting the context of the images in the 1950s- perhaps he was anticipating the tidal wave of images and information that now inundates us.
There cool stuff about long-ago events juxtaposed in the trays and carousels. There were images of Raven’s sketches and renderings of automobiles of the future, a place that at the time we did not fully realize we were condemned to live. He was an amateur shutterbug with an artist’s eye, an early adopter of Nikon technology and pretty good at it.
There was the amazing panoply of images: the SE Michigan Regional Soapbox Derby of 1958, some quite respectable photos of the Romney campaign for Governor of Michigan in 1962. A Segment on sailing regattas on the little lake by the cabin in Northern Michigan in 1966. The time trials at Indy in 1962….it is a little hard to grasp at this distance.
I saw how fast the snow was falling through the blue-white glow of the mercury vapor security light on the pole by the barn. I gave up on the cataloging and decided to read for a while and turned in.
The snow made nary a sound as it cloaked the property and the roads north. I ignored the alarm clock when the time came and went, but even the classical station that wakes me was fully engaged in the weirdness. It informed me that a team of Navy SEALs, with helicopter support from the guided missile destroyer USS Roosevelt, had bloodlessly seized the North Korean-flagged tanker Morning Glory before dawn (local) this morning at around 02002 GMT.
The boarding was made at the request of the Libyan and Cypriot governments, and the black liquid cargo will be returned to Libyan authorities. Some warlord in Behghazi was behind the renegade export, and this appears to be a victory for the Good Guys, if we could actually find any.
Nor can I tell you if this is related to the dozens of short-range missiles the Northerners lobbed into the waters near the Northern Limit Line. The Hermit Kingdom had previously denied that the tanker actually belonged to them, calling Morning Glory a “Stateless Ship.” Three men were arrested in Cyprus in connection with the affair- two Israelis and a Senegalese national- after they flew to Cyprus to rent a boat to go out and talk to the master of the tanker.
Trying to assess the extent of the snow disruption as I surveyed the immediate proximity- it was almost universal across the region- the headlines toggled between the mysteries. There is so much going on this snowy day that seems to be lifted from 1980s thrillers. I mean, this would not be plausible in a Tom Clancy novel.
The Crimea caper by Mr. Putin’s agents- you know, the thugs patrolling the polling places, widespread voter fraud, that sort of stuff is amazing enough, but the two other little diversions in progress- smuggled oil and rebels and missing airliners- read more than a little like a Robert Ludlum thriller from the 1980s.
The chattering classes of which I am part were engaged on several strands of analysis to try to make sense of it, once the coffee was made and the computer turned on: what is the most effective altitude for the detonation of atomic weapons, and why was that relevant in regard to the missing airliner?
Why was it that Dmitry K. Kiselyov, the top-dog Russian news anchor well known for his Howard Beale-style “mad a hell” diatribes appeared before an image of a mushroom cloud to remind his viewers the Russia was “the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S.A. into radioactive dust.”
Bombast? Good God. I was hoping we were beyond all that. Kiselyov was tapped by Vlad Putin to head the new national media outlet- which essentially makes him the equivalent of the old Minister of Propaganda.
This is quite literally more than anyone should have to endure on St. Patrick’s Day, you know? Particularly before the second cup of coffee. I could go on, but like I said, I am viewing this as farce, not reality.
Plus, I have some shoveling to do. Three days to Spring, hahaha. This really was a sort of Nuclear Winter, but like everything else, not quite what we were thinking that meant.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303