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2001.10.07 : 2001.10.13

Saturday, October 13, 2001
Back to Normal.
Does it seem disingenuous to you when Dubya exhorts the rest of us to get back to our normal lives, going to work as normal, shopping as normal, meandering about as normal, when he is now surrounded by a huge collection of heavily armed bodyguards, when flights over his home are now forbidden, when the Vice President is "operating from undisclosed, secure locations"?
Yeah, me neither.

Friday, October 12, 2001
Have a Nice Day.
We had a lovely sail today out to some foggy coastal islands. More lobster buoys than anyone could count. Lighthouses. Light winds but cold enough that we gladly donned the jackets offered by the owners of the boat. Several dozen seals. Two pods of dolphins. Lobster boats. Lobster for lunch (again). Stories about antics at the annual Fisherman's Festival. Fun people with colorful, parochial lives.
Elsewhere, the U.S. Senate passed legislation vastly expanding the government's ability to spy on, arrest and imprison without trial, apparently with virtually no Senator having even read enough of it to know what's in it.
The Bush administration tells us to be on alert for a terrorist attack in the next few days, though they don't say how or where or when. This is a few days after a classified briefing to Congress allegedly said that there was "a 100% probability" of terrorist reprisals if the U.S. attacked Afghanistan.
A photo editor at a Florida newspaper has died of pulmonary anthrax, an extremely rare disease. Anthrax cases have also been reported at NBC's New York headquarters (Tom Brokaw's assistant) and a Microsoft office in Reno. The latter two are cutaneous anthrax, a completely different strain.
The Bush administration tells us there's no indication that these are associated with terrorism. As if.
People are hoarding Cipro, one of the few antibiotics effective against cutaneous anthrax. I expect the government to make it a controlled substance within a week to prevent supplies from flying off of pharmacy shelves.
We are scheduled to return to New York tomorrow.

Thursday, October 11, 2001
Doing Nothing.
Sitting outside after a long, hot shower, the world smells faintly of wood smoke and low tide. So little changes in our cloistered refuge. The gulls and grebes are fishing, sometimes, though mostly they sit on the rocky outcropping just off shore doing nothing. For the third time today, a pair of boaters glides past in their daysailer, bringing it in for the winter.
Helen works on a new jigsaw puzzle, purchased yesterday at I'm Puzzled, a puzzle shop run by a guy named Bob, beside his house, to which you must follow signs for miles to find at all. I play the Quake II demo absent-mindedly, having given up on the system-crashing Covert Ops. It would be hard to do less.
And all the time, the crackly voices on the radio talk of 5000 pound bombs, cluster munitions and carpet bombing. What must it be like to be a sixteen year old kid, huddled in the chilly mountains, with only a gun that you're not sure quite how to use, when acres and acres of a nearby hill suddenly explode in deafening and blinding violence, catapulting fiery boulders and chunks of concrete hundreds of feet into the air and you know that, any second, that could be you?
I worry how all this will turn out. Sure, the Taliban will be displaced, whether quickly or eventually, even if all those sixteen year old kids have to be ripped apart in the process. Whatever replaces it will not be a democratic government. The U.S. has no apparent interest in fostering this, and it's not clear that the perpetually feuding leaders of the various Afghan tribes do either. So there will be a new regime, one that everyone will hope is less repressive, or at least repressive in different ways, and of course less hospitable to terrorists.
But when the twelve year old boys, too young now even to pretend to be soldiers, grow into twenty five year old men, I wonder what they will remember of the Taliban, of bin Laden, of the new regime, of the U.S.
And yet, this all seems so inevitable. What else could the U.S. have done, given what happened in September? What could we have done differently? What other path was even conceivable?
Sometimes we do nothing because nothing is all we can do.

Wednesday, October 10, 2001
Only of Academic Interest.
MOFFETT FIELD, CA (Reuters) Scientists at NASA's Ames Laboratory announced today that they have decoded the mysterious signals that they received from space some seven weeks ago. The signals, thought to have originated from the region of the Perseus constellation, have been the subject of much debate in the scientific community as they seemed to have a structure that indicated an intelligent origin.
In a prepared statement, Ernst Leighland, head of NASA's Ames Laboratory, said that the consensus of experts working on decoding the signals was that they represented a form of audio information. "While it is premature to call it music, all indications are that it is both of intelligent origin and intended to be interpreted as audio information."
A scientist at the laboratory, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "It is as if this was the one thing they wanted to say to whomever else was out there before they died."
"It is not music in any sense," said Jerrod Chen, Professor of Music at Tufts University. "Whatever it is, that much is certain. It does not lift the soul, does not excite or engage. It is gibberish. Whatever it is, and I'm sure it is intriguing to the scientists who are working on it, it is only of academic interest."
Janus, the most powerful orbital telescope yet devised, observed a massive explosion of a star, known as a supernova, in the Perseus constellation shortly after the transmission ended. Scientists are puzzled by the event, in that none of the stars in that constellation was of a type that would have been expected to result in such an explosion.

Tuesday, October 9, 2001
Hashashin.
Our most strenuous activity today was finding dry wood for the stove. It seemed about that hard for the U.S. Air Force to find and decimate every "target" that existed Afghanistan - all the airports, all the aircraft, all the SAM sites, troop barracks, communications towers - leaving it without any possibility of air defense. Now U.S. aircraft fly day and night without challenge.
We are told that there is an entire aircraft carrier full of Special Forces, and their insertion helicopters, headed for the area. An entire aircraft carrier.
In the 12th century, the cult of Hashashins held power in the area that we now call Afghanistan. These were practiced and ruthless assassins, and no one was beyond their reach. In this war of irony, a tribe of trained assassins is once again being unleashed on Afghanistan, once again seeking power by murder.
I wonder how these modern day Hashashins will get high before they set forth on their deadly tasks.

Monday, October 8, 2001
Dying Embers.
It was colder today, and windy, though the afternoon sun warmed our little cabin enough that we have let the fire die down in our wood stove. Still, we keep its door open to warm our legs as we listen to the crackly voices on the radio.
Those voices remind us that there are dying embers there too, in that other country, but they are not from quartered logs of oak and birch.

Sunday, October 7, 2001
The Gray Haired Man.
I was in the shower when World War III began, a shower in a rustic cabin on the Maine coast, a placid place where so little happens that our view of the bay often seems to be a painting.
We were on our way into the village for fresh lobster and to poke through the many small craft shops that cater to tourists like us. It was a beautiful day, bright and warm. People laughed easily and there was no sign that the country was at war.
No sign, that is, except for the gray haired man with the puffy face, standing in a booth that sold tickets for a boat ride.
Any news? asked a passerby.
No, said the man, except that we're bombing Pakistan.
Pakistan? said Helen, shocked. I hope you mean Afghanistan!
Whatever, said the man. One of them.
How long will Americans feel isolated from what is going on half a world away, where hundreds of people were suddenly blown apart by 2000 pound bombs while we were eating lobster, where doors were likely knocked down without warning in the middle of the night and everyone behind them shredded by automatic weapons, where teenage boys with no training wait in the hills for certain death in the days ahead?
And where, just as certainly, men are plotting counterattacks against the U.S. in which thousands of people will die, perhaps even someone dear to the gray haired man.

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