In the summer
of 2008 I was halfway through my culinary studies at a prominent school in
upstate New York, working on a two year degree in baking and pastry, and I’d
taken my required externship geographically two thirds of the way back West
across the continent at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, CO, a huge,
high-end resort within rock-throwing distance of Cheyenne Mountain and the
NORAD stronghold housed within it (but throw a rock in that direction and see
what happens, I dare you). This was a fact that I knew, but had forgotten at
the time that I was there. More on my mind, regional-fact-wise, was the
biography of Nicola Tesla I’d just read, and his experiments utilizing the
frequent and easy occurrence of lightning near the mountains. He’d been in
Colorado Springs for a six-month period at the turn of the Twentieth Century,
and I wondered how he would’ve seen the place back then. No doubt, it would
have been very different. I would be there for four months myself. And though
the mountain – not so large of a one, though it loomed directly overhead – seemed
to nag at me with some (literally) buried association, it simply never crossed
my mind what in fact was inside of it: a covert city, some dark inversion of
the sun-blasted, golf-happy daylight world that I was baking bread, frying
doughnuts, and grilling crêpes for. I was aware of the various and several
military bases surrounding the region, and was growing accustomed to the
ubiquity of the religious talk of informal Bible study groups that I would run
across just about any time I went out.
I lived
about five miles from the hotel towards downtown, and on my time off, I would
each day walk from my shared apartment to the chain-store bakery café at the
nearby mall in order to get out of the overcrowded employee housing and work on
my novel. Frankly, I was miserable. I was working long hours at hard work for
very little money, crammed into some dismal apartment with a bunch of student
caddies half my age, and wondering why I’d gone to such lengths to get myself
into exactly this situation, out of all possible ones. Except for the book, my
life had come to seem deeply pointless. The route I walked through the
neighborhood, about a mile in each direction, took me past a Catholic church –
really kind of a plain one, as far as such structures go, and perhaps something
of the black sheep of the local Evangelical (and Protestant) religious
community, notoriously fervid in that area. I’d had some dalliance with
Catholicism, converting several years earlier, not out of any deep conviction
but to show fealty to my wife-to-be and her family, but once I’d left the
marriage, I found I no longer felt any attraction toward the religion either. On
this hot afternoon – the 3rd of July, exactly – as I was walking
back home, a sudden movement caught my eye above the church’s vast, empty
parking lot, about twenty feet up in the air, to my left and less than fifty
feet away. I glanced over just in time to see something that looked like some
stylized graphic of a lick of flame, like a sort of living cartoon, made of
gold leaf or foil, turn and fold up into itself and quickly disappear. There
was no sound. It left a small puff of gray-brown smoke that lingered and
drifted slowly away, dissipating into the windless air. I walked slowly along,
my eyes fixed to the spot, and watched the smoke vanish. It had seemed like
almost nothing, but at the same time so vivid, so creepily artificial; abstract
and unlikely, yet intentional and also exact.
Much like
almost everything else that I’m describing here, this small event came with its
own deniability built into it: on the day before the fourth of July, in a town
populated by military and religious conservatives, if fireworks are shot off,
no one is surprised. If I describe a small explosion and puff of smoke in the
air, obviously somebody’s been playing with bottle rockets, right? Or so it
could be easily explained away by someone who hadn’t seen it. But if they had seen it, they would have noticed the
perfectly contoured shape of the curving, stylized “flame”, the glint of
crumpled foil in the sun that caught reflected
light, and not fire itself, not a burst of gunpowder; and they would have
puzzled over the odd, turning, curling motion of the shape, not expanding but
imploding, or rather folding into an
invisible space like a slit in the air. They would be struck by the extreme but
subtle strangeness of the thing. And like other things I’ve described,
particularly the Whidbey Island event, though containing its own deniability,
it had also came with its own reality-test, its own verifiability, at least for my own benefit: the lingering smoke
that I watched with such blank banality for several seconds as it drifted and
slowly scattered. That had come from something as physically real as anything
was. Aside from the traffic along the arterial street one block away, there was
nobody else around at the time. The church was closed and looked to be empty. I
saw no children from nearby lots, though I did look around to see if there were
maybe anybody around who could have shot something off.
I was at the
time only two weeks into my required 18 of study/employment, and things did not
get any easier for quite a long time. Eventually my young roommates all moved
out and I had the horrible little apartment to myself. I came to appreciate the
region, finding the parts of it that I liked, and even felt reasonably at home
after a while. The appearance of the cartoon flame had imparted something to me
– it seemed to be telling me that my existence, specifically my existence right
there at that time, was not some random fuckup; that there was a level of
meaning somewhere just beneath the surface perhaps, that had just poked
through, just enough for me to notice, to know that it was there. That was all
that it showed me, insofar as I know: just that it was there. Maybe that’s all
that I needed.
Perhaps as a
remnant of my brief Catholicism – certainly not because I’m any sort of Bible
scholar – I eventually recalled from somewhere (had I imagined this, I wondered?)
a description of the descent of the Holy Ghost to the disciples of Jesus,
post-crucifixion, post-resurrection, as tongues of flame. But this? This was a cartoon, for sweet fuck’s sake. It
looked like a decoration on a cake.