< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Fortunately, I avoided most of the local excitement last week after Walt Iiams found a pipe bomb in his mailbox Monday.
The news spread through town. I should have guessed earlier that something major was underway, since a helicopter was flying low and loud. That usually means a big accident on Monarch Pass, although sometimes it signifies a nearby airplane crash.
But this chopper stayed over town, as though it belonged to a broadcaster doing an afternoon traffic report:
You're going to have to wait at least three minutes
to get across First if you're coming down D Street to get
to the Vic for that afternoon cold one, so it would be
better to take F Street where you've got the town stoplight
-- no, wait a minute, somebody's trying to parallel-park on
F, and this is the fourth try, so it could be a while
there, too.
The intersection of Seventh and G is backed up at
least half a block because a city crew is repainting the
crosswalk markers near the grade school and so each street
is reduced to one lane on account of the cones. E Street
looks like the best bet if you're headed in or out of
downtown, but be advised that there are two cars stopped in
the middle of it while the drivers chat with each other
near Ninth, and down around Fourth, there's a squirrel that
keeps running out half way across the street and then
running back -- looks like another tough afternoon commute,
and the rush minute hasn't started yet.
One neighbor speculated that the helicopter was the Colorado National Guard performing some homeland insecurity with aerial surveillance of gardens. Another neighbor wondered whether it was a camouflaged black helicopter looking for UN World Heritage Conservation sites that would deprive us of our privacy and property rights.
Eventually, we learned that the rumors were true, and that the authorities had confirmed that the Midwestern Mailbox Pipe Bomber had struck Salida. This meant that the national media would invade, and there was a chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and getting interviewed.
Although such interviews may look like legitimate news, there's actually a script -- not a written one, but there are things you're supposed to say when you're in a small town where something happened.
For instance, It's always so quiet here.
Urban
audiences like to think that about small towns, so you're
supposed to say it.
In actuality, Salida's a town that has children shouting at each other on their way to school. It has cars, trucks and motorcycles whose mufflers do not function. It has illegal fireworks and loud outdoor stereos and backyards where people use noisy chainsaws and wood-splitters. In other words, it's a town.
If you want quiet, move to some foothills subdivision with 10-acre lots where the only noise will be the occasional deputy on the bullhorn, telling you that you've got 15 minutes to evacuate on account of yet another wildfire.
The small-town resident is also supposed to say We
thought we were isolated here.
If the place is so
isolated, how did those satellite trucks find and reach it
in time for that night's broadcast?
Then there's We never thought anything like that
could happen here.
In truth, something like that did
happen here, about 20 years ago when I edited the local
daily. About 10 o'clock one Monday night, I was writing up
an Army Corps of Engineers hearing about recreational
dredging in the Arkansas River, and the publisher had just
come in with the Poncha Springs Board of Trustees
meeting.
Then we heard an explosion, and listened to the police scanner for long enough to get a location -- about a mile away, but still in town. Determined to get the story into the paper that night, we hastened to the scene. The publisher took pictures while I interviewed everybody I could find.
Someone had set off a pipe bomb that took the door off a garage. No one had been injured, though that could have happened if anyone had been standing nearby when it went off. Other than the garage door, damage was minimal, but the people in the house were certainly shook up.
The house belonged to a state trooper who was, shall we say, less than popular -- he was notorious for writing citations for 57 in a 55, that sort of thing.
That explained the answer I got from the police chief
after I asked if he had any suspects, people who might have
a grudge against this state trooper. You want a list of
suspects? Pick up a phone book.
As far as I know, that crime was never solved. It was,
however, a pipe-bomb here in remote, quiet Salida. In a
state where terrorism
was rampant during the labor
wars of the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. In
part of the American Heartland
that was taken from
various Indian peoples by decades of hard war.
But you won't hear that on the news, since it's not the sort of thing we're supposed to say, out here in the peaceful isolated heartland.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >