Season Five

I cannot believe it has come to this in the fractured world we shall soon inhabit. One day we shall look back on today, and that will be “The Good Old Days.”

The sun made its way across the early morning sky. It was a tepid fiery ball barely making its way through the persistent stench and haze of this typical wildfire morning. These days we have too many such as this. Authorities told vulnerable people to stay home, the air was lifeless and dull, hypothetical offering its own degree of solitude.

With the fifth season, comes great angst and hostility.
Winter,
Spring,
Summer,
The Fifth Season, and finally Fall.

Vivaldi would be overwhelmed.

The day was disturbingly quiet, and that only dampened the chaos. We stood on the front porch sipping bubbly refreshment like it was the last night of the world. It felt so wrong and out of place and we were trying to capture the irony of the moment. It did not work well. People were nervous and not much in a joking mood. Deep thunder shook the foundations of the porch. It rarely thundered in the Pacific Northwest. We still had not established a new normal.

Downtown was desolate. It was an ugly day amongst many ugly days during the most splendid time of the year. It was difficult to breathe and a struggle to see fifty yards down the road. The late summer wildfire season extended into early November. The fires get worse every single year and this year was no different.

In fact, it was different in many amplified ways. The tension and acrid smoke hung in the air. Everyday communication was inconsistent at best as angry mobs targeted radio stations, newspapers, and coffee shops. The trains still made their way to this neighborhood echoing a recent mass exodus from downtown. People resisted mass transit for years and here it was for better or worse. We could sense downtown was under siege. You could smell it in the air. The smoke from rubber burning is far different than that of wildfires. We learned easily to recognize that sickly smell of the wildfires. We could feel it everywhere, it became a part of us.

The passengers on the train confirmed this reality. One after another they emerged from the smoke-filled air with an air of indignation. We were on a brief walk with the dogs and felt a difference in the air. Even the dogs could sense it. Recently, our stints outdoors was brief and to the point. The air, while borderline breathable, was a respite from being cooped up indoors.

Two months of heavy-handed smoke and the onslaught from the right is taking a toll. Today Jack is nervous and on edge because Jane is anxious and admittedly afraid. We had been silent for too long. We are angry, sad, and pissed off. We are livid the world is on fire. Still, what bothered us even more is the state of humankind. Those with anger, guns and firepower are marching in the streets in an overstated vigilante type of way. From the constant chatter, coming from those headed from the downtown train, it sounded like the conflict made a turn for the worse. Not that it could get any worse. Yet it still does and is no longer linear, rather in an exponential way. Every day is maddeningly worse than the day before.

The threat of full-scale violence lowered on the city like the gathering clouds of a rainstorm coming  off the Alaskan coast. Virulent white men with testosterone laden semi-automatic weapons were a constant in the downtown business districts. The scope of their presence started spreading into the University district and surprisingly Queen Anne. In retrospect there were no surprises anymore. The absurd and out of the question were now everyday banality.

Wildfire season was now a season all its’ own much like summer, spring, and winter. Autumn seems to have been gobbled, slowly by the fires. They remembered back in the autumn of 2019 when the wildfires stretched into late September. Some people panicked back then even during a worldwide pandemic. And here we sit six years later and sometimes that feels like the good old days.

This is where they lived, and it is what they loved and knew. They lived here for a long time and were alarmed at how everything changed. Change was a part of life. This was a regression toward the mean by the mean.

A large crowd gathered by a single picnic bench in the park. They addressed a young woman who had wounds to the arms and the neck. She was in obvious pain and there was a collective look of concern from those gathered. She was not in imminent danger, they all were.

A ravishing young redhead, with well-defined arms, skillfully cleaned the wounds as those gathered talked amongst themselves. They looked to the west concerned, there could be trouble coming from the train. What appeared as heat lightning slowly and meticulously rolled across the sky. The earth seemed to rumble a little.

Three police officers marched by and barely took notice. It is difficult these days to figure which side sat the police. It did not feel like they were on the side of the tax paying citizens. More specifically, it is common belief many are openly siding with the regression toward the mean. They had tried to limit the white loyalists, but that put a dent in recruitment. We did not expect to see the police rush to the aide of the women in the park. That is not how it works these days.

Jack recognized a friend from the group. Nico used to run with the same group of people. After graduating from university, those who stayed in town formed an informal group of friends who stayed close even through the pandemic years. Like many, they lost touch recently. People simply were not as social as they used to be and some of the trepidation was expected. as friends got married, had children, and tried to live their lives as normally as those who pride themselves on being not normal. In this demon-haunted world, he questioned why anybody would choose to bring children into such chaos and vitriol.

Nico pointed out this was Petra whom they both knew from back in the day. Petra was a gentle soul who was kinder than most humans should be. She was a gal who came from an affluent family. Petra resented how her family made their money and resisted all emotional and financial support from her family. She put herself through college the old-fashioned way. She studied with discipline and zeal, received good grades, and authored original essays and earned grants and scholarships. People loved her for her down-to-earth richness and zest for life. And there she sat wounded and battered in a park in the north end of Seattle.

Earlier, she had confronted a gun-toting zealot on a busy street corner in Capital Hill. He was one angry son of a bitch and knew her from somewhere. Where they knew each other matters little. This person has been menacing her for the past five weeks and it can be intimidating when they are six foot three, borderline crazy and armed to the hilt.

Jane made her way to the table and watched her friend try to rest on the table. She looked pensive, and at peace with herself. Her partner was on the way to give her a ride home.

The train station is fairly new to the neighborhood, it was still easy to recognize the distinct waves of people coming off the train walking through the usually quiet tree lined streets. Most houses had signs in support of one cause or another. A group of a half dozen white males came loudly marching off the train capriciously uprooting lawn signs that happened to get in the way, while smoking Cuban cigars and brandishing obnoxious, testosterone laden firearms. The smoke from the Cuban cigars faded somewhere in the wildfire smoke that made a surreal sequence of events just that much more hazy and obscure.

The mob of angry white men marched right toward the picnic bench in the park. Even though it was six blocks from the train station, and the mob knew exactly where they were headed. It may have been the built-up electricity in the air.

They were there to confront Petra and her loose group of friends. More specifically they were still after Petra as if she had not endured enough. This no longer seemed a law-and-order issue, rather a personal issue. “There she is Chipper. “Yelled a sinewy hawkish man to the leader of the rag tag militia group. This, as he marched up front and was the loudest of the bunch. He was also downright mean and nasty looking. He had the remnants of a nasty scar over an elongated right eye and a big old wad of oozing percolating chewing tobacco dripping down the edges of his ill shaven mustache.

Chipper made an aggressive beeline to where Petra lay nursing her freshly administered wounds. It must have been the tension in the air, or the nature of the beast, Jack’s dog made a sudden lunge toward Chipper and sunk its incisors into the back of his left Achilles’ tendon. He tried kicking the dog and the dog only dug in deeper. And then, the dog kicked even harder.

“Whoever’s god damn dog better call it quickly or it is going to see the dark side of this here gun strapped here on my god damn shoulder.”

He had no idea what to do. This man certainly looked capable of killing the energetic dog and we certainly did not want to find out.

He said this as the dog shook the man’s inked calf with increasing vehemence. He abruptly hit the dog with the instep of his boot sending the dog flying toward the picnic bench where the crowd still gathered around Petra. The dog let out a spastic yelp when the boot met just underneath the jaw. Saliva scattered, and the dog hit the ground with a thud. It then simmered, then scurried below the picnic table, and found some left over falafel.

“You dumb racist son of a bitch” came a voice out of the crowd. Chipper could not place exactly where this voice came from. It was clear he was getting more agitated by the second. And Chipper did not care all that much as his mission was to inject as much havoc as he could into Petra’s life.

“She could have hired him for the job on the docks but passed him over for some nappy dude from a country with lots of ancient ruins.” When he worked maintenance at the university, he stalked her in the library. “Damn lesbian would not give me the time of day. The damn University fired me for that. That bitch and her education ruined me.”

Treating animals cruelly is a trigger point for Jane and that is one of many things Jack loved about her. She realized the presence of six highly armed, undereducated white males made everybody at once uncomfortable as well as frightened more than most have been in their entire lives. When you are within a few feet of powerful firearms it can be a terrifying, sometimes life altering experience. Jane had been through this many years earlier and never wanted to experience it again.

And here stood this group of men brandishing testosterone and more ammo than needed. This was a man stalking a woman for something he perceived as done wrong to him. All those are horrible but harming or abusing animals is her trigger point. We all have them and sometimes we never know until we are triggered.

Chipper walked through the crowd with little resistance and stepped up to the picnic table where Petra sat nursing her wounds. Petra did extraordinarily little as she lapsed into a midday deep slumber on the picnic table bench directly below where Chipper towered over his female nemesis. Jack watched this all take place, and it seemed like a movie scene where he played a reluctant part.

The smoke from the fires took a deeper late afternoon grip on this little park in the north end of Seattle. An unexpected light rain started to fall. The Pacific Northwest was badly in need of rain and the pitter-patter of raindrops on the nearby trees seemed to deflect the mid-afternoon tension for a few seconds. The militia, the dog walkers and even Petra sat silently listening to the rain fill the afternoon air. All except for Chipper, who took the firearm from his shoulder and pointed directly into the soot filled air.

He stood on the picnic bench and started into a speech about the evils of socialism, quickly switched to some diatribe about an old politician and her emails.

And he stepped down from that picnic bench and glowered and taunted the girl who sat on the bench below. He then pulled the little dog from underneath the picnic bench and held it up by the nape of its neck and started to rant and rave about how he was going to.

There is an animal lover in almost all of us.

Chipper died a second or two later from a gunshot directly below the heart. Even cold hearted entitled white men also have a trigger point when the violence reaches a breaking point.

He died and the world turned black forever. That is conjecture.

Jane never got over making him pull that trigger on that Ill-fated day. She had never owned a gun and never wanted to own a gun. Yet she was never one who resisted change. Desperate times, take discouraging measures. Her husband Jack rarely talked with her about that day. They refer to it as the friendly fire that burns from within. It is funny, the neighborhood seems a bit more serene these days. Or it is a state of mind.

She did not pull the trigger, yet she had contributed indirectly to the death of a human being. In retrospect, it was not any different than deaths caused by neglect of the environment or the stress from living in the world we inhabit, and neither were necessary.