The light of this new day is brilliant on the Piedmont’s rolling hills. There is an expression of vitality in this part of our world, of rich green growing forces erupting from our soil. On the pasture below the Bunk House a single young deer stands inviolate, doing as it will. Unmolested. Free.

The Hummingbirds are active, flying in tight patterned buzzing flight. The Buzzards, so magnificent in their soaring pattern, are lit by the dawn against a brilliant field of blue. Splash, our resident recalcitrant, reached out early, hoping to accomplish some thought not directly supervised by Socotra House Management. He did not want to become immersed in the panoply of current events. He wanted to know what was next.

He had copies of the two projects the Writers Section had issued this year. They were both experiments in the Old School. Narratives of the times that shape ours told by those who lived them. The first was the story our pal Mac Showers told us across the last decade of his long and productive life. It featured vignettes of conflict and of love played out on a vast canvas. The second was of a promise fulfilled after nearly 40 years involving the same gigantic forces. It was partly an account of a rollicking sea story jammed into the fires of an Atomic Future, and which ultimately killed the narrator. Seeing that tale freed from old secrets was a galvanizing experience, and cause for a private audience with the Chairman to see what might be next on an agenda he could support in a world that now confronts unfamiliar resource limitations.

There was a pre-production meeting down by the Bridge that crosses the junction of the two little streams that bisect the property. It provides passage to the Lunging Ring, not used since we all abandoned such impetuous movement and surrendered to the lunges imposed upon us. Once on the concrete, the Bridge is out of sight of our Attorney’s watchful gaze, and conversation is not subject to redaction. This post-dawn interlude had nothing controversial regarding insubordination, regular order or support or opposition to institutions like those that are raging elsewhere. This one was about actual expenditure of the Chairman’s cash, and hence a matter of relevance and proximity.

“I think we ought to do a moment in history,” said Splash with an attempt at a certain element of drama.

Melissa looked at him as a curl of a smile spread across her lovely face, neatly framed by the lines of precisely cut once-blonde locks. “We are in one. I thought that is what we were doing every morning.”

Buck gave a grunt from where he leaned on the steel rail. “It may be that these little tales will tell their own story of what it was like to see great change in motion. This is likely to be one of those changes so vast and so deep that those of us whose lives were built and lived amid them cannot see them until they are passed.”

Splash was the one smiling now. “You got it. I found something the Chairman tried to capture when he was living it. It is a day-by-day account of a last military movement in a long struggle between two systems of opposed governance. As such, it has little to do with the “why” of it at that moment, just the reaction of forces in motion that suddenly changed a direction as one adversary fell, and another reigned briefly. It is an amazing series of a few months, not researched. Not viewed as a component of what was later judged as something inevitable. Just lived as it occurred.”

Melissa stretched and shook her head. “In the context of great change there was the ordinary aspect of our lives, our thoughts and the pressure of how we llive in the moments of time we are allowed. Love, in it’s time of passion and desire. Courage to stand against some things and the willingness to die for others.”

The bright light of a single precious day lit the Lunging Ring. In its brilliance swam the creatures blessed with motion and vibrant life. The sounds of the pasture were partially muted by the rich green. The lowing of the cows in their pastures to the south. The gentle rush of water in the streams, and the rooster in the fields just north of the fence line. Splash opened his vest and produced a thumb-drive from the inner pocket. “I found an old laptop in office in the motor pool. The Chairman wrote something about a great change he did not know was happening. For him, at the time, it was an attempt to capture what it was like to be one of thousands of people gathered in a vast machine of steel to travel an ocean and a sea. It was an instrument of war used for the purposes of peace. And in that brief moment, it was one of the pivots of history that echo with a weight greater than the steel and flesh that composed them.

The flesh- some of it- remains. The steel does as well, though not in the shape or purpose it once did. “We could take the completely ordinary tale of what it was like to live in a moderately unusual place while a great event swirled overhead, alterning the course ahead, validating some sacrifice and punishing some victories. It would be like….” He paused. Then he shook his head.

Melissa began laughing, crossing her arms in front to steady herself. “So, this is a story about the ordinary, the nits and grits of times that are not what they seem.”

Splash smiled. “Yeah. I would pitch it to the Boss as “The Last Cold War Cruise!” with an exclamation point. But of course, that is not what it is. It is just human life flooding over the usual rocks and down the ordinary channels. Some life, some passion, and some sights. Not realizing what they mean. Taking one thing, one experience identical to the other ninety or so such routine deployments that represented only a small part of a large and very expensive conflict.”

“Will it have pictures?”

“If we can find them.”

“Will it be true?”

“Of course. Because the Chairman had no idea it was anything but what it seemed to be. We get to make something of it now that it is gone but captured in the matter-of-fact. Just like an early summer’s radiant day in a place whose existence is composed of daily magic.”

“And not recognized for what it was.”

“Until it is, as we see something just like it happening now. Maybe we ought to write something about that now.”

“That would require us to understand it. If we claimed that now, it would only get redacted by the Attorney.”

Smiles and nods followed under skies that accurately mimicked the azure hue of a coast far away, under skies that radiated confidence and a certain amount of unscheduled joy.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com