Half a World Away

I was listening to the radio in my bed. It is dark and there is a chill in the breeze through my open window. It is 0500 on Sunday, a travel day, the end of which will not come for me until I am more than half a world away. I will be in England, briefly, and then on another flight of equal or greater duration, across Europe and Asia to arrive in night again in a land very far away. In the old days it would have taken a month by steam packet, or the better part of a half year by sail. But I travel today by Boeing and Airbus, and I will be delivered in flight segments with European crews. That is a comfort.

I have a couple of the usual pre-journey jitters and I have not begun to pack. I am making lists in my head and swearing I will not wind up wasting time at the typewriter. I have things to do. Laundry to start, an apartment to leave clean for my return a week hence. Things to carry up from the cars, putting some things things to bed and setting others up for speedy action on my return. And affairs to have in order, prudent, on the off-chance that I do not. Laying in the darkness I hear Carl Castle say that someone else had been shot here in Virginia, not so very far away. This time the attempted murder is ninety miles south of DC. Carl said that they could not make a positive connection to the rest of the shootings, or deny it, either. If it is connceted this would be the first time that the shooter had worked on a weekend.

The victim this time was a 37-year old man traveling with his wife. They were leaving a Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, a place far enough removed from the big city that you could reasonably expect to be safe. My son’s high school football team played their game in Richmond Friday night, to avoid the threat here in town. It is not far from where the shooter stood in the darkness last night and fired into the lit parking lot. Like the Home Depot. Everyone was trying to adjust to the new reality. A single bullet knocked him down in the parking lot, a strange counterpoint to the shooting last Monday night, when it was the wife who was killed in front of her husband. The sole evidence to connect the dots on this would be ballistic, and the doctors say that they can’t get the bullet. There are some discrepancies. This was not a head-shot, the bullet hit him in the abdomen, and he is alive but in critical condition. I tried to remember the pattern. When had he started to go to t! he head? Hadn’t numbers six and seven been shots to the body?

I puzzled over that, but decided to reserve judgement. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it might be a duck. Most people that shoot each other are acquainted. This one fit the larger picture of a killer that was working on something very cold and very evil. It quacked like our boy from DC, and in the end, if a single bullet cuts you down, who cares who fired it?

Carl went on in his dispassionate radio voice. Saddam had announced a general amnesty of prisoners in view of his superb performance in the last general election. He seems to be getting ready. It behooves me to do the same and the travel web that spans this troubled globe like a spiders web. Iraq will be on my right as we cross into Southwest Asia. I will look out the window with interest.

This is a signal trip. I have been west around the world to the vicinity of Oman, and east around the world to Bahrain. I carefully examined the lines of longitude and concluded there was overlap, and had in fact been all the way round. This trip will make it unambiguous.

They say that travel broadens one. If that is the case I will be vast upon my return, and happy to be back in my own nest once again. Once around the world lightly, in a week. I’ll talk to you all when I return. In the meantime, keep your heads down. And your powder dry.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra