The Fickle Sickle
Ya leave the country for just two weeks, and when you come back, look what’s happened. Actually, not much, at least not in the general scheme of things. Locally, there was another devastating fire. This one was a mile from our house, and pushed by 60-mile-an-hour winds, it blackened 26-thousand acres down a 17-mile-long corridor.
Our neighborhood was evacuated as a precaution, and it turned out to be a one-day evacuation. But as Linda said, it was a good thing we were away and didn’t have to go through it. The fire roared through whatever was in its path, diverting itself without apparent reason, wiping out some families and completely skirting the homes of others.
I won’t rehash the fickle-nature-of-fire angle, just mourn the losses. Many people in the fire’s path were living on the edge already, and thought they couldn’t afford insurance. Others decided they didn’t need it. They were all wrong. By the same token, some homes that had cleared the brush back extra far and installed sprinkler systems were spared. Had they not, they would have burned.
I’m getting back into my plane this morning, flying for the first time in more than three weeks. I want to polish up a for an hour before I take Linda down to the Bay Area next week. It’s the first time she will fly with me; she will be my first passenger.
Flying is a lot safer than driving, in case you were worried, though with the recent Payne Stewart and Egyptair crashes, the general level of trust of flight tends to fall.
Actually, I’d like to learn how to fly a jet like Stewart’s, and Linda and I just flew eight-thousand miles on two 767s like the Egyptair flight. Both these type of aircraft fly incessantly, without incident.
Eva Peron, the widow of the late Argentine dictator was taken off a flight just minutes before it was to take off. Police found a bomb on board. Peron was asked if such things scared her. She said, No one dies five minutes before the time God has set for them. While I might not agree specifically on the attribution, I do on the capricious nature of nature. When it’s your time, it’s your time. If your house is in the path of a firestorm, it may burn or it may escape. If you’re in a plane that has some problem no one could see and a part fails at 33-thousand feet, it’s your time.
As tragic as are the fires and the plane crashes, as heart-rending as are the stories of personal loss, we need to keep them in perspective. People will rebuild their lives, others will be warned, and there will always be more fires and more plane crashes.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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