Daniel James Brown

"Something was afoot that summer—something concealed, not yet revealed. All across the Upper-Midwest, a yellow-gray murk obscured the finer details of terrain and landscape, softening and blurring the outlines of everything one could see, and hiding much that one could not see. Silos in Wisconsin, tall pine trees in northern Minnesota, office buildings in Saint Paul and Minneapolis all seemed to be slightly out of focus and forever fading into an a vague gray background. Men piloting steamboats on Lake Superior put binoculars to their eyes and struggled to make out familiar landmarks along the shore. Railroad engineers peered through gray shrouds of haze that hung over the tracks before them, trying to make out what they were about to encounter down the line. Even the fierce, unrelenting sun of that summer seemed to strain to make its full force apparent through the milky gray overcast.

Country women rising early in the morning and stepping out of doors to fetch water from their wells could not see the haze in the pre-dawn darkness, but they noted the sweet smell of wood smoke. Later in the day, even when their kitchens were full of the warm smell of baking bread, they still noted it. People sitting in posh hotel lobbies and ornate railroad stations noted it, even through the ever-present smell of stale cigar smoke. Timber brokers and bankers and clerks working in stuffy city offices in Duluth and Green Bay slid open their office windows and looked out into their gray cities and they noted it as well.

As summer crept toward autumn, people went about their daily business. They marvelled at the extraordinarily orange harvest moons that rose over the eastern horizon in August. They calmed figety livestock. They watched in idle curiosity as odd curlicues of black ash drifted down from the yellow sky. They grumbled when they put white sheets out to dry on the clothesline in the morning and fetched gray ones in at the end of the day. But still they did not see it coming.

On the last evening of August, people in a remote corner of Minnesota--people who were about to die or watch their children die--sat around dining-room tables and chatted about their hopes for the future. They gathered around pianos and sang. They read newspapers, they went to their kitchens to get snacks, they kissed their children good-night and tucked them into bed. They crawled into warm beds themselves, by ones or by twos, and put out the lights. When the lights were out, the lovers among them brushed warm lips and pulled each other close and felt each other's hearts beating. Boys lay staring into the dark, thinking about fishing, or about girls. Old men lay remembering. Mothers and fathers lay planning. And one by one they drifted off to sleep, dreaming of things past or things yet to come.

But none of them could have dreamed of what was really coming. None of them could have imagined that within thirty-six hours people in places as far away as New York, San Francisco, and even London would be reading about the cruel hand that fate was about to deal them.