So now Eduardo is loose in the cornfield with his wife and kids, and it's really dark. We look at Chavez shivering in the car, and we look at the cornfield and we look at each other. No one wants to go running off into the tall, windblown corn to go looking for Eduardo in the dark. (Even though we have done really stupid and insane things in the past and gotten away with them.) We need another plan.

First thing is to get Chavez out of here, so we do. Back to the office for a very, very long and detailed debriefing when we get the time.

Next the SAIC, Ashe, gets on the horn and calls on the state patrol to block off the highway to the west. He radios the on-duty county uniforms on an open mike to meet with us out on the farm road, but doesn't say anything about what's going on, because he knows the TV stations monitor the police scanner, and the last thing we need is the media out here. Who knows what would happen then?

Now the river is to the south, and it's running at around 25,000 cubic feet per second, so that way's cut off. And if we put patrol cars on the county road to the east that runs north/south, and place cars up and down the road we're on, we'll have Eduardo boxed in an area to the south of us that covers a couple of quarter-sections, mostly in cornfields, but with a few abandoned farm buildings. As the thing gets put together and we get all the escape routes covered, more and more officers start showing up, and more and more people are getting involved. Dozens. It's turned into a full-blown cluster. I am very glad that Ashe is the SAIC and not me. Protocol says that it's his party, and he gets to decide what's served. He also gets to eat the leftovers.

Each car gets a pair of starlight scopes, distributed by the state patrol, which are great for seeing in the dark, but what we really need is the state's helicopter that's equipped with a FLIR unit, an infrared imager that can spot warm objects moving around. That way we can pinpoint Eduardo if we see a good-sized fast warm object, or his kids if we see some little slow warm objects. After we know where he is (or they are), we can figure out what to do about it.

But the helicopter's not available, because it's in the shop. Nope, can't be fired up. Engine's in pieces and parts, you know. We're on our own.

Those of us who were in on it at the beginning split into three cars, three people each. I can't speak for Juan and Susan, who are with me in my car, but I'd prefer not to be here. This whole thing has gone south on us.

We've put on our full raid regalia--body armor, jackets, caps--with very prominent markings and badges and such, so we don't become unfortunate victims of circumstance--we want everyone to be sure they understand who we are, especially since there are so many excited people with guns walking around, not all of whom know us. There's constant babble on the encrypted channels (to keep this off the TV if possible) about possible sightings, theories about where Eduardo might have gone, and conjectures about what he might do. After everything settles down a little and wind-blown corn gets investigated several times after movement is sighted, a rough order begins to take shape: Team 1 to the west, (the state guys) will start walking into the corn headed east, Team 2 to the east will start into the corn headed west, and those of us in the center will push south towards the river. We'll make lots of noise and have lots of lights, and maybe Eduardo will decide that he'll have to give up.

The team in the center, though (us) will have to clear the abandoned farm buildings on the county road.

We killed our lights and rolled up on the first one, an old hay barn that's started to lean wearily on its foundation. We park about a hundred yards away, and get out as quietly as we can, making sure we shut off the dome light so it doesn't come on when we open the doors. Juan and I arm ourselves with shotguns, and Susan (who's qualified with it) takes an MP-5 9mm submachine gun. Juan's taking the key, I'll back him up, and Susan will follow up after we've taken the door down.

We work our way towards the door, taking advantage of whatever cover we can find, and after what seems like a very long time, we're up against it, sweating. Juan to the left, me and Susan to the right. At Juan's finger-count, one-two-three, we all holler "Police" as loud as we can, and Juan kicks the door right off the hinges. A dark shape blasts out of the blackness and comes thrumming, right into our faces.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot," Susan yells.

So this was the plan:

We wired up the snitch and sent him in to meet with Eduardo Torres at Eduardo's house. Eduardo was staying in a house out by Fillmore that was owned by one of the big commercial dairy operations. Eduardo sort of worked for the dairy, but what he usually did, instead of milking, was to show up at milking time and offer somebody else a hundred bucks to cover his shift for him. Milking was work, and Eduardo did not particularly care to work. He had other fish to fry.

So anyway, Eduardo lived in the little rented house with his wife, Maria, and their four kids, and he sold cocaine to the other milkers and anyone else he could find. It was a good business. But, too bad for Eduardo, because his friend, Chavez, was our snitch since we twisted him behind a traffic stop wherein Chavez had been found, unfortunately,in possession of an oh-zee of a very familiar white chunky crystalline material that the NIK test flashed blue on. It took Chavez thirty minutes to roll over on Eduardo. His dear friend.

Most of us didn't speak Spanish, so we had our man Juan wearing the headphones and listening to the wire and telling us what was going on. We were all laying back in our cars about a quarter-mile away with the spotting scope on the house.

From the sounds of things, Eduardo was starting to get a little paranoid. We'd sent Chavez in to see if he could score a QP from Eduardo so we could do the buy-bust thing and show Eduardo our shiny new search warrant and then see what we could find. But it wasn't going well. Eduardo was being coy--yeah, maybe he could set something up, but maybe not, and why doesn't Chavez have a beer and chill out for a while, and we'll watch some wrestling on TV, and I'll call around and maybe I can set something up, and so on.

And the whole time, Chavez is obviously starting to get weird vibes from Eduardo, and he asks Eduardo several times why he doesn't just sit down, and howcome he's sweating so much? This didn't sound so good. And it goes on for hours. It gets dark outside. Finally, Eduardo says he's starting to get the feeling that people are watching him and something bad is going to happen, so he thinks he'll get his wife and kids and get in the car and leave for Mexico right now, and he thinks Chavez should go with him. No, he REALLY thinks Chavez should go with him, and whatever else is happening, Chavez agrees with him, but he doesn't sound at all well, according to Juan, and then Chavez says he doesn't think Eduardo needs to show him that.

Everybody goes on alert, of course, and we start to get ready to roll, but then Eduardo's car comes roaring out of the driveway headed west toward the highway, and we can't see much except that there are more than three people in the car.

Okay, change of plan. We've got our snitch who is obviously feeling somewhat uncomfortable for what is likely a bad reason, a very paranoid bad guy with maybe a gun stuck upside Chavez's head, and a carful of kids. What to do? Well, on the fly, we figure we'd let them get to the highway and then get the state patrol to do a hard stop on Eduardo with lots of flashing lights so he knows that it's really the police and not some other bad guys out to rip him off, and then most likely Eduardo will do the sensible thing and give up.

But no.

We're running without lights about three hundred yards back so Eduardo won't know we're behind him, but then way out in the boonies with the cornfields all around, the brake lights flash on up ahead. We light up and go for it.

When we get there, Chavez is sitting in the car and he's okay, not shot, which is good, but Eduardo isn't there, and that's not so good. And it gets worse. Chavez tells us that Eduardo was really getting paranoid and scary, and that he decided that there was somebody following him (which there was, of course) and that he was going to bail and run off into the cornfields. And the wife is with him, and all the kids. And the kids are little, too. All under eight years old.

Yeesh.

Change of plan.

And yet...

Near the great river of our region there is a place where thousands of springs emerge from basaltic river bluffs and plunge foaming to the rocks below. It was a sacred location to the Paiute who journeyed there in search of visions. Visions remain.

One bright, hot summer afternoon years ago, exploring the sources of water (my life's quest, I think) I found a little creek that squeezed beneath a rockfall far up the canyon. It was a splendid place for snakes, and I could smell their musk clearly, but saw none. Nevertheless, I was careful to reach only for the places I could see--prairie rattlers are forgiving creatures, reticent to strike, but they don't care to be surprised.

At the top of the rockfall I could see the creek flowing a shadowed way among boulders the size of houses and automobiles, a tumbled confusion of stone that would be difficult to traverse--no clear path to follow, but a long repetition of climbs and descents, scrambling over rocks to a destination that could not be seen.

After four hours' difficult and careful work (not a good place to break a leg, since most likely few people ever went this way) the narrow canyon choked with tumbled boulders opened into a natural amphitheater of stone with sheer, black walls a hundred feet high. In the center was a circular pool fifty feet across--glass-clear, with a heart of cerulean blue, growing inky at the center. All the water of the creek welled up from some unguessable depth at this place. The water was completely deoxygenated from its long passage in the darkness, and there were no living things in the spring--no fish, no insects, no plants.

And in the stone amphitheater itself, no birds sang, no creature moved. Only the powerful sun arcing slowly east to west to mark the passage of nameless, unnamed time. It was not a place for doing things, but for thinking about things--it seemed a roofless shrine to the spring itself, devised by an unhuman mind.

There are places, I believe, where we do not belong--that have nothing to do with us, with our concerns, our thoughts, our beliefs, our lives--where even our existence or non-existence is irrelevant. Places more difficult to find nowadays, perhaps, more hidden, more overlaid with the stupid carnival noise of our civilization. But when we find them, they remind us with bitter force that we are not the point and sum of all the world, and that our passage through it makes no more (and no less) impression than the passage of a dragonfly's flight through a meadow on one particular summer's afternoon. It is a terrible marvel to realize that these places comprise the greatest portion of the universe.

I sat and thought there for some hours, but left in plenty of time to get out before the sun set. I didn't care to spend the night there.

I think it's haunted by something that was never human.

Always, I've been fascinated by flowing water--its origin, its destination, its shapes and permutations along its course. When I was five, I spent a long hour captivated by one curl, riffle and plunge pool in a little creek, bending lower and lower to see what was there until I overtipped headlong into the pool. I still (and those who know me still, no doubt) remember my floundering, sputtering confusion.

And still, rivers intertwine with my thoughtstreams, memories embedded in riffles and runs and pools, following the course of knowing and belief from origin to destination, shaping metaphors for my view of the world. The word for world is river.

The flow of believing is seeing, for me, and it's difficult--goes against the current--to see things in anything other than a naturalistic way. That which is uncanny seems unreal, crosscurrent to how things truly are. When I am confronted by something that does not make sense, something in my perception twists and prods it into a shape that conforms to what I know and believe. It's a twitch, an impulse.

I know. This is unclear. I'll try to explain the type of thing I mean. An example:

I know a man, Hugo, who has a similar disposition--he simply has to explain to himself what a thing means when it makes no sense. And so when Hugo was told that a particular reach of the South Fork that he knew well was haunted by a ghost, he determined to come to grips with this ghost and shake sense out of it. The ghost, it was told, emerged from the river at the lee dregs of sunset, when full dark extended over the canyon. Each night, it would climb the riverbank, flowing palely over the darkened rocks, and disappear soundlessly into the night. A simple ghost, it seems, and easily dismissed or confirmed, and so Hugo resolved to see it.

He placed himself in the proper place one evening, waiting for the sun's rose to fade to blackness. At the cusp of dark, sure enough, the spectre slid from the water and began to ascend the bank. Hugo told that the hairs rose on his arms when he saw this--some atavistic physiological echo that went clear back to his forebears in the Paleolithic night. And the worst part, he said, was the way that the phantom moved--not walking, but--flowing--over the rocks, occasionally rising upright, descending to flow again, until it disappeared into black.

Unnerving, yes? And how to respond?

Hugo's response was to go back the next night with a powerful flashlight. At darkfall, the ghost once again emerged from the river and began its horrible flowing motion across the rocks--and Hugo transfixed it with the flashlight--revealing a pair of pinkish, glowing eyes attached to an albino otter.

Unlike Hugo and me, my daughter is less certain that the unco can be opened and examined like the contents of a dubious tuna can. The summer before last, she went to horse camp in the mountains north of here. The kids sleep in tents, work with the horses all day, and build corrals and bridges and outbuildings. A business that precisely suits my daughter. The highlight of horse camp is a night ride along a trail that winds, eventually, past an abandoned mining town where silvering nineteenth century clapboard buildings grow soft with the erosion of a thousand rains and a hundred winters. There is an old hotel, three stories high, with boarded windows and a melancholy demeanor. Her horse, Daisy, spooked badly when they were riding by the hotel, although nothing uncanny could be seen--and my daughter has deferred to Daisy's wisdom. Nothing now (in subsequent visits) will induce her to approach the hotel any closer than a hundred yards or so. I, on the other hand, sense nothing at all. Blind and deaf to the unco, it seems.

And yet...

Tonight, I'm writing this to the Hamletesque lyrics of Apollo 18's song "Turn Around"-- (Turn around, turn around, there's a human skull on the ground". ) Very tuneful, really. (Those of you without teenage proto-adults playing loud music are really missing out.)

Remembrancing mortality--quite valuable for those of us in middle years, more valuable, I think, than remembrance of things past--go along, do your duty, feed the cat, fix the dining room chair, work, read, hobnob, network, scribble, scrabble. And whenever and wherever you turn around, there's that damn human skull on the ground.

Can't go anywhere or do anything without "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal" echoing around in your laurel-crowned skull. As if I needed to be reminded.

But perhaps, perhaps I do--our ephemeral little lamps flicker for an instant in the midst of cavernous time, and we pass, and are remembered, and then forgotten, and then forgotten that we are forgotten. We remember our parents, sure, and most likely our grandparents, know who our great-grandparents were, in any case, but our great-grandparents, hmm, and our great-great-grandparents, I think not, and so back, back to all that misty and ultimately hairy, arboreal throng connecting us to everyone who's ever lived or ever will.

But now, (and now is really all that is, anyway) at least, there's the shape of that particular Ponderosa pine against this particular crescent of sky, the "tak, tak" of ravens, the thin scream of a hawk, the smell of pitch, of browning Douglas fir needles superimposed on damp earth and the secret tinsel-stream attended by huckleberries and ferns--tiny spring creek I named in my heart for my daughter when she was small and regarded the water-striders that moved on its ancient mirror face with her fierce attention. How many others had done the same, I wondered--how many faces reflected in time past, and how many more to regard it in time to come? Can I see their faces? Almost, almost....

Once I did an impossible thing.

I was fly fishing with my daughter on a spring creek, a larger one, on a summer evening with the light slanting darkways from the mountains to a seam of trout, and I plucked a swallow from the air--a violet-green swallow, exquisite emerald and huckleberry feathers, a life, hot and trembling in my hand. What to do? I watched, and could do nothing, transfixed by the horror of this thing unintended. But my daughter touched it with wise, young hands, released it to air, cupped hands rising upward--granting life.

Cupped hands rising.

Turn around.

Regards,

George Brooks