Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always said hot weather was movie weather.

That meant it was a good time to go spend 2 or 3 hours in a dark, air conditioned building. We saw some films I am sure we would never have watched otherwise, because Kage wanted to go to ground somewhere cool. Most of them turned out pretty well, especially as we were in a better mood once we were no longer melting. But one cannot always find a movie when one needs one, and one still has to survive at home somehow.

I am a weenie in the heat. Thank goodness, humidity rarely happens here – I would be dead, else, or mutated into the sort of gilled, goggle-eyed and fin-fingered recluse that inhabited H.P. Lovecraft’s New England. Kage loved the heat, but only if she could hide from it and just bask in it like a salamander. She required silk pajamas, fans and cold Coke for proper basking.

Yestreday, the heat that has been at the throat of the rest of the country found its way finally to California. When I drove through Simi Valley midafternoon, on my way home, it was 105 degrees there. It was in the 80’s when I made it all the way to Griffith Park – a vast improvement.

Today we skimmed the 90’s. Even so, we were blessed by a breeze; and the sun traverses the side of the house that is mostly uninhabited during daylight – so life in the living room was bearable, with the fans going and windows and doors open to the air. I hate air conditioners because they are usually noisy. So did Kage.

We usually resorted to wearing very little, aiming fans directly at our chairs, and praying for the wind to rise. Activity was reserved for emergencies – for instance, running out of ice cream – and after dark. Which is why I am writing this blog entry so late at night, and have so little to actually say. I spent the hot hours of the day asleep or reading, imbibing a steady stream of ice water and cold cherries …

This is weather where ice cream is the logical choice for every meal. When we were little, Momma used to put scoops of ice cream in our bowls of cereal. I highly recommend Rice Crispies with strawberry ice cream and cold milk. Root beer floats are also very fine, and we usually made them by the pitcherful.

Fudgesickles. Bomb Pops. Dibs: a worthy successor to the Ice Cream Bon Bons of our youth, which I can no longer find.  Most of the flavours of Ben & Jerry – but especially Bailey’s and Cherry Garcia. The 7-11 in Pismo always carried at least those two flavours, which made a lot of hot evenings survivable. And luckily, Gelson’s – the local fancy market – always carries them, too.

Far off to the East, thunderheads as faint and transparent as a morning moon have been hovering over the mountains. Way out there, the desert is exhaling – there might be lightning on the heights, but no rain. At least here in the Basin, a little fog is creeping slowly in from the sea – the hot air has risen in a column all day, and the subsequent movement of the middle air is sucking the sea inland a little. It’ll all burn off in tomorrow’s incandescent eredawn. but the night will profit first.

It’ll make sleeping easier. I can shift the cats who like to lie on my bed under the ceiling fan, and take my own turn there. Eventually. Right now, the first faint energy of the day is stirring in me, and it’s time to write. By candlelight and screen light, and the green glow of friendly tapetums over my shoulder, where the little black cat is absorbing all the cool output of the fan on her happy tummy. Her eyes gleam like faience emeralds in the dark.

Time for a Fudgesickle, too. Life by night in the hot weather … sleep well, all.

Kage Baker was a firm believer in listening to feed back.

If readers took the time to tell you something, she felt, they were owed the writer’s attention. At least long enough to decide whether or not the idea, suggestion or observation was pertinent.

She was also very, very fond of our wonderful friends Steve and Carol Skold. Those wonderful people fed and housed us so many times, they should have been able to claim us a charity. So when Steve requested that I notify people when I was going to miss this blog – so they wouldn’t wonder what new calamity had befallen me – I could hear her saying, “Damn right!” in the back of my mind.

So: We are temporarily down for service to my melting brain.

It’s unlikely I will manage a real blog tonight – I just got home from a busy weekend up North, and a long trip down I-5. Where it was 100 degrees most places. It’s only in the 80’s here on the edge of Griffith Park, but the light is going funny due to portions of Southern California being currently on fire.

Also, the I-5 around Buttonwillow is apparently being dug up, and possibly moved elsewhere. Both North and South bound roads are down to 1 lane each, and are moving at negligible speeds. There are CalTrans trucks and Gas Company trucks everywhere. And the area is crawling with the Army Corps of Engineers as well, plus lots of camo-painted earth-movers.

Space aliens? Giant gila monsters? Triffids in the Monsanto corn fields? A friend has suggested that Thor’s Hammer has finally landed and is being quarantined.

All I know for sure it that it took me far too long in the heat to get through there, and now that I’m home – I’m tired. There are fudgesickles and watermelon in the refrigerator, and I am going to go commune with them.

Stay cool, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker died before any of us even knew that her namesake nephew-of-love was on the way. I mean, we all knew his parents were trying, but the target baby had not yet been acquired. Kage had faith he would be, though, and left numerous orders for things she wanted delivered and said to him when he got here.

I got to fulfill part of that geas today, when a good lot of us gathered in a park for a picnic and a naming. It was my great honour to officiate at the ceremony, and now Alexander (Sasha)  Kage Paladini is named and claimed! Mind you, at this point – he won’t be a year old for a few months – the man of the hour probably thinks his name is “Honeypie sugar face little everloving jellybean NO NO NO!”. But that’s all right. We know who he is.

At this point it also looks unlikely he’ll learn to walk. He wants to, very obviously; but he just gets passed from eager arms to more eager arms, to laps, to shoulders … luckily, he is an amiable and cuddly little guy. And if the besotted grownup won’t put him down, Sasha just straightens his legs and bounces on their stomach. He’s a champion bouncer.

While we adults sat about and ate and drank and cooed at the beautiful boy, the older kids (from almost-3 to almost-18. Where the hell has the time gone?) ran around and played on swings and climbed backwards up slides and actually took good care of one another. Most of them have spent part of their lives so far at Faires, and consequently they are a competent and self-confident bunch.

A hot summer afternoon in Northern California, eating watermelon and cherries and watching the children run around … gossiping, telling wild and true stories, listening to DJ and Buffalo playing the music of dreams on their dulcimers … finally DJ started to sing, and then some of the rest of us joined in. And then it was Paradise.

I’ve spent so many afternoons like this one, resting contentedly in the heat of the afternoon, with all the work done and everything at peace, singing. It’s one of the perfect parts of my life – cold drink in hand, no one quarreling, everyone fed, half-a-dozen people improvising harmony to the old, old songs.

Sometimes only one of us knows the words, and the rest hum and then chime in on the chorus. Faire people can learn a chorus by heart, halfway through the first time they hear it – it’s in our blood.

I haven’t sung much the last two years, because I didn’t know how to do it without Kage’s voice singing harmony. But today I sang. And I discovered that some of what I sing isn’t the melody at all – it’s harmony Kage taught me, because that was what she wanted me to sing! Kage herself could harmonize with a garbage disposal if she had to: teaching a good melodic line to a silly soprano was easy.

So I’m still singing Kage’s melodies. They’re what I know. And I can hear her in my head, her alto coalescing out of all the other voices to guide me on. It was the best afternoon I’ve had in quite some time.

Thank you, everyone, for the very new joy of Alexander Kage, who solemnly gave his old Auntie Kate a lovely kiss on her nose. Thank you, everyone, for singing the way we used to under the oaks, all our voices blending. DJ, Buff, Mongo, Neassa … ah, the voices rising up like incense from the hot summer earth!

Thank you, thank you all.

Kage Baker’s favourite season to travel I-5 was the summer. Not only were the days long – reducing the time spent in the dark on that strangest of all roads – but it’s the season for fresh fruit. She could reasonably expect to live on fresh local cherries during any given day’s drive.

When we did have to drive in the dark, which we commonly did during Renaissance Faire season, the air was still sweet with the perfumes of orchards and fields all the way. We would drive through curtains of scent – cherries, melons, corn,  peppers, celery – like a labyrinth of perfumed gauze. It made even fast food burgers taste exotic.

By night, though, one saw terribly weird things off to the sides of the road. Of course, you see things by day, too … but they are admittedly slightly more alarming in the dark.

I drove up today, leaving Los Angeles on a mild, sweet morning and gaining about a degree of heat for every fifty miles I went North. But the morning moon was blazoned on the Western sky as I climbed the Grapevine, which was gorgeous – even though by the time I roared down the Grapevine again on to the flats of the central valley, it was 96 degrees (at 10 AM) and the hills were burned as bone-white as the transparent moon.

But the corn is leaping up tall in every other field! Peppers are showing like sparks amid their own rows; tomatoes are everywhere! Really. Everywhere. The trucks that haul them don’t use tarps, and the road has a thin red line of feral, squashed tomatoes for 300 miles. You can’t pull on to the verge without stepping in catsup.

And there is a new transport company loose on the road, that I have never seen before: The California Carrot Express. Its truck is all painted with ginormous winged carrots, frisking about on the panels. Although that’s not what they look like as you approach from a distance. It’s cheerfully phallic, if a bit startling.

But the I-5 had stranger things to offer me than even that today.

Around Buttonwillow, CalTrans has closed the right lane for about 50 miles to dig up half the road. The reason is not clear, but it means the traffic in the one Northbound lane was incredibly thick and making about 20 miles per hour. However …  that mean I was driving very slowly behind the Carrot Express truck when I glanced into the roadside field and saw … a chupacabra.

To be more factual: I saw a bone-thin, hairless animal like a coyote with a whippet’s tail – no fur anywhere. And it was dark slate blue. It was just standing there amid last year’s tumbleweeds, panting in an amiable way as it watched the traffic crawl by. What it had to be, of course, was a coyote afflicted with super-mange. At least that’s what it is presumed these bald blue chupacabras really are …

But I saw one! Right there by I-5! It made the jammed traffic totally worth it.

And so I offer it on to you, Dear Readers, as a sort of visual bouquet from I-5. If not the Mother Road (that’s Route 66), it surely is the Crazy Auntie of Roads. At least, it sure was today.

Kage Baker loved babies.

You’d think someone who had been baby-sitting (and feeding, and changing, and reading to) smaller kids since she herself was reliably house-broken might have gotten blase about it. But no, Kage was constantly delighted as our friends and family members grew up, formed pairs, and produced brand new people for her to meet.

There have been several marriages among our Faire friends over the years. There have been lapfuls and lapfuls of babies. Kage was a happy Auntie to all of them.

The “auntie system” is a good way of bringing up babies, one successfully used by species as varied as dolphins, wolves, elephants and, yes, human beings. I’ve never been sure of the philosophical underpinnings of the “It takes a village to raise a child” meme – but I do know that the average two-year old requires every spare pair of hands you find, just so parents and offspring all survive the experience. Kage was always proud to be one of those extra pairs of hands.

“I’m a professional Aunt,” she proudly claimed.

Two of our friends got married a few years ago, and started trying for a baby right away. What with one thing and another, their first-born came along just last year – after an unusually long gestation, as he is a chosen child. An adopted child. Watching this process as we did, along with dozens of other anxious friends and relations, Kage and I both realized just how much adopted children are babies who are really, really wanted: his parents went through birth pains for years to achieve this kid.

Kage knew that he was coming, but she died before she knew for sure when: so she left me with all sorts of orders for presents to be bestowed at certain times. I am making sure he gets what his Auntie Kage intended him to have, as various birthdays come along. There are some humdingers due over the next couple of Christmases …

What his parents have chosen to give Kage in return, she never had a chance to learn. But this Sunday, it will be my grateful delight to officiate at the naming ceremony of Alexander Kage Paladini. My glasses will steam up when I cry, but that’s all right – Master Alexander liked to pull ’em off my nose.

Tomorrow I am driving up the summer delirium of I-5, which I always love. High summer in the Central Valley! It’s like nothing else, and a good long drive through the corn fields and salt marshes and orchards and cattle ranges and interwoven dimensions of the San Joaquin Valley is like an E-ticket ride for the soul. It’ll be like driving through Kage’s own mind in a fever-dream. I can hardly wait …

Reports will be made once I reach my destination in the North, and settle down to catch my breath. It’s exhilarating but tiring, speeding along on the narrow interstices between tesseracts and time warps out there.

I have a date to keep with a beautiful blue-eyed boy. And I have orders to sing “Go Down, Ye Blood-Red Roses” to him. As a present from his Auntie Kage.

Kage Baker once broke our toilet with a conch shell. On Christmas Eve. With lots of family members coming over for Christmas Day. Including a clean-freak grandmother.

All of you, Dear Readers, probably have holiday plumbing stories. Some of you probably even have a similar holiday/plumbing curse. I’ve always felt that people simply remember the plumbing disasters that coincide with holidays, because they’re exponentially worse than normal days. But Kage felt it was a symptom and proof of the underlying sentience of the Universe, which was capricious, inhuman, and striving toward chaos.

Hence the conch shell disaster. Kage loved sea shells, and was especially fond of a couple of big, blush-pink conches she had acquired. She kept one on the toilet tank, as a grace note. During the frenetic cleaning of that Christmas Eve, the shell fell into the toilet bowl. Fortunately, it was unharmed. Unfortunately, it shattered the toilet bowl into half-a-hundred shards of razor-sharp porcelain.

(That accident was one of the reasons that, years later, Kage made Mendoza’s tropic hideaway with her three lovers out of nano-engineered sea shell. That stuff, she decided, was better than concrete.)

Our next door neighbor, Kent (who was a Disney Imagineer) glowed it back together with some sort of secret super glue; evidently what they used at Disney to keep pieces from flying off the Matterhorn and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Then we covered all the cracks with silicon gel. For the 3 weeks it took us to save up for a new toilet (because no one has extra money the day after Christmas!) the toilet worked – but sunlight shone through the transparent silicon and you could see though the cracks … hilarious and unnerving.

The entire incident has been memorialized in family history because there is just no ordinary aspect of it anywhere. Many families have holiday tradition of the plumbing going south – the sink clogs up or the dryer fails or the garbage disposal starts running backwards. This is the only occasion I personally know of, though, that involved blowing up a toilet with a sea shell. Or gluing it back together so it appeared to be encased in a transparent force field.

Today we are dealing, here in my family’s little century old California bungalow, with a leak in the toilet. It started out as a few drops round the bolts that hold on the tank, and rapidly escalated to a steady stream. Emergency work with Super Glue (and oh, dear  Kent, I miss you even more right now!) and Museum Wax  by nephew Mike gave us a brilliant improvised holding action for a while. But, with unaccustomed common sense, we decided to pursue a more permanent repair while the temporary was still working.

Those bolts, despite leaking, also proved to be rusted in place. Some heroic work with a hack saw by Mike got them loose, but we accidentally knocked a flange off the part where the tank is seated to attach to the bowl … we have just now finished gluing that flange back on (backed up by gaffers tape) and Mike has re-fastened the tank in place with nice new bolts.

Shortly, we shall draw straws. The winner gets to be the first to test the repairs. But it does look like it’ll last while we shop around for a new toilet. They come with so many bells and whistles these days – often literally – that a bit of shopping is needed.

The good thing is, the bathroom should then be free of toilet disasters for another 20 years.

Because no one has dared put a conch shell on the tank in this family since Kage murdered ours all those years ago.

Kage Baker loved the Fourth of July.

Well, she revered it. She thought that the celebration of our country was better served on a small, daily basis than with one big mindless spasm a year. Consequently, she paid her taxes, always answered jury summonses, obeyed the laws – except the ones she thought were illegal or immoral; those she protested in an orderly fashion. She was instrumental in preventing a criminally careless developer from turning a portion of the Santa Monica Mountains into mini-mansions: it is now part of the State Park there. And while we did most of it with letters, there were a few incidents involving trespass with a movie camera, and chaining one’s self to oak trees …

She recycled, with a fervour more usually seen in religious institutions. I have never entirely grasped what all the numbered classes of recyclable materials mean – I just put them in the bins as directed by Kage, who did.

Kage said that patriotism was better served by an informed electorate than a loud one. She said that it was more important to listen and learn and make moral personal decisions, than to leap up and down and scream with rage. Chimpanzees, she observed, conduct politics like that.

No, what Kage loved – indeed, worshipped – was fireworks.

When we were teenagers, we’d spend the night of the 4th leaping round on the roof of the house, like mountain goats. From the various levels of Momma’s house on a peak of the Hollywood Hills, you could see fireworks displays all over the San Fernando Valley: they bloomed like enormous eldritch chrysanthemums below us in the middle air. The higher rockets and blazons from the Hollywood Bowl could be glimpsed, too, over the hills to the West. And she loved the sound! I think those distinctive booms and bangs and frenetic crackles made Kage as happily insane as any burst of incendiary colour.

The years we lived in Pismo Beach were the pinnacle of her fireworks devotions. We never lived  more than two blocks from the beach, from the Pismo Pier where the municipal fireworks were set off; most years we camped out on the beach in mid-afternoon, surrounded by family and friends, close enough to be sitting in the drifts of black powder smoke that rolled across the beach. Kage was in an ecstasy every year.

We missed the annual display once when we were in  Las Vegas for a convention. However, our hotel room balcony gave us a perfect view of the city, whose inhabitants proved even more frenzied than those of the San Fernando Valley: it was like being in a siege balloon, surrounded by tracer ammunition. Kage danced in glee on the balcony.

We had one Fourth where the summer fog never lifted – that year, we watched the fireworks as blurred lights in a vast zone of invisibility, the explosions reverberating in our bones as they were transmitted by the vapours that wrapped the town like cotton. It was weird, but it was marvelous.

Kage’s last year … we sat on our tiny front porch and watched the fireworks from there. She had just started chemotherapy, and the walk was too much for her. Besides, on our second story balcony, we were watching the fireworks eye to eye. Kage was delighted; it was like being in the display.

Now I’m in Los Angeles. Fireworks, of course, are totally illegal in Los Angeles. Apparently that applies only to feral fireworks that set themselves off; because people are setting them off everywhere. They started over the weekend, and will doubtless continue to the next weekend. Firecrackers, cherry bombs, Piccolo Petes – that ascending whistle always made Kage’s hair practically stand on end with delight – the liquid gush and hiss of all the various cones exploding. Distant soft roars and percussions, like artillery in the distance.

Why, half a dozen trashcans have already had their plastic lids blown off in my neighborhood. And that’s not easy to do, they’re sturdy City-issued bins; you need the really big M-2s from Mexico to manage that …

Because she really was law-abiding, Kage herself never set off anything larger than a sparkler or a Snake, except down on the Pismo sands. But she did love hearing the evidence that somewhere, some loony was lighting mortars.

I remember, one Fourth of July in Pismo … our house and backyard were full of friends and family, a small tent city sprung up under the walnut tree that roofed half the yard. We went down to the beach, some of us, to set off the three precious Chinese rockets Wayne had smuggled down from the docks of San Francisco. We took Mikey, then perhaps 6 or 7, and delighted to be scurrying through the dark with giggling grownups. Kage stood sentry on a taller dune while Wayne set them off – and I think Kage’s soul went with them, arcing over the dark, green-lit waves … and then she yelled Cave, cave! The police cruiser three blocks away at the Pier had seen us and was starting down the ramp to the sand!

And we all ran off, laughing hysterically, and hid in a dark open garage as the cruiser roared past us; and Wayne explained carefully to Mikey that what we were doing was civil disobedience and not only our right but our duty, on the 4th of July … thus are the young taught all sides our of our improvised democracy.

Happy Independence Day, Dear Readers. Burn brightly, all of you.

Kage Baker just loved weird science-related facts. So let me take this opportunity to say Thanks! to all of you Dear Readers who sent me links to reports of the crater recently detected on Greenland.

Evidently something the size of Rhode Island hit there around 3 billion years ago. As Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old, Greenland was neither Greenland nor sitting where it is now when this happened. And about all this massive bolide could have killed were the more adventurous sorts of archaic bacteria. But as the oldest forms of life we have ever found are fossil bacteria from about 3.5 million years ago – well, the rock that hit proto-Greenland had to have had an effect on the evolution of life.

Because it must have been an ELE – Extinction Level Event. And most of what lived on Earth was probably promptly rendered surplus to present requirement. Who knows what might have evolved if some crucial population had survived, instead of our own bacterial ancestors?  No end of fun, speculating …

There is nothing, nothing! as interesting as weird scientific “facts”!

I’ve set that in quotes because the truly entertaining stuff is often on the cutting edge of sanity. Or science. Or both. Other goodies arise when someone honestly finds something peculiar in nature or an experiment – these folks are usually actual scientists, who are reporting something so peculiar that their initial reports are met with skepticism. And then, as they say, hilarity ensues …

Before the Internet, all such revelations, opinions, and entertaining misinterpretations of observations (phlogiston does not really snuff candles or mice) were usually confined to scholarly journals. You might get hints if you subscribed to them, but the real gems were confined to minutes of  various Societies’ meetings. Prior to that, in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, they were usually found in outraged letters to the Editor of the London Times, or in a walking stick fight breaking out in the august chambers of the Royal Society.

Science is a much more physically vigorous and rancorous field than most people imagine. That alone amused Kage.

One of her most favouritest examples ever was the Bone Wars between competing American paleontologists Cope and Marsh. Those guys were flat out nuts. They went so far, in many instances, as to dynamite fossil beds in the West so the other man couldn’t get any samples. Their dig crews went armed, and were recruited from local bully boys. Trains were diverted, maps faked, wagons raided – all to ensure that either Cope OR Marsh (never both!) got the best bones for their museums back East. And after all that, Marsh set up a brontosaurus with its head on the wrong end of its spine. For the better part of a century. As Kage chortled, “That really caps the joke!”

Right now, we are just in the full first flush of the Annual Silly Season, but things are picking up nicely. A giant UFO was reported crashing into the sea off Perth, Australia a few days ago. Or maybe it was a meteor. Or maybe it was a simple contrail lit by the sunset, but the only one pushing that theory is a mere astronomer.

In fact, a lot of UFO’s have been seen in the last month over Australia, Britain and Canada: all English-speaking countries. Coincidence? You decide … but, however  obviously a pie plate, street light or star in the photos, the accompanying witnesses’ statement are hilarious in their certainty that a Mylar balloon is, in fact, a manned interstellar probe. And then there is always that one photo that makes one stare and say I don’t know …

There has also been an upsurge in sightings of buildings on the Moon and Mars. That’s always fun. It seems obvious to me that many of the folks who detect these in released Mars photos simply have little experience with the way rocks look in a desert – what says battlements or giant face to the Builder Faction says wind-eroded sandstone  to me. But they do find the neatest-looking rocks, in their determined search for signs of government conspiracy and ancient gods; so it’s always productive to look at what sets the Builder devotees off.

The physicists at the CERN Super Collider say they have found the Higgs Boson! For certain sure this time, really. Probably. And they will announce it formally on Wednesday, unless some last minute tests fail. What makes this weird and wonderful is that we can make such progress towards actually laying eyes on a subatomic particle predicted by mathematics and the behaviour of other, larger particles. And that turning on CERN has not yet enveloped the Earth in a black hole, perhaps seeding a new Universe. And that some people actually believe it might …

Science finds so many weird things! The Internet is one humoungous game of telephone, where staid facts can be tarted up with all sorts of astonishing things. Even the Greenland Crater, recent as the news is, can’t escape oddities added through inattentive transmission. One of the reports sent to me this morning stated that when the Greenland crater was made, the Earth was only a third its present size. WTF? Or, my goodness gracious, can that be right? We’ve  got bacterial fossils dating from this time, implying that the crust and mantle were nicely formed and water was present – which probably means the accretion stage of Earth’s formation was past.

Oh well. The idea of the Earth expanding like yeasty dough is kind of fun. That’s how the Hollow Earth was formed, doubtless.

In the meantime, Dear Readers, keep those articles coming! You never know what will spark an idea in one of us. Or herald our new tentacled Overlords. Either way, it will be fun.

As Summer ought to be.

Kage Baker was one year and 20 days older than me. (Which is funny, because I am one year and 20 days older than my sister Kimberly …). This meant that for 20 days each year, Kage was technically 2 years older than I was, instead of just 1.

I used to tease her about it, especially as the years went by and we both became ladies of a certain age. She would snarl amiably about it. When my birthday came around three weeks after hers, she would triumphantly remind me the universe was now back in balance and she was not either two years older than me!

She was 57 when she died, two years ago: 5 months shy of her 58th birthday. So that first year, I caught up to her: I hit 57.  Last birthday, I passed her and reversed the age gap to 1 year. And this year, I have become in my turn 2 years older than Kage.

I’m 59 today. But my now being decidedly the elder won’t have a convenient end; things won’t revert to normal after a comfortable few weeks of teasing. Forever after now, and for the first time, I’ve turned a corner in the road where Kage did not precede me; I’m seeing a road she never knew.

There is nothing like having your elders die to suddenly bring The End into focus. The crowd of people between you and your own personal termination point begins to thin; your parents, your siblings, your friends – ultimately, all those folks have danced the last waltz, gone to sit along the wall and watch, and you are alone on the floor in the dark spotlight. You are the eldest of your line, and how the heck did that happen?

It gives one quite the frisson, if not the outright collywobbles. Still, somehow, Kage and I had always figured that we’d step out together. Probably in a bizarre accident involving tomatoes and rum and several flaming explosions. And we planned to enjoy some old age first.

Ah, such plans we had! Getting old was an inevitability we had finally admitted, somewhere around 55, but we planned to become a hilarious pair of old ladies. The sort who wear Converses and hoodies, and carry sword-canes. Saying outrageous things and speaking one’s mind had gotten much easier – after a certain point, it seems the social brake pads just wear out. If we ever ended up with blue hair, it was going to be because we dyed it bright electric blue.

Mind you, none of those things is ruled out now. Not even the bits with the tomatoes and explosions … but it really wouldn’t be as much fun.

Nonetheless, I keep walking. One of the enduring things Kage taught me was to enjoy the road while you’re on it, because who can say if you will ever see it again? And look for new roads all the time, too. She did. Literally. And when we’d take a turn we never had before, or set out to some utterly new destination – she’d settle herself happily in her seat and exclaim: “New road! God, I love a new road! Drive, Rasputin!*”

And I would. And I do.

* from Bewitched. Endora’s chauffeur.

Kage Baker would have decreed this a celebration day. A reverent one – not a leap around, drive wildly off to a good bar 100 miles away, set off some nice illegal fireworks a week early kind of day. Because as anniversaries go, this one is mysterious and rather creepy …

Today is the anniversary of the Tunguska Event.

The 104th anniversary, to be precise. But at the time it happened it was rather overlooked in the general affairs of the world. There was a hot World Series competition building up in the USA; the Chicago Cubs would eventually win their second Series title in a row – and never win another one. It was also a Presidential election year in the US, with Taft battling the last really 19th century candidate, Williams Jennings Bryan. Robert Baden-Powell started the Boy Scouts that January, so by June 30th there were presumably hundreds of brand new Boy Scouts camping out all over the wilds of Britain. Henry Ford was about to unleash the first Ford. Robert Perry was getting ready to go look for the North Pole.

So no one really saw what happened, largely due to the fact that the Event happened in Siberia. In Siberia, in summer, most of the inhabitants are trees and mosquitoes and warm-weather hunter-gatherers. Anyone who might have been a direct eye-witness was probably vapourized. Anyone more distant – and there were a lot of those – saw a brief bright light, or felt the shock of the impact, but had no idea what it was. Seismic stations across Europe and Asia registered it – the atmospheric shock wave was strong enough to be felt in Britain. Extravagant sunsets occurred from the dust and ash, and the atmosphere showed a heightened opacity for months. Why a mystery that concerned only a few seismologists and atmospheric scientists.

Oh, and 8 million trees fell over. But no one saw that for years (1921, to be precise. Russia was a little busy … ), since no one hiked out to see until then. But when they did, they found the trees in weird straight lines, arranged in a bulls-eye pattern around the impact site. Where there was, by the way, nothing.

No crater. No impact. No glowing star-stone or shattered alien craft. All there was, all that had ever been there, was a swamp. And the swamp was still there, breeding the famous Siberian man-eating mosquitoes like mad, but offering nothing else in the way of weirdness. Consequently, scientists – and anyone else with an interest in weirdness, actually – has been speculating and arguing over what the heck laid out 8 million trees in a giant star burst ever since.

Popular candidates are: a comet, a meteorite, a black hole, a flying saucer. It had to have exploded before it hit the ground, which would explain why there is no crater – though how long does a crater in a working swamp last, anyway? Still, there’s permafrost somewhere under that seasonal swamp, and geophysics has found no distortion of the land forms underneath. So, it didn’t land, per se.

But other than the fact that it seems to have done its explosive best without ever touching the ground, no one knows very much about it. The reports of high background radiation are no more credible than the similar (and false) reports of radiation in Harappa and Mohenjodero. However, the downed trees and bogs – which are all still there – do yield heightened levels of nickel and iron, silicate and magnetite sphericals, and iridium. All those are the hallmarks of an impact event – or, in this case, a mid-air event that then fell in finely exploded dust over the affected area …

What fascinated and also creeped Kage out was that there was nothing left behind, except those microscopic mineral traces. Something big blew up over Tunguska. It knocked down 8 million trees and covered over a hundred square miles with pulverized stardust. No one saw it. And though the traces left behind do indicate what it probably was … no one knows for sure. There’s nothing left of it; nothing we can find, anyway. If something peculiar is growing or breeding out there, it would be damned hard to be sure, even now. Unless it’s the mosquitoes …

Anyway, it intrigued Kage. She hypothesized several private explanations, of varying degrees of eeriness or goofiness. The explanation she finally put in a story was there to prove a specific, plot-supporting aspect of the structure of Time. It’s not what she actually believed; it was what worked in that story. (The Catch). Later, she was sorry she’d used it up – except that the story was very cool, one of her own favourites.

But she’d have liked to do something else with the Tunguska Event. I told her not to worry, there were plenty of other extinction events and peculiar impact craters: hence The Bohemian Astrobleme. And her own theory on what happened to the dinosaurs, which has not yet seen the light of day. Not that she argued with the Chicxulub Crater. Just with what might have caused it.

We should all mark today with some sort of remembrance. It was a remarkable Event, the sort that would have caused a disaster still mourned had it not occurred over a mosquito-infested swamp in the middle of nowhere. So raise a glass to our joint good fortune tonight! Get bitten by a mosquito! Step in a mud puddle!

And let’s all be grateful we’re not groaning under the yoke of beings from Barnard’s Star or Zeta Reticuli, Dear Readers: or anyone else who had better parking luck than the ones who hit Tunguska 104 years ago.