The vision thing

OK, you say - we get the writer part, but what's up with that mystic thing?

I'm glad you asked! If you've read Fuzzball, you know I think I can sense the possibilities along future paths. Sometimes it gets a lot clearer than that.

When I was 13, I was riding in the back seat of my parents car, heading north in the late winter. I was daydreaming and looking out the window. My inner daydream vision suddenly became much more vivid and detailed - richer in a way that is hard to describe. The sense I had was not unfamiliar. Somehow or other I knew what I was seeing was real.

I was looking at myself, my two brothers, and my cousin. We were in a rough line, shoulder to shoulder. We were much older and noticeably broader. We were sporting a variety of facial hair, from two day unshaven to full beard. Our dress was ragged, multiple layers of jackets and sweaters with rips showing the layers beneath. Our clothing and skin was grimy and our hair uncombed. There were blood crusted scratches on our exposed skin.

We stood with an air of triumph. The light behind us was a flat gray on dead trees and torn up pines. Our faces were reflecting a golden flickering light, and we had this expression of happiness and exhaustion, and something extra - an uninhibited sort of wacky confidence that I had never seen before.

I'm unsure of how I knew who it was because we were all thin teenagers when I had the vision, and the people in my vision were broad across the shoulders, with thick necks and big hands.

The vision faded and I was back in the car. With my comic book education I sort of concluded we would be fighting in some apocalyptic battle somewhere in the future. After many years had passed I had largely forgotten the whole thing.

In 1999, a massive storm ripped through northern Minnesota, blowing down thousands of trees in the BWCA. The storm didn't stop there and many miles away it struck again, taking down hundreds of trees on a piece of land owned by my extended family. This piece of land has deep spiritual significance to all of us, and the damage to it felt very personal. We were terrified as the summer wore on without rain. We knew we were living on borrowed time and a massive fire was inevitable if we didn't reduce the fuel load.

Summer turned to winter, and finally several large storms dropped a couple of feet of snow. My brothers and I met my cousin on our piece of property and we started a bonfire in a clearing and began dragging trees out of the woods to burn. We started the fire on Friday night on top of two or more feet of snow. We dragged hundreds of trees into the fire and by early Sunday it had grown to more than 10 feet across. The high for the weekend was 8 degrees below zero, and we spent the entire time dragging trees, briefly sleeping on whatever dry spot we could find in the warmth of the fire, and drinking heavily. It was tremendously fun despite the grueling work and cold weather, and we all got along wonderfully.

Late on Sunday afternoon we had let the fire burn down in preparation for us all going back to our homes. The four of us were standing shoulder to shoulder just sort of tiredly grooving on the fire, and suddenly I realized this was the vision I had seen 27 years ago. There we were, wearing our grubbiest clothes, much the worse for wear, scratched from dragging trees through the brush. We were triumphant and happy because we had almost certainly saved our forest from wildfire.

And that look I didn't recognize at the age of 13 - the look of something extra, a sort of uninhibited wacky confidence? Beer!