In the 1950’s I had a boyhood friend named Carl Fatz. Before he lost his leg we often went on fishing adventures together. One spring morning with lilacs still abloom and the fragrance of fertility everywhere his mother dropped us off on a paved road that ran along a mostly private lake on the outskirts of Barrington, Illinois. Access for us was limited to what was reachable from the public highway’s edge.  That particular edge of space in that particular moment of time was the beginning of an adventure that boys of overflowing energy and imagination relish so well. Those edges would somehow hook up with others and revisit me in a moment of insight and meaningfulness a half century later in places as far apart as Twentynine Palms, California and Blacksburg, Virginia.   

        Twentynine Palms is a desert town known for it’s Marine Corps training base and its similarity to the geography and climate of Iraq. The town is situated a short distance above the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park.  Remnants of the old Dale Mining District extend to the east of town, compressed between the northern edge of the park and the southern edge of the base.  It is desolate and can be hazardous to the unwary.  But it also is a source of a very pretty, crystalline form of natural gold.  I was many Jeep trail miles beyond cell phone range at the 2300 foot elevation of a mountain wash on a placer claim.  My nephew, Nathan, was situated about the same elevation at the Virginia Tech campus nestled sleepily on the western flank of the ancient Appalachians.

        The stillness of the Illinois morning gradually gave way to a freshening breeze and the approach of dark thunderheads. Oblivious to these changes, I worked the shoreline with my favorite gold Mepps #2 while Carl tried coaxing a bite near some emerging spring lily pads.  Carl’s mom was not due to pick us up for another few hours.  Fish began rising and swirling further off shore.  Focussed thus, we continued to ignore the wind shifts and gathering turbulence in the atmosphere above.

        Nathan heard the noises made by those first shots fired in his dorm building.  But for him, at that moment, they were not perceived as shots. They came from two stories above where his girlfriend’s dorm room was located. Probably some type of horseplay, he may have thought to himself.   

        It was a Sunday. The mountain wash basked beneath a warm and gentle desert sun.  We had been digging for three days now in a tough, but rich, pay layer.  My partner and I gradually had been accumulating a mildly damp mound of pay dirt and our minds envisioned the potential yield once it was dry enough to run at the end of the weekend or maybe on Monday.  It was about then that I noticed the temperature drop.  This was followed by more edges -- those of grey-bearded clouds pushing in from the northwest.  I thought I heard distant shots being fired. But I was wrong.

        Carl and I noticed that the fish quietly had retreated from the surface zone as wind gusts prickled the water.   Our attention was slapped across the face by a sudden clap of thunder and a few droplets of icy rain.  We gathered our metal tackle boxes and brown paper lunch bags without a further plan.  It was then that I literally felt myself becoming very positive.  The little hairs on my arms as well as the hair on my head seemed suddenly to rise upwards.   The flash and KABOOOOOM were simultaneous. Metal tackle boxes clattered to the ground and our feet propelled us toward a distant farm house through air that reeked of ozone and swirled with hail stones.    

        Nathan was jostled by an e-mail alert.  His RA was advising that all students should remain in their rooms until further notice. Suspicious, he e-mailed queries to acquaintances in his building.   His girlfriend did not respond.    

        The mountain wash suddenly darkened. I scurried to cover my equipment with tarps.  I was in the process of unplugging a 25 foot extension cord that led from my Honda generator to my drywasher blower when the hairs on my arms began to rise up.  A deja vu moment freeze framed me for a micro second. Then I threw down the electrical cord as if it were an angry rattlesnake.  A flash and KABOOOOOM ripped open a sky full of hail stones. I sucked in post-concussion air with an acrid smell/taste of ozone that stung my throat.    A glance told me that my partner, Bob Dunkin, already was clambering into the shelter of my truck some 30 or 40 yards distant near our tents.  I slipped and scrambled across the glistening desert pavement to join him as lines of hail stone drifts began gathering in the strong wind -- like foamy ocean spume.  Bob and I outwardly joked and hee-hawed about our predicament inside the space-time safety zone of the truck.   But inside a different type of zone lodged in a private corner of my consciousness I grimly acknowledged just how close the Reaper once again had come.  More significantly I perceived the vaguest hint of a message -- a forewarning of sorts.

        Exhausted, I backed my sodden load into our driveway north of Los Angeles well past midnight.  The equipment would just have to spend the rest of the night in the truck bed.  Some time early Monday morning Jill whispers me awake. “Don’t you have a nephew who goes to Virginia Tech? Something is happening there.”

        Existential edges were coming together. On goes my Macintosh. The jigsaw puzzle of existence begins to hint at connections and connectedness. Nate has just e-mailed me and others on his e-mail address list. He is barricaded inside his dorm room, but he is okay. A girl has been shot dead on the fourth floor, but his girlfriend is alive and well. Cops in flak jackets are everywhere. There is distant gunfire, but not to worry.

        I lean back until the chair creaks to its limit point. I close my eyes and try once again to connect the fragile lines that mark the edges of our existence. There is meaning to what has happened. I struggle to comprehend the enormity of life and of our fragile place within it, the enormity of our desires and our limited time for achieving them. Nate and I, each in our own ways, have not only tasted of life, but also of the meaning of life. And each will go his own way, connected by the web of these moments, toward an ultimate, unknowable destiny. But the journey now will be a little more special, a little more meaningful.

        Then my fingers begin to type Nathan a reply, the meaning of which is, in part, shaped by a lifelong accumulation of personal edge zone passages. These are to be shared. We are all connected.