Night light

The flight was uneventful -- aside from meeting a fellow traveler with a dream job (he's a short-hop pilot around the islands in farthest Maine, and finally explained to me how helicopters work) and a soldier back from Iraq (I bought him a beer and he was glad to know I thought he ought to come home for good).

The fireworks started later, about two miles away.

It was 10:30 last night, and the power went out, the sky lit up and even inside the house it sounded as if someone had powered up Frankenstein's zapping, humming generator.

At first I thought a squirrel had self-immolated on our transformer. But there were no sparks in the woods, and the sky was flashing green, then blue, then red, all to that wild zapping hum -- and then lots of sirens.

No radio, no phone, no nothing -- and if it was the chemical plant down the road going up, I wanted to know about it and prepare to make tracks. So Robert and I pulled on some clothes, pried the gate and garage door open and went out to investigate. He was hoping it was a UFO.

We passed a carload of neighbors who told us U.S. 11 -- the old Cherokee Warpath -- was closed, so we turned around and went the back way to the little county road south of us.

Turned out a big substation two or three miles away had burned itself out spectacularly -- one of our local stations posted this cellphone picture sent in by a viewer -- and a sheriff on the way to the scene southbound had collided with a motorist escaping the fireworks northbound (just minor scrapes), so the highway was filled with fire trucks, ambulances, other cops.

The power came back about 3, with Robert still dreaming of ET.