Some of you may know my guilty secret that in the morning, I listen to country radio for an hour or so while I am on my daily walk.  The morning show hosts on 99.5 are quite funny, but I’ve also realized that their brief news bulletins are almost my only source of mass-media current events, since I do not watch any television or read newspapers.  I heard about Hurricane Katrina on that station.

And this morning, I heard about the Wolf Point meteor.  The information is still sketchy, but there was enough to make me realize how much I unconsciously rely on our mild West Coast climate to protect us from disaster.  There is so little to worry about here in Oregon … there’s no extreme weather, we don’t have major earthquakes.  Mount St. Helens was a bizarre aberration, but in general … I don’t worry.  I’m sure that people in Montana didn’t worry, either.   But death raining from the sky isn’t the type of natural disaster that geography protects anyone from.

And yet, to be immediately killed in the H-bomb-like impact of a meteor seems a strangely merciful way to die.  Those thousands of people were the lucky ones.  What must it be like, trying to avoid fiery debris, hiding in cellars wondering what will hit next?  After St. Helens, I remember everyone wore surgical masks to filter out the ash.  How many people, in how many states, will be trying to figure out how to breathe while the dust is still in the air?  Protected as we are here by the Rocky Mountains, it may not reach us.  Another reason to be grateful that I live in Oregon. 

Some legends of King Arthur say that Excalibur was forged from “sky-dropped metal” — meaning that it was mined from a meteor.  The sword was particularly sacred to the Druids because the Goddess Earth had not been raped in order to create it.  We seem so far from these quaint tales … too far to see anything good in the random fall of destruction from the sky.

Two thousand years from now, I wonder what people will make of the Wolf Point site.  Perhaps some miracle will arise, legendary as King Arthur is to us now. 

Another Oregon resident’s thoughts