It happened on July Fourth...

My own private airshow

It was one of those evenings for the ages.

Sunset. July 4. The verdant and purple mountains gobbled down a blazing ball of red to the west. It seemed as if the earth paused expectantly at the crescendo of the year, the latest twilight, the longest afternoon. Nighthawks darted silent overhead, feasting on a banquet of bugs. A hermit thrush sung ever briefly from its perch high and deep in the woods, as if to put a perfect coda on the day.

But there was more soon to come.

The air lay in a curiously light gentle dry blanket upon the land. Cool, balmy and light Canadian zephyrs wafted in from the distant hills of New Hampshire and beyond, not that usual heavy damp draft, laden with southern humidity, of most Independence Day weekends.

While embalmed in this pleasant stasis, I sensed, then felt, then heard, a deep rumble from high in the heavens. My vision lifted to the sky and was greeted with the approach of four military aircraft. Their intensely dark angular but sleek shapes perfectly matched the growing and soon monstrous, marvelous thunder in my ears -- from engines built for war and fettered only by the restraint of their pilots. In apparent slow motion, these ponderous and powerful machines now reconnoitered, pinwheeled, banked and lazily loitered right over my house, no less than a hundred feet up. The marker lights on their wing tips glowed brilliantly like sparks of burning magnesium.

As if on cue, I found myself snapping to attention and offering up a salute. In spite of myself, I felt a sense of national pride, a surge of good old American testosterone, as I saw close hand what billions upon billions of national defense dollars can create.

For a few moments we – I and this quartet of technology almost beyond my imagining – seem to eye each other with curious caution. I well knew they could – in a trice – convert my quiet humble and modest reality to a smoking hole in the ground, with a merest fingertip motion. Perhaps they in turn wondered about this miniature man on a white flat roof, nested in a forest and unusual from the air.

But before I knew it this rare moment of equilibrium passed. These four sinister, sinuous birds of prey took their leave due east. For they had an Independence Date with destiny over the Charles River and the Hatch Shell. All that was left was a faint perfume of jet fuel and an echo that rumbled and rolled off the hills to the west. And then receded into a deep growling whisper. Was it just my imagination or did one of these aerial gladiators tip his wings in acknowledgment to my salute as he departed?

I was about to clamber slowly down in the gathering dusk from my roof top vantage point when Nature proved it always has the last word. Levitating up through a sea of leaves came a tiny hummingbird to put on a little airshow of its own.

Barely bigger than a bumblebee, it hovered, it darted pugnaciously, it hung in mid air as if the law of gravity had been repealed. Then with an iridescent flash of green and red, it spun on a dime and zoomed out of sight in a flash, as if to squeak:

“Hey! Look at me! Look at me! I’m a fly boy too!!”

2005