et me tell you what the wildfires of Montana look like from above: not what you think. From 35,000 feet, the altitude of our airliner last week, fingers of smoke far below clawed at the air from five or six distinct patches of white, which could seem like hands. Each was a separate conflagration. Otherwise, no hint of flame was visible, nothing red, as we'd imagined, nor blazing tongues licking through the treetops. Only smoke. Thinking of the old saying, the fires were our deduction. Yet the mere sight of white on green sparked a feeling for the world that makes us sit here again looking for words by which to measure the rare emotion of such direct experience.
From the air the northwestern forests seem like so much uninhabited wilderness, but we knew from summer news bulletins that teams of men and women were down there with shovels and saws, working to contain some of perhaps 30 fires across 600,000 acres in Montana alone. The moving perch of our airplane was giving us a safe glimpse of an earthly horror, however natural, that we had been seeing in our mind's eye for weeks.
Though only smoke, the sight stimulated a first real sense of the heat and combustion, the explosions of dry wood and leaves, the herds of panicked animals, the soot-stained firefighters just ahead of the searing wind. Only smoke, yet that quite specific indication of what we had been reading about in the paper or viewing on the evening news raised the question of our normally abstract relationship to momentous events.
Wars, earthquakes, plagues, the sinking of a nuclear submarine, say, or even an election campaign - the things that make for history go on at remove from us. Indeed that distance from the provincial and mundane boundaries of our own lives seems essential to the gravity of such ''news.'' But that gravity, ironically, has a kind of weightlessness about it when measured from afar.
Why else can we read reports of vast hunger or unchecked illness - Clinton in Africa today - and take no action for the suffering people? Momentous events experienced at remove, oddly, are both more significant and less real than what we see with our own eyes or hear with our own ears.
As a boy - and this reverses the point of view with which I began - I would go out into the yard at night to scan the starry sky for the one star that moved. I was looking for Sputnik, the Russian satellite, and until I saw it actually there,threading its way through the throng of motionless pin-pricks of light, like some divine watchman's flashlight, I did not believe - really believe - anything of what I'd heard. But the sight of Sputnik, beheld with my own eyes, not only brought the doomed cosmonaut-dog alive, and the entire project of space travel; it also made the very existence of the monstrous Soviet Union so palpable that I could feel afraid of it for the first time. When in that season American leaders warned that Nikita Khrushchev wanted to kill us and could, the stamp of Sputnik on our own senses made the threat real.
Now there is every reason to believe that Khrushchev's successors want nothing of the kind, yet how does that changed situation impinge on what our current obsession with national missile defense, say, suggests is an unchanged American mind?
If we could have drawn close enough to that sunken Russian submarine last week to have our own sense impression of the disaster, instead of filtered news accounts that emphasized the callousness and xenophobia of Russian leaders, could it have been a felt epiphany, perhaps, of the rank desperation of ordinary Russians?
What will it take for a booming America to grasp the terror, panic, and despair of a nuclear-ridden nation for which the word boom equally applies - but in the exact opposite way? What will it take, that is, for America to get serious about shutting down Cold War arsenals at home and abroad before they explode?
See how the mind of this child of Sputnik winds round to the old problem again and again. I acknowledge the monotony of this column's nuclear preoccupation, without apologizing for it. In booming America, the nuclear threat is the ultimate abstraction, which is why, once again, we can risk, with the national missile defense program, the re-ignition of a nuclear arms race.
There was nothing abstract in the fate of the crew of the Kursk, but on the evening news an ocean away it could feel like the benign nightmare of H.G. Wells, or like the morality tale of someone else's failure, as if the Cold War had deadened places in the Russian heart, but not ours.
If the metaphysics of mortality were such that now the dead Russian submarine could be seen tracking across the night sky, a warning light of the gods of war, the meaning of such news might register as something real, like the conflagrations of Montana glimpsed from above. Smoke means the forests are on fire: clear enough. Alas, shy of critical mass, the physics of nuclear reaction are invisible. So, too, apparently, is reactionary politics. But arsenals of nuclear weapons, whether rotting in Russia or re-armed in Washington, mean the planet itself is ablaze beneath its crust. We just don't see it yet.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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