Yeah! I'm calling bogus on this. Six hours since the original post and, I do not see a story on this anywhere.
Time for a story.
When I was in my early twenties after I left college for the first time, I worked for a while in the oil fields. One cold winter Saturday morning we were about two and a half hours away from our home base in Sweetwater some ways outside of Aspermont sitting on a sandy bluff above the Cold Fork of the Brazos River. We had driven two and a half hours up there from Sweetwater to replace a defective valve that had shut down a pump jack. A representative of the oil company who had found that dysfunctional pump jack sat up on the ridge in his nice warm pickem up truck, watching our efforts.
Now, he could have taken that valve off with six twists of a cresent wrench and replaced it with six backwards twists of the same with the same valve that we purchased for 75 cents at the hardware store five minutes before it closed at noon back there in Aspermont. After our three man strong crew of two roustabouts and our one requisite tool pusher in our $500.00 per half day bob tail oilfield truck finished performing that delicate procedure, we decided to stop and eat our homemade sandwiches that we had brought with us, there above the Cold Fork of the Brazos River on that bluff. Actually, if we had to be out working on a cold wintry Saturday, it was quite a pleasant place to be. .
We sat there eating our sandwiches and watching the birds soaring over the river in mobs that weaved back and forth, up and down, like sentient amoeboid flocks all of one mind. We turned on the radio. There was only one station on AM that we could barely hear way up there. After a little while, a news bulletin came up on that radio. It spoke incessantly of the invasion of Aliens from outer space in Washington D C and around the world, and ... well it sounded suspiciously to me a lot like a local radio spoof of H G Wells', "The War of the Worlds". But out there on the Brazos ... well, it seemed like the only reality in the world ... for a while, at least.
We listened intently as we munched our sandwiches. We talked about it. And, we were silent as we rode our way over the bumpy sandy, rocky road back out of that desolate ranch land. I am sure that we all were thinking about the world that we knew. Would it still be the same when we got back there? Nothing was said. When we got back to Aspermont, we stopped at the cafe for coffee. We were back. We were back, in the real world as we knew it. I hope that is the way it is with Jeff Leiding ... I hope.
