Terrorism?

It was a beautiful, clear and temperate midwinter's day and I was on my way to photograph items for an auction when I noticed out the window that a firetruck was maneuvering to block Main Street in front of my house. Thinking that perhaps my property was aflame and I hadn't yet noticed it, I joined every body and soul in the neighborhood out on the street.

No fire, thank the Goddess. But more police and firetrucks than we see on these empty streets on the edge the prairie in a month of winter Sundays.

Word travels faster than a spark in fire season. As houses near the center of the hamlet where I live were evacuated, the 90 year-old man just down the street sat in his car just south of what had been designated as the "safe line," allowing to anyone that would listen that all the hubbub might be a response to a hot check he had written.

No hot check.

Another neighbor invaded my yard where half the town had come to watch the spectacle unfolding down the block. This man is not the doofus he sounded when he announced in a booming drawl to the gathering crowd that maybe "they" (the United States gov'ment?) had found Osama bin Laden hiding in our Post Office. That drew a collective laugh, second only to the one that rolled from the crowd when a certain blonde, middle-aged woman rolled by in a beat up SUV with a bad exhaust and called out the window that no doubt whatever was happening was a plot by Hillary Clinton. I shook my fist at her and she went on her merry way.

What was happening was a bomb scare. Yup. Right here in River City, where we have barely recovered from the guy back in March who stalked the streets with an automatic weapon shouting, "Somebody's gonna die tonight." Here we were again, though, on the evening news.

Turns out it wasn't just a scare. Two apparent pipe bombs were found at the local car wash despite the fact that the emergency pager said there might be a pipe bomb in the Post Office. I have it on good authority that one of the makeshift bombs was big enough to impact a 300 feet area. The bombs may have been only partially completed. One contained black powder but the substance inside the other has yet to be identified. Maybe one had a fuse but the other didn't. Neither were capable of remote detonation, meaning they would have to be lit, or perhaps shot at, to ignite. Scary, huh?

I'm sure Osama bin Laden wants to kill Oklahomans, if he knows where we are, just as much as he wants to decimate those folks living on the East Coast. But we aren't that afraid of distant radical Islamists here as we are wary to the bone of home-grown violence. Oklahomans count April 19, 1995, as a day of despair almost equal to September 11th.

One of my professors in college told me once that our blood would run cold if we knew what trafficked along the Mother Road, Interstate I-40 that bisects our state from East to West. I have no doubt that's true.

So were these pipe bombs a random act of misplaced concern? Did some local farmer find them in a ditch far from the heart of my small town, load them on his flatbed simply to clean up and then casually throw them into the refuse bin at the car wash as he went about jetting the mud and manure off his one-ton? Or was someone trying to send us the message that my ex-husband so often reiterates? You are never safe. I will kill you if the opportunity presents, at the moment when you are least likely to expect it.

It's a good bet that we'll never really know.