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It happened today, right in front of my second-floor window at work. I heard it before I saw the closing seconds of the collision, several thousand pounds of asphalt-filled truck slamming up onto a sidewalk, yanking out a tree and tossing it like a caber; the final result ending with grass, fuel, oil and antifreeze tossed everywhere and another tree jammed through the truck's hood.

People from all over the newsroom wedged themselves into my cubicle, craning their necks to get a view of something so jarring and frightening, a metal fist of a vehicle at rest on our front stoop after clawing up pavement, sod and a bike rack now-twisted like an abused paperclip.

When I heard the collision, rather when I heard it coming and my brain lit up a warning sign that something terrible was coming (as you would when you suddenly hear screeching brakes and you wait for the unholy sound of metal crunching), I went cold, projecting the worst. Truck bomb. Driven by a zealot to crash through the glass facade of the entrance. A cargo of explosives. Semtex. C-4. Wired to a remote device. Akin to Lebanon in 1983. A truck bomb hitting a marine base and more than 200 U.S. troops killed in one hideous detonation.

This was it, I thought. The first attack in the next wave. A newspaper. Why not? Primitive kind of information warfare. Blow up the newspaper and TV stations, the prime sources of news in troubling times. Leave the natives in the dark. Isn't commandeering media outlets the first step when attacking a nation?

A tooth-rattling boom as the truck finished jumping the curb and twisted like it was trying to skid on a path of ice. I next imagined the explosion from the bomb hidden under the layer of asphalt, sending the black rock up and out, a wave of shrapnel riding the wave of the sonic blossom from the blast. The 10-foot-high picture window inches from my nose burst into pieces from the force and thrown grit, raining over me in a million razor-sharp teardrops. I'm simply shredded from the force, chunks of skin popping off me, followed by blood and the death of little cuts.

But it never came. Instead, a man clad in a black jeans and a black shirt ambled out of the cab, clutching a cell phone, calling back to the home office before someone else did so, cued by the "How I'm Driving?" bumper sticker.

And so, life spared, I thought about a tree I had on my L-shaped corner lot when I was growing up, and how one day it had to come down. It wasn't the designated climbing tree of our house; it didn't have the easy history of having birds in a nest or the time we nursed a squirrel back to health and then let it loose when it was better. The squirrel bolted up the climbing tree and then got stymied by birds protecting a nest. Our neighbors' dogs from across the street spotted the squirrel and bolted to our front yard, barking at the knobby base of the climbing tree. The poor trapped squirrel leaped off a branch, dodging birds and above the jumping, yapping maw of the German Shepherds, making to safety on the nearby tree...the tree that would someday come down for some reason. For that one day, that squirrel was thankful for that relief, that escape hatch, growing silently all those years and being the right height at the right time. The squirrel leaped, action-hero style, bounded a couple times on the bark, and ran for protection in another locale.

And one day sometime in the future, the tree was gone, leaving behind a tan, pulpy stump as a memorial.

It took about six hours to clean up the mess in front of our building. It took the police about 30 minutes to respond to our calls, longer for the fire department. From behind my window, the fire department workers in their thick tan coats and the blue-draped police standing on the crust of this accident pie scuttled around, spraying a white foam that turned the dirt into a sickly caramel, melting into the slices in the sod. It was my own emergency-response ant colony at work, seeing tiny men push brooms and chop of the dislocated trees. Soon, the tow truck came in to pull the dead mastodon out of the mud. The street was cleaned again, and traffic returned. Tomorrow, it'll be a memory. A shared history. Even a passing joke, told with levity afforded with an incident where no one was hurt.

Still, you have to admit, this was one place you didn't want to have a massive screw-up: In front of a newspaper. It's like robbing an armored car right in front of a police station.

Today's Word: Vapor.

From One Word

Fumes, perfume. The odor of any object, a ghost of scents. The state between liquid and gas. Planes slicing trails in the sky, giving the earthbound a tell-tale trace of where aviation has been. Water and mist cascading in the hot summer air, evaporating in heat and bliss. Up to the sky and back to us in rain.

P.S.
The photo at top was taken by Jeff Larsen, a staff photographer. Sorry for any by-proxy credit I may have stolen from Mr. Larsen.