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Jay Meehan: What goes around

Jay Meehan, Park Record columnist

"Well, I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in

And you know it blows right through me like a ball and chain."

~ Bob Dylan "Brownsville Girl"

They arrive over elastic timeframes, showing up in non-linear succession, current events triggering memories nestled in the foggy past. It’s all about cycles and history getting right in your face. I become, in the Vonnegut sense, unstuck in time.

Cases in point this week tended to involve wildland fire, a possible hurricane developing in the central Pacific, and a much-anticipated film on the birth of "gangsta rap." Who needs threads of continuity anyway? Play it as it lays, I say!

Recent firestorms across the West, including my old stomping grounds in the Panhandle of Idaho on the 105th anniversary of the 3,000,000-acre "big burn," have been grabbing me by the lapels and shaking me senseless on an almost daily basis.

News of wildland firefighter fatalities, as those surrounding the Twisp River fire in north central Washington state, never fail to trigger an inner rage as they also most certainly did back in 1990 when two Heber City firefighters were caught by a sudden wind shift — or as combustion psychologists like to refer to it, a change in "fire behavior."

Memories of spending nights curled up with my trusty "Pulaski" on various fire lines throughout the Coeur d’Alene National Forest in north Idaho during that far away summer of ’61 repose just below the surface. Moments that began a scant one-week removed from high school graduation in LA but light-years distant endorphin-wise.

As opposed to the crews frantically rushing about hauling equipment within the chaos of this summer’s white-hot maelstrom, what I recall most vividly is the serenity that lay upon the land between blowups. We were teenagers and bulletproof and felt lucky to have the work. Even the explosions inherent to wood radically combining with oxygen couldn’t tarnish our newly discovered sense of adventure.

Next up were reports late last week of a tropical depression with hurricane potential adopting a similar directional model to the 1992 path of Iniki which had made a hard right turn west of Big Island before smashing into Kauai as a Category 4. To this day, the word Iniki still shivers the timbers of anyone with connections to the Garden Isle.

With both a drop in intensity and a slight northwesterly directional shift that has waylaid Hurricane worries for the moment, all of the islands continue to get hammered by rain with flash flood warnings posted throughout the state. I have a feeling that the normally idyllic Wailua Falls is a gusher these days.

While family and friends had hunkered down in basements and doorways wearing bicycle helmets and mattresses, Iniki pretty much had its way with Kauai, ripping away roofs if not blowing houses down. Recent online images of the Wailua River which drains Waialeale, the wettest spot on earth, show a quite-muddy footprint where it enters the ocean.

One would imagine that there’s probably not a whole lot of water skiing or guided trips up to the Fern Grotto taking place but you never know. Historically, even nature has had its hands full keeping the Terheggen clan off the water.

The third intrusion into what I laughingly refer to as my consciousness was the recent release of the film "Straight Outta Compton," an LA community I became quite familiar with during the latter half of the sixties.

Now, I should mention at the outset that the film didn’t trigger any memories, other than architecturally. With or without AK-47s, bungalows are bungalows. The Compton I knew, however, the integrated middle-class community just down Long Beach Boulevard from where the Meehans had landed in Lynwood, wasn’t the one depicted in the film.

By the time the rap group NWA had formed and release the iconic LP that first introduced "gangsta rap" into the vernacular and gave the film its title, I had gotten straight outta LA and straight outta Park City and straight outta Woodland and straight "overta" Heber.

Anyway, I totally loved the film and, if not for an impending concert later that evening, would have stayed and experienced it all over again. No doubt, it’ll be quite some time before the celluloid depictions of Eazy-E and Dre and Ice Cube and the rest dissolve into a final credit scroll. The mark they left is rather indelible.

Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for more than 40 years.

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