Papering together a shaky rescue plan

“Wake up Jim,” rumbled Dave’s voice, “There’s been a major earthquake! Swallowed a whole train, it did. Caboose trailed down last. Now, I am wedged here, inside your newspaper van, just on the other side of the chasm in Shoshone. No one can trek through.” I’m surprised the cell phone even works.”
“What are we gonna do? First I better freshen up and fix a cup of coffee –that is, if the water pressure is still pumped up. Call me back in the shower in five minutes, Dave, sometimes I find the best solutions beneath the eternal waterfall.”
Man, I just knew that another unforeseeable thing was going to happen. Seems like these catastrophes always take place on dark Tuesdays. The stock market crash, 9-11, newspaper trucks swal-lowed up by blizzards and whatnot.
The cell phone vibrated again. “Dave, I’ve thought this over; how’s your gas by the way? Running on empty? Oh yeah, your United Oil card is only valid at the Cenex on this rich side of the tracks. Just a breath away too. Do they seem open? Are people fanatically crashing the gates for gas or anything yet? Okay, I will gather up fifty stout men, along with their rigs, some come-alongs, ladders and other cowboy stuff. We will breach this dam quagmire. After all, it’s only an earthquake. It’s not like Hailey’s comet bopped us upside the head or anything.
Maybe I should Google Earth in real time. See if it’s showing any other crack ups that we should know about. But would the transportation department update Idaho that fast? Holy Katrina! When roads get sealed by avalanches in our state, we merely rely on the good fortitude of the next snowplow driver to post a “Road Closed” sign on his way to till people out from their brief ice ages.
“Dave, I’ll call our offices to send men around to the major stops and post the main stories up from the Internet onto bulletin boards around town- until our trucks can get here.”
“Dave we’re heading down, I think we can bridge this prob-lem with the tools we have. Have you felt any aftershock trem-blers?”
What’s that? Another train just pulled up, to the twisted tracks? You don’t say? When the conductor peered into the chasm, -as he was peaking off the Perrine Bridge- his wig broke a flipping record.













Our fifty stout men bridged together a Rube Goldberg contrap-tion of pulleys and boards across a shorter span of the universal chasm. We rolled papers along the ditch line, while adjacent res-cue workers familiarized themselves with mining equipment to probe for the long gone train. Without waiting for FEMA’s ap-proval, we sank bolts from the blue into solid lava rock outcrop-pings, reopening the lifeline for crucial freight to transport to-wards trucks, idling by newly appointed North & South poles of Shoshone. Some of the iron men were former pirates, used to working under shaky conditions and happy to come out of retire-ment to save the day. They stayed back and helped the other ma-rooned newspaper cross the chasm; helping them to avoid spiral-ing into the thin air of advertisers’ demands for refunds.
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I stumbled into the boss this morning, after we finished dis-tributing the consuming news wraps. He asked if there were any problems with the earthquake. “None that we couldn’t handle”, I said, “Just like we’ve been saying all along -our circulation guys & gals are miracle workers. However, I do suggest that we look into opening a third office in Bellevue. Further from Mount Saint Helens you know. Where do we want to be in five years anyhow, with what’s likely to play out geographically in our valley?”
In the meantime, stay tuned for next weeks paper. I’ve glimpsed a sneak preview of an earth shattering front page story.