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It wasn't going to be easy, living in a police state, but he saw how it would go.

He'd have to construct a mental wall, a way of keeping what he knew suppressed, and work on developing a long-range view, a hopeful, enlightened vision for his and everybody else's future. He'd also have to shut up if he wanted to enjoy what was left of his rights. That was the really weird part, not being able to talk or write freely about what he believed. This could spark a return to oral tradition, he mused. How else to keep something precious except inside one's own head?

He felt himself slipping back in time. Maybe if he went back far enough, he'd notice where the train had jumped the tracks, and then when he advanced again he could leave a sign for others. "DON'T turn here!," or something like it, would do. Anything to reverse the nightmare in some alternative reality, if there was one.

The line between corporate interests and government, never boldly drawn, was now all but erased: Microsoft and the United States Department of Justice, allies! This was as chilling to the heart of a Mac devotee as the assault on the Bill of Rights was to any citizen with a love of history and enough smarts to care. No, it didn't take a genius to figure out where all this was headed.

Microsoft planned to have a piece of every Internet transaction. Microsoft produced bloated, buggy code. Microsoft had made enemies of thousands of highly-skilled afficionados who hacked their way through every loophole to embarrass the company or make political points. Now there was a law on the books that equated malicious hacking with terrorism. Investigation of claimed incidents of Web site tampering against Microsoft, for example, would take place in a surrealist realm of unrestrained electronic snooping, break-ins, and secret detentions. The wording of the law was so vague that even hostile emails could be construed as intending to cause damage. Harlan Ellison couldn't have written a better doomsday scenario, he thought, though not even the blackest fantasy writer could have predicted how easily the takeover was effected. He grimaced at the memory, then turned to other matters. Life would go on, after all, and anything was possible.

Tentatively then, and with an eye toward the window, he began his "GRACK!" column. At any moment he could be interruped by his neighbor Wiz bringing news that today's wood run was "on." Naturally he hoped it was not (his limbs still ached from yesterday's efforts), but it needed to be done and he would do it. The gorgeous, dry, sunny 70 degree November days couldn't last forever, and the Forest Service firewood permits expired on New Year's Eve. The permit was only $10 and allowed the bearer to harvest 5 cords of standing or fallen dead timber from the Carson National Forest. To his way of thinking, this was almost free fuel.

Free fuel! Like sunshine... Pour a little water and a lot of sun on the higher mesas and mountainsides, wait a generation or two, and piñons and juniper would dot the landscape. Here and there a few would die: cut them down and split them up, toss the chunks into your stove and stand back! There seemed to be as many BTUs in a stick of seasoned piñon as in a similarly-sized chunk of fissionable material, he laughed to himself, remembering the first and last time he foolishly stoked a wood stove with 100 percent piñon. That episode had been resolved by the extremely judicious application of cold water squirted through the cracked firebox door with an old ear-cleaning syringe. The sad tale of the Texan up at Angel Fire who tried the same thing with a full bucket had taught him that much, at least.

"Sunshine!"

"Free fuel!"

"Open source!"

"Free speech!"

Were these heresies now, he wondered, the open impulse to trust, love, and share replaced with fear, hate, and stinginess? He had more faith in humanity than to believe that. On the other hand, the rich were now attacking the poor, and being raised on Bible stories, Robin Hood, the American Revolution, and the Lone Ranger had led him to expect more than merely toeing the line. Something was out of whack, for sure. Even his beloved Macs were biting back through the obscured complexity of buried Unix. Sacrificing one's sacred origins was the theme of the day, and he wondered where it would lead.

At least the wood was free, what they were able to get. Most of the afternoon the day before had been spent field-dressing their respective chainsaws, one of which suffered from a mysteriously too-long chain and the other which refused to start. But that piñon! And to reach the distant slopes where cutting was allowed, they'd driven miles across stupendous vastness and crossed a 600-foot-deep gorge. The trip alone was worth the sore arms and bruises. He'd stepped in fresh elk poop and day-old bear scat. He'd gazed at distant snow-capped peaks. He'd marveled at the utter silence when the cutting stopped. No sound, no dwellings, no other people. What could possibly improve on this, he asked himself?

Well, for one thing, inner knowledge and an extra helping of compassion (it was easy to trust one's fellow man when no one was around, but in a crowd he always knew which pocket his wallet was in). And sitting that evening in front of the kiva fireplace, he knew: give everyone a kiva, ho-ho! Give everyone a taste of piñon! It smelled so good and burned so well, he wanted nothing more than to make fires all day long. That and play with his Macs, anyway. He'd gladly run his computers on wood, he grinned to himself, at least if he could keep gathering piñon under a clear blue sky in a land where everyone had an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He asked out loud, and lo, the column was done. Now to commit his insights to memory and move on, he vowed. Somewhere, sometime, someone would want to know what it was like once, and he would tell them.

[But you never heard that from me!]

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr knows a lot and has seen just about everything but still doesn't pay enough attention to what's important in everyday life. (See if you can do better. :-)

The new GRACK! Update mailing list is now operational. To receive your own weekly notice of new column postings, just CLICK HERE and send a blank email.

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.

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