Great Balls of Fire

On his “Reports from Dark Acres” blog, Bill Vaughn writes entertainingly about how the Great Daylight Fireball of 1972 — which raced from Montana to Washington state on the morning of February 19 that year — saved a giant brown trout from becoming his victim. “First, I’d been caught up in the drugs, high drama and copious sex of the antiwar movement. Then, maybe as punishment, the army drafted me. However, a couple days before I was supposed to report to Fort Lewis, Washington, for boot camp I was informed that my government didn’t want to use me for cannon fodder after all because Richard Nixon had decided to turn over the war to the Vietnamese.”