A Sad Day in the Neighborhood
News Carson City has a brief report about arson and a missing boy. The folks involved are my next door neighbors on both sides of me. The fires happened at the house to the north and the missing boy was from the house to the south. I never knew the boy, but that is not surprising with the hours that I have to keep.
During the evening my attention was drawn to the activity of the fire fighters. I was first told that they would be done with what they had to do in about an hour. Well, as it turned out they weren't done until many hours later due to the additional fires. Later, and perhaps while the fire fighters were still doing their work, a caravan of trucks drove up which really caught my eye. I first thought that someone further down the street was throwing one huge party to draw in so many vehicles all at once. It did become apparent some hours later that there was no party and that these folks were searching for the boy. This was also the first I'd heard about a boy being missing, and the time was now around 3 am. Danny and I both briefly spoke with the searchers as they'd wondered if the kid could be hiding in our garage or in my car underneath a down throw that I keep in it. I explained to them that our garage was always locked with a deadbolt and that I never left my car unlocked. It was highly unlikely that the boy was hiding in either place.
Not long after that a huge helicopter came in from the east and began the aerial search for the boy over the many open fields of sagebrush that we have here. The coyotes were howling too so there was really a lot of noise.
About 4 am our neighbor two houses to the north was on the phone with us as he'd been woken up by the chopper. That was when I found out that it was the shed that had burned (I'd previously thought it was the master bedroom of the house and I didn't find out until this morning that more had been burned when I took a look at the online version of the Nevada Appeal). Anyway, this was all happening in the middle of my day so I wasn't kept awake by the noise, and I can tell you it was really, really noisy with the chopper flying around and around and low to the ground until daybreak.
At the time of this writing, all appears to have finally settled down around here. The dozens of trucks and cars have left for the most part, although there may be one or two out of my line of sight. Rich likely has a load of paperwork to do if he had proper insurance on his stuff that was damaged and/or destroyed. Personally, I won't miss the noisy Mustang but that's just me not liking anything noisy. I've got a backyard now filled with footprints from the hiking boots that the searchers wear and wonder how long before the winds we get here will simply erase them into oblivion.
Why the boy did what he did is really anyone's guess. I have a few opinions without even having known the kid, but they're best left unsaid.
