Sun of Godzilla
Staggered downstairs into the kitchen for a bite to eat, and thru the windows saw a strange, orange yellow red glow growing swiftly on the horizon. Forgot all about nom nom nomming on a post-midnight snack. Felt confused. Fear came alive as I watched the weird glow expand into a raw, giant, golden, Godzilla cloud.
Big windows looked west from the great, long hill in North Seattle called Phinney Ridge. I currently abide there within an old, dilapidated house built over a century ago. Shared it with two other single, divorced guys, too, plus two elderly brothers down below in the daylight basement. From an old, grandma kitchen we could look west over the top of Ballard across the Salish Sea into the Olympic Mountains. The United States of America maintained one of the world’s largest stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons right in the guts of Cascadia just over there across the water from Seattle.
There I stood in my underwear with my hair all stuck up crazy in the air. The clock on the wall showed twas a little past one in the morning. Gazed upon a nuclear explosion rising up from the secret, underground Trident submarine base the U.S. Navy keeps over there on the edge of the Hood Canal. The Hood isn’t a canal at all, but a type of fiord, a mostly submerged, deep-water fiord carved during the last Ice Age. It’s a large, colon-shaped extension of the Salish Sea and curls thru the eastern edges of the Olympic Peninsula.
“What in the world?” I thought to myself and muttered a short chain of profanities.
It was too late to do anything even duck under the kitchen table. The thermonuclear monster would boil up into the atmosphere, melt away my eyeballs and anyone else’s who dared looked the Monster in the mouth. The blast wave would flash out in a gigantic burst and cave the house in upon me. I fully expected to be shredded by an aerial tsunami of splintered wood, jagged glass, and broken metal as my remains were obliterated beneath soaring, roaring mushroom clouds.
Monsters from our Ancestors for today, tonight, and tomorrow.
Wait…I should be dead already, but I’m not. No sound. No pulse. No rush. No imploding house. Still on my feet, too. The earth didn’t even shake. There was only one giant, glowing mushroom cap dome forming. Not numerous columns of roiling stellar brilliance and demonic smoke surging upwards into churning radioactive clouds from multiple nuclear warheads. No atomic mushroom cloud after all. It was the Moon.
Luna was enlarged and waxing gibbous. Yes, waxing all gibbified cuz I looked up the current phase of the Moon. An optical illusion of sorts was formed by the Moon rising from behind an unusually thick mass of fog heavy upon the Sound. Luna appeared to push and rise up as a giant, radioactive dome in the same manner a bent-over Godzilla would stand up in full, massive domination of the world. I felt relief upon the realization there were not any nuclear attacks going on. Felt amusement at my overactive, history-&-current affairs influenced imagination. Clearly I’m scarred from the nightmares of the Cold War. Now the Second Cold War stumbles on in full ignorance, dread, ill-preparedness, naiveté, and, yes, stupidity. At least we weren’t being invaded by conquerors and destroyers from Outer Space. The melancholy demons of Inner Space are bad enough.
But, oh, twas only moonrise. For it was only the Moon.
Luna madness
Wait! Wait! Hold on, now. The Moon usually rises in the east and sets in the west. Right? Or left? Planet Earth rotates faster on its axis than Luna revolves around us. Depending on being at higher latitudes the appearance of moonrise and moonset changes location but not direction of passage. I’m at 47.61° in latitude. What, then accounted for the weird optical illusion, if what I witnessed in the middle of the night was indeed an illusion? I saw this enormous glowing dome rise up from the area where the Bangor submarine base is (or was, as it was merged with Bremerton into the greater Naval Base Kitsap back in 2004). Bangor’s at 47.42°, by the way. The Moon appeared to rise from the Salish Sea in front of the Olympic Mountains. That’s impossible, of course.
This certainly was not any thermonuclear blast nor a UFO or UAP. Clearly the Moon…but in the wrong place. I was indeed wide awake, and I do not drink alcohol or smoke pot. Stopped those habits long ago.
All I can think is an illusion was generated by the light of Luna somehow being reflected back and forth by layers of clouds, open water, and icy, snow-covered mountains serving as lens to project an image from the sky, hidden by dark clouds, down towards the surface. There the reflection appeared behind the lower clouds and fog over the water and against the flanks of the east-facing Olympics. As Luna sank in the west behind the Olympics, the reflection somehow bounced from higher clouds down to the water, against other clouds, and off the mountains. All physics of light refraction. Yes? No? Does this make sense? Or perhaps I felt hyper alert but my mind misinterpreted the data my limited biological senses zipped to my brain. Or…maybe there really is a Godzilla!
Zounds! Feel free to comment below.
William Dudley Bass
Friday 8 November 2019
Wednesday 11 December 2019
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol
Notes on images: The two fotos of atomic bomb explosions are free pictures downloaded from the web and edited in iPhoto. The third foto, “Luna madness,” is one I cropped from a picture I shot in a smokestorm darkening the Pacific Northwest on the night of the 4th of September 2017.
Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.