Sparks from the page

I love the sparks a book page can set off, conjuring distant memory, moments that suddenly rise as clear as morning.
I'm reading through Tim Egan's "The Good Rain" - that sum of the Northwest soul - on a page where he talks of Justice William O. Douglas:

"....a thin-haired noodle of a man who favored lonely alpine meadows and young wives, was that rare breed from another time, the Renaissance Man of the American West:  lawyer, author, outdoorsman, lover."

And that passage rolled the screen far back to the summer of 1973.  Bill Dorsey, with camera, and myself drove early - perhaps 4am - over the big mountain past Sunrise and down to Goose Prairie to the mountain home of Justice Douglas who, that August 4th morning, was to rule on President Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia.
Being young - near rookies of journalism - we imagined we might get an advance, an exclusive interview.  Innocents on the road......

So I knocked on that prairie door, unannounced, but beyond a few words with Mrs. Douglas (nee the young Cathy Heffernan) and a glimpse of Douglas himself (scowling a few feet away), we didn't get much more than a shot of the cabin, set in a great meadow east of Mt. Rainier.

We drove, disappointed, on down to the federal courthouse in Yakima where later that same day Douglas ordered an immediate halt to the bombing, setting in motion a momentary Constitutional crisis.
Before we got home, though, the rest of the Supreme Court - voting 8-0 by phone - reversed Douglas, but Bill and I - years later - still remembered that journey as a piece of history traveled - a moment remembered again today by that passage in Tim's book.

So read on - we never quite know where it will lead, or what it may provoke.  That's the wonder of the written word......