Dour clouds skulked low in the sky…..

“A sky like that never brings no good” was the conventional wisdom – except, in this case, in anticipation of the impending storm, school was closed and junior Whipsaw inhabitants liberated for the day.

So it was that Mikey Milcheck, with way too much time on his hands, instigated what came to be known as ‘the Whipsaw Lake incident.’

Michael Milcheck, at the tender age of 11, had already spent the majority of his school life sitting outside the Principal’s Office or, as on this fateful day, playing hooky.

Due, however, to his close attention to Extreme Sports on satellite TV, he was able to correctly identify to Sheriff Redbone that it was a Kawasaki XZ990 snowmobile that flew over his head and exploded in the snow bank on that miserable January morning.

Snug in seclusion behind the Milcheck ice fishing shanty, Mikey was savoring a quick smoke of something recreational when great God Almighty Himself rained down in all His Firey Glory!

Retribution and brimstone were followed, in quick succession, by the smell of sulphur, gasoline, singed flesh  and leather snowmobile suit. Flailing down from above next followed the Devil himself, flames licking around his head and ‘cursing in foreign tongues’ as Michael’s embellishing mother would later add, just for color commentary.

To say it was all a bit of a surprise for Mikey would be, well, a bit of an understatement.

For 5 seconds he considered:

a) if there really was a God

and

b) if He really had decided to fulfill the promise of Mikey’s earthly Father to ‘skin your sorry little ass’ if he ever caught him smoking dope again.

At the 6 second mark, Mikey ran his sorry little ass as fast as his sorry little legs could carry him up the hill out of the Village Park and into to the Whipsaw Bar & Grill.

The Sink Hole, as it was fondly known, was frequented at that mid morning hour by the usual crew of folks with nothing better to do on such a foul weather day, plus those who had no back up generator and just wanted to scrounge hot coffee and check the Weather Channel on the saloon satellite TV.

“Terrorists!” yelled the plucky child, pointing to the Park but still clutching his joint – indicating he had not lost it entirely during this frightful experience. He was particularly proud of this presence of mind ‘under fire’ and always made a point of mentioning it in later life when asked to retell how this all got started.

Conversation paused. Folks turned, looked, …….. then laughter exploded and just as quickly turned back to Jim Cantore describing, with way too much enthusiasm, the collection of ‘upper air disturbances’ about to play their part in the subsequent ‘incident at Whipsaw Lake.’

“Stay tuned, Weather Channel bulletins every hour at 10, 20 minutes past the hour.” The signal went snowy itself,  for just a second, and in the silence came ……..

“Explosion! Fire! Terrorists!” squealed Mikey in a slightly higher pitch and with just enough little catch in his voice that Cliff Swenson, the bar owner, muted the TV and ran to the picture window.

A plume of black smoke could be seen swirling up over the bank as two ‘suspicious characters’ came running toward the front door. Cliff later insisted they were ‘suspicious’ to Sheriff Redbone because they were wearing all white outfits, “matching like, a uniform, with damn strange foreign looking squiggles on the front!”

As the two suited terrorists burst through the bar door they came face to face with Cliff, and his fully loaded 30 Odd Six, plus four upstanding citizens wielding Louisville Sluggers.

It would be hard to say at that moment who looked the more terrified.

And so the stage was set, and the players in motion, for the ‘incident at Whipsaw Lake.’