The man, the myth, the legend … Geoff Newton.
A day that will live in infamy.
Holding on to the roof of the hatchback with my fingers turning white, a notebook clamped between my teeth to keep from swallowing my tongue, I looked fear in the eye and laughed that day.
Or screamed like a little girl with a turbo-wedgie.
Probably the latter.
Geoff Newton, the mad man at the wheel, was driving with one knee, loading his camera with one hand and twirling the dials on his police radio with the other, all while screaming “You’ll never catch me, bastards!!” at the fire trucks which futilely tried to keep up with us as we zigged and zagged down rutted back country roads.
He, an award-winning photographer, was hell-bent to beat everyone to what the radio was describing as a fire of epic proportions.
I, not even an official reporter for the Whidbey News-Times at this point, was hell-bent to keep from remembering my lunch in vivid detail, as I felt it storming up the back of my throat each time the car found the ground long enough to skid.
Mere moments before, we were on a leisurely afternoon drive to interview the new boys’ basketball coach at Oak Harbor High School.
Now we were reenacting “Smokey and the Bandit” … in a car built to go 30.
Holding the line on two wheels, we whipped around a twist in the road, narrowly missing a row of trees and found ourselves at the gates of Hell.
Then Hell went up in a blaze of gunfire.
No mere marshmallow roast, this was a raging inferno, with a house being ripped apart.
Toxic paint and ammo had been stored where the fire started, and they were gettin’ it on at the moment.
Huge clouds of eerily-colored smoke poured out of windows, generally followed by firefighters pouring out of said window.
All around us, gunshots cracked, ping, ping, ping, then a boom lifted part of the roof, which then came crashing back down. Audible profanity could be heard coming from multiple directions.
Geoff, a towering presence in the newsroom and my newspaper idol, strode into Hell with a skip in his step. Crouching in the bushes next to the inferno, he clicked away like a madman, daring the toxic smoke to try and invade his lungs.
The smoke declined the challenge.
Then the owner of the house arrived home and went running past me, screaming about his cat being inside.
The first firefighter missed tackling him, he dodged the second one, but then his foot caught on a loose board and he went face-down like he had been shot, his melon making a squishy sound as he connected with the ground.
Right behind me, up a tree — way up a tree — Sir Wellington, his cat, not being as stupid as the humans, sat passively watching the joint burn down. From his expression, any arson investigation should have started, and ended, with the sassy tabby.
Somewhere a lonely basketball coach sat in an empty gym, wondering why nobody loved him.
In a time before cell phones were giving everyone cancer, I was in a field in the middle of nowhere, flinching in unison at each new blast, along with the veteran fire captain who had set up shop next to me.
“I didn’t flinch! You better not write that, boy! I’m just really itchy today … the wife put too much detergent in my shirts again.”
Then, his foot would take off like a mad man, thumping in place. Apparently the detergent had gotten into his pants, as well.
Hours later, back at the newspaper, I found myself with the first front page story of what has turned into a scatter-shot, on-and-off 23-year newspaper career.
As I pounded away at the computer keys, our editor, Fred Obee, a dead-ringer for Wallace “Inconceivable!” Shawn in “The Princess Bride,” strode by the desk I was using, a lit cigarette already working in his mouth.
Surveying the 45 empty Coke cans scattered around my still-twitchy body, my face smudged with smoke, he laughed.
“First rule of newspaper club, boy. Always pack a clean pair of undies if you’re riding with Newton.”
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