It might be construed as a strange miasma for someone whose beloved grandfather was a demolition expert and who’d taken his favorite grandson out onto Alligator Alley during that highway’s construction to let him watch the blasts that turned ancient limestone into rubble and made a bombing range out of an incomparable meadow of grassland beauty. He could still recall being a nine-year-old kid standing in the heat of a Florida summer next to his towering grandfather and hearing the patriarch of his family call out in his booming voice: “Fire in the hole!” The explosion that followed that order seemed to begin as a rumble, a vibration that would start in one’s heels and travel up the ankle and leg bones and somehow settle in a young boy’s chest, tickling his small heart. He would cover his ears, knowing from experience the rip of noise that would then assault them. His grandfather, like all the other men on the job, would simply shade his eyes and look out to the blast site to witness the WHOOMP and the following dirt cloud that signified success.
