Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

The Circle of Lies

7 pm. The Sheep Meadow, Central Park. The website said this would be a prime place to see the 1000 foot verticle Ring Of Fire over the reservoir. The scene was very idyllic and the park started to fill up with people, all excited and in good spirits.

7:30 pm. Okay, starting to rain a little bit. Nothing bad, though. Then immediately stops. Then little drip drops here and there. I’m sitting on an embankment of large granite rocks with about maybe fifty people behind me. It’s a sloping shelf that gives you a good view of the whole meadow. Then somebody shouted out, ‘Ack!!! Bats!!!’ And there were about seven or eight small bats flying over head. I was pretty impressed how well those little things can fly, since I’m used to seeing only rubber bats in 50s horror movies bobbing up and down on strings. These real bats were doing loops making abrupt nose dives and basically showboating for the crowd. But one swoop got a little too close and everybody on the rocks all screamed in unison. Aaaaaaaahhhh! Somebody shouted, ‘They’ll go away if you throw sand at them!’ But there of course wasn’t any around. With only seconds away from starting, the skies opened up and it started POURING.

Amid the confussion of the deluge, it was like everyone forgot why they were there and so it was kind of shocking when the first group of fireworks went off. Everyone on the rocks, smug with their vista, immediately started running towards the meadow (also full of people), since the explosions were all happening behind us. You couldn’t see any of the fireworks, just hear it. It was actually really scary and confusing.

The main thing was: you couldn’t see shit! There were some scattered green explosions slightly above the tree line in the direction of the reservoir. Then it stopped.

Nobody seemed to think much about it cause it was raining so hard. Like maybe they had to stop it for a second cause of the rain.

Then it stopped completey and everybody just stood around like, ‘c’mon, c’mon… give us the ring of fire….’ Some people started to leave, but mostly, folks were like, no fucking way, we didn’t stand in this rain for THAT. It was pretty sub, sub Macy’s 4th of July fireworks. Ultimately a park ranger type guy came around telling everyone to scram because they were locking up the park. The crowd was getting rowdy. The ranger was getting defensive: ‘well, I was at the reservoir, and I saw action!’ So everybody kind of slumped away, soaking wet, having seen nothing.