Boom.

What is it that divides us?  What is it that puts us on opposite sides of the river? What is it that transcends the veil, the veil of death, of darkness, of misunderstanding?

Jets from the coastal naval station flew impossible patterns, criss-crossing one another's paths, flying so near us that we could see the rivets that held these incredible machines together. As children, we watched these air shows daily. We heard them, we felt them.

The jets cosied up to the mountain sides, disappearing; we feared they were gone, crashed, when
suddenly they would swoop up like a hawk, shooting straight upward as a fallen star desperate to return to heaven. They were as a flash, a spark from a far away fire; they moved as light, their silver bodies like herring flitting and turning, diving and floating.

They flew faster than we could speak of it; before we could point and utter, look, look, the boom shook us, thrilled us, awakened in us the desire to let go, to follow them into the heavens and look back upon the earth. Boom. The jet passed through a veil we knew existed but could not see. We heard it; we felt it; we knew it was there.

The veil is open less than a second, two-tenths of a second. Joe Broyles captured that moment after five years of trying. What validation in seeing his image, as if the moments we had felt were confirmed. Seeing this image was like finding a long-buried treasure, a treasure held inside for eons. It spoke to me: I am not crazy. . . .  I did not imagine these things. . . . Those moments were real. . . . They happened. . . .

Some experiences are so incredible that even as we pass through them we question what is real. Yes, these things happened, in less than a blink of an eye.

Then they became myth.