My relationship (what I might steal most easily, if I were an author) with Rip Van Winkle might be more like the part of old Peter Vanderdonk, a character in that story who "assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill Mountauns had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half Moon, being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise and keep a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain, and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder." (p. 17). When I hear thunder, though, I am reminded of how much it sounds like a distant echo of bombing in the mountains where I heard my first B-52 bombing strike, near An Lao northwest of Bong Son in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam almost 33 years ago. Other people might have different associations for thunder, but the link to Rip Van Winkle remains uncanny.