If you go out of Montgomery on 211 towards Middletown and you get to the Wallkill River Bridge just passed the airport and you imagine you are in the 19th Century and all the land is fields with a few big trees on the fence lines and it’s a Sunday. And if you imagine you are there, as I was, with hundreds of others for it is Sunday and people loved to go on picnics on Sunday afternoons, and they parked their horses and buggies along the cutbacks of the field and road and picnicked on the edge of the river and in the fields of grass on large blankets, some ladies with parasols like a Seurat or Monet, and with children and dogs. And you see some yellow flowers and some red -- like poppies. But it is not a full-sun day and things are slightly overcast and the parasols have been folded up and many have just finished their meals and are packing up the wicker picnic baskets with the hickory handles.

Then, suddenly, two large explosions go off, to my left, in the east, as I was facing south, down the road, and they are white explosions and seemed to come right from the ground itself, not like by bombs from the air. Each explosion was separated by about 250 yards and, simultaneously, they blew upwards and outwards like the size of the Walden Municipal Building housing the Josephine-Louise Library, each one and…, but, it was hard to tell exactly as they were a good, rare, par-6 away, maybe a 1000 yards away in the field, a pasture.

While they started as explosions, the issuances were ongoing events, and a white phosphorous-like fluid, in the form of a dense smoke, poured, billowing out of the ground in those two spots like liquid nitrogen and spread across the pastures, pushing itself in a solid white cloud, one from each explosion pit.

When the explosions happened you could feel them in the ground and everyone stood up immediately from their blankets and stared at the tracers and trailers which first streaked the sky before the scene settled into the rushing flow of gases maybe as high as the tallest oak trees in the fence rows, a fire hose pointed straight up, but wider, like water flowing from a drinking fountain in a city park.

I stood there, too, watching and thinking, what could this be, there were no bombs from the sky, how could this be happening? Did someone plant these bombs there, bury them, with timers or some remote triggering device? And I decided within the dream that these where not man-made, but rather coming from the ground itself like a volcano or geyser, yet not lava or water, but thick gas.

We all stood and watched in silence as the gas spread out in large concentric sheets, like dumping icing on a cake, and we were silent until we saw the first casualties. The first to fall were the cows in the pasture. They tried to sidestep the initial wave of the white gases reaching them but, after getting a whiff of the tracing vapors, the cows took a few steps and dropped dead on the green grass which turned white, ice-white, when touched by the expanding cloud.

With this, the crowd began to shout “Run, run!” and fathers grabbed their children and even the horses were left behind as it was determined it would be faster to just run. Even though there was no wind, the gas cloud was fast enough to overtake people and they died on the spot and more people screamed and ran.

I turned towards Montgomery now and was running as hard as I could and I stopped and looked back and almost everyone was now dead, just a few people near me alive and coming my way, and I knew if something didn’t change the gas would get to me too and I was going to die. There was no-where to go. I thought “maybe the river” and ran towards the river and jumped down the embankment into the river, into the water, and I thought “how can I cover my face?” I saw a mastodon tusk sticking out of the river embankment, as has been found in our era, and I pulled the tusk out and stuck my head into the hole in the dirt left by the extricated tusk and I thought maybe, just maybe, there will be enough air, oxygen, in this hole for me to survive the passing of the cloud.

I took one last look over the river bank and the white phosphorous cloud was right there, the two sources now feeding one cloud, thick as pudding and I knew it would never let up and I slid back down the gravel and mud and eroded, exposed tree roots and, looking at the tusk hole in the dirt like a bank swallow nest, I knew I could never survive and with that in mind, I knew it was dream, and knowing now that it was a dream, as the will to live would have it, I decided to wake up. Of course. And then there was nothing but reality.