I Read The News Today Oh Boy

I used to read the entire newspaper when I spent summers at our mountain cabin. It was reading material and therefore it was important to consume every page. I read a lot of stuff that eleven-year-old boys don't regularly peruse. I read Michael Chricton's "Andromeda Strain." I read "The New Yorker" cover to cover. I even read "Ms. Magazine" when my mom was done with it. Then there was the newspaper.
For a time, we received both the Denver Post and the Boulder Daily Camera at our house. That meant that we generally didn't get our news until the following day, since part of my father's duty as the commuting member of our family to bring both papers back up the hill to us at the end of his day. This meant that a lot of my newspaper reading was done at night by the light of kerosene lamps. In the cabin. In the middle of a forest.
That's the part that got me. We were isolated. We didn't even have a phone. That's why the articles I read near the back of the front section were the most troublesome. They were still news, but they were not exactly "hard news." These were the two inch items about UFOs and Bigfoot. They were on the same page as the day's weather. UFOs were out there, just like those intermittent thunderstorms. And Bigfoot? Back in the early seventies, I was sure that my next trip to the outhouse would be my last.
No doubt about it: the newspaper was every bit as terrifying as Michael Chricton's deadly space virus - or Gloria Steinem.