At the Redding Library this afternoon local historian Orville Bumpass spoke of the time before The Smokescreen, a long ago era when Redding had an uninterrupted view of not one, but many different mountains. "They rose above us, green and sometimes white," Orville recounted with a tear in his eye. "Why, twice a day they could even block out the sun, a sun so bright it hurt your eyes." An audience member asked if it was a red sun as we've all seen for as long as we can remember but Orville shook his head. "The sun wasn't always red, my son."
In a question and answer session Redding Jefferson asked the quadragenarian if rumors of a volcano were true. "Aye, my boy, they are," Bumpass replied. "It rose above us, whitecapped, and named of the county we are in." When asked why it was white he said, "Snow would fall from the sky." When asked what is snow, he said, "Sometimes when the rain falls from--" When asked, what is rain, he paused and said, "Well, sometimes, almost like magic, water would fall from the sky, and then turn to snow as it passed through the cold air." When asked what is cold, Orville sighed. "I honestly don't remember."
Orville assured us that while the presence of one volcano is true, rumors of a second volcano to the east are spurious and unlikely. "I mean really," he said with a laugh, "what are the chances of Redding being built near two volcanos? Preposterous!"