Escape from 'jail' came just in time

The email came from one of my sisters.
“Bail me out,” she said. “Help me get out of jail.”
“Jail” was, of course, part of a charity fund-raiser, one of those deals where volunteers agree to tap family and friends for donations to help them “make bail” and reach a fund-raising goal.
I complied with a small donation. (She is, after all, my sister.) And recalled that I’d turned down requests for the same gambit numerous times, every time except one.
The exception was in 1986 during Jay County’s sesquicentennial celebration, and that was a year exceptions were made for just about everything.
When a community is celebrating its 150th birthday and you know it’s a once in a lifetime experience, you end up going with the flow and doing things you never thought you’d do.
Grow a beard, for instance. The scruffy whiskers on my chin date from the sesquicentennial celebration and have hung around ever since.
Guys who didn’t grow beards — no matter how scruffy — could face “fines” from an informal (and ridiculous) group known as the Brothers of the Brush.
Looking back it’s easy to think of the whole thing as silly, but it was also fun, and you had to be a real stuffed shirt to sit on the sidelines.
That doesn’t mean things didn’t occasionally get out of hand.
Like the time I ended up in jail.
Jail’s not quite the right word.
It was more like a cage, made of steel and a little larger than a phone booth. (Those of you who have never seen a phone booth ought to be able to find a picture on Wikipedia.)
Some sort of event was happening around the west entrance to Jay County Courthouse. As I recall, some of us with scruffy beards had paraded through Portland from McDonald’s to the courthouse. The cage — the “jail” — was there, and a kangaroo court of some sort was in session.
It was June or July and late afternoon, so it’s not surprising that the weather was unsettled. It had been hot and steamy, and a storm front loomed out toward the horizon in the neighborhood of Dunkirk.
And it was about that time I found myself dragged before the kangaroo court. My “offense”? Who knows? You’ve got to be a good sport about these things, and besides, it was all for fun.
That is, it had been all for fun until I found myself standing in that steel cage.
It was about then that the weather turned worse.
You could feel the storm rolling in from the west. I looked out from the steel cage and saw my wife, who was roughly eight months pregnant at the time. The worry on her face matched the worry in my gut.
Lightning flashed on the horizon. Thunder rolled.
“Hey, you know guys, this thing’s made of steel,” I bleated in words more or less to that effect.
I imagined headlines: “Editor zapped in sesquicentennial birdcage.” “Wrathful heavens weigh in on editorial transgressions.” “Journalist jolted.”
Seconds later, the steel door swung open. And as it did, the storm arrived in full force. Heavy rain, wind and more lightning sent everyone scurrying for cover.
And I was able to celebrate the sesquicentennial intact.