I spent the bulk of the next forty-eight hours hauling Snow and Hering around so that I could say goodbye to investigators, local members, and fellow missionaries. On Wednesday, Snow dumped Hering off on a split with someone or other, and he and I drove around town sightseeing. I took pictures of everything in sight—including the hookers who showed up to start working the downtown streets promptly at five in the evening.

One garishly dressed pimp, spying me with my camera pointed at his girls from the passenger window of our car, started yelling and cursing and running toward us. "Go, Snow, go," I shouted, rolling up the window. "Get us out of here!"

Snow put the pedal to the metal and drove.

God, what desperate fun we had!

The next day, all my goodbyes having been said, Snow and Hering helped me load my stuff—two suitcases, filled with all my worldly possessions—into the car, and we headed off to the airport.

President Tuttle must have been occupied with something important that morning. He didn't come to the airport to see me off. I guess I wasn't worth his attention now that I was leaving his jurisdiction.

Three other people were there to see me off, though. Agent Q was there to verify the fact that I had left the country. Constable X, the fellow from the R.C.M.P.'s Airport Precinct who had arrested me, was there to shake my hand and offer me the best of luck. And, most surprisingly of all, my old friend Stephen King was there.

Not the real Stephen King, of course, but rather the bearded Customs fellow in the orange windbreaker who resembled Stephen King. He was as snotty as ever. As I approached the Customs kiosk, he came up to me and said, "I heard you got off."

"I didn't get off," I said. "I went to jail and paid a fine."

He sniffed haughtily and looked away. "So you're leaving, eh?"

"That's right," I said.

"Where to?"

"Spokane."

"Are you still a missionary?"

"Yes."

"Well," he said, stroking his black beard. Then he nodded decisively and walked away.

That was the last I saw of him. Odd duck.

At the kiosk, I shook hands with Hering, then hugged Snow. "Take care, buckfart," he said, which was his brand of sentimentality.

Then I went through the Customs gate, headed down the concourse, and boarded my flight for Spokane. I couldn't have guessed it at the time, but less than six months later I would see Snow again.

The flight took only an hour. The Spokane apes met me at the airport and drove me back to the mission office, where I went into an orientation session with the greenies who had arrived from the M.T.C. the day before. I learned a lot of interesting things. I learned that the Spokane Mission covered eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and a tiny bit of western Montana. I learned that the mission rules were more strict in Spokane than they had been in Calgary. I learned that I really missed Calgary.

Then I was summoned into my new mission president's office for a little chat. President Aames was a short, pleasant-looking, soft-spoken, white-haired fellow whose outward geniality turned out to mask a frightening void in the area of human understanding. He was a retired pathologist. As one elder later explained to me, "Of course he can't relate to people. He spent his entire professional life in a windowless room full of dead bodies." It wasn't that President Aames didn't try to be understanding. It was that his attempts mostly went awry.

Aames asked me to repeat my entire bomb-threat experience to him, and I did so. When I was finished, he said, "I'd like you to keep all this between us, Elder Shunn. No one else knows why you've been transferred, not even my assistants."

"Okay," I said, assuming that there was a good reason for this, one which would be made clear to me.

President Aames didn't offer a reason. "You're to tell people that you were transferred because of illness," he went on. You might have expected a pathologist to provide me with a convincing disease which I could use as part of my cover—but he didn't. "If people's questions start getting too pointed, you can tell them that it was mental illness."

Yeah, right.

I didn't like the idea one bit, but I kept my mouth shut about it. I mean, first of all, the president was asking me to lie. Second of all, he wanted me to tell my fellow missionaries that I was sick in the head. I'm sure he thought he was protecting my best interests, but I felt as if I had been suddenly thrust into the starring rôle in some nightmarish play that I wanted no part of. "Let's all welcome our new friend Elder Shunn to the stage—fresh from his debut performance at the loony bin!"

	Elder Steve Summers, unwinding in our basement apartment in Yakima, Washington. (Note the practiced, Jaggeresque pout.)

No, thank you. But there didn't seem to be much choice.

My first assignment in the new mission was in Yakima, Washington, a town of about fifty thousand people in the hot, hot desert of south central Washington. My companion, Elder Steve Summers, was a zone leader. Together, he and his normal companion, Elder Jay Breinholt, supervised three districts of other missionaries—but Breinholt was in Spokane recuperating from a bout of appendicitis. I would fill in for Breinholt for the time being.

I got along very well with Summers. We were both musicians. He played the guitar like a virtuoso, and had belonged to a popular local rock band back home in Utah. He and I eventually made plans to form our own band when we both got home, one which we would call Cornerstone. (It never happened, though we did get together to jam with some other friends for about two hours once.)

The Springsteen of the Spokane mission.

A tradition developed between Summers and me over the next few weeks. At night, after proselytizing hours, we'd often buy a bag of Santitas Tortilla Strips and a bottle of Pace Picante Sauce (Medium) and then not stop eating until both were gone. It was on one of these evenings of camaraderie that Summers started questioning me about my "disease."

I'd been awfully tightlipped about my situation, doing my best to follow President Aames's injunction, but I suddenly discovered two things. First, I couldn't stand lying to my new friend Summers. Second, I really needed to tell someone about what had happened to me.

So I spilled my guts—and Summers spent the time rolling on the floor laughing. He thought my story was the greatest thing he'd ever heard. He couldn't believe that President Aames had instructed me to pretend I was mentally ill instead of telling the true story.

But not everyone saw it in quite that way, as I was soon to learn.

It started innocently enough. Elder Summers, as zone leader, periodically went on splits with the district leaders he supervised. One day he made plans to split with Elder Berenstein, who was the district leader in Ellensburg, a college town fifty miles north of Yakima in the foothills of the Cascades.

Summers and I drove to Ellensburg in the morning. There, Summers picked up Elder Berenstein—a tall, thin, shy fellow with homey good looks and a cowlick in his hair that made him look like a deeply tanned scarecrow. They drove back toward Yakima, leaving me to spend the next twenty-four hours with Berenstein's companion, Elder Wally Brown.

Brown was a ruggedly good-looking swinger who had a fixation on Top Gun. He wore aviator sunglasses, planned to become a fighter pilot, and wanted to be Tom Cruise. Everyone called him Wally, because there were two Elder Browns in the mission.

Wally had only been out for two months, but he had the kind of dominant personality that made it all but impossible for me not to tag helplessly along on whatever mad errand he wanted to pursue. And what we did that night was to spend several hours hanging out with the two gorgeous college cheerleaders who lived in the apartment next door. Nothing untoward happened, but I was uncomfortable about the situation all evening long—while at the same time enjoying the thrill of doing something illicit. (What a mass of contradictions I am.)

The next morning, Summers and Berenstein returned. At about the same time, the postman brought Berenstein and Wally their mail. Wally sorted through it as the rest of us chatted. After a few minutes, Wally said, "Hey, Shunn, you transferred down from Calgary, right?"

I nodded. I had told him my cover story the previous night—illness, with the "mental" part left out.

"Did you know Sister J up there?"

I'll call her Sister J here, because—well, you know the drill by now. "Black woman?" I said. "Really pretty? Hasn't been out long?"

"That's the one," said Wally. "I just got a letter from her. She and I were in the M.T.C. together, and we were good friends there." Big surprise. "She says some elder up there in Calgary got thrown in jail for calling a bomb threat in on an airplane. She says the guy's companion was going home, and he was trying to stop him."

I didn't say anything. My cover was about to be blown for good. Boy, wouldn't that be a relief!

But Wally failed to put two and two together. "The guy went to jail and everything," he said, scanning the letter. "Can you believe that? Did you know this guy?"

Summers covered his mouth with his hand. I nodded. "Yeah, I knew him," I said.

That was when soft-spoken Berenstein piped up. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!" he said. "I mean, can you believe how stupid someone would have to be to do something like that?"

Summers was trying hard not to laugh. I grew defensive. "Maybe he had a good reason," I said.

"Good reason, my foot," said Berenstein. "My gosh, the guy must have had the brains of a flea!" And so on.

Later, after my story had become general knowledge in the Spokane mission, I would take advantage of every opportunity I could to razz Berenstein about the way he had called me stupid to my face—without even knowing that it was me he was calling stupid. Berenstein was very, very embarrassed about the whole thing, and every time I mentioned it he turned bright red and said, "Jeez, Shunn, do you have to bring that up again? I've said I was sorry. Jeez."

It was a delightful and satisfying reaction.

Our threesome, in a rare moment of domestic harmony, shows off a trio of trendy Swatch watches. Left to right: Elder Steve Summers, me, and Elder Jay Breinholt. (Note the various handsigns being made.)

After I'd been in Yakima for a few weeks, Elder Breinholt returned from his recuperative stay in Spokane—and he and Summers and I were thenceforth a threesome. He and Summers fought a lot, because Summers was a worker and Breinholt was a kicker. It was my misfortune to get along well with both Summers and Breinholt, so until May I was caught in the middle of a rather uncomfortable situation. Salvation came when I was transferred to the small town of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and promoted to district leader.

Bonners Ferry is the last town of any size that you'll find as you travel north through Idaho. The population of the town is about two thousand, and it lies only thirty miles south of the Canadian border. "Now, I can trust you not to cross the border, can't I, Elder Shunn?" said President Aames when he phoned me with the news of the transfer and the promotion.

I laughed. "Absolutely," I said.

My new companion was Elder Rob Hull, a native of Glendale, California. He had been out on his mission a month longer than I had, and he acted resentful of the fact that I was the district leader and not him. To worsen matters, Hull was a topper, which made him all but insufferable. (For an example of his inconsiderate behavior, consider the simple farming family we were visiting one day. They were telling us about how exciting it had been the previous summer when they had visited the West Edmonton Mall—at the time, the world's largest indoor shopping mall. Hull's only comment was, "When they finish it, the Glendale Galleria back home is going to be even bigger." The asshole.)

Life with Hull might have driven me right 'round the bend had it not been for the fact that I loved Bonners Ferry. It was a beautiful little town, nestled high in the forested mountains of northern Idaho. I also liked my district quite a good deal. The district was unique in that it had only two elders. The other four missionaries in the district were sisters. Sister Sigmon and Sister Parker served seventy miles east of us in Libby, Montana, while Sister Sullivan and Sister Barkdull served forty miles south of us in Sandpoint, Idaho, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Pend Oreille. We got along pretty well, the six of us, and our district meetings were usually a lot of fun.

(I'm very pleased to be able to report that I've gotten back in touch with Lisa Barkdull as a result of this Web site. Even if nothing else, these pages have accomplished that much.)

Bonners Ferry would hold nothing but good memories for me if it weren't for something that happened late that first month. A letter arrived for me from Katrina, and the news was not good.

The strain of waiting for me had become too much for her.

I had thought I was immune—every missionary does—but I was wrong.

This was my Dear John letter.

The nice thing about being dumped by the girl back home is that you instantly become a member of a tight, supportive fraternity. I mean, statistically, less than ten percent of the girls who promise to wait for their missionaries actually end up doing so. Some elders will tell you that you haven't had the full mission experience until you've gotten a Dear John.

If that was true, then I was definitely part of the club now.

	Elder Timothy Jay Bishop, posing on the deck of our luxurious house in Bonners Ferry, Idaho.

But all was not doom and gloom. In July, Elder Hull was transferred out of Bonners Ferry—an answer to a prayer if ever there was one—and Elder Tim "Bish" Bishop was transferred in. Sister Sullivan was transferred out of Sandpoint, and Sister Leslie "Oy" Oyler was transferred in. Libby, Montana, where not much had been accomplished, was closed to missionary work for the time being, and Sisters Sigmon and Parker were transferred elsewhere. Things were looking up.

Bish and I became best friends. (In 1990, I was best man at his wedding—and I even spent their wedding night next door to them in a Motel 6 in Rock Springs, Wyoming. But that's another story.) Our three months together in Bonners Ferry were all kinds of fun. We baptized only one person in all that time, but since she was a 91-year-old Russian Jew, it seemed to us like a spiritual coup of the first magnitude.

The best day of 1987, though, came on September 3—my hump day.

Elder Snow called me from Lethbridge, Alberta, in the waning days of August. He had been promoted to zone leader by then, and his territory covered much of southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Alberta. His current companion was Elder Vernon Vickers, who (if you recall from Chapter 3) had been my district leader in the M.T.C. Snow told me that my old M.T.C. companion, Elder Judd Nash, was serving in Creston, British Columbia—only ten or so miles north of the Idaho border. September 3 would be hump day not just for me but also for Vickers and Nash—so Snow suggested that the only sensible thing to do would be to get together at the border for a party.

This was too good an opportunity to miss. The only place where the Calgary mission bordered on the Spokane mission was right there to my north, on the boundary line between Idaho and British Columbia. Snow and I agreed to meet at noon that day in Eastport, Idaho—a greasy little spot in the road just this side of Canada—and have lunch together.

I was so excited I could stand it.

Bish and I invited Barkdull and Oy to come with us to the border, and the two of them readily agreed. We would call it a district activity and hold it in place of the district meeting we were supposed to have that day. What a keen idea.

But the night before the border party, I received a call from my zone leaders, Elders Choi and Cavaness, who served about seventy miles south of Bonners Ferry in beautiful Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

"Elder Shunn," said Elder Choi, "we'd like to come up and do splits with you tomorrow if we could."

I panicked. Technically, the get-together we were going to have in Eastport the next day was against the rules. The Calgary elders would be breaking mission rules by crossing the border, and Bish and I would not only be misusing our proselytizing hours but also be bringing the sisters along on our misadventure, which could be, well . . . misconstrued. "Um," I said, "tomorrow wouldn't really be a good day for that. Maybe--"

"Oh, relax, Shunn," said Choi, a short, round, perpetually smiling Hawaiian fellow. "The sisters told us you're having a hump-day party at the border, and we wanted to come along. You wouldn't leave us out, would you?"

Of course not.

So the six of us—me, Bish, Barkdull, Oy, Choi, and Cavaness—ended up driving north together the next day. As we reached the main street of the tiny town of Eastport—the only street, really—we came within sight of the Canadian border checkpoint. I started to shake. Just being within spitting distance of the border made me unaccountably nervous. I knew that I could be arrested and locked up for a long time if I were caught on the wrong side of the border, and I didn't want to get anywhere close to it. It may have been an irrational fear, but hey, it's how I felt.

As we parked and walked toward the border, a blue Chevy Cavalier crossed over from Kingsgate, British Columbia, and parked near us. Snow and Nash emerged, along with two elders I didn't know. Snow and I exchanged manly hugs, and I shook hands with Nash. (He and I may have been companions at the M.T.C., but that didn't mean we'd been close.) I looked around then, somewhat distressed. "Where's Vickers?" I asked.

Snow grimaced. "A couple of elders in our zone are having a really hard time getting along," he said. "Vickers and I had to split off to take care of the situation, to keep them apart. He's stuck back in Cranbrook with one of them, and the other one's here with me. Vickers is really sorry he couldn't come. Actually, we're both pretty flippin' cheesed off about the whole situation."

Introductions were made all around, and the ten of us headed off to the Eastport Café—a pleasantly dim structure of rough-hewn logs—where we ordered lunch. The big attraction at the Eastport Café was their buffalo burgers, and that's what most of us ordered. We were a noisy, boisterous group, as most large gatherings of missionaries are, and the few other patrons eyed us strangely as we ate and talked and laughed.

Snow and I caught up on a lot of things. One of the first things he told me was that, just a few months before, the same female reporter from the Calgary Herald who had covered my trial, intrigued by the little glimpse she had gotten into missionary life, had accompanied two sister missionaries in Calgary on their rounds for forty-eight hours, then written a very favorable story about the whole experience. (Incidentally, this reminds me of how President Tuttle was mistaken that day in the courtroom when—as I reported in Chapter 26—he blamed the sloppy news stories from the Sun on the female reporter and gave the male reporter credit for the good ones in the Herald. In point of fact, it was the other way around. Draw your own conclusions.)

Left to right: Sister Lisa Barkdull, Sister Leslie Oyler, Elder Stuart Choi, Elder Mike Cavaness, and Elder Tim Bishop in Canada—and me in the United States. Note the cleared line of trees extending up the mountain, marking the international boundary.

As we talked, I learned that Snow and Hering hadn't gotten along well at all after I left Calgary, and that Snow was now very happy in Lethbridge with Vickers as a companion. I learned that Grant and Pamela Worthingtinn were still active in the Church, and that they had already gotten one of their friends to join. I also learned some top-secret Calgary mission gossip—that an elder somewhere in northern Alberta (Cold Lake? Peace River? High Prairie?) had run off with the (married) ward Relief Society president. Wow! Scandal!

I caught Snow up on all that was happening with me—including my Dear John from Katrina—but it wasn't long before the conversation at the table turned toward my days as the Mad Bomber of Calgary. The story was by now general knowledge in the Spokane mission, and everyone present had questions they wanted to ask me about it.

Eventually, of course, Snow said, "Shunn, you've got to do the strip search for everyone!"

I was aghast. "Here? In the restaurant? In front of everybody?"

Snow pounded his silverware on the table and started a chant that the others at the table soon took up: "Strip search! Strip search! Strip search! Strip search!"

Those nine voices persuaded me, against my better judgment, to get up and do the strip-search pantomime one more time—in front of everyone in the café. The missionaries—especially Barkdull and Oyler—applauded lustily and laughed so hard I'm not sure why their sides didn't split. The other patrons simply stared at the whole bewildering spectacle.

	I stick a toe across the Canadian border, in clear violation of my departure notice.

After lunch, we went outside for the ritual picture-taking that happens at any large gathering of missionaries. We gathered near the international border to take pictures of each other. The border is marked by a line of stone pylons set perhaps twenty yards apart. The line of pylons runs right up the hills to either side of town, and the trees are cleared away for about ten feet on each side of the line. Someone took a picture of my five Spokane friends on the Canadian side of one of the pylons, with me staying firmly on the U.S. side. Another picture shows the nine other missionaries beckoning me across the border, like tempting demons.

Another picture shows me being dragged, kicking and screaming, across the border by four or five other elders. (Much to my dismay, however, I've lost this particular memento. Damn.)

That was a wild moment. Took me completely by surprise. As soon as they let go of me, I ran straight back to the good ol' U.S. of A. as fast as my little legs would carry me, heart pounding wildly.

Like I said, it was the best day of the whole year.

My path over the subsequent year took me from Bonners Ferry to Orofino, Idaho, to Pasco, Washington, and finally to Wenatchee, Washington—the town where I was promoted to zone leader, and where I would eventually die.

My release was scheduled for August 19, 1988, and I impatiently counted the days. Early in May of that year, I quietly became a double-digit midget—an important milestone in every missionary's career.

Now, most missionaries fly home when their missions are complete, and they are greeted by a veritable flotilla of friends and relatives at the airport, often bearing banners saying things like "Welcome Home, Daniel!" or "It's All Over, Elder!" or "Welcome Back to the Real World!" This is almost a stereotype of the typical missionary's homecoming, in fact—but it didn't happen for me. No, my family wanted to drive to Spokane to pick me up, then tour some of the areas where I'd served on the way back to Utah.

Now, I wasn't exactly keen on this idea—after all, I'd been a missionary for a good long time, and I was rather eager to be getting on home—but I went along with it. They were my family, after all. Family can push you around.

The days kept ticking away, and before you know it I was a single-digit midget. I turned twenty-one on Sunday, August 14, five days before my release, and the Lueders family of East Wenatchee—a very cool crew—threw me a spiff party. In a slow-motion replay of my last days in Calgary, I spent the next few days bidding farewell to investigators and members alike—and gathering a lot of illicit hugs along the way. The most memorable were one from a rather zaftig young foreign-exchange student from South Africa whom my companion Elder Gregerson and I were teaching, one from the enchanting young waitress who worked at the pizza parlor we frequented, and a doubly illicit and chummy one from Sister Barkdull, who was by then serving in the nearby town of Leavenworth.

On Thursday, August 18, I bid farewell to Elder Gregerson and boarded the mission van. With one of the apes at the wheel, we picked up other dying elders along the way to Spokane—including the hapless Elder Berenstein. There were eight or nine of us leaving the next day. When we reached Spokane, We each had an exit interview with President Aames (who advised us to go home and start seeking out that choice "eternal companion"), and then we gathered at the Aamess' scenic home for what was known in mission parlance as the "Last Supper"—a huge homecooked dinner that would be our final evening meal as missionaries.

My parents arrived at the mission home just before the Last Supper was to begin. My four youngest brothers and sisters had come with them to Spokane (I'm the oldest of eight), but my parents had left them back at their motel for the evening. Mom and Dad joined us for dinner, a boisterous and gleeful affair over which our favorite mission stories were swapped. Inevitably, mentions were made of my experience in Canada, and I bore the razzing with an easy smile.

After dinner we all gathered in the living room for a final testimony meeting, at which we would all be expected to stand and express our feelings about Jesus Christ, the Church, our missions, our families, and so on. (There was no graceful way out of this for any of us—but least of all for me, since my parents were in attendance, and they would be expecting to hear my testimony.) When it was my turn to bear my testimony, I took advantage of the opportunity to razz Elder Berenstein one final time about the way he had trashed me nearly a year and a half earlier. Berenstein turned red and muttered something about how he wished I'd stop bringing that up.

Finally, I started to feel badly about the way I kept doing that to him.

When we all had borne our testimonies, including my parents, President Aames stood to say a few words. He turned to me with a somewhat bewildered smile and said, "Elder Shunn, it would appear that more people than just you and me know about your experience in Canada."

I nodded, not feeling the least bit abashed. "It sort of got out, President."

President Aames looked around the room at the gathered elders. "You mean you all know about it?"

My friends all nodded. There wasn't a one of them who hadn't known for at least a year.

"Well," said the president, "that's news to me. And I thought it was supposed to stay a secret."

It was a pointed, if mild, rebuke—but it was rather too late for President Aames to punish me for my honesty. I mean, what was he going to do—send me home?

The next morning, my fellow elders set off for the airport and their short hops home. Me—I clambered into the family van and began the long and winding trip back to Utah.

The, well . . . the most interesting two years of my life were over, and all I had to take home with me was a box of snapshots, a head full of memories, and an international criminal record.

What a long, strange trip it was.

And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you.

—Moroni 10:2

How, I ask, am I to wrap all this up?

Good question.

I suppose a roll call of the players in this little drama would not be out of order.

I haven't seen John Snow in person since the day we met at the border between Kingsgate, British Columbia, and Eastport, Idaho, in 1987. I attended one Canada Calgary Mission reunion a year or two after my return to Utah, mostly in the hope of connecting with him, but he wasn't there. I did chat with him on the phone a time or two in the years after our missions, and a few years ago I received a wedding invitation from him—but I had no way of getting to Fresno, California, to attend.

At the aforementioned mission reunion, however, I did connect with Vernon Vickers—the elder who failed to make it to the hump-day party at the border. He and I were practically the only two attendees who showed up without trophies—er, I mean wives or girlfriends. But that was fine. It gave us a chance to catch up on things.

In the time since the first run of Terror on Flight 789 debuted, however, I've received email from both Snow and Vickers—and, unsurprisingly and unfortunately, they're both teaching seminary in the Pacific Northwest. We've exchanged a few letters, but there's not all that much common ground these days.

Emma Steed used to send me cards at Christmas and Valentine's Day, but that ended after a couple of years. It's no excuse, but I don't do snail correspondence very well, and writing to me can easily be discouraging.

I received a wedding invitation from Kim Herzog before I'd even gotten home from my mission. I haven't seen her since Calgary, though we talked on the phone once while I was still stationed in Bonners Ferry.

I attended Monica Roper's wedding reception a several years back in Salt Lake City. The Tuttles were there. They seemed a bit bewildered by my long hair and beard, but they were quite friendly. I seem to recall that they were making plans to serve another mission, this time as a regular proselytizing couple.

President Aames was diagnosed with leukemia shortly after I was released from my mission, and he had to be released as mission president. He died a few months later.

Last I heard from Steve Summers, he was president of Master Muffler, a chain of muffler and brake shops in northern Utah. He inherited the position from his father. While I was still in Utah, I used to hear from him every once in a while—usually when he had a computer problem he needed help with. It's too bad our band never took off, but Steve tells me that he's trying to get a band of his own going again, which is a Good Thing.

Elder Finn ran across Terror on Flight 789 during its first run and sent me a few email messages, but our correspondence really didn't go anywhere. It turns out that he returned to the mission field some time after his mother's operation, completed his service, and returned home honorably. He now runs an electronics store and is still active in the Church, but I won't say more than that because he values his privacy on this issue. He did write to me rather breathlessly late in 1996 when the screenplay based on this story (written by Christopher J. Rivera, James Meek and me) was close to being optioned. But he hasn't written again since.

Katrina McCormick got married shortly after I returned from my mission, divorced late in 1996, and now lives in Alaska with a new husband. We've been in fairly regular contact since our ten-year high school reunion in 1994. It was later that year that Katrina and I got together for a chat at which she asked me some pretty tough questions about why I was choosing to stick with the Mormon Church despite the fact that it was making me so miserable. I consider that visit one of the turning points in my apostasy—a fact which will not surprise my father, who always thought "that girl" was a bad influence. Personally, I think she was one of the best influences, and one of the best friends. Still is.

My younger sister Seletha has followed my example and served a mission. She was sent to the Dominican Republic for eighteen months. She was shot at and kidnapped there on separate occasions, but those are her stories to tell.

At this writing, my brother Tim has served a mission in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, return home intact, and gotten himself into a Temple marriage, all in relatively short order. My brother Lee is currently serving a mission in Japan—curiously enough, speaking as much Portuguese as Japanese. I hope his mission doesn't turn out to be as exciting as Seletha's and mine were. I'm sure he hopes the opposite.

And what about me? What's happened to me?

I've changed. Brother, have I changed.

There are other pages here at my Web site that deal with that metamorphosis. Perhaps the most important change I've undergone, in light of the current narrative, is my new laissez-faire attitude toward other people's lives.

You can go your way. I'll go mine.

I won't interfere with your life, so long as it's not hurting anyone else, and I hope you'll extend me the same courtesy.

And should the day ever come when you're tempted to drop a bomb in the middle of someone else's life, I'd suggest that you stop and take stock and very seriously ask yourself if you're doing the right thing. And if you feel absolutely certain that you are, then I'd suggest with double seriousness that you think it all through again, because the person with perfect self-confidence is the person least likely to be troubled by questions of morality.

Certainly there are occasions when quick, decisive action is demanded—knocking someone out of the path of a speeding car, for instance. A friend of mine once told me, at the end of a messy and long-overdue divorce, that she wished I'd been there to call in a bomb threat at her wedding. But most situations aren't so cut-and-dried. Know what you're doing when you do it. I certainly didn't, that day eleven years ago in Calgary. I still don't, not entirely.

And if you do act, and you make the wrong choice—or even the right one—you'd better be ready to weather the fallout. (I'd suggest keeping a lockpick hidden in your orifice of choice.)

Because not everybody wants, or needs, to be saved.