While strolling beside the American River during my daily walk with the dog this evening, I heard the sound of a siren in the distance. A moment later I spied a plume of blue smoke rising in the sky. My first thoughts were that I had run across a wild fire, and if I were able to get some good photographs of the fire fighters taming the flames, I'd have my first real scoop for the Sacramento Press. In fact, I thought, if the fire got big enough, and I got my reporting done quickly enough, and my step-daughter wasn't playing Sims on the computer when I got home (or if I could bully or bribe her out of the computer chair) and my wife didn't rush home from work, wanting to know what was for dinner, then I could get the story bashed out and even scoop those jokers from the TV news. Their "Livecopters" and satellite hookups could not help them now. I was there first!

I rushed to the crest of the hill. Instead of an inferno, I saw about eight teenagers kicking sand into a campfire. Some of them were clutching skimboards. Obviously they had been playing in the bird pond I wrote about recently, and they had probably built the fire to dry their clothes. I glowered at them. Camp fires are prohibited in the Parkway, and I was especially angry that they were befouling the sandy beach of the bird pond.

However, timidity and cowardice got the better of me, and I let them run away without yelling down at them the curses that were resounding in my head. I went down to the beach. In addition to leaving a smoldering fire, they had left beer cans, potato chip wrappers and a dirty sock behind. The was no danger of the fire spreading, so I walked on towards the siren. Perhaps I'd run into a Sheriff deputy or a Park Ranger, and I could give a description of the fleeing arsonists.

"Yes, deputy," I imagined myself saying. "There were about eight of them, mostly boys, but a few girls, too. (There's always "a few girls" with that sort, eh?) They were heading in the direction of Bannister Park last I saw them. I'm sure you could still catch them. And, you know, they haven't completely closed down Guantanamo Bay. In case, I don't know, you think striping them of their Constitutional rights might be merited."

I arrived at the bend in the river a half a mile or so north of the San Juan Rapids. It was obvious by then that the siren had come (they were silent now) from the other side of the the river from me. I should have figured that from the start, since there were no roads on my side of the river. But visions of scooping Dann Shively had clouded my reason.

There were no firetruck to be seen, just an ambulance and a Ranger's vehicle behinds some trees. I could not see what was happening. Would a real reporter swim across the river to find out? I wasn't sure, but I decided that in any case I wasn't swimming. A man and a woman were picking their way down the steep river bank on the other side.

"What's going on over there?" I cried, feeling, for a moment, like I belonged in a Mark Twain novel.

"A biker wasn't wearing a helmet. He got hurt in an accident," the woman yelled back. She meant a bicyclist, I assumed.

I went back to the bird pond and put out the fire completely, then I picked up the trash off the beach, save for the dirty sock, which I couldn't bare to pick up without latex gloves.

My scoop had been seriously demoted in newsworthiness. Bicyclist wipes out on the parkway, not wearing helmet, ambulance called out. But a citizen-journalist has to follow the story where it leads like any other reporter. And I had.

That was good enough.