Perhaps it was just ironic that Putin and Trump happened to meet in Alaska, of all places, on August 15, of all days. Or was it arranged on purpose to send a clue?

While the two were meeting last Friday, I spent a lot of time thinking about where I was on that day -- August 15 -- 54 years ago. Sounds like a long time ago, but it seems like it was only yesterday.

We only recall clear details of days from our past if something big had happened -- where we were when Kennedy was killed; the day we went to the moon; 9/11. Weddings. Births.

On August 15, 1971, I was 23 years old, a rookie newspaper reporter and was drinking beer at a neighborhood tavern. It was a Sunday night and I remember that the place was empty except for me and the bartender. Both of us were looking up at the television set mounted above the rows of liquor bottles along the back wall of the bar, waiting for Bonanza to come on.

We both liked to watch Bonanza. Every Sunday night. It had become like my latest ritual instead of going to church. Just me and a bartender in Hillsdale, Michigan, of all places, to witness the world turned upside down.

So, on the night of August 15, 1971, we were waiting for the Cartwrights to come charging towards us on their horses out of the television screen, kicking up a trail of dust, racing across a western scene, bringing justice to an untamed land.

Instead, the dark, grim face of Richard Nixon unexpectedly came into view. He announced the creation of “a New International Monetary System.”

When Nixon was done talking, the bartender poured each of us a shot of Jim Beam, looked at me and asked: “What was that?”

Since I was a newspaper reporter, he probably figured that I should know what Nixon was talking about. I shrugged a “beats me” shrug. I was clueless. For all my education, which included one year of economics in college, I didn’t even know that there WAS such a thing as an International Monetary System, and now it was being replaced by something new. What was it? What was going on? As a reporter, I felt like it was my job to know.

The next day, I asked around town, but couldn’t find anybody to help me. Even the town’s banker was in the fog. Then I remembered something the Dominicans had told us in grade school. They said that Aquinas had said in his Summa that we know God by knowing God’s creations. That seemed like a crack in the door to let in a little light. I could know what an International Monetary System is by knowing its creations, which, I reasoned, should be reflected in statistical graphs of socio/economic conditions over time.

I didn’t make much progress for a long time until it was shortly after 9/11 and I was working as an over-the-road trucker and living in my truck on the road. That's when I first got connected to wireless internet, an incredible new tool for doing research.

Parked in truck stops at night, kicked back in my bunk area after a long day of driving, feasting on truck stop pizza and Diet Coke, I would plug my computer into this vast library of knowledge spanning time and the globe. That's when I started looking at socio-economic graphs of America over time.

The picture that emerged was shocking. In graph after graph, for most of the 20th century the plotted lines for good things like wages and leisure and education inexorably kept going up, while the lines for bad things like hunger and disease and bankruptcy kept going down, indicating progress and stability, despite the two World Wars and the Great Depression.

But then something happened, at a particular point in time. Like the Earth's magnetic field suddenly just shifted, and the American story was turned upside-down.

I recently discovered a website called "WTF Happened in 1971." It's put together by some young economists and techies. They collect and publish socio-economic graphs of America over time. I was looking at their site this week. It's where I got the graphs for this week's column. Their graphs are more up to date than the graphs I was looking at shortly after 9/11. But the story is the same. America is still going downhill.

We have been, and are, witnessing an historical new Renaissance in scientific understanding, some say knowledge of God's creations, but the socio/economic graphs of America to the present tell a different story. For over half a century now, concealed behind a screen of Hollywood glitz and Monday Night Foodball, America has been going downhill.

When the two world leaders shook hands last Friday, they each had a big problem. Putin's countrymen were being killed in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands in a savage European war. And Trump?  Trump needs to turn around a leaky old boat that's been going down the river towards Niagra Falls for a long time.  They're both in a pickle. Maybe by working together they might get themselves out of the jar.

From my own circle of sources, I’m pretty sure that Putin would have brought up the idea of all the mutual benefits that can come from working together on what’s called “Great Projects,” like the space program had been when we couldn't build our own rockets, and fusion still is as the world builds ITER in the south of France.

Another Great Project, one that starts in Alaska, is to build a tunnel beneath the Bering Sea to reconnect the Americas and the Eurasian landmass. Engineers say that with our advanced technologies, it would be easier to do than building the tunnel beneath the English Channel had been. In Russia, there is high level support for the project. It's discussed widely in their press. And in China, it’s already integrated into its vision of an interconnected world, the Belt and Road Initiative.

If Putin and Trump did actually discuss the Bering Sea Tunnel, it would have been during their private discussions, not to be leaked to the press or mentioned in the final diplomatic communiques. They would not want it known publicly, at least not yet. It would give Trump's opposition a red meat issue in the run-up to next year's midterm elections, a new feeding frenzy for the Nightly News... "A tunnel to Russia? You've got to be kidding, right? Crackpot idea. Totally insane..."

Mental health experts would appear on talk shows to say it's further evidence of Trump's mental decline... Humanists denounce the inhumanity of building a tunnel from Alaska to nowhere while L.A. is fouled and burns... Maddow delights: "See! He is a Russian agent after all."

Bloomberg and CNBC interview nervous managers of a 54-year-old New International Monetary System. Already ensnared by their own rules in trillions of unpayable debt, they warn that the "Alaskan dream" could push "the system" they manage "over the edge."

And then what?

Over the edge?

What's that supposed to mean?"

We're racing downstream. Around kitchen tables people are beginning to hear the Falls. What are we supposed to do?

August 15. Alaska. Maybe it was a clue.