by Michael Dare
The Leonids from Space
It was November, it was 2001, it was four in the morning, and I was up. There was news of an enormous meteor shower, the Leonids, due at four in the morning on a Sunday. I'd gotten similar bulletins that didn't pan out so my hopes weren't high. Turns out predicting meteor showers is in the same ballpark as predicting ANY kind of weather, and what looks like a storm a-brewing can mysteriously evaporate into sprinkles by the time it reaches you. It's been four years since I moved to the middle of the desert, a good ten miles from the nearest city lights, I've paid attention to the predictions, and I still haven't seen anything even close to a meteor shower. Not that I'm complaining. The everyday sky is ceaselessly spectacular. Weather has become one of our primary sources of amusement, and we'll actually get up from our TVs and computers to run outside for nothing more than a neat piece of weather.
The difference between where you live and where I live is where you live, if you want to see the stars, you go outside and look up, but where I live, if you want to see the stars, you go outside and look straight ahead in absolutely any direction. My horizons are many miles away.
The reason I was up had nothing to do with meteors and only slightly to do with showers. I had a choice. Should I go to the bathroom and flush a toilet with water that I have to bring in by truck, or should I treat each drop as precious, go outside, and water a cactus?
I ran to the front door in my underwear. From the hallway, about ten feet away, I could see the horizon through the window in the door. Four meteors in a row, like that, here and gone in a flash. If that's what a tiny square of sky looked like, I wanted to see the whole thing. I ran back to the bedroom, put on a sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks and kung-fu shoes and ran outside.
They were everywhere. You'd see one and stare at that spot, expecting another one in the same place. There was nowhere you could look that wasn't full of meteors but down, and that's not where I was looking.
The kids had to see this. I didn't look at a clock. I didn't worry about
whether I was being a responsible dad. This was like The Who playing live
outside my door, like the world premiere of the new Star Wars directed
by Stanley Kubrick brought back from the dead just for us, tonight, it
was now or never. I didn't contemplate anything. I woke them both up, Buster,
14, on the sofa, and Max, 8, on the bunk bed. I was gentle. "Trust me,"
I said, "wrap yourself in your blanket and come outside to see this." They
wrapped up and came right out, astonished that I would instigate such an
exodus on a school night.
Most were quick pencil sketches lasting fractions of a second, but some
were ten times brighter and wider than the rest, coming in close, the width
of your thumb at arm's length, the sky like fireworks, looking like actual
flaming rocks from space instead of the standard ephemeral splash of white,
leaving lasting trails that hung around till they faded into the galaxies
in every direction, no right way to look, one after another, a mad, cosmic
etch-a-sketch, the universe playing connect-the-dots with itself.
I suppose it ended sometime after we got tired and went in. They were back
asleep in minute, dreaming of tomorrow when they would have to explain
to the teacher why they were nodding out in class.
You see, it was like this. The sky was falling last night and my dad woke us up in the middle of the night to go look at it.
2001 wasn't so bad.
MD
Pictures from space.com.
For more pictures of
the Leonids in 2001, including some incredible time lapse video, go here.
"As a net is made
up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series
of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent,
isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net because it is
made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place
and responsibility in relation to other meshes."
- Buddha -
