Everyone looks up. We have since the first slimy creature looked out of its crowded, muddy pool of stagnant water and said, "I wish there was a way I could walk onto that beach." Looking up is what we descendants of that evolutionary link do best. In the words of the immortal Coen Brothers, "It's [Our] whole goddamn raison d'itre." As I young child, I would look into the blue, suburban sky of Newbury Park and wonder at it. Wonder at its depth, its form, its blue. I would spin in circle, arms extended grabbing a street sign and look up until I fell over. Up is limitless--limitless. We don't know its beginning or ending, nor even our own position in it. It is what we see every day when we are tired of looking down, when we have felt enough of the gravity of our planet, our lives.
I would walk the two miles home each day from Sequoia Elementary school, alone most days during the whole of my 7th grade year. I was too afraid to ride my bike as I had been a late bloomer bikewise and didn't think much of my skills (the next year, I went over the handle bars while looking at Kelly Clancy walk, but I digress). I would walk home, alone with my head facing up, not from happiness, or haughtiness, but because my life was shit, because I needed to look up and see any possibility of a life beyond that moment, and I did. I saw planes, birds, trees, clouds; you've seen it, you know. And in 1978, we saw rockets, and we saw Space Shuttles. We had been fed a steady diet of Jetsons, Battlestar Gallactica and even Alf, so we knew that a life in the sky was surely in our future. The moon landing changed the world, but TV gave us pictures. The Space Shuttles made for the best of these.
I saw a launch of a shuttle in 1983. I was in Merrit Island, Florida at the national "Teen Missions" training facility. I was heading to Norway, the land of Munch and Ibsen, to build a church and spread the Good News. The Jim and Tammy Baker types who ran the "camp" (we slept in tents and bathed in an alligator filled lake (really)), decided that we had enough time between doing the biblical verses obstacle course and our afternoon meal next to the palm trees with the coral snakes on them to drive the 3 miles down and watch a shuttle launch. I was tired that day, having cleared a fallen tree with a hatchet and wheelbarrow, and filthy in a way that only a Nordic type, who sweats when he wakes up, could be in the middle of a Florida swamp in summer. So we got on a school bus and went to the launch.
I wasn't ready for the smoke, for the size of the exhaust trails that covered most of the sky I had so long observed. I was struck by the scope of things, and scope always impresses. If you can make something bigger than a bus fly into space, your bound to impress and that's the thing. The Space Shuttle, if it didn't outright scare the Russians and Chinese, couldn't have failed to impress them with our ability to see beyond the limitations that were our birthrights. Almost two years later, I drove out to the desert with Mary Duggan to Andrews Air Base to watch the shuttle land. Mary is a nun now, but she wasn't then. We parked her car and watched that thing drop from fucking heaven onto the middle of the California dessert and I cried.
We are a nation of people who look up. Perhaps we are rowing backwards, Mr. Fitzgerald, but we wouldn't know--we're looking up. It may have been the Challenger that I take off or land, but I honestly can't remember that as much as I can watching with 7 other boy/men as we sat in Germany in the Army , watching Armed Forces TV cover the death of the crew and explosion of the Shuttle. While the Challenger disaster was a horrible event, even then, perhaps especially then, I couldn't feel bad for the astronauts. They were flying into space, going places we may never have meant to go because we do not accept limitations easily. And if God has made us, then he better like competition, because we will not be stopped, not by Global Warming, not by overcrowding, not by anything because we still have the ability to look up.
I took my students out to the football field yesterday to try and catch a glimpse of the Space Shuttle Endeavour's final flight to its new home. We got fleeting glimpses of the Shuttle Carrier 747 and its extra-Terrestrial cargo through the smog as it flew over L.A. landmarks in the distance and that was it. I drove home with my oldest son, who was trying his best to not be interested in the Shuttle, or anything, and there it was. In front of my window, 400 feet off the ground above Aviation Blvd., the Shuttle Endeavour flew by and I said something vulgar. The child told me to calm down, but I couldn't. I have seen three of these things in the air and that makes the sky watching worth it. I was 12 again, unsure of myself and not very happy, but hopeful. That anyone should ever have looked up and thought, "I will go there", is all you need to know of the future. Yes the shuttle is gone, but I'm glad to be part of a species who made one. There will be another shuttle, or likely something better. Our story is not done, and the sky is limitless.
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