The morning after the
long, sad day when the Columbia fell to earth in pieces, I made
my daily trek to retrieve my newspaper from the driveway. The
weather in my part of North Carolina had been snowy and/or rainy
and/or cloudy for two weeks, but when I looked up before dawn
that morning, I saw a clear sky and a myriad of brilliant lights:
the planet Venus to the east, the Big Dipper almost overhead,
and what looked like the great orange star, Betelgeuse, low on
the south western horizon.
I'm no astronomer,
but I do love the heavens. Standing perfectly still and thinking
about the seven lost astronauts who had so recently been Up There,
looking back at our beautiful earth, I somehow found a kind of
peace despite my sadness. I found myself thinking of all the humans
who have died in the process of pushing forward man's frontiers,
answering the innate call to satisfy the curiosity that seems
so much a part of our species, that urge to see what lies beyond
the next hill. Our history is full of purposeful wanderers and
explorers, like the people who trudged across the land bridge
that once existed between Asia and North America, or Marco Polo
who traveled east, or navigators and sailors who foundered in
the wild seas en route to the New World, or the pioneers who struggled
west across mountains and deserts. Our first aviators and astronauts
are the most recent in the long list of adventurous, brave humans.
It is inevitable that some will be lost, just as it is inevitable
that some will succeed and expand the limits of our knowledge
of the universe.
In 1986, when the Challenger
space shuttle exploded, I was still teaching school. The morning
after the tragedy, one of my students put up her hand and said
fearfully: "I'm glad you weren't the teacher in the Challenger."
I had to admit that I was glad, too, but at the same time, I said:
"I'd gladly climb into a space suit tomorrow, if they'd let me
go up." It seemed to me to be important to assert the necessity
of continuing our voyages of discovery - and besides, it was a
true statement. I would have loved to take the next flight. When
John Glenn went up for the second time, no one was more envious
than I. Imagine being over 70 and still allowed to venture into
space! NASA, if you're listening, I'm here.
Hanging in my classroom
was a poster of Earth as seen from the moon. There in the blackness
of space hangs the fragile-looking blue and white bubble that
is our home. Its land masses are only a faint brush of tan beneath
the white of the clouds. I wish that the poster could be hung
in every government building in every country of the world; in
all classrooms; and in all churches, mosques, synagogues and temples.
It is a thing of breathtaking beauty in and of itself, but what
is most striking to me is that there are no lines drawn upon it,
no national borders. It is one perfect whole that is part of the
larger universe.
I am often amazed by
people who aren't interested in the sky. They seem unaware of
sunrises and sunsets, of the variety of clouds, of the brilliance
of noon, or the subtleties of twilight. Perhaps they are so focused
on their own busy lives that they can't take the time to look
up.
It seems to me that
we were always looking up, when I was a child. I can remember
lying on my back in a field near my house, looking up at the stars
as my parents or brother identified constellations and planets
and the Milky Way. We watched the sky as storms rolled in from
the Pacific. We watched sunrises and sunsets. We watched the coastal
fog as it swept in and turned our whole little world into a grey
opacity .
When I first started
teaching small children, I kept a weather-watch calendar in my
classroom. Each morning, I'd ask a child to look out the window
and report on what he saw: sunshine? rain? clouds? snow? We'd
affix a weather symbol to the day square on the calendar, so that
at month's end we could count up how many of each kind we had,
and graph the results.
I was amazed by the
children who would reply "sunny" when the day was really cloudy.
Apparently the fact that it was light outside meant "sunny" to
them. That misapprehension led to a great discussion about all
sorts of sky-related subjects like shadows and clouds and why
you should never look directly at the sun. One of my students
came back many years later to thank me for introducing him to
what he called "atmospheric studies." I was a little puzzled by
that, until he said: "I remember that you were always crying:
"Look UP!"
Perhaps it runs in
my family. My grandmother, bedridden at 97, demanded that we place
her bed next to the window, so that she could look out and enjoy
seeing the sky. The clouds provided her with endless flights of
fancy, as she saw shapes and forms in them, and even imagined
races or conversations between them. And my mother, now 96 and
nearly blind, always remarks on the sky when I take her for a
drive. It is one of the few things she can still see, and she
"reads" it with great skill.
Those of us who love
the sky love it in almost every aspect: stormy and dark, or cloudless
and bright blue, or grey and featureless, or even hot and shimmering.
Perhaps it's that very changeability that we love. The only time
I look at the sky and feel distress is when there is a scum of
brown smog lying along the horizon. Then, I feel guilt and fear
over what is happening to the air we breathe. I wonder if our
descendants will find a way to clean up the mess our industrial
society will leave behind.
But most often, I find
both calm and peace when I look up, and a kind of hope, too, because
if you look long enough at the stars, you begin to understand
that there's more out there than we will ever know. And not knowing
is what inspires human beings to keep on reaching for the stars.
