We_Had_Telescopes_The_Size_Of_Oil_Drums
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For reasons that fly in the face of predictability, I live in a mountain town whose population doesn't even hit five-figures. I, whose most direct exposure to small-town existence are reruns of Twin Peaks, now inhabit a community for whom Friday night karaoke is the big event. This town's primary commodities seem to be liquor, leather and woodcarvings, and every time I walk to the center of town, I expect some murderous Headless Horseman with California license plates to scream around every blind turn at 70 MPH and run me down like a dog.
But I am a science teacher, and the mountain twilight allows for wicked astronomy lessons.
This school is directed by a former superconductor engineer, who still walks and talks like a California surfer boy. My comrades, my teachers-in-arms, are kung-fu fighting graph theorists and cheery, redheaded hobos who sleep under rocks. The former Jehovah's Witness broke free of his religion while standing on the rim of the Flagstaff meteor crater, went and earned his degree in astrophysics, and after this school year will track planet-killer asteroids at an observatory in New Mexico. One woman here was once thrown out of an eight-story window while swing dancing, landed in the swimming pool below, and snuck back into her parent's house at 3am with a full-body bruise that they never discovered.
We are the only affordable school within hundreds of miles with the equipment necessary to teach proper science, and so buses roll in every week from as far as two states over. We turn off the lights and crank up the Van der Graaf generator, evoking lighting bolts two feet long. We man rock-climbing walls that we only allow children to climb after they've told us amazing facts about Mars. And we point 12" telescopes at the Pleiades star cluster, while drawing out the Cassiopeia constellation with a green laser pointer powerful enough to distract planes.
We collect bizarre medical conditions off the student release forms. In a distant third is the boy who is 'allergic to smoke in Japanese restaurants.' The esteemed runner-up is a young lad who, we are warned, 'talks until exhaustion': we see him every day, talking like he was afraid his tongue will fly the coop like a clay pigeon, and then collapsing into a panting heap. The winner of the whole season, however, is beautifully simple: 'Sleepwalks. Can be awoken by saying, 'In Jesus' name.'' We really want to try, 'Hail Satan,' to see if he'll lapse into a coma.
We are reckless dorks living together in a confined space, which is a combination fraught with both danger and hilarity. We create a three-liter dry ice bomb which erupts so loudly that the director races down from his hilltop home thinking the propane tank exploded. We have access to a launching pad used for the kids' model rockets, and one night we start launching our own ramshackle creations, in pitch darkness, and hope that they don't fall back down on our heads. And at one point during the season, a fish tank explodes - which is actually entirely my fault.
The staff develops a sport called 'stick fighting': at midnight, a dozen geeks who spend their daylight hours being child-friendly gather on an open field, and pair off into approximate weight classes. Two combatants at a time stand across from one another, and both grab hold of a sturdy, five-pound tree limb that someone plucked out of the wood pile. Then, somebody yells, 'Fight,' and we battle each other in the dirt and grass for guts, glory, and just because.
Near season's end, the martial artist physics major and I teach a whole class in the style of Bad Kung Fu. We do roundhouses, speak like we've been dubbed, and proclaim astronomy to be a matter of our father's honor. We receive a standing ovation, although you really had to be there.
But on one night, a real rocket, one called a Minotaur, launches from a nearby air force base. In the blue-black night we watch what looks like an earth-born comet glide across the sky, like a baby spider on the wind, from the Big Dipper on over to Scorpio. The first and second stage boosters detach, and the third stage shoots forth, leaving behind a contrail ten times as wide as the full moon. Half the sky is coloured a ghostly white with exhaust, which fades out, slowly, into the starlight. And it remains, to this day, one of the most stellar things I have ever seen.
For reasons that fly in the face of predictability, I live in a mountain town whose population doesn't even hit five-figures. I, whose most direct exposure to small-town existence are reruns of Twin Peaks, now inhabit a community for whom Friday night karaoke is the big event. This town's primary commodities seem to be liquor, leather and woodcarvings, and every time I walk to the center of town, I expect some murderous Headless Horseman with California license plates to scream around every blind turn at 70 MPH and run me down like a dog.
But I am a science teacher, and the mountain twilight allows for wicked astronomy lessons.
This school is directed by a former superconductor engineer, who still walks and talks like a California surfer boy. My comrades, my teachers-in-arms, are kung-fu fighting graph theorists and cheery, redheaded hobos who sleep under rocks. The former Jehovah's Witness broke free of his religion while standing on the rim of the Flagstaff meteor crater, went and earned his degree in astrophysics, and after this school year will track planet-killer asteroids at an observatory in New Mexico. One woman here was once thrown out of an eight-story window while swing dancing, landed in the swimming pool below, and snuck back into her parent's house at 3am with a full-body bruise that they never discovered.
We are the only affordable school within hundreds of miles with the equipment necessary to teach proper science, and so buses roll in every week from as far as two states over. We turn off the lights and crank up the Van der Graaf generator, evoking lighting bolts two feet long. We man rock-climbing walls that we only allow children to climb after they've told us amazing facts about Mars. And we point 12" telescopes at the Pleiades star cluster, while drawing out the Cassiopeia constellation with a green laser pointer powerful enough to distract planes.
We collect bizarre medical conditions off the student release forms. In a distant third is the boy who is 'allergic to smoke in Japanese restaurants.' The esteemed runner-up is a young lad who, we are warned, 'talks until exhaustion': we see him every day, talking like he was afraid his tongue will fly the coop like a clay pigeon, and then collapsing into a panting heap. The winner of the whole season, however, is beautifully simple: 'Sleepwalks. Can be awoken by saying, 'In Jesus' name.'' We really want to try, 'Hail Satan,' to see if he'll lapse into a coma.
We are reckless dorks living together in a confined space, which is a combination fraught with both danger and hilarity. We create a three-liter dry ice bomb which erupts so loudly that the director races down from his hilltop home thinking the propane tank exploded. We have access to a launching pad used for the kids' model rockets, and one night we start launching our own ramshackle creations, in pitch darkness, and hope that they don't fall back down on our heads. And at one point during the season, a fish tank explodes - which is actually entirely my fault.
The staff develops a sport called 'stick fighting': at midnight, a dozen geeks who spend their daylight hours being child-friendly gather on an open field, and pair off into approximate weight classes. Two combatants at a time stand across from one another, and both grab hold of a sturdy, five-pound tree limb that someone plucked out of the wood pile. Then, somebody yells, 'Fight,' and we battle each other in the dirt and grass for guts, glory, and just because.
Near season's end, the martial artist physics major and I teach a whole class in the style of Bad Kung Fu. We do roundhouses, speak like we've been dubbed, and proclaim astronomy to be a matter of our father's honor. We receive a standing ovation, although you really had to be there.
But on one night, a real rocket, one called a Minotaur, launches from a nearby air force base. In the blue-black night we watch what looks like an earth-born comet glide across the sky, like a baby spider on the wind, from the Big Dipper on over to Scorpio. The first and second stage boosters detach, and the third stage shoots forth, leaving behind a contrail ten times as wide as the full moon. Half the sky is coloured a ghostly white with exhaust, which fades out, slowly, into the starlight. And it remains, to this day, one of the most stellar things I have ever seen.