Perihelion & Aphelion
By the skin of his teeth, my youngest brother had finally graduated high school. I was in my dad’s garage, going through all my brothers’ old homework. After some thirty years, it was time to ritually destroy most of it. Leave it all behind and render it to memory, where you get to embellish and lie whenever you want because there’s no paper trail. Life’s more fun that way.
Trick to throwing away family artifacts is to be a mercenary, a cold-blooded murderer. That’s how my grandma kept her house, a house the same size as my one-bedroom apartment, from bursting at the seams. You’re 18? So long, Evel Knievel stunt cycle. That typewriter reminds you of the good old days? Not anymore. Goodbye. Those photos from Aunt Betty’s funeral? Depressing. There’s dust all over them. Adios.
Most of our homework was trash, a bunch of work-for-hire gigs we didn’t get paid for because apparently we were getting paid in education. By and large, it was ready for the fire, with two exceptions. First was my brother Daniel’s Warren Zevon obituary, which opened with this hall of fame line: “Warren Zevon was one of America’s best gun-slinging, piano playing, binge drinking, chain smoking, drug abusing sadistic cynics ever.” Couldn’t toss that.
Second was something I wrote when I was 6 or 7. Some assignment about working at the newspaper. It asked what I wanted to be paid, and I answered with a child’s hopeless optimism about the future of media: a day of food for a day of work. Then it asked what features I would write. Answer: wars, funnies, and the space program.
I had to keep this one. Good time capsule of an era where we had newspapers, and a souvenir of the ten years where I was obsessed with outer space. When it was the only thing I cared about. When I would take a book about astrophysics to youth group and hide in the corner and actually read it even though girls occasionally tried to talk to me. When I subscribed to Sky & Telescope and read it so much it made me question my relationship with God. My parents even made me have a sit-down with my pastor over it. Space had become my god.
Beats the hell out of me why that was. I didn’t like science fiction. I liked Star Wars but I liked it as a car movie by a dude from Modesto, and it may as well have been a sequel to American Graffiti. Star Trek was fine but even as a kid I kinda knew they were just going to Planet Griffith Park and Planet Agua Dulce. I liked Jules Verne but mostly because he was so prophetic I wondered if he could give me winning lottery numbers.
The banner achievements of the American space program didn’t even interest me that much. Landing on the moon seemed like a boring waste of money, and a glorified demonstration of military dominance. For one thing, I could go outside and see it so well I had a decent sense of its geography. The damn thing was right there. My attitude was the same as my grandpa’s back in 1969: Howard Hughes could have gone to the moon if he wanted to bad enough.
If I cared about the moon landing at all, it was because of two men: Michael Collins and Harrison Schmitt. Michael Collins because I couldn’t comprehend what it must have felt like to get that close to the moon without getting out of the car. One shot, ever, and he couldn’t go. And Harrison Schmitt because he was the last guy to put his feet on the thing. What could that possibly feel like, to walk on the moon, get back on the ladder, and know deep down you would be the last person to ever do that? The only thing interesting about the moon, which is deader than dead, is it makes earth look breathtaking and miraculous in a way our brains normally can’t process without a shitload of drugs.
Mars was a little bit more interesting. It sort of has an atmosphere. It sort of has water. It looks exactly like a worse version of Arizona. The prospect of getting there was more of a logistical challenge, more of an adventure, a voyage. And there was the outside chance that maybe we’d find the fossilized remains of life, but with the hilarious asterisk that it would be extremophile bacteria and nothing else. Just like Arizona.
(Digression, because this is a newsletter, not a magazine: I have a short story idea I can’t shake off but for whatever reason won’t actually write. Goes like this. A guy at NASA is sitting at his computer in Alhambra, driving a decommissioned Martian rover. He crests a hill and discovers a desert ironwood. He’s found life on Mars. But the tree is in bad shape and it isn’t photogenic and it’s not intelligence, which is all anybody cares about. He heads over to Baskin-Robbins for a butterscotch ice cream cone and debates whether to make an announcement. It’s life, and theoretically it changes everything we know, but it’s just too anticlimactic. Who cares? When he gets back to the office, he turns the rover around and goes home early.)
What ultimately did it was Comet Hale-Bopp. I wasn't even ten years old, puberty was way off anyway, and my only hobbies were collecting coins and complaining about editorial decisions in Hardy Boys books. I just didn’t care. Oh boy, a huge chunk of dirty ice. But my mom’s friend had a nice telescope and I had to go outside, so when it hit perihelion, we drove to the desert to gawk.
That’s what got me into space. That, by itself. Nothing else. That was the punch in the face. Not movies, not toy spaceships, not tinted photos from the Hubble. Just the sky. I had thought of the sky as immutable, but now here was this huge anomaly, this busted exhaust pipe kicking up so much dust that even the sun had to call attention to it. The one constant ever in my life was now fundamentally different, and it would stay different for almost two years. There was poetry in there someplace. If the sky could change, then anything could change.
Most nights, until it was gone, I’d go to the backyard at night and look up. Say hello to Hale-Bopp, maybe look for shooting stars. I finally cared about something beyond earth. Something bigger than us. I didn’t want anybody to invent gravity boots or land on Mars, I just wanted to look up. Hale-Bopp, was a reminder of infinity. It was a miracle. Makes you understand how Comet Haley drove kings and navigators nuts.
Two dudes discovered Hale-Bopp at about the same time, in the summer of 1995. Alan Hale (astronomer) and Tom Bopp (factory manager). Tom’s story is the one that got stuck in my head. He was in the Arizona desert using a friend’s telescope, he spied something fuzzy, said hey what is that, used his cell phone to call the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, found out there was no reception, drove out to a payphone and realized he forgot the number, then got all literal and sent a telegram from Western Union and altered the life of every single human being who ever went outside at night.
Tom wasn’t happy about the discovery. He got famous for a minute and went on television and he was treated like he won a twenty billion dollar Powerball. But when his comet was at peak brightness in 1997, his brother and sister-in-law died in a car crash after photographing it. “This has been the best week of my life. And the worst,” Tom told National Geographic.
Tom’s dead too. Not convinced he ever got over that tragedy which wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t closed his left eye and put his right eye to that lens in 1995. But I hope he had at least a dim awareness that he got people to go outside and get away from streetlights, to scan the sky for anything, to look for something they won’t ever find, to do what makes us human. By the time Hale-Bopp was out of sight, I was bored with it. I was used to it. I’d gnaw my own arm off to see it again, but it’s not playing an encore for two thousand years, and I have to drive home anyway. Just have to remember I was lucky to be there.
P.S. Shortly after I finished writing this, I cared about the moon again. William Anders, an astronaut on Apollo 8, died (he crashed his WWII-era plane in the Puget Sound at the age of a million, which is basically the plot of Secondhand Lions and makes me burn with jealousy). When he was orbiting around the moon, he shot probably the best photograph anybody will ever shoot. Earthrise. Bottom of the frame you see the moon in all its deadness and up top you see the earth in blinding glory, a billboard not just for the existence of life, but the unique conditions necessary for it to keep on going. Look at that, you son of a bitch.