Comet Watching

I woke up today to hear about a meteor hitting the earth. Actually somewhere in northern Russia. Why is it that they usually hit Siberia? Good thing, eh.

Anyway, I wasted the better part of this morning looking at YouTube clips of the bright streak in the sky and the sonic boom or “blast wave” that rocked nearby towns and blew out windows.

I’ve always been interested in nightsky phenomena. Is it good luck or bad luck to see a comet? I guess it depends on the society. Halley’s comet—the most predictable, coming every 75-76 years and the easiest to observe with the naked eye—throughout recorded history was either a sign the world was ending or a time of cyclic uniqueness. In his autobiography, published in 1909, Mark Twain wrote, “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley’s comet.” Twain died on 21 April 1910, the day following the comet’s closest sweep. The last time we had a visit from Halley’s was in 1986. I will not live to see it again.

Technically, I didn’t exactly see it in 1986 either.

I believe it was the springtime when we went out to view the comet. This was before Internet and live blogging. For amateurs such as ourselves we had to read the newspaper (remember those things) to figure out the optimum time to catch a glimpse. The best time was before dawn. So sometime in the middle of the night my friends and I decided to go comet hunting. We had to borrow a car and what we came up with was an old shortie school bus. Next we had to pool our change to come up with gas for the bus. Then we had to get out of the city, away from the light pollution.

Little did we know how far we’d have to go.

We drove I-55 past the Saturn rings of the suburbs and warehouses that ringed the city. Past the Des Plaines River, a geographic marker, which meant we were out of Cook County and past Joliet—but the sky was still twilight! We were running out of time looking for dark sky—soon it would be getting light. So we took the next exit.

The road was narrow and unlit, though in the distance we could see the ethereal glow of Chicago and a bright light on the horizon. As far as getting out of the city, we were definitely away from subdivisions. There was no a single house or person around. We kept driving over broken and then dirt roads. Finally we parked. It was now or never to see the comet.

We tramped over open ground and in the near-dark sighted a mound, more like a heap of dirt or slag, so we climbed up for what we supposed would be a better view. I lay down on the rough hillside next to my husband who wasn’t my husband then. We might have been engaged. Anyway, I imagined it being romantic, lying together watching a once-in-76-year event. We probably held hands. Slowly the sky lightened. We didn’t spy the comet at all, but came to realize we were sitting on a toxic waste dump right outside the Joliet Arsenal Plant.

We hurried to get back into the city before rush-hour traffic stopped us in our tracks. We were on Lake Shore Drive when we ran out of gas. Had we been paying attention to the gauge we might have noticed we were running low, but back then we were ALWAYS running on empty. Who was to say we wouldn’t make it back on fumes? All I can remember is sitting in the right lane with traffic building and cars honking, thinking we were going to get rear-ended at any minute. Just as a city tow truck pulled up to get us off the roadway, my husband and another guy returned with a plastic jug of gasoline for the tank.

We made it home, comet-less and possibly contaminated from rollicking around on an industrial Superfund site. A few years later the arsenal closed down and was turned back to prairie and Mike and I got married and had a baby girl with more or less all her limbs in tack and toes and fingers accounted for. And since Halley’s, other comets have come and gone. This memory of a crazy night out comet-watching is like a fuzzy, white streak against a fast and far receding past. It will not come again.

Comments

Sheila said…
Wow! I love this account, Jane. I have been busy and not reading your blog, so it was great to find your wonderful essay this morning.