When I lived in Tulsa, I met some amazing women. One of them was Margaret. I had not seen her since I left, 5 years ago, but we do talk on the phone. She is one of my best friends and has supported me always. I knew mostly of her parents, having never spent a significant amount of time with them, but much time with Margaret. She and her parents travel together often and this year they decided to travel to Washington D.C. and Virginia. Luckily, we lived only four hours away from D.C. So, we decided to meet up with her and her parents while they were in D.C.
On a Friday in June, we drove to our hotel near the Pentagon. A quick call confirmed that Margaret and her parents were at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I have been there a few times before. I was confident I would find her despite the crowds of people. In fact, when I think about this museum I immediately feel the largeness of the air space; it has high ceilings to display the large planes and satellites. I also feel the closeness of the floor space, where many people are pushing and walking, often with heads up as they go from exhibit to exhibit. Children on field trips, mothers with babies in strollers, people from all over the world. It is an exercise in trying not to get in someone else’s way and an impossible one to avoid. I also think of the air that blows through the museum as if the planes and rockets were flying through the air instead of just suspended above us. I envisioned this as we talked about meeting there.
Our hotel had a shuttle that would take us to the Metro station and back. Transportation is what a city is all about. After 5 years of living close enough to D.C. that it became a common vacation spot, I felt I knew the Metro and how it worked. So, taking the Metro from our area of town to downtown felt easy; it required no transfers. And, it was a treat because we crossed the Potomac. Moving from under the ground to above the ground in order to cross the river gave the trip a sense of realness. In fact anytime I have ridden the Metro and seen daylight, as we did on the Red Line when we took it from its end point in Fredricksburg to downtown, I realized I felt that I really was on a train moving through neighborhoods and past people’s workplaces. It is easy to forget I am on a train when I see only the dark walls of the tunnel and the interior of the car. Then, suddenly the car comes out onto the surface and light fills the car as it swishes by corporations, suburbs, and stations.
The shuttle too was an experience in Eastern American landscapes. We shared our ride in the van with a New Jersey family all dressed up in their finest, carrying flowers, on their way to see a son, grandson, nephew, husband graduate to lieutenant at the Army ceremony. We were near the Pentagon and our hotel had advertised itself as a place for families of the military to stay. This family was a colorful bunch. The women wore dressers, high healed shoes, and makeup. The men slacks and ties. The young were texting the rest of the family who had decided to drive their own cars since they were too many for the van. Some of the cousins were calling the other cousins in the cars following the van. New Jersey accents were flying fast at top speed. The men complained about the van being too hot and tried to get the driver to turn on the A.C. The grandma was rolling her eyes, fanning herself, and deferred to by everyone.
We made it to the station, boarded our train, and crossed the Potomac. Then, we proceeded on foot to the Smithsonian Museum. Every step got me closer to my friend. We only had two blocks to walk and being back in D.C. navigating the streets felt like being in a familiar place, not quite home. The only odd thing we say was a squirrel lying flat and spread out at the base of the tree. Usually you see them jumping about and frantically chasing one another. Not this one. We wondered if he was close to death and joked he might be a politician lazing about, such bad jokes seem to escape everyone’s lips when in D.C.
When we entered the museum and felt that first rush of air that seems to emanate from deep within this museum, and passed through security, I looked for Margaret and her Dad. I missed seeing them though. Margaret had cut her hair short, and it looked great, but was not the cut in my vision of her, which was five years old. But, the hug was the same. It was wonderful seeing her. I had not realized a piece of me was sleeping until I met her again. Here was another part of who I was and where I had been. And I had only gotten through it with her help. That is what friends are and do. They are pieces of us, our past, that make us who we are even when those friends are not physically present. Friends help us when they are physically present with whatever we do while we are there with them and support us when we are gone. And all of what we do, who we see, what we say, who we love makes us who we are. To be reunited with Margaret meant to suddenly see myself completely again. I do not know if this was the same realization she had, but I did know she was glad to see me. I could see returned love.
Ernani was dying to see the House, so he went off to do that. Margaret’s Dad wanted to keep her Mom company. Her Mom was taking a break, sitting after so much walking. They had been in the area sightseeing for over a week and she had recently had some surgery on her hip.
Margaret and I took off to the space part of the museum. The best part of what we saw together was the pictures from the space probes, Voyager and Cassini to name a few, of the planets and sun in our solar system. Wonderful, visionary pictures. My love of space and geology combine with these pictures. We saw solar flares, the volcanoes of Venus, and the lava flows of Venus and Mercury. As gazed at the pictures, we were suspended above these planets who really were somewhere out above us, massive and large and hostile, while we were protected from them and space by chemistry, by layers of gases between us and the vacuum of space. It was a reminder again of who I was, one human in a vast city, country, continent, planet, universe.
But, that was not new to me. I had had those thoughts plenty of times in my life and not just when looking through my telescope at the moons of Jupiter but also when hiking or thinking about what to have for dinner.
What was new was Mars. These pictures were not from 30,000 plus above the surface. With these pictures, the camera’s eye, and so mine too, were on the ground. All I could say to Margaret about these was: “We are on the surface!” It was amazing. And original. It was a moment in history that I could see with my two eyes and it was in front of me. We all study Abe Lincoln and abstractedly see him win the war and lose his life, but none of us was there and no picture we see can make us truly be there or feel we were in the audience at Ford’s theatre or a General with Lincoln in a tent field. But, these could. I was on the ground looking at another planet and even though it was truly through the eyes of the robot, it was through eyes that felt like mine. They were not detached from their landscape. These eyes were slightly above ground level, as if I was looking slightly down from a sitting position, and they revealed a horizon that was not Earth’s horizon. They revealed red rocks and dust that were not of Earth’s Arizona desert or the Sahara meant to be Tattoine.
I could not stop looking, and yet I had to move on and see what else to see. And, what I saw next defied human eyes.
The planet Jupiter looks like an abstract painting and can easily be dismissed as such by the eyes and brain who know it’s a planet, but also see it as a large pretty ball. It is easy to know the truth. It is a planet. It is real, we know, but it does not look real. It looks like it comes from a human imagination.
As we go out from Jupiter and get more distant images from the planets out way way way past us, I think we get more distant from them. Mars is no longer distant, so we can assume, I think, in some future the others will get more real and immediate too. Unless of course human vision remains short and we see less money diverted to the realms of NASA, filled with scientists and dreamers both. Both can and should exist in the same place, but we often think of the two as separate and this could be a dangerous thought pattern that might lead to one versus the other and which one is best or worth our immediate time and energy. Thus, we invest in one and not the other and lose out on something important and/or profound about us and our worlds.
But, back to the topic at hand. Uranus looks alien. Pluto looks unreal. And we can just look with awe and forget them in a moment. Perhaps, too, this is because some of the images of the planets have been around for a long time and we have seen them before. These new images were sometimes a variation on what we had seen before, but there were surprises, like thermal pictures of Venus and being on the surface of Mars and seeing the robot leg and the Martian horizon. Then, there were the pictures of Saturn, which stopped me in my tracks just as those of Mars did, but for entirely different reasons.
Saturn and its rings. We all have seen them and know that they tilt, so we get the idea they are 3D, but again, like with Jupiter, they have the feel of a painting. That was the first familiar picture of Saturn at the museum. The next picture of Saturn’s rings destroyed that idea completely. This time the satellite took a picture of the rings edge on. So, as I looked at the picture, Saturn’s rings were vertical and filled the frame as they ran top to bottom. It blew my mind. This was the most alien thing my eye had seen. Each ring had a thickness and my brain could not fully comprehend that what my eye saw existed in the real world. I had no reference except the line. It did look like lines; they were straight and long like a line, but they were also thick and metallic and more than a black line on a page or the edge of a record, a board, a desk, a car. They were alien. They had the definition no line had . No reproduction of real life, no painting, could look like this. Nothing on Earth could be used to help us understand these rings and rings itself seemed an inadequate word. A pictorial tour of the universe awed us and took away all words except the mundane ones like awesome.
We left to meet up with Margaret’s parents, David and Katie, and try to explain a bit of what we saw. With her parents, we decided to see the 3D movie the museum was playing on the Hubble telescope. It began by moving us from Earth to the planets to the closet galaxies and the stars in them, to the Orion Nebula, and to the most distant stars from us that teach scientists about the creation of the universe.
In 3D stars flew past us and the experience made us all feel the distance and vastness of our universe immediately. All of the images Hubble has given us and they would not exist with the telescope. We got the history of the Hubble: how it was made, how it was repaired, how astronauts go up in space and repair it. It was a reality TV show in 3D, which revealed how nerdy and awesome astronauts really are. They wear sunglasses in space and spend hours hanging in space above Earth putting together the best telescope Earth has and not breaking it or dropping anything. Amazing.
The best part though was about the Orion Nebula and the star nursery there. We saw tons of small galaxies with suns and planets that looked like ours revolving around another large sun blowing enormous amounts of energy at them in the form of solar winds beyond any hurricane force wind we have on Earth. All potential life like us billions and billions of miles from us.
The farther back in time we went, we got closer to the truth of how we all got here, but we also got further from it as well. It became darker and more mysterious and harder to see. They let us know that eventually we would reach a black hole, and that all we had really seen of the universe from the eye of Hubble was a tiny sliver of the rest of the sky, perhaps a fourth of the sky. How many more nurseries are out there? What will the 90% reveal if we get a chance to look deeply at it? I hope someday we know.
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