from August 11, 2015
Last night, I was out to walk the dogs again, or we were walking each other, helter-skelter. It was our typical scenario--out there after Perry Mason on ME-TV, which was after a round at the D&D pub, balancing on the bar stool, scribbling poetry notes, where Max's 2$ special Blue Sunsets (sort of an inverse tequila sunrise) and a couple Busch Lights prevented me from going on to see Fantastic Four, which was while I'd forgotten to drive over to Rocheport to hear a talk from Missouri River Relief, which was after a day reading for the up-coming, crushing semester, mostly Adventures in the Anthropocene, and after making a 500$ payment for the school trip to Scotland next May and my annual 30$ donation to Wikipedia, sketching out some wilder blog ideas, all that, with way too much coffee, after a breakfast of cottage cheese and cold beans. The usual sort of day.
So, we're out walking, me and the three dogs, my shirtless summer-tuned body shivering in this mere 70 degrees, while two nights ago, trying to sleep in the lingering 90 degrees, touching my own chest, I would have diagnosed myself with terminal fever. I had to sprint down the road to keep up with the dogs, who decided the world out there was too exciting to waste a moment of. I see a meteor heading my direction, due east. I wheeze and puff along.
I caught up with the two retrievers out in our far field. With them huffing nearby, I had time to stare at the sky. I used to often see meteors during those last 25 years of walking, at least one a week, dozens during the prime times in August and December. But not so much with this latest crew of canines. Is it that the earth has spun into a different corner of the cosmos? That my neck creaks too much to stare at the sky? That the two new pups need a good deal more attention?
Two other corner-of-the-eye glimmers, but not enough streak to count those as for sure meteors. Sometimes, fireflies just at the right height can trick me, sometimes glints from an edge of my glasses. I stand there in the field, stroll back and forth, bump into a hay roll. Strangely, not while I was in Iceland, not during those nights in the Ice Hotel in very-north Sweden one January, but right here in this twilight-zone field in Greater Metropolitan Hallsville, I've once seen the Northern Lights, that wavery green and pink, in a decade-gone September. Just that once.
I scratch at all last night's tick bites, the seed ticks that swarm all but invisible until too late. I scratch, or try not to, not seeing any celestial show, and try to compensate by framing all this poetically: look, the Milky Way pointed south-southeast toward Columbia's glow, like a Titan's bronze-tipped spear. There, is that Jupiter, 15 degrees up in the West? The Big Dipper northwest, upright, full of entire oceans of red wine, waiting to be tippled down to us by some errant star. Could I work in Stardust, that movie I showed the last night of English Lit II, which I can't get my niece to watch? I scratch more, or try not to. A second meteor streaks along at a crazy angle.
It's kind of cold standing shirtless in the field. I whistle at the dogs, and get two headed back with me. A fourth and fifth plane drone, high enough their red flashes are un-synced with the sound. I imagine, um, what movie? in which airplanes are struck and crumpled by the cascade of meteorites. I recall reading Day of the Triffids, that great spectacle a way to blind humanity before the insidious alien invasion. I recall...oh, by then I have two dogs home and I'm out whistling for the third, yelling Maya, Maya, over the creek and hills, my tone increasingly less civil, our 20-minute or so walk stretching to 45 minutes, before the shaggy white beast comes up the road, still taking my sweet time.
So, we only saw two meteors last night, but the big show is tonight and Thursday. Escape from those pits of light pollution, venture out, and stare up at the sky. Go to the River at Rocheport or Boonville and watch the sky and the reflection in the rough wet mirror. Give us your counts Friday.
Here's a more complete guide for 2015.
http://www.astronomy.com/-/media/Images/News%20and%20Observing/Sky%20this%20Month/2013/08/Perseid-meteor-shower-2013.jpg
later, bob
No comments:
Post a Comment