By Larry Berz
In my boyhood, in 1960s suburban Chicago, I began my life-long love of sky watching. I can’t quite precisely sequence the experiences, which ingrained this head-tilting preoccupation.
I grew up in considerable comfort and affluence. My father, Marvin, served the U.S. Army/Air Force as a B-17 pilot during WW II, ultimately ferrying both supplies and dignitaries aboard the Air Transport Command from Presque Isle overseas to Casablanca, Morocco. The war over, Dad received his discharge and refusing an opportunity to join the Reserves (and thereby avoiding duty in the Korean War), preferred to carve out a career with his best buddy as manufacturers of metal storage cabinets. They built a plant for that purpose within the industrial park of southwestern Chicago. His success within the climate of American postwar prosperity guided and vaulted him and my mother to build their beautiful home along the shores of Lake Michigan in suburban Glencoe. My own birth rite included the precious gift of uninterrupted solitude and a relatively dark sky for little eyes to gaze upon.
In 1960, I glimpsed (now remembered within the mists of my memory) the first presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. In 1962, at age 6, I vaguely recall the dread and fear engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In November, 1963, I was a second-grader at South School, barely bicycling back to Miss Johnson’s classroom where the hallways buzzed with “rumour,” a new word for my young mind. The “rumour” exploded that weekend- President Kennedy assassinated! Our family sat solemnly watching the horse drawn caisson and listening to the drum-drum-drum on a black and white Hitachi television from our newly constructed home. We all knew something terrible had taken away — our President.
But life and time wait for no one. I continued my story, watching from ever evolving television sets the news and drama of that decade. Assassinations, civil unrest and reform, overseas war, drugs, space, technology, social experimentation and “liberation” convulsed and stimulated our community on an American growth curve from Dallas to Watergate, from Peking to New York City.
I ate, did my homework, went to the bathroom, went to elementary and junior high school, ate, did my homework, went back to the bathroom, went to high school, ate, did my homework, went again to the bathroom, moved to California, went to college, ate, did my homework, went to the bathroom, completed my resume, worked in retail and a paint factory, went to law school, paid my dues, ate, did my homework, went to the bathroom yet again, flew to Presque Isle courtesy of my Air Transport Command, packaged the stars for the public in Easton, and somehow 25 years flew away — far, far, away.
Fifty to 60 years later, I still look up, but now with wiser and even hungrier eyes. Here are some lessons that seem to animate my purposes for the County community and myself. We live with the gift of consciousness, capable of connecting with the cosmos or capable of cutting ourselves off from that universal communion at any moment by our free will. The power of choice overwhelms the sensitive heart and mind.
Daylight memories of the moment include a crystal morning, scintillating grass blades (the grass, the grass, it’s full of stars!), flying geese, a silent contrail — American aeronautical power 35,000 feet above, a brilliant morning Sun in Scorpius, holiday festivities consuming the Goughan Farm staff, the invisible constellations above, (Venus and Saturn and Mercury, oh my!). Evening impressions include my loving and loyal moments contemplating and personally calibrating the dance of Jupiter’s satellites through a small huggable telescope. I stare through a pane of welder glass No. 14 each and every clear morning, the best to you each morning.
Second, we do indeed live our lives, “passengers on a little spaceship” as Adlai Stevenson once declared. The Earth, our precious living globe, stands as an awareness we must awaken to … immediately. It is an attitude not requiring any formal educational distinction or privilege. It is an attitude not requiring a certain income tax bracket. It is an attitude and an obligation available to all regardless of age, regardless of political party, echoing to the scriptural call, “be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be dismayed.
It is an attitude calling for courage and not commercial complacency. Caribou courage involves the complete surrender of our exercising ego to the sheer wonder and heart palpitating awe of our privileged planetary position. Who is asking you to be a pioneer upon that new frontier? I am. And he is.
A star, a star, shining through the nights of November above your heads is calling. That same star called away our 35th President 50 years ago. His message and his memory, his hopes for freedom and peace, are now anchored securely in the substance of that new, untended Garden almost within our technological reach. He is waiting out there amongst the inert material of the solar system, longing for us in conjugal concert to celebrate with him the rebirth of a new morning. Will you join him and I in that historic effort?
Larry Berz of Caribou is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
