- December 20, 2024
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OK, this was serious. There was a fireball. In the sky. And it was headed right for us.
“Am I the only one seeing this?!” I yelped to no one, sprawled over my steering wheel and peering upward through the windshield.
It seemed far away — too fast to be a plane, too big to be some freak, daytime shooting star. So that just left one explanation: We were clearly under attack by extraterrestrials.
Well, that or a killer asteroid. Either way, I wouldn’t have work tomorrow, which seemed like silver lining.
This is how my mind works.
Should I take a photo? I thought. No time! Check the news? This is bigger than news! Call my loved ones for heartfelt goodbyes? Meh.
The further across the clouds the fireball sped, going so fast it forced a bubble-like force field around it, the less sense it made. There was a smoke trail — which meant it couldn’t be your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, earth-crushing meteor.
Or could it be? I’m an envelope-pushing artist — a great literary mind, sure — but what did I know about science? I just knew it couldn’t be a shuttle: NASA was done.
Or was it? Literary minds like me tend to eschew low-brow distractions such as “news” and mass media, so I’m out of the loop. (We do, however, allow those outlets to pay our salaries.)
Finally, the fireball reached its peak, where the flames went out. Just like that. But if you squinted, you could still see a spec, gliding quietly now, its hyper-drive thrusters disengaged, camouflage shields armed (the the final phase of its sneak attack [classic UFO]).
It never occurred to me that this could be a rocket ship actually from earth, or that the planet’s curvature could manipulate the look of its trajectory. That would be ridiculous. So when I watched the spec suddenly burst into three separate parts and head back down toward land, I was convinced: This was a comet. Or a meteorite. Or whatever four-eyed space geeks call them.
Incredible: I got to watch this mass streak all the way across the sky — what timing. I watched it claw its way through the atmosphere. I’d seen it catch fire. And then I saw the clouds pummel it to pieces and brush it away like nothing, left to trickle down in pebbles here and there.
“This’ll sound weird,” I blurted to Molly when she finally picked up the phone. “But did you hear anything about a comet? A meteor? Cause I think I’m watching one now!”
And the giddiness was real. After a few long, uneventful days, I felt like I’d been given this gift: a glimpse at something rare, and scary, and beautiful. A reminder of our delicate place in the universe.
“What’re the chances I’d see it start to finish?” I gushed. “I mean, there was a force field, Molly. A force field!”
I parked the car and rushed inside, opened my laptop.
“INSANE ALIEN INVASION AND/OR DEADLY METEOR DEC. 3,” I Googled, confident that’d do the trick. And it did.
Apparently, the same day, right around that time, a company called SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 shuttle to send a commercial satellite into geostationary orbit for the first time ever.
Hm.
The whole thing sounded like a lot of nerd talk to me. Geostationary? Falcon? Orbit? This condescending report was obviously only interested in rubbing in how I hadn’t considered the most obvious possibility first.
Seriously, you’ve lived an hour from Cape Canaveral the past 23 years, it chuckled in its subtext.
And that’s when I deflated.
“Never mind,” I told Molly. “Guess it wasn’t anything special, after all.”
Just a stupid satellite.
I walked back outside and fixed my view over the tree line, where the rocket’s smoke had all but dissipated, turning pink and gold as if the sky were blushing and embarrassed.
And I thought: You know what? It should be embarrassed!
This wasn’t aliens or asteroids, but how could I think for a second it was ordinary? That fiery miracle was a toy some overgrown kids made in some garage somewhere. That’s all. And they made it with their hands. And then they blasted it into a place that has no oxygen or sound or sports or cell phones.
Here I was feeling foolish, as if I’d gotten excited for nothing, like I hadn’t just witnessed magic: Man defying all the rules, cracking the world wide open to sink his teeth into the fruit inside.
Puny, stupid earth, I thought. You’ve got to be kidding me with this whole “gravity” thing, right?
BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIATE EDITOR
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