A Walk in the Park
May 14, 2001
7:19 a.m.
There are a thousand stories I could tell you about our trip to Space Camp. Traveling with 36 kids from 10-12 years old is like that. I could talk about the kid who was perpetually late. Or the one who was always losing something. Or the one who was perpetually late and always losing something. Or the couple of them that seemed hell-bent on testing limits. There are always moments, you know? Or I could comment on the kids who got caught up in the space museum, enthralled by weather simulators. Or those that got into the old Apollo Command module simulator and started radioing Houston, hitting switches and studying the control panel and beginning whatever they thought the process of launch might be. I could try to relate what it felt like to see a group of kids sitting at the feet of a guide as he asked them question after question about the space program--Mercury, Gemini, Apollo--and one after the other get the answers right. There is hope for the future, my friends. There is hope. I could tell you about what it felt like to see your daughter be with her friends for three days. How it made my heart ache to see the confident way she held herself--giving way sometimes, and pressing for her way at others. I could tell about how she volunteered to tell the story of Apollo 13 to the rest of the class, and how she did great until she froze on one point, and how her best friend jumped in and picked up the story from that point. I could relate that the two of them bought souvenir dog tags, and how they left Space Camp each wearing one tag of their own, and one of their friend's. I could tell you about the two teachers who went on the trip, and how they worked tirelessly and with the ultimate patience to deal with everything from the kids to the parents to the Space Camp administration to the restaurants, and still have a little left over to give to bedtime stories. I know beyond a doubt now how special those two are. Yes, there are a thousand stories I could relate. But the story I'm thinking of right now is one that happened in the very early hours of Thursday morning. As usual, I woke up early and took a shower. Two of the boys were up and wanting to do something. So at something before 6:00 a.m. the three of us slipped quietly from our Space Camp habitat and began to walk through the compound. The morning was crisp and glorious, the sun having barely risen and the sky a cloudless blue orb that seemed at its most endless. Birds calling in the distance were the only sounds. Dew hung on the Alabama grass like fruit. The kids whispered when they talked--not because I asked them to, but because it just seemed right. Silence was in the air, you know? If there is a holy time, this graceful moment before the day starts is surely it. I carried a bag of gorp with me--a mixture of Cheerios and M&Ms. I offered it to the kids, and one of them dug in. First we came to Pathfinder. It's a full-sized shuttle mounted on an inclining angle with solid rocket boosters and the big brown fuel cell attached. "Is that a real shuttle?" the kid who ate the gorp asked. "It may have some real parts to it," I said quietly. "But I think it was more of a mock up so they could test the trucks and the other things they needed in order to move shuttles." "What's the brown thing?" "It's fuel for the main engines." We talked for a little more. The gorp kid was into the engineering parts, the other was more quiet. We went to read the plaque on the shuttle, which, to my relief, confirmed what I had said. I didn't want to look like a total dork to these kids, you know? We moved along and came to rocket park, a place where they have aged hardware of all sorts of configurations--Redstones, Jupiters, Mercury and Gemini capsules. The required multi-staged Saturn V split apart to reveal the stages and their insides. The quiet kid walked ahead a little. He's a good kid, I know. Very popular at school. He would leave at the end of the day with his mother (they had to attend a wedding, and so he missed the last day), and I would find that he's also a leader who can keep a group of kids under control merely by his calming presence. But this morning he wanted his space, and so I gave it to him. We came to a full-scale mock-up of the lunar lander on a simulated moon surface. We talked about the rockets that were lined up. We talked about Gus Grissom and John Glenn and Alan Shephard. Later I was to explain to a group of kids that I could always remember that Alan Shephard's flight was May 5, 1961 because it was four days before my birthday, That afternoon one of the guides asked the group when Shepard's flight was, and was stunned to momentary silence when one of those kids rattled the answer off like a Gatling gun. Then we went to the Saturn. The first stage is a huge fuel tank enclosed in a metal rocket wrapper. "Woah!" the quiet kid said. "Is this something that actually went into space?" "No," I replied. "I'm sure this is a test unit. Before the shuttle, the only thing that ever came back was the tiny capsule at the very top." I pointed way up the field to the Apollo capsule that we couldn't quite see, yet. We went in behind the rocket--something we probably aren't supposed to do, but it was six a.m., you know? The kids were interested, and they were very, very good. Engineering kid asked about launch ballistics. Well, he didn't phrase it that way, but he asked how they know where to point the thing. But I'm not going to penalize him for a lack of vocabulary. He asked about launch ballistics. [grin] "Hey!" the quiet kid said. "They've got an opening down there." One of the sections had a bulkhead open, and I could tell the kids wanted to see in. "Come on," I said. "Let's check it out." And so we saw the front end of the second stage fuel cell, and all the hardware that goes with that. The quiet kid stared with eyes the size of silver dollars. "How fast does the fuel burn?" he asked, looking up at me. Goosebumps lined my arms. We talked about it as we walked toward the capsule. I explained about the launches they see on television, and about how when the first little explosion goes off how they are losing that bottom stage. His eyes narrowed as if he was thinking. I asked him if he knew why it takes all that fuel to get off the Earth. "Gravity?" "Yep." We've come to the capsule. "Do you know what the fuel is made of?" I asked again. "Hydrogen and oxygen," engineering kid said. "That's right." I nodded. "Did you know they found water on the moon?" The kids hadn't known that. "What's water made of?" "Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," the quiet kid said in his quiet, far away voice. He was looking at the capsule, you see. And he was looking down the field at the rocket that it took to put a man into space when launched from Earth. "I wonder what it felt like to sit in that capsule," he whispered. "I don't know," I admitted. On the way back to the habitat, I offered the gorp again. Engineering kid said he had had enough, and went on talking about a method of shooting ICBMs down. Quiet kid looked at me for a moment, then reached in and took a handful. He ate them quietly. From the corner of my eye I caught him glancing back at the spacecraft once, then--very deliberately--he turned his head to the blue blue sky that seemed so endless overhead.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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