Now that the election is over, a new peacefulness is trying to settle into my soul. I just can’t let it, much as I’d like to. There are many issues left over, and a couple of months to get through before Donald Trump is again President, very much like getting to my next paycheck without starving my pets. And myself.
I work “over the mountain,” in the next county. It’s an overnight hitch, most days, and sometimes it’s twelve hours long, meaning I am sometimes absent for fourteen hours. Whatever the shift length, working overnight messes up everything else. I haven’t gotten a handle on the solution yet, and sometimes, my phone actually dies for lack of power. I’m usually busy doing other things, like feeding pets at some odd hour.
So, last night I actually didn’t work, and I fed my dogs at about 1:30 AM because I’d been sleeping. Part of the feeding ritual is that I walk my three big hounds up the hill to the fenced dog run after they eat. That’s a little risky in the dark, with skunks and all, so I take them on leashes when it’s dark, and hope everybody stays quiet. Of course, I was thinking about how tired I was and why I was awake, anyway, and that I still had cats to feed. I hadn’t given a thought to my phone, which was busily charging on my computer table.
That phone, hassle that it is, is part of any sit-down-and-wait ritual. So when I open the gate to the big dog run and cut them loose, I sit in a lawn chair in the evening chill and wait, perusing Substack and a few other frequented sites.
It’s been warm here lately, despite the fact that it’s fall and my location is in the northeast. Really comfortable, like, seventy degrees at night. So, I was ready for perhaps a ten-minute respite from chasing down my various responsibilities. But, lo and behold, I didn’t have my phone. Damn!
Well, I’ve gotten old and that phone was at the house, down the hill about 300 steps, which means retrieving it meant a walk. I’ve gotten used to living in that phone to a degree, but not entirely. I thought, I could adapt. This once.
So I settled into the lawn chair and then slumped, so I could look at the stars. It’s terrible, but it’s actually been awhile since I’ve done that. I’m not a stargazer so I couldn’t, quite actually, name off the constellations I was seeing. But their brilliance against the deep, deep blue background was startling, almost as if I was actually seeing them for the first time. A southerly breeze blew, the silence barely broken by an occasional fall cricket’s chirp.
Then, it happened. A once-in-a-lifetime event; I witnessed a rock, a huge, misshapen rock, mottled with craters and tumbling in a fiery path through the upper atmosphere. I kid you not. If the visible sky was 180 degrees of a sphere, that rock’s visible path was perhaps, twenty to twenty-five degrees of that. Which isn’t a lot, I know. The only thing it could have been was an undocumented near-earth object that broke into Earth’s atmosphere, just long enough for me to get a really good look at it. I don’t understand why there was no sonic boom. Perhaps it was the distance. The notable characteristic about it was that it wasn’t in the atmosphere long enough to be engulfed in flame, rather, there was some fire but mostly, just bright sparks.
And I’ve gotta say, that rock was huge, probably larger than the appearance of the size of the moon. Of course it was about 235,000 miles closer, so it perhaps wasn’t that big, but, had it actually entered the atmosphere and come down, it seems like there’s a great chance somebody would have gotten hurt. Its direction was almost precisely, west-to-east.
Hey astronomers. I saw it. You didn’t.
From now on, I’m leaving the phone on the charger when I’m at home.
I’ll let you know how that works out.