The Visitor

In the summer of 1967, as near as I can judge after nearly half a century, I was standing on the small front porch of my family's house near Jackson, Michigan, hoping to see a meteor.

I'm pretty sure it was the Perseid shower; I remember a warm summer evening. We knew about the upcoming shower because the local newspaper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, had published a small article about it. My father had gone so far as to purchase a small Tasco telescope -- one of those tiny 2.5" or 3" white refractors standing on a tripod that I expect that you could bend if you leaned on it.

Even at the age of nine, I knew that a telescope would be useless for seeing shooting stars. I guess I must have seen some before, because I knew perfectly well that they would make such brief streaks in the sky that you wouldn't be able to follow them by turning your head, let alone by looking through a little telescope and swinging it in a wild arc.

I believe the time was late evening, with daylight still in the sky. We were just getting set up, and I believe that my mother and younger brother had not yet come outside.

There may have been other people on the street. It was the kind of suburban neighborhood that I expect doesn't exist anymore. It had been rural land just a few years before, the people who bought houses there were all middle-class-aspiring-to-be-upper-middle-class thirty-somethings, and they all had children in a pretty small age range. At Halloween there, I remember swarms of children rushing back and forth across the street like piles of many-colored autumn leaves blown by the wind, in a world before rumors of poisoned candy, or razor blades embedded in apples.

But on that summer evening I was waiting for the sky to get full-dark, and wondering when the meteors would show up. I turned my head toward the east, and I saw the one that showed up.

Many years later, I learned that it was a rock the size of a small house. It struck the Earth's atmosphere at a shallow enough angle to skip off at a high altitude rather than plunging to its destruction -- and maybe our as well. I believe I saw an estimate in later years that if it had impacted the planet it would have struck with a force of 10 or 15 kilotons. The size of a Hiroshima bomb. And it would have struck the heartland of the United States. Were we sophisticated enough in 1967 to know that it was not a nuke? Probably. Maybe. As it was, the rock's closest approach to the Earth's surface was fifty miles high, and that was over the Rocky Mountains, thirteen hundred miles west of my house. Which would have happened less than two minutes after I first saw it.

The fireball was as big as my thumbnail at arm's length -- like the full moon -- so big that you could see fiery structure in it. It was not just a featureless blob of light. There was also obvious, curdling structure in the tail which, as the bolide continued on its course toward us, soon covered a third of the sky.

I think my father and I just stared at it. I recall clearly that I was too dumbstruck to even think of calling to my mother and brother in the house.

I have always felt that I could actually hear the object, but that can't be right, can it? It would take forever for the sound to propagate down from fifty miles high, and what the heck kind of sound would propagate that far, especially coming down from the incredibly thin air that high? The voice of Doomsday? I'm sure that my memories must be wrong about the sound. It just looked like it should have a sound. Like it should have a very loud sound. My first sight of the meteor was so far to the east that it actually appeared to rise in the sky as it approached us. It passed almost straight overhead trailing its slow-motion smoke and fire, and then it continued into the west straight toward the sunset.

The entire apparition lasted twenty or thirty seconds, which seemed like forever. In that time it must have traveled four or five hundred miles.

It's kind of hard to deal with something like that when it simply flies away into the sunset and leaves you behind. I think I wanted to catch up with it and ask questions. Or have it come back by sometime. Or fly away with it.

Many years later when I was going to college in Ann Arbor, one of my friends asked me what I thought would be a good way to die. We were not very many years past the days of Viet Nam, Hippies, and the Weather Underground, and we used to have some pretty philosophical discussions. (Do people still do that?)

Without thinking, I told my friend that I wanted to die during re-entry into the atmosphere, making a fiery streak that a little boy would see.

It was not long after that earlier day in 1967 that I started using our little Tasco telescope to look at things, mostly by taking it to the golf course where my father would practice sometimes until the late evening. Mostly I looked at the moon, because that was the only thing I could actually find, besides random stars like tiny jewels.

I think it only took until the end of that summer to realize that I was going to want a much bigger telescope.