I was talking to a new friend at a meeting a few weeks back and we were swapping tales of life experiences. Many I’ve had in my life revolve around my interest in astronomy. I guess for a 50-year-old you could say that I’ve done a few things, but this person was just getting to know me and the more we talked, the more I kept hearing, “Man, you’ve been there and done that!”
It reminded me of the time Mark went to record actor Avery Brooks in a narration session for one of our shows and he asked Mr. Brooks if he’d ever been to a planetarium. Brooks patiently said, “I’m 50 years old… ” At the time, I thought that sounded kind of cheeky but now that I’m at the same place he was, I kind of know the feeling he was communicating.
A long time ago I worked at the Denver Post. Due to a lack of a journalism degree (although I had another degree and a few semester hours in newswriting and newsphotography), they stuck me in as an editorial assistant. Eventually I got to do some reporting, but it took a while. It finally dawned on me that I could ASK to cover science stories. So, after I asked enough times, they finally let me go out to JPL to cover the Voyager 2 encounter of Saturn. That was a valuable lesson, and provided me with a couple of mantras that have stood me in good stead: “You don’t get if you don’t ask” and “Don’t let anything stop you.”
Over the years I’ve tried to stick to those precepts, not always with complete success, but they have opened up some avenues of experience for me.
Like the time I was hired to be the “trip astronomer” by an mountaineering adventure travel company that wanted to make gobs of money sending folks to South America to see Comet Halley. I spent 3 weeks in Peru, guiding two successive groups of tourists to dark sky spots to see the comet. It was in the heydey of the Sendero Luminoso and they had a penchant for blowing up power stations — which they proceeded to do just as our plane from Miami was touching down at the Lima Airport. I’ll never forget getting off the plane, walking across a pitch-dark tarmac and looking up to see the Southern Milky Way for the first time. It was magnificent!
Little did I know that a few years later, I’d be researching plasma tail orientations on thousands of pictures of Comet Halley as part of a research team!
Most people who know me know that I have a “thing” for Mars. It stems ‘way back to childhood and it has taken me to Case for Mars meetings, planetary science courses and meetings, and out to cover Mars missions at JPL. Well, during grad school I signed up for a planetary science seminar and one of our field trips (geology is fun that way — the field trips are a gas!) was to study volcanism on Mars. Only instead of going to Mars, we went to the Big Island of Hawaii. Twice. Both times we sampled lava as it was flowing down to the sea, tramped across newly-laid lava beds, studied sapping valleys, and got to know parts of the Big Island better than we knew the CU campus. It turned me into a lava junkie, and there is just no way to describe the incredible rush of fear, interest, excitement, and adrenalin that comes from chasing the wild pahoehoe. Tempered, of course, with scientific inquiry.
Also during grad school a bunch of us who shared an office decided we all wanted to learn to downhill ski. So, for two winters we regularly drove up to Eldora or Breckenridge or Loveland or Winter Park, took our lessons, and had a blast. I never got to be too good at it, although I could hold my own on the blue slopes. But, one time I found myself on a black diamond slope. It looked like I was diving over a cliff. My choices were to ski down or walk down and there was no way I was going to walk. So, I put myself into the most severe snowplow I could muster and I bitched my way down that mountain. It went like this: snowplow ten yards, hit a rock, stop. Yell at myself to “keep going, woman! you can do it!” (only I didn’t say “woman”). Go another ten yards, slip and fall, get up, yell at myself some more. Stop to catch my breath. Go another ten yards, and another, and another, all the way down keeping my spirits up by giving myself hell. It was a terrific confidence builder, that run was. When I got down to the entrance to a blue slope it was as if I’d found the Promised Land. Some of my buds were waiting for me there and they had watched me make my way down. The guys just joshed me, we went off to lunch, and that afternoon we did it again! And the second time was just as scary as the first, but at least I’d done it!
Stuff like that makes life worth living. But so do most of the things that are hard-won and precious. And in the next 50 years, I hope I have more experiences like them! I often think that if it wasn’t for my love of the stars, my fascination with Mars, and my desires to share all that with other people, I wouldn’t have done any of it. And then where would I be?