It is Monday in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut. We have stopped here on our summer vacation to see the tall ships. On the deck of the L. A. Dunston we look at the stacked dories. The lecturer describes a hard fisherman’s life of launching dories twice a day to pull in 50 lb Cod and 100 lb Halibut. Along with 40 other tourists of the day we drift along the waterway on the Sabina, the last remaining coal-fired steamboat in America. Later we walk by the Charles W. Morgan, the tallest of the clippers and sneak into the planetarium to rest. The star-room is cozy and lined round with wooden benches with leather neck rests. We lean back to gaze at the white tile of the dome as the lights dim.
Frank looks over Longmeadow High School for the first time in the 22 years since his graduation. With our children running ahead we walk across the green grass and mown clover of the football field. He is not much of one to brag, but from the memorabilia his mother has passed on to me it is clear that he was well known as a star high school student athlete. He will occasionally talk about a special football game or an outstanding baseball event like the time he pitched a perfect game. Today he looks over the school entrance and says, “It’s pretty rundown.” ‘Home of the Lancers’ is still emblazoned on the scoreboard at the end of the football field. We cross to the sidelines and our feet crunch on the fine gray gravel of the track. “Dad always sat there beneath the announcer’s box at centerfield. He would yell ‘kill the quarterback’,” Frank says pointing at the home stands. From Frank’s grin I know that he understood that his proud father was really yelling ‘you’re doing great son’ in some crazy father-son secret code.
Once our eyes get dark-adjusted we can see the light bulb stars and planets. The lecturer tells us that this night sky was set up just before this show. It depicts the night sky over Mystic as it appears 1 hour after sundown. “The stars move across the night sky,” he tells us, “Because the Earth is spinning west to east at 700 miles an hour.” He shows us a picture of a galaxy that looks similar to our galaxy and reminds us that we are only one galaxy among millions. In fact we are on track to collide with another galaxy that is moving toward us at 250 million miles an hour. “Don’t worry,” the astronomer chuckles, “It won’t happen for billions of years.”
Kids in hand Frank and I cross the road behind the school to the baseball field. “There was never grass on the infield when we played here,” Frank says pointing to a patch of clover that has encroached on the clay along the third base line. “We used to have to run up that hill behind the field for exercise,” he says with a nod to the right of the field. We look over the hillside which is overgrown with lanky hardwoods and a crowd of shrubby underbrush. The twenty-person bleachers that sit on either side of home plate stand empty, but the guy chalking the field lines tells us that there will be a Mickey Mantle game at 5:30.
“Although the stars had a predictable pattern, early astronomers noted that some of the heavenly bodies wandered about the night sky. These, of course, were the planets,” says our lecturer as he shows us his slides. “There is Mercury which has no air and, therefore, no sound. It is scorching on one side, but freezing on the other. Venus has vast volcanoes taller than Mount Everest erupting on its surface. The planet is surrounded by inhospitable carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Here is Earth,” he says fondly as we view a picture of Earth taken by astronauts on the moon. “I refer to it as the blue dot around the sun. Earth is a speck of dust in our galaxy, but it is OUR speck of dust.”
We cross back to the grassy field behind the school and look out across the football field where Frank was the star quarterback for dozens of fall Saturday afternoons. “Maybe it looks better when there are people in the stands,” he says and wanders off toward the open door of the gym. Our children play with their soccer ball on the lawn. I can imagine such a sunny football Saturday. I can feel the nervous tension that must have been his when the team came jogging out to the field, helmets on, shoulder pads smacking together. I can see him taking the snap and rolling back to pass. The hometown crowd would be cheering and his dad would stand clapping and smiling. Being here with him brings it back for me.
The astronomer explains that the stars move across the sky from east to west each night. He points out Orion’s belt and the big dipper that drips water onto Leo the Lions’ back. There is the little dipper, the swan and, of course, the stardust Milky Way in the eastern sky. “And,” he concludes, “Here is the most important star for the navigator. It is the star that is fixed in the sky. It is Polaris, the North star. You can imagine it as the point of axis for the Earth. It is the unmoving point around which the Earth spins on its infinite journey.”
