Aroostook Skies: Look skyward or you’ll miss the show
By Larry Berz
I am delighted to announce our family’s survival of the recent annoyance and furious manifestation of Hurricane Irene this weekend past.
The children, terrified by the late night thrashing of nearby spruce tops, fled to the bowels of our cellar where I unceremoniously and ignorantly banished them back into the jaws of their fears. Nevertheless, Sharon and I can confidently report a minimum of morning damage in the attitude department as the first school bells tolled for thee.
Still, as America’s happiest astronomy educator, I stay perplexed. While driving toward Presque Isle from Caribou along Route 1, the inescapable skyscape rattled my realities. Massive billows of shredded clouds, like the wreckage on an uneaten bowl of oatmeal, stampeded ominously above, oblivious to mortal traffic. The scale of the whole sky deal just boggled my mentality. I sensed something frightful had just demonized and demoralized our land during the night, our small piece of turf and Earth. And now the invasion was moving on, spent but proud, into some final dissipation eastward towards our Canadian cousins.
But the whole sky itself looked engaged in the trumpeting retreat! Scientifically sober, I began to digest that our sky, covering perhaps 10 square miles of local land, couldn’t even begin to comprehend the scale of this storm called Irene. This startling and stunning display of natural force clearly extended for hundreds of miles beyond our concerns, programmed to fulfill its destiny wondrously.
For the open eye, the organization of the billows, layer by layer, revealed an intelligence operating and directing even this meteorological mayhem. Scientists, especially physicists, create mathematical vectors to map such forces in magnitude and direction. But when you and your own mechanical 4-wheeler become a vector terrestrially in contrast to the vector celestially above you, then my friends you indulge a close encounter of the scientific kind. And finally for all of its noise, Irene’s skirts even revealed coyly some dabs of beauty by 8 a.m. Monday morning. A patch of cornflower blue barely braved a greeting through the rush hour cloudiness.
But to my bubbly binocular eye, I must confess that the most disturbing phenomena of that fantastic voyage, involved the flat, flatulent faces of the fellow drivers working their way to work. Never, never, could I adequately describe the fatigued, bored, restless, deflated, insulated, hurried, artificial, angry, anxious, masked, vengeful visages behind those circular wheels of steering and steerage. Should I laugh or cry? My entire professional lifeforce cried out to them all.
Now the ancient trumpet sounds, summoning us once again — not as a cry for battle but a summons to shed off the old skin of summer’s finality and to embrace our Friend, the Sky of August. Yes, the land and the inhabitants of that land look pasted and wasted — Summer’s indulgence will soon end.
But is this the end of the story! No! The sky in its courses declares otherwise. But time, time is short. Turn back — the heavenly hosts of Irene’s wrath and fury warn us purge yourselves of summer’s paradise. Brace yourselves for your own unique Aroostook destiny.
Whether we like it or not, we are intimately connected to this planet Earth, and the peculiar blend of Aroostook atmosphere is our companion. Or maybe we are its companion. When a society on a Monday morning cannot find room to acknowledge its own atmosphere cartwheeling above, and recognize its majesty, then we face a serious depletion of the living stream of our days. If 10 inches of snow fell this morning, and like the maidservant in “Nanny McPhee,” all stopped and squealed “Snow in August!” perhaps, just perhaps the magic could begin and lives start living like old bones re-sinewed as an army of Aroostook awesomeness. Or maybe for the stubborn among us, some huge, twisting lanyards need descend from the Irene’s skies hooked to snare your proud Pontiac and whisk you away a subsonic speed to some Mysterious Island?
When I was 12 years old, in Chicagoland, I first encountered the existential deterrence of nuclear mushroom war to devastate my soul with the fear of undeclared, swift annihilation of my existence. God did not create nuclear weapons. Los Alamos and J. Robert Oppenheimer and his American team bear that questionable achievement. God did create the heavens and Earth and the weather within. Is the display of our Monday anomie and ennui to the joy, wonder, and terror of natural forces leading us to solemnly confess that Man, rather than God will serve as the measure of our ultimate mortality and eternity?
Who will speak for Aroostook County? For Humanity? For Earth? The antidote must begin with your own testimony of observation. Perhaps each of you need awake at 3:30 a.m. and stagger into the back yard after a needed bathroom break, cocooning within your hammock with a pair of binoculars. Now study a tiny taste of sky directly above your heads. Waiting for you in a tiny cigar-shaped cloud is a congress of some 300 billion stars — the Andromeda Galaxy. At 2 million light years away, this film of mist represents the most distant celestially presence visible to the unaided human eye. Let your communion with the Andromedans guide your next Monday morning. Time is short.
Larry Berz is director of Easton’s Francis Malcolm Planetarium and astronomy instructor at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics.
