Aroostook Skies: The agony of April
By Larry Berz
In the dream, I am aware of a strange motion from the corner of my office eye. It is neither animal nor human. I am compelled to turn and whirl in my padded swivel seat. I’m terribly preoccupied with thoughts of what might have been.
All morning, I am tredding in a kind of mental quicksand, multitasking unsuccessfully to solve a hundred financial, domestic, and assorted relational concerns and educational ambitions. But above all, I’m suddenly aware of a slow maddening motion outside the walls and windows of the Science Center. There is a wagon, a surrealistic projection upon the modern highway.
There it is — a slow timeless clop, clop, clopping progression of a black wagon, drawn by a single aging horse. I cannot see the driver. And I. oh God, how badly I need to see the driver holding the reins. Because I know that driver. I met him in my childhood, in my school books, in my child heart, so young and tender and innocent and historically passionate for a bearded tall gaunt silent stove piped hat Father. I, coatless, run outside the door of the building and hesitantly call out to the wagon, but no one answers. It pitilessly rolls forward upon the softened dark soil. I run faster but the faster I run, the further behind I find myself. And with a last gush of expended effort I , I, I, just — but no I cannot see that driver!
Because there is no driver! All I can see in the wagon are 200 billion Suns, a galaxy rise, shining in a powerful pinwheel of my infinite imaginings.
Why does anyone go outside and look up at the starry sky. What possibly can the starry night hold for a weary winter watcher? May I suggest the recent phasing and waxing of the crescent Moon. I had the liberty to show and shower a few students from the Math and Science School on April 6th, a telescoped image of the slightest slip of a young moon, ghostly bathed in Earthshine. Through the eyepiece, the lunar globe stood out suspended with a kind of clarity, both so clearly ugly in its battered texture that one’s breath was swept away. The tiny craters crisply dug out of that old moonsoil just defied our sense of the plausible. We saw the ultimate Christmas Tree ornament — an ancient rock ball defying our conventional definitions.
Abraham Lincoln, too, defies conventional definition. As this past Thursday commemorated the 146th tragic memory of his untimely murder in Ford’s Theatre on a grim, ghostly, raw late evening (the shooting occurred between 10 and 10:15 p.m.) I found myself pawing at my mind’s ability to re-witness such a crime against America’s best and a time of its worst.
“O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done; The Ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.”
His visage was almost repulsive, his stature exaggerated in length, his presence disjointing. But the mind, the words, the humanity, the compassion overwhelms. We stare at his photographs, searching. My earliest childhood memories and visions always see the face, the full face of Lincoln. The everlasting sight of a Father’s forever face — so ugly as to become beautiful. One of us, all of us. And taken away from us, so unfairly. “Here Captain! dear Father! This arm beneath your head; It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.”
The sky in April reminds us that winter is almost over. It’s luminaries, Orion and Taurus and Gemini and Canis Major, are vanquished. Gentler, more subtle sights are in store: Virgo’s blanchments, Saturn — golden and alluring. The Big Dipper overhead. And for the hawk-eyed a gathering of month’s end planets low and drooping in the East. The attendants of Venus gather force to escort Her Highness to a solar rendezvous. But when the Sun rises in Aries the Ram, and we stand transmazed by its boldness in the early morning light. Remember how dark days and the cold nights led us to find some sign of an invincible Summer within us. Remember.
Larry Berz is the astronomy educator and planetarium director of the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton.
