Basketball Astronomy
I was hiking up from the caretaker's cottage to the bighouse on a gimp knee caused by too much hiking and a smidgen of yoga. So clearly I know where I am, which is a qualifying statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with the statement I don't really know where I am. If I had to guess though, and now typing I'm pretty damn sure of it, I am in the South as defined by the Mason-Dixon Line, which is a statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with my assertion that I saw Northern Lights three days ago.
Some people around town, those that saw it anyway, are calling it the Aurora Borealis, and others are calling it a solar flare phenomenon. I'm calling it northern lights. By removing the beginning capital letters I am hedging my bets, because what I saw was an unusual lighting scene taking up most of the horizon between true north and northeast, and therefore, by anyone's definition, it was a humdinger of a thing going on, northerly. Although let me be clear about one thing—this thing in the night was not as spectacular say as a boy riding a bicycle across the sky framed in circular fashion by the full moon.
So I'm walking up the gravel driveway between the two homes on this property. To my right is the northern horizon back dropped by a chunk of the Shenandoah Mountains or perhaps not per se Shenandoah but only a geological relative. What I’m saying is—there are various names for things that are actually the same and what makes it more confusing is occasionally you run up on something that has only one name but is in fact several different things. There is specific truth and general truth and if you came for the specific you may as well just back right on out of here. There is none of that here. Actually, I was limping. That's as specific as I'm likely to get. It was my right knee; I'm ok, thanks for asking. It was near about 7:30 in the evening and the sky overhead was pitch black and dotted profusely with specks of star and planet. I recently climbed up on my roof and corrected the weather vane, which was prior to my ascent all caterwomped, so I knew more or less the points of the compass as they relate to the property landmarks, and something was awry with the sky.
Too much light to the north. Starting at true north and running towards the east for about 50 degrees that whole part of the sky looked like it had sunset afterglow except there weren’t no colors involved—it was just white light or white blue to be true. Bracketing this unusual but in no way spectacular light, about 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon, were two rather large splotches of red. Red that was not pink and was not crimson but could have been a blend of those two or you know it could have been any number of different versions of the red school. Evidently the phenomenon went away for awhile and came back near to midnight and some other people saw it and I believe the colors were different which is not meant to de-emphasize that so too were the people who saw it and very possibly their pharmaceutical content.
The splotches I saw took up an amount of space in the sky that could be represented if you held a basketball three feet in front of you angled up to the wrongly lit night sky. You would have to have very long arms to do this. I don’t mean to imply the shape of the red splotch was like a basketball because it wasn’t. It was the shape you get when you give your 4-year-old son a two-inch chunk of crayon without the paper wrapper and the kid draws a diagonal splotch using the crayon on its side. He does it twice, once on the left side of the paper and once on the right and you remark to anyone who will listen or is skilled at pretending to listen (head bobbers) that isn’t your son remarkable in general and specifically artistically because the two splotches are almost mirror images of each other and if there is anyone listening to your proud prattle they might remark seriously on the well balanced nature of the two sides of your son’s brain.
The next night I was over visiting Lorina when her ex-husband called to ask had she seen the Northern Lights the previous evening and that cinched it for her because I had mentioned it earlier and now she had to see for herself. She started gathering up enough winter clothing for the both of us to live an indefinite period of time in the wilderness but I should be more specific about the indefinite nature of the time period as implied by the quantity of clothing gathered. It would be a period of time longer than I wanted to be outside on an evening that was predicted to bring the season’s first hard frost. I had been gearing up for a little hard boozing, light doping, and relaxed movie watching. Of course one of these activities does not necessarily preclude the other but…it was getting late and was, my brain calculated, the exact time period between the previous night’s two sightings by various people in the community. There was the sense for me, unfairly yes, paranoid yes, that her ex-husband was conspiring to fuck up a relaxing evening for me by spurring on Lorina’s general nature—which is to live life to the fullest. I could see him in my minds eye, smirking, as my skinny ass froze. My feelings towards this imaginary version of Lorina’s ex-husband are not hard ones, I’m just saying.
While we stood there, Lorina and I, and I played with the convertible mittens she had provided for me, wondering was I really a stick in the mud or was I justified in feeling totally tossed asunder in my own little prescribed time-space continuum, a meteor as bright as a halogen lamp lit up the sky right above us and traced itself in 2.5 seconds a distance of what?—ten miles? A hundred? A thousand? If you put a basketball in front of your face tilted up to the night sky it would be about equal to the distance between the two poles of the ball, except you wouldn’t be able to see if the basketball was that close to your face. It wasn’t what we had come to see so it wasn’t but nominally remarked upon. Until the next evening, when it was again mentioned, briefly.
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I was hiking up from the caretaker's cottage to the bighouse on a gimp knee caused by too much hiking and a smidgen of yoga. So clearly I know where I am, which is a qualifying statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with the statement I don't really know where I am. If I had to guess though, and now typing I'm pretty damn sure of it, I am in the South as defined by the Mason-Dixon Line, which is a statement meant to juxtapose interestingly with my assertion that I saw Northern Lights three days ago.
Some people around town, those that saw it anyway, are calling it the Aurora Borealis, and others are calling it a solar flare phenomenon. I'm calling it northern lights. By removing the beginning capital letters I am hedging my bets, because what I saw was an unusual lighting scene taking up most of the horizon between true north and northeast, and therefore, by anyone's definition, it was a humdinger of a thing going on, northerly. Although let me be clear about one thing—this thing in the night was not as spectacular say as a boy riding a bicycle across the sky framed in circular fashion by the full moon.
So I'm walking up the gravel driveway between the two homes on this property. To my right is the northern horizon back dropped by a chunk of the Shenandoah Mountains or perhaps not per se Shenandoah but only a geological relative. What I’m saying is—there are various names for things that are actually the same and what makes it more confusing is occasionally you run up on something that has only one name but is in fact several different things. There is specific truth and general truth and if you came for the specific you may as well just back right on out of here. There is none of that here. Actually, I was limping. That's as specific as I'm likely to get. It was my right knee; I'm ok, thanks for asking. It was near about 7:30 in the evening and the sky overhead was pitch black and dotted profusely with specks of star and planet. I recently climbed up on my roof and corrected the weather vane, which was prior to my ascent all caterwomped, so I knew more or less the points of the compass as they relate to the property landmarks, and something was awry with the sky.
Too much light to the north. Starting at true north and running towards the east for about 50 degrees that whole part of the sky looked like it had sunset afterglow except there weren’t no colors involved—it was just white light or white blue to be true. Bracketing this unusual but in no way spectacular light, about 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon, were two rather large splotches of red. Red that was not pink and was not crimson but could have been a blend of those two or you know it could have been any number of different versions of the red school. Evidently the phenomenon went away for awhile and came back near to midnight and some other people saw it and I believe the colors were different which is not meant to de-emphasize that so too were the people who saw it and very possibly their pharmaceutical content.
The splotches I saw took up an amount of space in the sky that could be represented if you held a basketball three feet in front of you angled up to the wrongly lit night sky. You would have to have very long arms to do this. I don’t mean to imply the shape of the red splotch was like a basketball because it wasn’t. It was the shape you get when you give your 4-year-old son a two-inch chunk of crayon without the paper wrapper and the kid draws a diagonal splotch using the crayon on its side. He does it twice, once on the left side of the paper and once on the right and you remark to anyone who will listen or is skilled at pretending to listen (head bobbers) that isn’t your son remarkable in general and specifically artistically because the two splotches are almost mirror images of each other and if there is anyone listening to your proud prattle they might remark seriously on the well balanced nature of the two sides of your son’s brain.
The next night I was over visiting Lorina when her ex-husband called to ask had she seen the Northern Lights the previous evening and that cinched it for her because I had mentioned it earlier and now she had to see for herself. She started gathering up enough winter clothing for the both of us to live an indefinite period of time in the wilderness but I should be more specific about the indefinite nature of the time period as implied by the quantity of clothing gathered. It would be a period of time longer than I wanted to be outside on an evening that was predicted to bring the season’s first hard frost. I had been gearing up for a little hard boozing, light doping, and relaxed movie watching. Of course one of these activities does not necessarily preclude the other but…it was getting late and was, my brain calculated, the exact time period between the previous night’s two sightings by various people in the community. There was the sense for me, unfairly yes, paranoid yes, that her ex-husband was conspiring to fuck up a relaxing evening for me by spurring on Lorina’s general nature—which is to live life to the fullest. I could see him in my minds eye, smirking, as my skinny ass froze. My feelings towards this imaginary version of Lorina’s ex-husband are not hard ones, I’m just saying.
While we stood there, Lorina and I, and I played with the convertible mittens she had provided for me, wondering was I really a stick in the mud or was I justified in feeling totally tossed asunder in my own little prescribed time-space continuum, a meteor as bright as a halogen lamp lit up the sky right above us and traced itself in 2.5 seconds a distance of what?—ten miles? A hundred? A thousand? If you put a basketball in front of your face tilted up to the night sky it would be about equal to the distance between the two poles of the ball, except you wouldn’t be able to see if the basketball was that close to your face. It wasn’t what we had come to see so it wasn’t but nominally remarked upon. Until the next evening, when it was again mentioned, briefly.
- jimlouis 11-11-2004 6:39 pm