Sunset #734
the fire dies down, and the colors rise up
rivers flow amber, gold, and blood-rose
cascading one upon the other
wave upon wave around the sky
pushing back the eastern dark
holding the light for one last hour
giving us time, time to remember
all of the days we have had together
the glorious days beneath the sun
The main character in my recent book, All That Was Asked, is a poet. It’s a first-person narrative, and he keeps mentioning how people reacted to a poem, or how much he enjoyed writing a poem, or that he likes to watch sunsets because they inspire poetry. But . . . there aren’t any poems in the book itself. It seemed to me I couldn’t quite measure up to the standard implied in the text . . . one gets the impression, although Ansegwe is self-effacing about it, that he’s actually rather good.
Still . . . it’s nagged at me, that I didn’t have any poems by Varayla Ansegwe. After spending hours and days and weeks and months with him, I’m sort of a fan, if you will. If I were a real fan, I’d have his work, wouldn’t I?
So I gave it a try. It’s interesting, to try to write personal-style poetry from someone else’s perspective. The one above results from all those mentions of poetry related to watching sunsets. Imagine our hero trotting down the hill after enjoying a really nice day’s-ending light show, muttering to himself, wriggling his fingers, anxious to scribble down this latest idea. We can leave it to your imagination how he improved this “draft”.
For a second poem, I tried to combine two things from his background. First, it seems Ansegwe had a fairly decent collegiate-level ranking in, well, whatever ball game is popular in Korlo. I envision it as sort of like baseball, maybe like an upsized version of kickball, with a larger, rugby-sized ball. Lots of running, jumping, catching, throwing–very energetic. Second, it’s evident that he was quite the one for romantic entanglements.
If I can gather enough of these, I’ll put together a little “collection” that I can share at events and such. Oh, and as a reminder . . . consider these as translated from Korlovian.
(Photos are mine. All from our own universe, alas.)
Intercept
In this moment,
there is only the ball, gliding on its parabolic arc.
It requires all of your mind to calculate the leap
the extension of your arm, the stretch of your fingers
the breath you draw at its approach
the strength you need to hurl it to your comrades.
For this moment, you do not know that she is gone.
For this moment, your heart is no more than a muscle.
Whether the ball glides into your hand
whether it skims your fingertips and caroms off under the lights
either way, you will crash to earth again
the world's gravity will bear you down
the moment will end
and you will know.
But in this moment, you leap
and time stretches to meet you.
So, for the next month and more, this blog, or at least most of its available posting space, has been claimed by a fan of the Grand Canyon. Yes, a fan of a really big hole in the ground. Itâs not as big as Valles Marinaris, but there is still a river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which greatly facilitates travel by river raft. The goal is to take you along on a fourteen-day expedition, from Kaibab Sandstone to Vishnu Schist, through rapids, slot canyons, waterfalls, and thunderstorms, and along the way reveal a few of the deep dark secrets of these trips so few of us take. Weâll cover over 180 miles on the river plus many miles afoot on canyon trailways. Why use up a month to take you on a two-week trip? Because thatâs what it feels like. You forget what day it is, how long youâve been gone, how much time is left. If you donât keep a journal, youâre lost.
I kept a journal.
I also took about 3,000 photographs and an hour of video.
Yes, there will be a fair amount of âwhat we didâ, but I also want to share the background information the guides (and other travelers) shared with us, the additional tidbits Iâve gleaned from research (the addiction of the Ph.D.), and perhaps even paint the picture well enough that if you canât go on this trip you can claim you did and provide your friends with a verisimilitudinous description. Just pick one of the falsified names in the diary segments & say âyeah, thatâs meâ.  Also, if youâre a well-heeled adventure traveler planning your own expedition, Iâd hope youâll come away with enough information to know where you should not take short-cutsâand with some clues about how to find experienced, capable guides to get you through safely.
In the meantime,  I donât want to wear out your eyeballs with more than a few photos and a thousand words of gushing per post. There will be directions to see more photos, but, I promise, this wonât be a session of âWatch my Vacation Slideshowâ.
Time for the first installment of Secrets of Grand Canyon River Rafting.
Deep, dark secret #1. Not everyone wants to go on this trip. Three husbands who could have joined their wives refused the chance to walk away from work, television, and electronic connectedness for a week. A young backbackerâwho had completed the climb of Mount Whitney with his mother just a few months previouslyâturned down a free ticket and sent his retirement-age Mom on her own. She said he didnât like the idea of not being in control on the trip. Another travellerâs wife sent him off with a (female) friend heâd recently reconnected with after a thirty-year hiatus, because the wife just can’t stand camping. His son, a golf enthusiast, only agreed to chaperone them if they took the shorter trip, to be sure heâd be home in time to watch the Masterâs. Me? No, actually, I didnât want to go on this trip. The only person who couldnât tell was my husband, he was so excited about going. Why would this nature/science/ancient-peoples-loving photographer want to sit this out?
First of all, itâs frightfully expensiveâif you want to travel the Canyon and not spend a fortune, you need to be able to work there.  I am not the correct age or physical type to start a new career as a river guide. Nor do I have the right background or training to get hired by (or even volunteer for) the Park Service or any of the scientific research teams with feet on the water down there. So when my husband Clark declared that it had âalwaysâ been his wish to make this trip and that he had, after all, a big landmark birthday coming up, I made him pay for it out of his IRA. That was the only place we had enough money set by.
Second, Clark got the idea from a friend of his, a childhood friend whoâs facing the same landmark birthday this year. When these two get together, they tend to devote a significant amount of our time to recalling those good-old-days. Days I did not share. Oh, great, my jealous heart predicted: two weeks of traipsing along behind while they play âremember when.â Well, I did end up trailing along behind, but not quite the way predicted. Youâll see.
And the third and most sensible reason:  I broke my shoulder in January and my orthopedistâs solid opinion about my going river-rafting in April was: âI wouldnât recommend doing that.â  The bone knitted on schedule, but shoulders are complicated messes of tendons and muscles that donât take kindly to the whole process. I was told it would be a year or more before Iâd be back from this injury. My physical therapist did what he could to get some of my range-of-motion restored and added a couple of exercises to build back a little strength, but I went off with one arm fully-qualified to hang on tight and one that complained bitterly about any extension beyond a basic stretch while it simply refused to raise my hand beyond about 80 degrees.  One upside was that Clark got to haul all my gearbags, because I just couldnât handle them.
The other upside is that I would not want to have missed out on this trip. Even though we couldnât afford it, it was worth it. Does that make any sense at all? Well, it will.
So, all right already, letâs go. For a teasing sneak-peek, here is a picture from Day 5. Oh, aye, it’s the Grand Canyon.
Here is some feedback from the game. I kept score of Layin’ Pipe when they batted. Susan, the acting manager, kept score of the Aeromen and has the batting stats. The game was played on Field 5 so we expected a low scoring affair. The Aeromen led the entire game for a efficient and satisfying 5-3 playoff victory. A blend of 7 veteran (i.e. older) Aeromen and 4 younger so-called âOtherâ players (Jose, Nick, Ulongo(?), and Mandy) provided the winning lineup. It was a fast paced win taking only 55 minutes.
Everyone contributed to the win. Alan (P) pitched a gem. He gave up only 2 earned runs. After the 4th hitter in the 1st inning, he retired the next 10 in a row. He only gave up 8 hits and only an one extra base hit, a double. Charlie (C) was his supporting battery mate. The defense was almost flawless. There were 14 fly outs and 7 ground outs. In the outfield, Antonio (LC) had 5 putouts, Ty (LF) 3, and Jim (RC) 1. In the infield, Jason (SS) was busy with 6 assists and 4 putouts, and Mike (3B) had an assist and a putout. He had the most creative play of the night when he dove to his left to snare a one-hop line drive, got to his knees, and shot put the ball to Ulongo for a force out at second base.
I asked our fans âOK, really our fanâ to respond to such an artful win by the Aeromen. Vanessa stated matter-of-factly, âIsnât that the way they’re suppose to play!”
Thatâs why we love the Aeromen Nation.
Next week we progress to Round 2 game, and with a win, to the Championship game. The Round 2 game is against New Market Mallers, who are 1st seed and had a bye.
Think: Aeromen are the Champions
(Note: Detailed coverage of the Aeromen will occasionally appear in these pages. Guest authors retain copyright. Less-detailed game reports can be found on the team’s Facebook page.)
Compare the sizes of Earth and Pluto & Charon (Pluto’s shadow isn’t that big on Earth!) Image Credit: NASA
It’s been a super-fantastic #PlutoFlyby day (see the video for a Pixel Gravity simulation of New Horizons’ close approach path on 7/15/2015), and I can’t resist going to one of my favorite astronomy projects: building a scale model of the Solar System that takes you out of the house, out of the classroom, and under the sky. (Where maybe Pluto’s shadow, cast by a distant star, will pass over you.)
As a reminder, you can look for the following in any Messy Monday project:
A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.
As before, I’ll break down the presentation into four postings, to spare readers trying to scroll through a 5000-word document, but I’ll post them quickly, so you can jump ahead if you are raring to go or want to access the reference materials first. In other projects, we built our own comets. In this project, we travel out into the solar system, hoping to reach the source of that comet.
Step 1: Space is Big
Itâs a long way to Pluto. But as far as the Universe is concerned, Plutoâs in our condo’s tiny back yard. What would it be like, though, to take a hike to Pluto? Like the New Horizons Spacecraft spacecraft buzzing past Pluto and its cluster of moons, but, well, maybe taking a bit less time about it. Nine years (the explorer was launched in early 2006) is longer than even the above-average studentâs attention span. What if we could shrink the Solar System down to a reasonable size for nice walking field trip?
Paths of the nine planetary objects orbiting the Sun for many years (A Pixel Gravity simulation result.)
No surprise here: itâs been done. Six ways to Sunday, in fact. While no one person claims to own the idea of building a scale model of the solar system, my favorite advocate of such models is Guy Ottewell, who likes a scaling factor that makes the model a reasonable size for the average person to walk. You can buy his book on the subject (now with cartons!) at the books page on his website. As a bonus, youâll also find the most current editions of all of his other books on astronomy and much more.  (He self-effacingly describes his annual Astronomical Calendar as âwidely usedâ; a more-accurate description would be âfanatically used by serious amateur astronomersâ.) No disclaimer necessary; we’re not friends, I’m just one of his (many) Twitter followers.
The goal of this project is for everyone involved to obtain a personal sense of the feature of Outer Space that is hardest to conceptualize by reading books and trolling the internet: Space is BIG. (Yes, you may pause to reread the opening to The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.)Â Indeed. Really Really Big.
On top of that, the places you can stopâthe non-empty bitsâare few and very tiny compared with the distances between them. And it takes a long time to get from one stop to another.
So, when assembling materials and presenting this project, keep these two key goals in mind. Itâs not important whether you model Earth as a peppercorn (Ottewellâs model) or an allspice seed (easier to find in my own kitchen) or a spitwad from the ceiling that happens to be about a tenth of an inch across.  Whatâs important is that the Earth is not only extremely teensy compared to the Sun, but you canât even fit the Sun and Earth into an ordinary classroom. And you have to hike at least a half a mile (a kilometer) if you want to make it to Pluto. With any luck, you can make practical use of the excess energy in a classroom-full of kids and also amaze them. If youâre doing this as a classroom helper and the teacher is used to taking advantage of the time to catch up on infinite paperwork, this is a time to persuade that teacher to shove the paperwork aside and join the expedition. There will be no regrets!
The objects used to represent planets and other bodies should be chosen for familiarity, because you want the participants to absorb the scale comparisons effortlessly. âEveryone knowsâ how big a jellybean is, a pin is familiarâboth the pushing end and the painful poking endâa soccer ball is a known object, and so on. It doesnât matter if the object you use is not exactly the design diameterâand no one is going to care that jellybeans or coffee beans are bumpy ovoids, not spheres. The next time youâre eating a jellybean (or slurping a Starbucks), at the back of your mind will be âI had to hike a half-mile just to get to this little Neptune hereâ.  Plus, âYum, astronomy is delicious.â
If youâre interested in the underlying concepts, I encourage you to stop by the National Optical Astronomy Observatoryâs website and read Guy Ottewellâs original 1989 description of his Thousand Yard Model; however, if you consider yourself a mathphobe, donât let the arithmetical computations worry you. Iâve made you an Excel worksheet to do that task. Running a mind-expanding science project should help relieve that condition, not make it worse.
If you have visited a museum’s scale model, read Ottewell’s book, or done a similar project in the past, there are a few differences you may encounter in this project. In particular, I suggest you avoid having planets represented by peanuts. Including nuts in school projects, can be problematical if any student (or parent helper) with nut hyper-allergy could possibly be affected. (I have relatives with this allergy, and there is nothing quite like coping with anaphylactic shock to ruin a dayâs outing.)
Iâve included a few more âdestinationsââsuch as the ever-popular asteroid âbeltâ and my personal favorite of Plutoâs fellow dwarf planets. The number of steps taken between planets (and other destinations) is greater, because kids take shorter steps than grown-ups. (Also, other models Iâve seen assume a stride length more typical of menâand the majority of teachers and parent volunteers are still women, with shorter strides than men.) And Iâve included the current (for now, at least) locations for a few more distant âdestinationsâ that we can look out towards from our turnaround point at Pluto.
The tables Iâve provided are in both English and SI units. The scales are slightly different between the two, in order to yield intuitively-scaled results in either set of units. And Iâve provided a âcheat sheetâ of the key data for a teacher or other presenter to carry as a reference source on the walk. If anyone would like to get completely precise and build their own model matching their pace length exactly, or adjusting to a different scale, you can request a copy of my Excel workbook for this project to create your individualized pace-off. Or if you know a Senior Girl Scout or Boy Scout in need of a Gold Star or Eagle project, a community solar system model would be a very cool service project. (Câmon, Scouts, do you really want to build another park bench?)
Speaking of space, and coolness, and peanuts, and bigness, by the time your group finishes this projectâeveryone who participates should wholeheartedly agree:Â Space is Big
