BIG STUFF

Being asked to remember a place that has special, lifelong meaning, at first brought on a sort of brain freeze for me. I tend to remember memorable events fused to the places they happened, as if the

place somehow influenced the event’s outcome or defined its fuller meaning in some way inseparable from the experience itself. Case in point would be the rooftop of the St. Mark Hotel in downtown San Francisco where, in 1976, a few of my friends from Berkeley and I went up to celebrate New Year’s Eve — indulging in the midnight count down, witnessing it from one of the tallest perches in

In Remembranceof Things VastBy Jeff Howard

the City. Hearing the cacophony of car horns and fireworks break out at the stroke of 12 was

one thing, but to hear all of the ships in San Francisco Bay below us — all

around us — leaning on their fog horns

in a sustained “moan” was

simply so

haunting and so wonderfully “out of time”, that the shape and tone of that “chorus” has been permanently lodged in my mind “as if it was yesterday.”

The spell that that deep echoing sound cast last-ed perhaps three minutes, because suddenly, out of the same door we had used to enter the hotel’s tar beach, piled 3 or 4 security guards scream-ing at us to get off the roof. “You are breaking the law!” they yelled as they rushed toward us. I remember the fearsome joy I felt the instant I realized that there were 3 more doors exiting off “our roof ”. I yelped for my group to split up, and each to shoot toward a separate door. Needless to say, we escaped the cops’ grasp this way, and wound up laughing far into the night, stashed away in a friend’s room down in the trunk of the hotel. In this instance there was the PLACE of the roof perch, the mournful SOUND of those foghorns, and our hair’s breadth ESCAPE all rolled into one hilarious and exhilarating expe-rience that had “youthful prank” sprayed all over it. Exciting as it was, though, this example misses the bigger point of how place and memory can powerfully intersect.

tnoTrip

What this assignment demands instead, I think, is to recall some place that has a special meaning over time for you and

others who matter to you. Without hesitation I steer my cogs of recollection toward a family ritual we savored for years at the “Maine camp” (New England code-speak for a rustic fishing or hunting cabin which, in this case, my grandparents had built on a lake in the 1920s). Specifically, I recall going down together as a family at night to the dock, which extended like a wide plank out over the lake. We’d lay down under olive drab, scratchy army surplus wool blankets, turn off our flashlights, and proceed to stare up at the night sky for an hour or more.

And, what a night sky it was! Compared to DC’s dog days’ haze from which we had just escaped, not only could it be as cool and crisp as the mid-40s out there, but the sky was truly inky black with a bazillion stars. So clear and so countless were the stars, in fact, that the name “Milky Way” finally made sense to me, seeing it stretch like a glowing garland from the southern hori-

zon on up and over us, only to stream back down thru the black pine branches reaching out over our heads from shore. If the air was still enough, this glowing arc would continue on down into the black mirror of the lake to form a glowing band that described a complete “celestial sphere”. It was, quite simply, an awesome sight that made for an incredible setting. Suspended out on that plank of the dock, hovering in the midst of that sphere full of stars, our family somehow took to talking about countless thoughts and feelings we never spoke about anywhere else. Context and timeframe surely explain a bit of why this might have been. Our “philosophical discussions” began in the early 1960’s at the height of the Cold War and as the “Space Race” was amping up both national expectations and national anxieties. My Dad had worked for the Air Force, so he knew that some of the “satellites” we were seeing were actually SAC bombers circling out or heading back from their endless rounds standing guard along the Arctic Circle. He’d point them out as the dots traveling faster than the silent satellites, and then hush us to see if anyone could hear the drone of their engines. They were so high up, no one could convince the others what they heard

were actually those bombers, though I swear to this day that I heard them. Harder still for any of us was to imagine them as huge, lumbering, nuclear-armed B52’s ready to go to war in an in-stant. For all we knew, in fact, they were already heading out on that mission.

Once we’d honed our senses on spotting warrior planes, we’d start keeping track of the slower satellites and counting the streaks of shooting stars. We’d challenge each other to find the planets plying their way along the Milky Way, giving up their presence as the only orbs that refused to twinkle. The “space race” part of the equation eventually brought brain-teaser rid-

dles into our conversation, because tied up in the concept of “SPACE” were

questions Einstein had made all of us feel compelled to contemplate. How big was the universe? How was it created? How fast is the speed of light and how far does light travel in a year? How many millions of years ago did the light of any given star out tonight

leave that star so we could see it tonight? What is infinity and what

does it look like? If the universe is expanding, how can infinity get big-

ger still? All of this philosophizing felt like flirting with answers that might not

just be harder to understand than we might think, but harder to get than we COULD think.

The sheer vastness we were staring up at and out at, was both fascinating and incredibly humbling at the same time. We invariably talked on in this “big ideas” way until we simply got too chilly or tired to keep laying there on the cold, hard wool and wood. With that we ambled up to the cabin, stepping between the protruding roots of the tall pines that leapt into our flashlight beams, and on in to bed.

We grew all of us more mature of mind over the years, as did the scientific theories and the complex explanations that attended them. And so the discussions slowly shifted and grew ever more complex and philosophical. Unbeknownst to my parents, they also got increasingly fueled by beer and pot, as the group expanded to in-clude the siblings’ best friends and finally their spouses. To this day, when any one of us ventures “down on the dock” at night, the understanding is that we are obliged to stare at the stars, dis-cuss the vastness of the universe, and count the streaks of meteor trails. Because we know — and treasure — that there is a time and PLACE for that.