Here Be Dragons
My father-in-law walks a lot. A few years ago he had coronary bypass surgery, and while he came through it fine and at 80 remains active, going out to his farm and feeding his cattle, you can never be too careful. So he walks.
This is what he was doing a year ago, at his home southeast of Dallas. Taking a walk. He heard something, something he couldn't identify. A sonic boom maybe; maybe not. It wasn't alarming, just curious, so he did what curious humans have done for millennia when confronted with mystery. He looked up.
A convenient byproduct of doing what I do is that I can look back in time and see what I was thinking. I know what I was thinking a year ago because I wrote about it then. It's what I think and feel today, too.
Questions have been raised about why we grieve so strongly for these seven astronauts, when others who serve us die in the line of duty and their passing goes largely unnoticed by the nation. This is good to acknowledge, I think; the lives of soldiers killed in a helicopter crash or cops cut down on the job are as worthy of national mourning.
There is something different, though, about these seven. Their deaths have reminded us of their resumes, and of the types of people we send into space. Men and women, Israeli and African-American, Christian and Hindu -- their differences are overshadowed by their remarkable journeys that led them to Columbia.
We've gotten complacent, we're told, about the dangers of "slipping the surly bonds of earth." We've also forgotten, I think, that there is such a thing as excellence, and that there are superior people, perhaps not bred as much as formed by their desire to dream and commitment to pursue those dreams.
The American space program sprang out of the shock of Sputnik, an affront to a nation that had begun to believe it could do anything. It was articulated at Rice University in 1962 by John Kennedy, who said we chose to go to the moon "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
This was an appeal to nationalism, of course, pure Cold War politics, but filtered through the sensibilities of a man who'd been a sickly child, reared on stories of King Arthur and knights. It appealed more to our awareness of what human beings have always done, searching for the unknown because it was there. "Here Be Dragons" was written on the ancient maps for places yet to be explored, and filled with assumed danger. It was a warning to the cautious, and a beacon to the adventurous.
This is who these seven were, then, and why I've wiped away tears this week, grieving for people I didn't know. It's a sorrow based on young lives lost and children left behind, and sacrifice that knew the risks. It's a personal sorrow, for those who explore the unknown on my behalf. It's a sorrow that marks the vagaries of nature, the uncertainty of life, and the courage and passion of those who would seek out dragons, last seen streaking across a bright blue Texas sky.
9:45:54 AM 
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