Astronomy & Space – The Celestial Monochord

Dapples: Trees Create Images of the Sun

Dapples of sunlight are like arboreal religious art — depictions by trees of the star that created them.

Suns-rise: Dapples of sunlight through a linden tree

I’m not a religious or spiritual person — not in any way most people mean when they say such things. I think the Universe is a physical place. Nevertheless, I do ask you to join me in understanding and pondering this:

All trees need the nearest star, the Sun, to live. And on every sunny day, they create representations of the star that made them possible and sustains them. It’s more or less as simple as that.

Dapples of sunlight are images of the Sun.

A few people notice this now and then. When the Sun is being eclipsed by the Moon, dapples get moon-shaped chunks taken out of them. And, on even rarer occasions, when there’s a big enough sunspot on the Sun’s face, you can see the sunspot in the dapples streaming through the leaves of trees.

Trees make representations of the star that made them. You can see this on any sunny day wherever there are trees. As long as there are trees, they always will make images of the sun.

I wouldn’t go quite so far, at least literally, but a person could be forgiven for thinking dapples of sunlight are like religious art projected by trees into the shadows — like cave paintings depicting their creator.

[ This is the first of a series on dapples of sunlight being images of the sun. ]

Notes on Frank Cloutier’s Grave

Finding the grave of a long-lost musician shakes my grasp of time and space

This past Thursday was the 55th anniversary of Frank E. Cloutier’s death. He died just over 5 years after the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music, for which he’s marginally remembered.

Here’s what his headstone looked like on my first visit, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2006:

It’s in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is a beautiful drive from the Twin Cities, especially if you take Highway 61 through the Mississippi River valley.

You pass through, or near, Red Wing and Rollingstone, Wabasha and Zumbro Bottoms, Frontenac and Trempealau. There are often bald eagles, red-tailed hawks.

Frank Cloutier is buried “on a local heroes hill,” to borrow John Prine’s phrase, in La Crosse’s Oak Grove Cemetery. Frank’s is one of about 200 headstones of veterans of each American war from the Spanish American through the Korean.

Though basically from Rhode Island, Frank happened to be working as a piano player in Manitowoc when the US entered World War One — hence the “Wisconsin” on his Army-issued headstone.

He arrived in France with the 311 supply train company in 1918, not long before the Armistice and too late to see fighting.

But France was pretty out-of-sorts and needed supply trains, so Frank’s company stayed on after the war for about 9 months in wine country. Less than six months after Frank returned to the states, Prohibition took effect.

Knowing he was both Catholic and a Freemason, I was curious to see whether his headstone would have a cross or a masonic square-and-compass.

Frank Cloutier contributed the Anthology‘s only Upper Midwestern music. Here’s his headstone on March 1, 2009:

As the musical director of St. Paul’s Victoria Cafe, Frank and his band made a 78 RPM record in September 1927 — “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One”.

It was released that January, but by then the Victoria Cafe itself was already in Federal court, fighting for its life. From the start, the record always represented a gone world.

“Moonshiner’s Dance” seems to have utterly vanished from history almost as soon as it was released. When Frank died in 1957, he apparently didn’t know the recording had been reissued 5 years earlier in New York as part of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

But even then, nobody would’ve been able to predict the Anthology would become as important to America’s self-image as it’s become.

Frank Cloutier couldn’t have foreseen that “Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One” would one day become the best known recording made in Minnesota during his lifetime.

Its hard to appreciate how deeply the country had changed between 1927 and 1957. Indeed, much of the Anthology’s power derived from the way the alien sounds of Prohibition-era, pre-Depression, pre-WW2 America mystified young Cold War listeners.

Frank Cloutier died on a Friday morning in 1957.

That very same morning, the Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launch pad in Florida. Meant to meet the challenge of Sputnik with America’s own first satellite, the Vanguard TV3 was an embarrassing, televised explosion. Headline writers dubbed it Flopnik, Oopsnik, and Stayputnik.

The satellite itself was recovered from the wreckage and put on display at the National Air and Space Museum, where I took a picture of it in January 2005, not yet knowing the object was somehow about the Anthology.

(I was in Washington for Mike Seeger’s concert marking the “Picturing the Banjo” exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery).

Note the light trespass fogging the film in my old battered 1970’s camera. More than any other single photo, this one finally convinced me to get a digital SLR camera. (In retrospect, I should have just replaced the light seals.)

In any case, that Friday morning in 1957 not many Americans were focused on the death of Frank Cloutier.

Even by the time the Smithsonian reissued the Anthology on CD in 1997, there was exactly zero research on Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe to draw from while writing the liner notes.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving weekend 2006 that an Anthology listener finally showed up at Cloutier’s grave, wearing earbuds to listen to his record graveside.

In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of Cloutier’s death, I had planned to be in La Crosse, but an opportunity suddenly arose to go to Chicago instead. It took me a while to choose Chicago, but I made the right decision … although I still do think about that now and then.

Observation — IRAS-Araki-Alcock

In May of 1983, IRAS-Araki-Alcock came closer to Earth than any comet since 1770 — about 12 times the distance to the Moon.

It was my first comet, and I saw it from the back yard of my family’s house in Palatine, Illinois. Although Palatine was small then, it was already a Chicago suburb on O’Hare’s flight path. I did a lot of complaining about the light pollution, but those turned out to be the darkest skies I’ve ever lived under.

IRAS-Araki-Alcock was a ghostly thing. It looked roughly the size of the moon, and spherical — it had no visible tail. You could see its nucleus, though … overall, the comet was like a round patch of smoke with a star caught inside. Aside from its pale blue-green color, it looked like one of the little fairy sprites that followed the UFOs around in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Because it was so close, you could almost see it move against the background stars, like the minute hand of a clock (and believe me, I know how the minute hands of clocks move). I would try to get a fix on where it was in relation to the stars, but what my eyes were seeing would never match the image in my mind, which was always already obsolete.

Having spent so much of my youth with my developing brain focused on the sky, it felt a little perverse to have something new up there, especially something that moved so fast. I could feel in my bones why comets were regarded as disturbing omens of bad things to come.

Mostly, what it looked like was … and this was the most remarkable thing … it looked like an evaporating bit of ice about 12 times as far as the moon. Although I knew more than enough about astronomy to know why it had to be silent, I remember being amazed at its silence. It just slipped on by.

Editor’s Note: This morning, my wife got her copy of her latest publication, a poem entitled “We Seek a Shepard or a Sign” in Court Green #4, a literary journal from Chicago’s Columbia College. Check it out.

This is installment 17 of a 28-day experiment. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post once a day, sort of like a blog is supposed to do.

Drone! Drone! Drone! Pilotless Airplane!

Astronaut diaper
Get it?

When I founded this journal in March 2005, I got a little purple notebook in which to keep ideas for future entries. On the first page, between two ideas I never used — “Skin, Gut, Wood, Bone, & Metal in Banjos” and “Chemistry of Red Clay Halos” — is the following idea, also unused: “Astronauts in Diapers”.

So, before moving on to more recent news, let me recap where my head was at — what I would have written — 22 months ago.

Nobody loves the space program more than I do, I would have written. I grew up with my room wallpapered with galaxy posters and, at one point, I listened to little else but Vangelis. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as I wrote more recently, was an early cornerstone of what you might call my spiritual life. Every solid body in the solar system should be crawling with Spirits and Opportunities, I would have argued.

And this would’ve been a bargain, if we would only shut down the “manned” space program, which I found increasingly pointless and grotesque.

It’s true that if the Galileo spacecraft had carried a crew, they could have climbed out and shook loose that stuck umbrella antenna, giving us orders of magnitude more data from that mission. On the other hand, for what it would cost to feed the mission’s astronauts, supply them with air, give them a way to crap and pee and take a shower, entertain them, satisfy their sex drives, keep them from killing each other — I would have written — we could have had a flotilla of 500 Galileo spacecraft, of varying design, that would have swarmed around Jupiter like bees around a nest.

And nobody would have died. The main reason for maintaining the Shuttle Program is to finish the wildly over-budget, useless Space Station Freedom, my argument would have gone. The claim that we need the station for scientific purposes would have been called a lie — the only thing we could learn from that station that we couldn’t learn more easily, cheaply, and safely in other ways would be how to keep people floating around in space.

Why do we keep hurling these brave, bright, strong, idealistic people up on these monsters designed in 1970 to play nurse maid to billion-dollar junior-high-school science-fair ant farms? Just to have them die painful, fiery, long, terrifying, lonely deaths? Or for a massive welfare program for defense contractors? Have we no shame? Is nothing sacred? … I would have asked, had I written that post 22 months ago.

The argument is often made that “the young people of today” need heros to look up to and to stimulate their imaginations. Again, a concept from 1970. (Aaaahhh, remember when “disposable” was synonymous with “expensive”?) Young people today find it wildly stimulating to sit behind a computer, issuing commands to robots. They may well find it irrational and regressive — backward and idiotic, even — to risk death just to fly around in circles in the dark. Or so I might have speculated, had I written that post.

And the emblem for all these ideas would have been The Diaper. Yes, those brave explorers spacewalking in the new frontier are wearing DIAPERS (which really inspires the teenagers, in my experience.)

Well, I could go on … I mean, I could have gone on … like this forever, oh so long ago. I think you can see why I never wrote that entry — hysterical rants are simply against the editorial standards of The Celestial Monochord, which attempts to put forth a rational, contemplative exploration of ideas. When one of our writing staff submits such a screed, the Editorial Board politely rejects it.

Anyway, that’s where I was before this week. Then, two news items caught my eye.

First, the pilotless drone story. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle started using messages that readers leave on the paper’s voice mail for the Chronicle’s podcast. The first such experiment became a huge internet phenomenon. It was a guy enraged by the Chronicle’s use of the phrase “pilotless drone” — a drone, you see, already implies the lack of a pilot. The caller’s off-the-rails tirade (“DRONE! DRONE! DRONE! Pilotless airplane! GET IT?”) is hilarious, as is the attention it has received.

Mostly, I like the way the caller’s hysterical chanting roughly reflects my actual position on an important public policy issue.

And then there’s Lisa Nowak. Yes indeed. As I write this, I haven’t yet seen what fun the late-night comics will make of her. The woman is clearly having what used be called, in the old days, a “nervous breakdown” and I don’t want to exploit her mental health crisis. Leave the exploitation to the cable news networks and the Florida prosecutors.

But I can’t help pointing out that I was right — and what’s a blog for, except to point out the rare occasions on which you were right — about astronauts and diapers. Something needs a second look here. Maybe we need to go focus on real knowledge, on missions like the Voyager Spacecraft, which to my generation were so inspiring, so beautiful, and so dignified.

Editor’s Note: This is installment seven of my increasingly bizarre attempt to post one entry every day for a whole month. THIS month, as a matter of fact.

Carl Sagan, Ten Years After

a telescope in Times Square, 1933

(Sorry for all the autobiography lately, but today is the 10th anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. Bloggers worldwide are marking the date with remembrances.)

When I was 15, I thought a bit about becoming a priest.

My family was Catholic, and I loved the Catholic Church. I also had already been obsessed with astronomy for about six years, and now my thoughts were just mature enough to start worrying over some of the hard questions this background presented.

Astronomy made it obvious that the world was much older than the Bible claimed — the Bible was wrong. In fact, I saw there was no way to confirm virtually anything in the Bible. The Creator himself suddenly seemed mythical compared to the easily confirmed natural laws I was starting to understand.

But a universe without God, so far as I could tell, was a horrible place — meaningless, without beauty, amoral, loveless. The evidence seemed to be forcing me into a sad and frightening universe in which I certainly did not want to live.

Knowing no other alternative, I thought about entering the priesthood — that is, of handing myself over completely to faith. Evidence and reason were leading me where I didn’t want to go, so I toyed with the idea of turning a blind eye to them. If a “good” universe was the only tolerable kind, maybe I would have to simply assume one, regardless. I was deeply conflicted, and didn’t know what to do. I remember a lot of pain about this.

By an astounding coincidence — divine intervention? — Carl Sagan’s Cosmos debuted on public television exactly one week after my 16th birthday. The series turned out to be a 13-hour, carefully reasoned, gorgeously dramatized argument. And this argument was an elaborate answer to precisely the very question I was struggling with.

Cosmos argues that the universe is profoundly beautiful and meaningful, and it demands an ethical response from us — even, or especially, when we view it without the supernatural. Sagan argued that the only ethical response to the universe we know in the 20th century, given the challenges of that century, is to get the whole evidence thing, and the whole reason thing, right.

We’ve got see the world as it is and not how we wish it was.

The guy in the turtle-neck sweater spent 13 leisurely hours SHOWING why the character of the physical universe, and of our origins it it, oblige us to embrace a humane, ethical, rational, evidence-based world view. The evidence shows us a universe that is not only beautiful, but beautiful in precisely such a way that it requires from us an ethical, loving response.

For the next couple years, my synapses flowed with the greatest antidepressants on Earth. It was a mind-blowing and delicious religious experience.

I won’t go into every twist and turn of my intellectual and spiritual development since 1980 — there’d be a lot to dredge up. It will suffice to say that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was among the most important events of my life. The Celestial Monochord would certainly not have existed without it — surely among Carl’s greatest contributions to mankind!

I will add that Sagan’s importance has unexpectedly deepened since 2001’s dual attacks on Western Civilization — September 11 and Inauguration Day. Lately, I terribly miss Carl Sagan and what I think of as his ethics of epistemology, as I call it — his sense that we have a moral obligation to resist baloney.

I mourn his inability to be here to remind us of who we used to aspire to be — a humane civilization based on reason, evidence, and the universal rule of just laws. No one has taken his place.

John Cohen and the Voyager Record

The New Lost City Ramblers: John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Tracy Schwarz

Voyager Record
NASA technicians bolting the Voyager LP to the spacecraft

It has finally, really dawned on me.

The Voyager Record is a timecapsule, designed by Carl Sagan and friends, in the form of a long-playing phonograph record. Identical copies were bolted to the side of NASA’s two Voyager Spacecraft, which are now drifting in interstellar space. And this record contains a field recording made in Peru by John Cohen, co-founder of the New Lost City Ramblers.

Here at The Celestial Monochord, that’s one heck of a revelation. Let me think about this.

The Voyager Record (and the soundtrack to the Cosmos TV series, which borrowed heavily from it) was my first exposure to all sorts of music — not just Blind Willie Johnson, but also Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven string quartets, and a variety of non-Western musics like the Javanese gamelan and Japanese shakuhachi.

More often than you might think, 25 years later, the thought of the Voyager Record still occasionally overwhelms me with grief and wonder. It must be the strangest episode in the history of the US Government — for one thing, it was partly the result of Sagan’s stunning, awe-inspiring innocence. The record is Carl Sagan’s quixotic love letter to Planet Earth — Earth, which filled him with a grief and wonder of his own. To Sagan, the record expressed Earth’s “cosmic loneliness.”

And somehow, he arranged for this document to roar into interstellar space, riding like a stowaway aboard the federal government’s Cold War nuclear missile technology.

———

When the Voyager Record was launched, Carl Sagan saw it as a fitting tribute to the recently-deceased inventor of the LP, Peter Goldmark.

Sagan had become a young Ph.D. in 1960, about six months before Bob Dylan first arrived in Greenwich Village. His generation passionately loved the long-playing record, and they soon came to define themselves and their worldview through the LP.

They studied LP’s — such as Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper — with a reverence and creativity that previous generations reserved for The Bible. The social movements that defined the 60’s and 70’s were shaped and held together, to no small degree, by the LP format. It was The People’s Format, an invention that invented a generation.

So, by 1977, it wasn’t a big stretch for Sagan to envision a total summation of Planet Earth encoded into the grooves of an LP. But what should this record say? What would be its argument?

Above all, the Voyager Record is a global anthology. An anthology, because it juxtaposes diverse music, images, voices and sounds. And global, because it sees itself as unconstrained by national boundaries. Its varied elements belong together in a common space simply because they’re all the work of Earthlings.

The argument of the Voyager Record (at least for its human audience) is its humanism, set against the Cold War. It tries to show, by means of an outlandish and beautiful thought-experiment, that the differences separating us are trivial when viewed from a “cosmic perspective,” as Sagan liked to say. In the all-consuming milieu of the Cold War, now difficult to recall, that could be a very forceful vision.

It’s often said that the peace and environmental movements were deeply inspired by NASA’s photos of Earth taken from space. On the other hand, NASA was one of the USA’s primary Cold War weapons. The display of those photos also scored points in the Space Race.

The Voyager Record inherited both poles of this irony. It was Carl Sagan’s ambition to resolve the contradiction in favor of peace.

———

That ambition had roots, of course.

The intensely humanistic Alan Lomax served as an advisor to the Voyager project — it was Lomax who recommended to Sagan’s group the inclusion of John Cohen’s 1964 recording of a young Peruvian woman’s wedding song.

Lomax himself had recorded folk musicians in many countries, partly to get out of the country during McCarthy’s red-baiting and to find a way around the blacklist. This episode, like the Voyager LP, is clear case of the Cold War leading directly to “world music.” Indeed, in a vivid echo of Sagan’s project, Lomax would later dream of a Global Jukebox representing all of human culture through one portal.

And then there was Moe Asch’s Folkways Records, for which The New Lost City Ramblers recorded exclusively. Back in the 1930’s, Asch proposed “a complete acoustic record of the human lifeworld” (as Robert Cantwell put it). He came closer to fulfilling that dream than you might expect, as a little time with the Folkways catalog will show. The Folkways vision first formed in a spirit of resistance to the early stages of WWII and the Holocaust — and, as such, it was endorsed by Albert Einstein (as I’ve described before). Asch’s company certainly became the most critical record label of the Folk Revival, a movement whose reason for being was the disillusionment of America’s children in the post-WWII, Cold War environment (see Cantwell’s brilliant book).

Asch and Lomax (both of whom vigorously pioneered the anthologizing potential of the LP) were the inventors of the Voyager Record’s very spirit. Sagan and NASA — by reframing Asch and Lomax’s vision in the contexts of the Cold War and the Cosmos — each appropriated the vision for their mutually contradictory, competing purposes.

———-

I will close with a few startling anecdotes about John Cohen — not so much to fit his life into the thesis above, but to show you that the guy actually makes sense, standing there on the corner of such mighty intersections.

Besides having co-founded The New Lost City Ramblers in 1958, and having made many recordings and award-winning documentaries about Andean culture, Cohen is also famous as the guy who coined the phrase “high lonesome sound.” In Bluegrass: A History, Neil Rosenberg provides a good summary:

John Cohen … contributed to the interest in bluegrass with his photography and through a short documentary film whose title has become closely associated with the music. In February 1963, when Cohen chose The High Lonesome Sound for his movie about Kentucky mountain music, he was seeking words to describe the high, intense quality of the singing which had impressed him during his research in the region … The film included footage of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys in a free concert at the 1962 Coal Carnival, on the courthouse steps in Hazard, Kentucky. It was the first documentary film to include bluegrass and marks the beginning of the association of Bill Monroe with the term “high lonesome sound.”

This John Cohen is also the same John Cohen who Bob Dylan addresses in his liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited. In them, Dylan refers to Cohen’s rooftop where Cohen had taken perhaps the first photos of Dylan in New York. I once read that this rooftop was demolished to make room for construction of the World Trade Center. Here’s the passage [punctuation and capitalization are Dylan’s]:

you are right john cohen — quazimodo was right — mozart was right … I cannot say the word eye any more … when I speak this word eye, it is as if I am speaking of somebody’s eye that I faintly remember … there is no eye — there is only a series of mouths — long live the mouths — your rooftop — if you don’t already know — has been demolished … eye is plasma & you are right about that too — you are lucky — you don’t have to think about such things as eye & rooftops & quazimodo.

This is also the same John Cohen who provided what was, for many years, the only available interview with Harry Smith, eccentric editor of the influential Anthology of American Folk Music.

And finally, it appears that the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band” is about John Cohen and The New Lost City Ramblers.

Editor’s Note: One of many reasons it’s been so long since I’ve posted is that I’m working on an experimental news blog on The New Lost City Ramblers — The New Lost Times. Let me know if you think I should keep going or quit.

John Glenn’s Capsule

John Glenn Spacesuit
John Glenn’s Mercury spacesuit
(from beercheesesoup.com)

I’ve often heard John Glenn’s Mercury 7 capsule is about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, but this week, on a trip to Washington DC, I was still surprised to see it up close — it hardly seems bigger than John Glenn himself.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has a great way of displaying its capsules, kind of shrink-wrapped in plastic allowing VERY close examination, especially on a slow day at the museum. Rivets, seams, little dings and burns — Glenn’s capsule really is just a tin can.

Its interior redefines “cramped” (and I thought my connecting flight to Chicago was tight!). Glenn was in a little can of human with only enough room for movement to touch a few controls. Just above his head, he had a window about four inches wide and twelve inches high.

Standing next to the capsule, the familiar facts about John Glenn now seemed strange and beside the point — the ticker-tape parade, the “hero” status, the eventual power and privilege of the Senate. Even the idea of his being “The First American In Orbit” fell away. What stuck with me was that, during the 4 hours and 55 minutes he was in orbit, he was alone up there in 1962, his bones as breakable and his flesh as flammable as yours.

Because fabric is very prone to degradation, the Smithsonian stuffs the old spacesuits on display with under-sized manikins. It gives the strange impression that all the Mercury astronauts were skinny 13-year old boys. It seems as if the astronauts were like wiry early hominids — Lucy’s younger brothers.

Water On Mars

I am leaving town to visit relatives and to see Tom Paley in concert, so The Celestial Monochord will be quiet for several days. But I thought I’d show you this image from the European Space Agency, showing water ice in the floor of a crater on Mars. It’s very cool and the press release about it is worth reading.

But part of what interests me is that I know of the image from only two sources: a friend who emailed it to me to ask "Is this real?" and from the latest issue (October) of Sky and Telescope. If the picture got wider press in the United States, I completely missed it. It’s water. On Mars. Do I have a conspiratorial disposition, or would this have been utterly unavoidable in the United States if it had been taken by NASA, which has made so much fuss lately about its own search for water on Mars?

Sun and Moon / Summer and Winter

The full moon in summer follows the same path across the sky as the sun in winter. The inverse is true, too. The sun in summer follows the same path across the sky as the full moon in winter.

About that full moon on hot, humid summer nights, all big and low and yellowy, Tom Waits sang, “looks like a buttery cueball moon, all melted off to one side — Parkay.” I love that … Parkay margarine starts to liquefy and skew on hot summer nights, and the moon on those very same nights looks like that — relaxed, too moist to hold its shape.

It looks like that because the full moon on summer nights rides low from east to west across the sky, down near the horizon, where you have to look through a lot of air to see it, and moist warm air at that. The further north you are, the stronger the effect.

Of course, the sun sort of looks a little like that on winter days — riding low, fuzzy, yellowish. On those days in the dead of winter, the sun streams sideways into the room and shines on parts of the house you’d forgotten the sun could ever reach. I remember that light especially well from my childhood, I suppose because it came so near Christmas and during the rest of long, house-bound winters.

Now, around midnight in those same winters, the full moon is almost directly overhead, like a bright blue eye, small and alone in the middle of the sky. It strains your neck to look straight up at the full moon in winter – it exposes your neck to the cold, and makes you a little dizzy without a horizon to keep you steady, and the moon is so stark and bright that it’s a little blinding.

In that way, it’s like the sun in summer, straight up and baring down on you from directly overhead around noon. No wonder people have called it merciless – bright, hot, featureless, colorless, and overhead. I think of sunshine in summer days, but not really of the sun itself – it’s too high and bright and dominating to really look into and see. Hart Crane simultaneously described the Manhattan skyline and the sun above it: “a rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene.”

The sun in summer follows the same path across the sky as the full moon in winter, and visa versa. I’m not sure how to explain why that’s true without waving my hands and drawing a lot of diagrams, so I thought I would try to remind you that its true. Maybe you’ll think about the “why” on your own. And maybe I’ll think of a way to explain the geometry some other time …

The Train to Adler Planetarium

Photo from Carl Zeiss AG Germany

Beginning when I was about 10 years old, I suppose, I would occasionally take the train to Chicago to see the Adler Planetarium.

I grew up in Palatine, one of the dozens of small towns that grew up into suburbs along the railroad tracks running northwest from Chicago out to McHenry and Johnsburg and Harvard, Illinois. I used to lie in bed late at night in the summertime and listen to the train whistle blow in the distance, never imagining it might be a very tired old cliche. Ah, such innocent times …

I remember my anxiety about asking the train station clerk for the ticket, even though going downtown to the end of the line was the easiest ticket to explain. My mother must’ve given me the cash for the trip. (Someday, I will write at great length about the countless ways she encouraged my interest in astronomy.)

My eyes never stopped studying the view from the train, which passed through the oldest parts of every town along its route, because, as I say, the towns were born along the tracks. We stopped at their turn-of-the-century depots, which apparently never got around to becoming obsolete. As a result, the picture in my mind’s eye of Mount Prospect, Des Plaines, and Park Ridge is rather more charming than those towns probably are. I still don’t know for sure to this day.

The end of the line was the Union Station, which was one of the old vaulted, vaunted cathedrals built when trains were the fastest, proudest vehicles on Earth. I remember walking through the station with my face turned upward, staggering slowly across the marble floor, no doubt obstructing businesspeople late for work.

The Adler Planetarium was truly hallowed ground to me then. Its exhibits stayed pretty much the same throughout my entire childhood, so visiting them was more ritual than education for me. That’s what I was looking for anyway, a place that understood and affirmed my view of the world, one that only Adler and I could see. There was no secret to it — it was simply ignored by most people. It seemed they had some sort of defect that left them blinded to it.

I was the youngest of seven children, growing up in a crowded house in a claustrophobic suburb. The train to the Adler made me feel adult and free, as if I owned my whole self, not just the inside of my head. I don’t think I felt much like that again until I left home for Tucson, to study astronomy.