1986. That was the year I turned 10. From beginning to end, it was a roller coaster ride unlike any other period for me. For anyone who knows me personally, for me to say it was unlike any other is no small statement. Rather, it’s probably the beginning of a winding, twisting, upside down, downside up, corkscrew of a story. Yeah. 10.
January came in typical Georgia fashion when snow falls on daffodils and melts in the same afternoon because Mother Nature said, “Here, hold my sweet tea.” My grandparents were at our house for a visit. My brother and I were homeschooled at the time, so we didn’t have to worry about missing a opportunity to play a round of rummy or go for a walk. I could do my work any time during the day as long as my assignments were done.
I was a Junior in Girl Scouts, and to raise extra money we collected aluminum cans. Now, my brain did the math here and figured out that about 25 regular cans were right at a pound, which was fetching a long-time high of 50 cents. Each can made a 2 cent cha-ching in my mental register, and if I gathered cans from a certain area of the road we lived on, they were likely to be the bigger beer cans that had recently been introduced to the guzzler community. Those were almost the equivalent of 3 cents for a heartier sounding cha-CHING. Going for a walk along the mile and a half of dirt road was like picking money off the ground, so Grandpa and I took our daily stroll with plastic bags in our pockets. He walked along the road while I ducked and bobbed and wove my way through the brambles along the roadside, my mental radar pinging each time I spied another cha-ching just waiting for me to pick it up.
When we left the house, the world was normal. By the time we got back, it had exploded. The space shuttle Challenger had blown up, killing the entire crew and leaving the country shaken in its smouldering path. All day, we were glued to the TV. We got only two channels with the antenna my dad had rigged, but we watched as again and again the footage ran on a nearly continuous loop. It continued for days with interviews of schoolchildren saying they wanted to be astronauts now more than ever and their parents looking on proudly, silently pleading for answers as to what happened and why. There were then more interviews with scientists and NASA engineers and anyone else who had an opinion to share.
Memory is a strange thing. I don’t remember my grandparents leaving the next week. I know they did, but the event was minimal as compared to the news. I know that NASA was able to figure out what happened, but I can’t tell you what it was, at least, not without going back and reading the stories from the 32nd anniversary of the event. It didn’t matter. I know it mattered to those who came after in the space program, but not to me. I remember details that make no difference to anything, except to me.
The smoke trails. The piece that broke off and made that second trail. The image is indelible. It is absolutely seared into my brain. Gray and breaking, falling like a campfire ember back down to the ground that it was unable to escape. They stayed there too long, those streaks of shock and grief. They were painted onto that perfect blue canvas of sky as if they would never dissipate. For me, they never did.
After the grief, people started to joke. As an adult, I understand that joking can be a form of defense mechanism. As a nearly 11 year old, my response was,”Well, screw that!” I hated the jokes. To me, they belittled the dream of flying to escape the bonds of Earth and the wonder of life itself. Death is far too immense a thing to be mocked so. They made me angry. I didn’t want to be an astronaut. Not because of the Challenger, but because that was never what I wanted to be. I wasn’t one of those kids who decided that they would try to join NASA because they wanted to keep the dream of space travel alive. I don’t like heights (at all, ever), so for me to even consider being an astronaut would be down right silly. I freeze up in glass elevators, so trust me, that line of work is not for me. I believed though, that the people who made those jokes lacked compassion and empathy. In my mind, that was a travesty almost as horrific as the explosion itself.
So it began, with smoke and fire and tears. Cue deep narrator voice, “Little did she know, it really was just the beginning…”
To be continued…