| Rain |
[Mar. 20th, 2006|11:55 am] |
I was driving back down the mountain when I saw the rain begin.
Glancing over to my left, I could see Mount Wrightson towering above me in the cloudy afternoon light, the summit lost in cap cloud. The movement caught my eye as I slowed down on the dusty road, and I saw what appeared to be a dull gray metal part curve down and plough into the mountain side. A small crater of dust puffed up, the size of a small house, acting out in silence across the two mile gap. Stopping, putting the emergency brake on, switching the engine off, wind down the window. Listening.
Nothing but the wind to hear on this cloudy day, the grass bending and whispering, no sound to be heard of the impact. More motion in the prehipery, and another piece, arcing slightly from the cloud base, descending in a slow spiral movement. This piece flickered as it rotated in its path, hitting somewhere a few hundred yards to one side of the original impact point. Too slow to be from space, but definitely in at terminal velocity. I moved my hand to the radio, and called for any other traffic on the twenty mile road to stop and look over the saddle pass to the other mountain. Crackling back, one driver, and then another broadcast from a stronger signal, curse words and expletives in Dutch. Something had impacted just behind another driver, causing him to almost swerve out into the gray day.
A whickering, atonal noise, rising in volume far too fast for the reptile parts of my brain to be comfortable with. Small lobe reaction causing me to go fetal and cover my head, spiking my temple with the radio antenna still in my hand. A subsonic thud some dozen yards away followed by a conveyor belt of objects cutting right to left down the slope. Agave, gravel, barrel cactus, three fist sized rocks, then a silver object. A machine part, a threaded screw partially unwound from an unidentifiable blasted part of metal. It rocked to a stop, some few hundred pounds of designed ... what?
Another radio crackle, another yell. Looking up, the gray sky now scattered with irregular pepper grains, followed by a finer mist of paler blue. More whistling, and now in the valley, the scratched line of the mountain road was becoming pocked with some of the larger chunks of metal. Noise began to drift towards the car, a strange pattering as the blue mist reached the ground and bushes and plants began to shiver and shuck to an invisible force. A wave of waking triffids making its way up the slope towards me -
A sharp crack from the windshield, and looking back in I see a white line and a small bolt, barely half an inch across, bounce off the front of the car and into the gravel. More small cracks and snaps, and a scattering of muted thumps on the ground. A twitch, a clutch, a gentle hiss to a dull roar as the mechanical parts began to rain down on my car. A sting of pain as a washer cuts my arm as I pull it inside. As the roar increases, the stink of burned metal wafts in. The bushes begin to thrash, and I racked back the passenger seat whilst I scrambled into the cover it afforded in the seat well behind and beneath.
I cowered and tried not to think of half ton blocks of metal descending towards the two millimeters of steel above me, imagining concrete instead of the paper above me. |
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| Insomnia |
[Feb. 17th, 2006|03:38 am] |
"It's three in the morning, and I can't get no sleep."
Ugh. Decompressing from a week long run at the telescope, and I'm really glad to be home again. I spent a week listening to astronomers moan about how bad the weather was, which gets boring after the first few minutes.
"Hmm, it's cloudy tonight."
"Yup."
"I mean, we've got this cool target to look at, and we can't look at it because it's cloudy."
"Yes, I know."
"It would be really cool to to have a clear spot to look at this really cool object of ours."
(close eyes, count to ten) "Yep. It would be cool. And then you'd get on with taking data."
I love astronomy, it's just the astronomers I can't stand sometimes. |
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