Up and Down and Found
Psssssssht went the noise carrying over the sagebrush and grasses and low juniper branches. In Utah’s west desert, nothing grows much taller than me.
That noise dove deep into my memory and emerged with a net full of elementary school moments when I launched rockets with my father on the football field. I was the same age then as my boys are now, those boys who were running through the sagebrush and sandy hillocks.
But they weren’t looking at the wildflowers scattered among the prairie grasses. Instead, their eyes pointed skyward to find the model rocket that had ridden a glorified firecracker aloft into the cloudless Saturday morning air. They followed the trajectory of the white line of exhaust smoke until the parachute deployed. It was never a certainty that the system would work - that the cardboard tube would survive ignition, that the nose cone would pop off at the apogee, or that the crinkled plastic circle would emerge.
“‘Fire in the hole,’ came a child’s gleeful voice as she held the remote control launch device in her hand and watched the pad holding her rocket intently.”
Then the parachute worked, the rocket’s descent became more of dance with the wind. It twirled and dipped, tumbled and sashayed down to the waiting pack of children. They zigzagged and juked, eyes always up, because it was a game to catch the rocket before it touched the ground. There were two to fourteen children in the field at any given time and their ages represented a similar range.
After launching and losing and finding, they returned triumphant. The catcher held the rocket in their hand while the others chattered about how high it had gone and whether it was damaged and who was going to launch theirs next. Many of them had built rockets specifically for this weekend in May. For rocket camp where we gathered with the friends who invited us and with those we invited.
“Fire in the hole!” came a child’s gleeful voice as she held the remote control device in her hand and watched the launch pad intently. She pressed the button and off it went, smelling the exact way it had for me on that football field; evidently the formulation for propellant hasn’t changed in 30 years.
There were hoots of delight at the success of each launch. The adults fixed any rocket injuries from previous launches in order to make them usable again. They smiled at their sons and daughters while seeing bits of their younger selves inside.
“The adults remembered what it was like to be delighted.”
Four hours later, the sun blocked our view enough that it was time to be finished. We lowered the shade canopy and the children walked back to camp with sunburned noses, dirt smudged on their sweaty faces, and grass seeds matting their socks. Everyone retreated to their tents and trailers to lay down and escape the sun.
The next morning, we did the same thing but under a cool overcast sky that meant no sunscreen was necessary. Sunday morning had a different vibe because everyone had partially turned their minds towards the weekly preparations they would make after the dirt road drive back home.
We launched and lost and found on the slopes of the West Desert’s basin and range that weekend. The adults remembered how to be delighted. We all played with fire (in a careful way.) We watched the children laugh and run and smile.
We all turned our faces skyward at the same time to see something we made rise and then fall. Then to watch the wind at work on our creation.
