Rugged mountains, dusted with a thin layer of powdery-white snow, protrude from a pine-tree scattered landscape, piercing benign clouds of thin mist. Amber streaks of sunlight slice through crystalline air, defining the angular clefts and lichen-covered boulders. Nothing moves in the panorama. But closer, a small speck appears on the mountain-side, a man scrambling towards the peak as loose rocks fall away from under his feet. Despite the thinsulate layers covering the man’s long limbs, he outpaces the encroaching late-afternoon shadows descending between valley shoulders. He stands at the summit with one foot out, weight on his back leg, hands grasping the straps of his backpack: a contrapposto snapshot blending man back to his native, jagged wilderness. He takes a sip of water from his Nalgene, and looks out over the horizon with his crow’s-feet accented eyes, scanning rugged cliffs, spotting a marmot dashing into his burrow, tracking its movement until it disappears. A salt and pepper moustache and furry eyebrows frame his chocolate brown eyes. Even at 54 years old, this suburban soccer-dad with three kids and a wife still searches for unturned rocks in the High Sierras and Colorado Rockies.
He makes decisions based on the first flutter in his stomach or spark of a synapse in his brain, by impulse. Throwing himself onto the last cliff, he pulls himself towards the peak. In those few seconds, the weightless freedom of flying, stretching towards the edge, the goal, perhaps my father feels equal to the earth and the stars from which he materialized. My father believes in a commonality between living beings, a powerful sharing of atoms from the very beginning. He likes to think of solving the puzzle that once connected together, billions of years ago, when the future of our galaxy, earth, us, still waited with anticipation in a star. He so often settles down in the evening after dinner, when no one asks him to fix the electrical wires powering the garage door or explain cosine functions from math homework or take out trash-bags full of day-old Chinese food, and ponders the spectacular vitality emanating from the electromagnetic wavelengths of billion-year-old stars.
My father wanted to be an astronaut. On the humid August nights of his childhood, he lay in the soft grass of his midwestern backyard and stared up at the stars and the moon, wondering how they got stuck so high and far away, admiring their sparkle, fascinated with this complex science his fifth grade mind couldn’t yet understand. He bought toy model rockets he could piece together: Shuttle Xpress, Black Diamond, L.G.M. 0095, Alpha, CC Express, Cosmic Interceptor. At ten, he started writing letters to NASA, asking them for any construction manuals they had on their booster systems and capsules, or publications of pictures and technical specifications. Their responses filled his walls, and after hours of pouring over the formal documents, his attentive hands smeared the thick black ink and aged the pages, staining them with acrylic detailing paint. He spent entire afternoons in his bedroom studying astronomy and the engineering of rockets; every complex and undecipherable statement printed in the NASA responses, and each dazzling star that ornamented the expansive darkness of the remote outer-space, untouched and uninhabited, sent chemical messages along the myelin sheath of his neurons, traveling through the axon terminus to a nearby dendrite, presenting his brain with stimulus.
A skinny boy of 12 or 13 runs down Grant Street in Appleton, Wisconsin toward Chimera Hobby Shop on Wisconsin Avenue. Sunlight trickles through the overhanging tree-branches onto the sidewalk on this clear springtime day while the boy’s Adidas make satisfying thuds on the concrete. He turns the corner into the market, pushing through the screen door, ringing the attached overhead bell. Even though rows of BB guns, miniature cars, and slingshots line the store walls, the boy heads straight to isle five for a particular item. The supreme Estes model rocket. It stands a foot and a half tall, narrow and streamline. He chooses the Red Rider addition, hugs it close to his chest and searches for an engine. He skips over the dinky, children’s engines, glancing down the row, stopping at the very end in front of the C6-5 …. enough to power a 5-foot rocket.
"Why’d you get such a powerful engine?”
“I don’t know... I just didn’t always think these things through. I just knew I wanted my rocket to go high. How old was I, em, I guess about ten then. Yeah, hadn’t quite gotten to Newton’s law of universal gravitation I suppose.”
The boy drags his father to a clearing in his neighborhood near a small playground. Houses with ivy climbing their red-brick walls line the streets, and families, packed into large, lumbering cars, roll out of driveways. The boy plunks down on the grass and opens the cardboard box containing his Estes, attaching the C6-5 engine to the bottom. A tentative smile replaces the boy’s serious concentration as he marvels at his rocket. Just like one of NASA’s. He looks up at the bright-blue, cloudless sky, then crouches and pulls the matchbox out of his pocket, strikes a flame, and ignites the fuse. With the full force of his lungs he yells, ten, nine, eight, and scrambles away as he continues to concentrate on his his rocket. Four, three, two he screams, unaware of the car pulling over to watch or the construction worker squinting towards the scene, one!
The rocket bursts into the sky. The boy jumps and punches his fist into the air, yes! yes! watching the red speck tearing higher and higher into the atmosphere. Shooting past the shingled roofs, the tips of pine trees, and into the troposphere, so high he needs to strain his eyes to see the speck of a toy rocket, until bam it hit him! … not the rocket, but the realization that the rocket would come down. It slows its climb, hangs for an instant, then begins its descent. The boy begins his dash. He hears his father’s “Holy...” as the boy sprints towards his rocket, now plummeting towards earth, drifting fast away from his neighborhood. He flies up the hillside onto the sidewalk, throwing the matchbox to the ground, keeping his eyes plastered on his beloved Red Rider, the brick homes fading into a red backdrop, old oaks reaching overhead, forming a tunnel-vision as he swats overhanging branches. Where’s it gonna land? Too focused to notice the coarse burlap covering the sidewalk or the sinking feeling under his feet, the boy chases his rocket until the construction man, yelling profanities, grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him with the full force of his burly hulk, red-faced, spit flying. The boy struggles and squirms to keep a visual while the hefty man yells. The father arrives and confronts the steaming construction worker, engaging him in a heated argument, forcing him to release the boy who breaks away to streak after his still-descending rocket.
Ten o’clock now and Dad leans back into his leather chair, thumb on his chin and index finger stroking his mustache.
“I left my footprints down the entire length of new cement.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“I don’t remember, I don’t think so. All I could think about was my rocket, ya’know, where it might be. I guess I never stopped looking for it. That darn rocket. But I guess it’s poetic that I ended up with a career in cruise missile software development and satellite communications systems. Can you write that Veebs?"
“Yeah Dad.”
“And ya’know at General Dynamics, that’s where I met your mother. The first time I asked her out, I invited her to go waterskiing in Mission Bay... in February... at 6 am before work. She said no.”
“Geeze, did you think she might actually say yes? That sounds awful.”
“It sounded exciting to me. And I was a damn good waterskier.”

Ten below in Appleton. The trees lining Grant Street, naked and frozen with a thin layer of ice, glisten. Last week’s fluffy snow condensed into mounds of hard ice surrounding the homes that huddle close together to keep warm. The only movement comes from the sooty spirals of smoke swirling from the chimneys into the frigid air. Inside one of the homes an 18-year-old boy hunches in his corner of the couch, wearing layers of grey cotton underwear and thick wool socks. He grabs a blanket to cover his shoulders as he shuffles over to the thermometer hanging outside in front of the picture window overlooking the lifeless street. Negative ten degrees. He recalled the day before when he attempted to go ice skating, when his skates just squeaked because the ice wouldn’t melt underneath the blades. He decided to stay inside today. He and his dad set up trays and ate TV-dinners of chicken and mushy peas in the semi-warmth of their wood-paneled family room. He flipped on the TV to the Rose Bowl. The bright, California yellows and oranges assaulted them from the screen and they recoiled into their thick, woolen, grey layers. “Welcome to the Rose Bowl. Today, we’re here in Pasadena, where it is a beautiful 76 degrees as we get ready for the big stand-off between the Michigan Wolverines and the USC Trojans”, the commentator subtitled as the camera panned the crowd, pausing on college kids wearing t-shirts and shorts, the sun reflecting off their tan skin and golden hair. The warmth radiated from the TV, drawing the father and son closer and closer like cavemen coveting a fire. Seventy-six degrees compared to minus 10. How could this even be the same planet? The same country! He lowered his spoonful of peas, turned to his father, pointed to the TV and announced, “That’s where I’m going to college.”
The black, Samsonite suitcase that accompanied my father to Caltech now dwells, forgotten, in the recesses of my garage amongst the old dance costumes, bikes laced with spider webs, and the ‘97 Amana refrigerator. But in 1975, two months after the Rose Bowl, my father threw it onto his bed and manuevered around his room picking out his Adidas running shoes, a couple of Nike shorts and dri-fit, sleeveless shirts, sandals, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Hurley swim shorts, and an old, unused bottle of sunscreen, dropping them into the case. Before locking the Samsonite, he tore off one of the NASA letters from his wall and slipped it into the side pocket. He left his grey woolens at home.
“So you just dropped everything and left?”
“Yep. Not another thought.” I sat in a red, toddler chair in the driveway, watching Dad wash his silver BMW. The suds drained down the cement as he scrubbed the driver’s seat door in a circular motion, squatting so he could inspect his work. The late-afternoon rays of sun poured onto the hood of the car and my brother’s skateboard made click-click sounds as he rode over the cracks in the sidewalk. Dad wore his Adidas gear so I knew he planned on going for a run afterwards. That’s the thing about my father, he never stops moving.
“It’s a habit of mine. I did the same thing while your mother and I were dating,” Dad continued, “We weren’t really serious at the time, not near marriage or anything. But she was planning on going to Europe and wanted someone to go with her. And I sure wasn’t going to pass up roaming Europe with a beautiful woman. So that was that. I quit my job at General Dynamics and sold my car to pay for the trip.”
“Are you serious? You weren’t nervous about what you were gonna do when you got back? I mean, geeze, that’s kind’uv a big decision to make in a second.”
“You can’t know every detail before choosing a course of action, Veebs. You’ve gotta get comfortable making decisions without over-thinking them. ”
Standing inside a dark cave, clutching my father’s hand, I couldn’t see the walls of the small hole we crawled through after navigating elaborate subterranean passages, since dust and rocks fell with every vibration, and my construction hat kept falling over my eyes. Even at six years old I watched the news, growing hyper-vigilant of strangers, wary of decrepit rollercoster rides, and fearful of hungry rip-currents and great white sharks lurking in the sea. So stumbling and squeezing through unstable death-chambers, five-feet underground didn’t appeal to me. I could just imagine the story in the newspaper. But the hand that grasped mine, steady and warm, led me through the darkness, until some light peeked down from above.
“No dad, I can’t, I’m staying,” I whimpered, my worried, brown eyes begging my father.
“Okay fine, we’ll live in this cave forever. Did you pass an area that would do for a bedroom?”
“Dad, I’m serious,” I retorted, looking up the haphazard ladder and round hole a couple feet up. “I’ll fall. I’ll hit my head. We’ll start a rockslide.”
“There’s only one way out. And that’s it,” he shrugged.
He let go of my hand, and with a loving pat on the shoulder, he encouraged me to climb up the ladder, promising a sight worth the worry. At the top of the ladder near the rim of the hole, I realized my arm couldn’t stretch far enough to grab the edge and hoist myself out. I hugged the ladder and squeezed my eyes shut. Frozen. Just as I accepted the ending of my six, fruitful years of life, Dad lifted me through the round hole into the shower of warm, golden sunshine and onto the earth’s surface. After my pupils adjusted to the initial brightness, I found myself on the top of a bluff, overlooking miles of high-desert. Around me, thousands of sparkling, clear crystals covered the fine sand like stars that fell out of the sky and lay idle, now, in a barren desert. I lowered to my knees and picked up one of the crystals, holding it up to the sun between my thumb and index finger so it sparkled and reflected the light. I slipped it into my pocket to add to my pink, quilted box of special items when I returned home.
I wish I lived more like my father; an explorer, traveler, venturer, a voyager. A pioneer. A daredevil. Off the beaten track, mile a minute, everything up in the air; discovering hidden treasures that require a there’s-no-mountain-I-can’t-climb attitude. When everyone else looks through a telescope, I want to look out over the vast horizon; I want to look at millions of stars in the sky instead of just one.
After billions of years, massive stars ten times the size of the sun, continue to collapse even after the helium and hydrogen deplete, burning oxygen, producing neon, silicon, sulfur, iron, fusing heavy elements, these atoms then bouncing off the core to initiate a supernova explosion, scattering the material throughout intercellular space. All elements more massive than iron came from a supernova explosion; atoms from an exploding star comprise our being. We are children of the stars; the atoms in your right hand came from a different star than the atoms in your left hand. Living, breathing, stardust. A romantic, as far as engineers go, my father likes to think that if we came from the stars, we can’t be bound to earth. And I don’t mean it as an aim-for-the-stars kind of way. People follow a societal pressure in which “ final goals” serve as a type of map for life, something that makes humans who follow it restricted to one-way roads, into a narrow vision, tangled details, and limitations in general. Not life at all. Life has less to do with the results of journeys, but values instead a branched street, a malleable destiny. Because by the time you stand right in front of a star, the wonder vanishes.