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The Mid-Atlantic as the center of the universe
October 6, 2022
Memories of beach vacations and Buck Rogers are indeed relatable. SUBMITTED PHOTO
During the 1950s, on one of my family’s summer beach vacations in Cape May, N.J., right across Delaware Bay, a renter in a cottage nearby aroused curiosity by nightly lugging a mammoth telescope on a big wooden tripod into the back yard at dusk, and spending much of every night gazing at the skies through the telescope and writing notes in colored pencil on lined school spiral notebooks. We were cautioned not to go over and disturb him. This was presumably to instruct us kiddies in both polite manners and staying away from people doing eccentric things. After the man and his family left, we were told by neighbors he was one of the people who wrote and drew the Buck Rogers comics.
The formative Buck Rogers comic strip appeared in 287 American newspapers from 1929-83. It was also translated into 18 languages. I commemorated my beach neighbor by dressing as Buck for my next Halloween in a bright yellow costume with black stripes. I playacted fighting the Tiger Men of Mars by shouting Buck Roger’s war cry about “getting down.” My first space hero was soon to appear in the movies, with Buck being played by an actor named Buster Crabbe. And Buster was my childhood nickname! Karma?
Just seven decades later, I thought of Buster or Buck and the neighbor with the backyard telescope. It hit me on Sept. 26, right after watching pictures of a DART spacecraft crashing at 14,000 mph into an asteroid 7 million miles away testing “planetary defense.” The idea is to intercept an asteroid before it crashes into Earth. And this was broadcast from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., halfway between Baltimore and Washington. All the more cosmic is that while watching this, I was sitting in my Baltimore retirement home a mile from the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus while it is processing the Webb Space Telescope’s picture of nebulas and black holes millions of light years away and using scanning technology to discover some secrets of the origin of our universe, like methane. The Webb is seeing things farther away and far longer ago than ever before.
And so my epiphany to hereabouts as the center of the universe progressed from comic books to my computer’s pictures of collisions with asteroids. This brings up the issue of how well I, or we, have processed this idea. One thought is that there has been a huge visual evolution from Buck’s enemy Ming the Merciless to star nebulas from the time of the Big Bang. So have I not progressed much in my thinking, as with today’s movies the new imagery is doing the mind-expanding? However, I already predict there are wonderful and perplexing surprises in store, if not in my remaining years, but for my children and theirs. And, fellow voyagers in time and space, that’s today’s “getting down.”
