On the night of Thursday, August 19, 1999, I was lying back on a lawn, looking up at the night sky. I was at the Shoreline Ampitheater, a ways South of San Francisco. Onstage, the Barenaked Ladies were jumping around and playing music. I was with some friends, far from the stage, lounging on a blanket.
I was glad to be there. The band's between-song banter was quite amusing. I figured I'd get a chance to talk with some rarely-seen friends (and I did). I was glad to be there. But I wasn't really into the music.
When the band was playing, I looked at the sky, wondering if I could detect the spinning motion of the stars. I knew that the stars weren't really spinning, of course. It was the earth's spin which gave that illusion. Back in school, I'd taken a class in the history of astronomy and astrology. I'd forgotten a lot, but I remembered some things about how to navigate by the stars. We'd made astrolabes. You can't make an astrolabe without learning some things about the motions of the stars.
If you live at a pole, then you will always see the same stars through the night. They seem to revolve around you.
If you live on the equator, there might be no star that you see through the night--each will spend some time hidden under the horizon. Still, over the course of a night, you'll see plenty of stars. If only night lasted 24 hours a day (if that isn't a contradiction in terms), you could see every star for a while each night.
Most people don't live at a pole or on the equator. Thus, over the course of a night, there will be some stars that are visible the whole time and others that drop out or rise in to view. There are constants; there are variables.
I was going to try something old in a new way. On Sunday, I was going on a week-long sailing trip on the San Juan Islands. I'd done that before. But the upcoming sail trip was going to be different from any sailing I'd done before. First of all, it would be on a large ship, with a large group. The rigging would require effort to comprehend. Every task would be scaled up, would be more complex.
More importantly, I wouldn't know anyone else on board. Up until this trip, my friend Piaw had always been the skipper. Everyone I'd sailed with had been a friend or a friend-of-a-friend or something. This time, I was sailing on a trip organized by the Sierra Club.
I'd always thought of sailing as mostly a social activity. I'd said, "I'd rather sit on a porch to talk with these people, but it's hard to get people to come over just to sit on a porch. So we all have to get on a sailboat instead."
What on Earth was I doing?
Trying something new, that's what I was doing.
I looked up at the sky. I hadn't really been able to detect the stars' motion. I was at an outdoor concert, after all, and there were lots of lights around the horizon. The only stars I was able to see were high above the horizon. It's not easy to see the motion of the stars and it gets tougher when they're far from the horizon.
Then I saw motion. A satellite, a point of light was racing across the sky. I tracked its motion for a couple of minutes as it zipped along, moving faster than I could imagine. I was delighted, chuckling at its progress. It was going really, really fast.
After the concert, Dave and Veronica drove me home. Everyone was pretty quiet.
On Friday, I was on an airplane descending into Seattle. I wasn't absolutely sure of this, mind you. It was a night flight, and I hadn't really been able to see where we were going. I had a compass in my backpack, but I hadn't taken it out. Still, I was sure we were descending, and the timing was right. Thus, I was a little surprised at the start of the conversation behind me. Two children were talking.
The first child said, "We're getting higher again!"
The second child gently corrected: "No, really, we're going down." I was impressed by his poise. Most children I know, in correcting someone, would have been a bit more gleeful. Ha-ha I'm right you're wrong.
The first child glumly said, "Oh. Okay."
The second child commented (stoically, calmly), "Yeah, this is the part where I always get sick."
It was about 11:00 AM PDT, Saturday, August 21 and in about six hours, Global Positioning System (GPS) devices would experience the system's first date rollover. It was like a little Y2K experience, very mellow. GPS was a new technology, and there wasn't a large legacy of old devices out there. Most people with GPS systems had upgraded to newer models with software ready for the date rollover, software that wouldn't confuse now with some other moment, years ago.
Scarlet wasn't navigating by GPS, and was relying on memories of other moments, years ago. She was navigating on memory. She'd driven this road before. Michael, her fiancee, had been doing some kind of study in the woods around Mount Ranier a few years back, and she'd driven out to visit him a few times. We were driving out there to meet Michael now, in fact.
Following us, in a minivan, were my friends Ron and Joon, along with Joon's wife Soo Jeong, daughter Hellen, and sister-in-law Sua. Somewhere ahead of us, at a ranger station near Packwood, was Michael and a few members of his immediate family. We were all going to picnic together. It would be kind of a strange agglomeration of people, the bizarre result of me trying to visit lots of Seattle friends in one short Saturday.
Scarlet was driving and we were talking.
Scarlet and I had gone sailing the year before, along with skipper Piaw and Scarlet's friend Lea. We talked a bit about what we'd been doing in the meantime.
Then, I'd been working at Geoworks, hoping to spin off. In the intervening year, I'd given up on that, quit Geoworks, bummed around for a few months, and then gone back to Geoworks and the spin-off effort. I was starting to get worn out again, and wasn't sure how long I could last. Maybe throught January.
Scarlet had gone to New York city for a few months and come back. She'd gotten engaged to Michael. She'd looked at some possible wedding sites on both East and West coasts and was narrowing in on the perfect site in spite of a bunch of imperfect sites posing as perfect ones. Scarlet's boss at work had quit, and the new boss wasn't so good. Her co-workers were quitting in droves, and Scarlet was starting to look for a new place. She had high hopes for water quality work in Bellingham.
Piaw had quit working at one start-up and started at another. I'd tried to go sailing with him and some of his new co-workers on San Francisco bay a couple of months previous, but it had been too windy. They were a mysterious bunch, hadn't talked much.
Lea, having presumably done some rotations after medical school, was in England, of all places. She'd followed her boyfriend there. She had a bunch of friends over there, and didn't seem likely to succumb to boredom any time soon.
We were far from Seattle now, out in the boonies. Gone were the tall buildings, here was no urban setting. It was an area of surpassing ugliness, a testament to the hard work and dedication of the local population. In the foreground was rural sprawl: buildings, fences, trash by the side of the road. In the background were mountains and hills, criss-crossed by clearcut.
Scarlet and I talked a bit about that. We drove through the town of Morton. She said that if you're against logging in Morton, they'll accuse you of starving loggers' children. Looking at the hills surrounding Morton, it looked like if the logging didn't stop, then the loggers' grandchildren would be starving and surrounded by a treeless wasteland.
We talked about the sailing trip I was about to go on. I had some misgivings: "It's, like, the description of this trip, in the guidebook; it was really emphasizing that there would be lots of talk about the nature and ecology of the region and stuff."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. And, like, I don't know. Do I really want to sit through some talk on, like, The Life Cycle of the Minkes Whale? I mean, lots of talks on this kind of stuff? I mean, some is okay, I guess, but..."
Scarlet wasn't worried: "So, maybe there's one lecture a day or something. It probably won't be that bad."
"Hmm."
"Who did you say was running this voyage? The Sierra Club, right?"
"Yeah. Well, the group is from the Sierra Club, but the people who are running the boat, they're some local outfit. They're, uhm..."
"Are they called 'Sound Experience?'"
"Yeah! Yeah, that's them."
"Hmm. You might be in for two nature lectures a day, then."
I think I cursed.
After the picnic, I was in the minivan, drowsing. Joon was driving, Soo Jeong sitting shotgun, Hellen and Sua in the middle row, Ron and I in the back. Scarlet, Michael, and Michael's family were staying behind to camp at La Wis Wis campground. The rest of us were headed back to civilization after walking around a bit on Mount Ranier.
Ron worked at Amazon.com, had recently become an Amazon.com millionaire. I'm not exactly sure how hard one has to work to earn a million dollars, but I was pretty sure that Ron had done it. He'd developed software. He'd been on call--answering a pager when programs crashed or program operators couldn't understand the output. It had added up to insane hours in a cramped office working on predictive inventory management systems.
He'd been there a year, his first batch of shares had vested. I'd been glad to hear that he'd gone on vacation. He was talking to Sua about his vacation.
I was drowsing. During the picnic, I'd gone chasing after Hellen the toddler, mostly keeping her from falling off of things and hurting herself. She liked being up high, being swung around. She enjoyed them so much that I forgot that I wasn't actually very good at lifting things and swinging them around. I'd worn myself out. Plus, the time when she'd fallen off the picnic table and I'd been too slow to catch her, I'd aged about a year.
So I was having a hard time following what Ron was saying. He'd gone to the Cook Islands, to New Zealand, to Cairns (pronounced "cans"), to Hawai'i. He said that he was hoping that, at these relatively unpopulated places, he'd be able to see more stars at night. For some reason, this hadn't happened.
But he'd seen new stars, the stars of the South.
I am often petty. Over the course of the last year, as Ron had been slaving away at Amazon.com, I'd thought,
The boy just doesn't understand what's important. He's going to slave away for a year, make his million, and later on figure out that it wasn't, that no amount of money is worth spending a year on an inventory program. If only he knew how to enjoy himself, he'd never have landed in this mess.
Now I suspected that I had been wrong--Ron did appreciate the world, did understand that there were things out there to be savored. He just had the patience to keep his nose to the grindstone for a year, had the long-term vision to understand how nice it would be to be able to retire after a year or two of hard work.
More the power to him.
On Sunday, I was in the back seat of Ron's car, zipping along towards Anacortes, the gateway to the San Juan Islands. Ron was driving me up to where I could catch the ferry to Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, where the sailing trip would start. My original plan had been to catch the Seattle-Anacortes ferry. This plan possessed a fatal flow: there was no Seattle-Anacortes ferry. So I needed a ride. Ron thus also had an excuse to take Sua for a day of kayaking in the islands. But I wasn't thinking about that. I was bobbing my head, rocking out to the music blasting on the stereo. It was a Korean popstar's dance cover remix of "You Come from the Land Down Under." It was a thing of glory. That album would be the last recorded music I'd hear for a week.
[Author's note: Ron corrected me: It wasn't a Korean popstar's dance cover of "Down Under". He made me listen to the song, and it's just a dance remix, with no new vocals, certainly not vocals in a foreign language. This story has an unreliable narrator. But you would have figured that out eventually.]
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