*
It was mentioned on the news last night that some young adults have never known a life without Harry Potter. For them, this final movie is the end of an era. For many of us 30-40-somethings, it's like that with the final space shuttle launch. I can't remember a time without it, and some of my earliest memories were made while watching its progress.
I was so excited about space exploration as a kid that I once made my own set of solar system flash cards by copying a set of colored, illustrated cards in the library onto my own set of index cards. I carried them around wrapped in a rubber band in the 4th grade. I memorized planetary statistics and knew the names of several asteroids. Without a doubt, I was going to become an astronomer. That was a year or so before I discovered entomology, a decade before I discovered ham radio, and twenty years before I discovered Arabic.
I was six years old when
the Enterprise carried out its first test flights off the back of a modified 747. I can't remember whether this test was broadcast live, (it seems unlikely to me that it would have been). But I do remember watching video of the flight tests with excitement at some point during that year, probably on CBS Evening News.
I do remember watching various launches throughout my elementary school years. We didn't have TV's in the classrooms back then. If we were going to watch something, the teachers would wheel the TV in on a cart, and several classes would crowd into one room to watch. At some point there was a TV mounted in the school's administration office, but I think that wouldn't have been until after 4th grade.
This was long before VCR's were common. The first time that I remember watching anything on a video tape was in my 8th grade English class, when our teacher played Michael Jackson's Thriller video on a beta cassette player. In the early days, there was a lot of excitement around each live launch.
The space shuttle was my introduction to space flight. I was too young to remember the lunar landings, although I was close enough to them to still feel excited to watch the next one, and to look forward to the first landing on Mars, which I was sure would happen within a decade or two. We're all still waiting for that one.
My initial enthusiasm regarding outer space wore off eventually, overtaken by an obsession with insects and the study of entomology. I still enjoyed lying out in the back yard at night watching for satellites to fly over, and learning the names of some of the stars. I had a full-size lunar globe which identified many of the visible craters on both the moon's near and far sides. My curiosity has stayed intact, but my obsession has waned.
I was in 10th grade English class at Yuma High School when the Challenger disaster occurred. When the announcement came over the intercom, our English teacher told us to listen up because we were about to hear from Christa McAuliffe (the teacher on board the craft). Of course what we heard was not her voice, but the announcement that the Challenger had been destroyed in a malfunction. I remember all of the students walking around the high school campus like shell-shocked zombies for the rest of the day.
When the Columbia was destroyed on reentry, I was working in Georgia. I had pulled up to my driveway in my truck when I tuned in to NPR. The newscasters were listing the names of the shuttle astronauts one by one and giving short descriptions of their individual backgrounds and specialties. This sounded ominous to me, as I had only heard that done when there had been an accident of some kind. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the narrator interjected that it appeared that Columbia had broken up over Texas.
Watching the space shuttle Atlantis lift off this morning brought back many memories. I was glad to see it lift off safely and without any mishaps. It has been said (too many times) that this final launch represents the end of an era. It feels like the end of my childhood. What will be next? I'm excited to see where we will go now.
***
Sonoran Desert Vista from the Yuma Territorial Prison Hill.
The prison cemetery is in the background down the trail.
The prison cemetery.
The main guard tower and the mission across the river where Fort Yuma once stood.
The stunning view from the Main Guard Tower, across the Colorado River, into California.
The main entrance to the prison yard.
Pearl Hart's Six-Shot Colt .45 revolver.
A view down the corridor of prison cells.
Inside one of the multiple-occupancy cells.
The "Dark Cell" (insert involuntary shudder here).
The doorway to the prison library, which was the first in Arizona.
The "new prison yard" which is, in my very humble opinion, not nearly as interesting as the older stuff...
Some tools used by the prisoners.
Fort Yuma played a historic if obscure role in the American Civil War. The saddle shown here and displayed in the Yuma Territorial Prison museum belonged to Lieutenant F. Green, M.D. who served with the Union Medical Corps at Fort Yuma during the war.
A "dump wagon" used around 1900.
The object of the cat's affection.
Prison Cat inside the main prison yard.
The view looking across the Colorado River to the California side,
The first thing that I saw upon arriving at the work site for the new playground was the Burrowing Owl Habitat! The trees that can be seen in this picture are located in an area where Dr. Tuttle used to take his group of 4-Hers to look for newts and darkling beetles under pieces of wood and rocks that could be found in the scrub brush alongside the Colorado river. In this picture we're looking towards the north and the playground site is directly behind me to the south.
Here you can see part of the trail that follows the river. This dirt trail leads to a paved trail that follows a canal and train tracks from Avenue B in Yuma all the way to the Yuma Territorial Prison, which is 2 miles east of this location. From that paved trail, the new trail that follows the main canal through town can also be accessed. That trail goes from 8th Street to 32nd street and is 3 miles long. So a peaceful 5 mile bike ride through town can be had now without encountering any traffic.
Here we're looking at a head-on picture of what will become the new children's playground. All of this will become two side towers of the castle that can be seen in this rendering of what the playground will look like upon completion. This picture was taken when I first arrived early on Sunday morning to begin working on this project. There were plenty of volunteers organized according to their level of experience or lack thereof. I was teamed up with a guy named John who is a former Marine who joined the Marine Corps the same year my dad did and came to Yuma the same year that my family did (1973). He left the Marines in 1974. We worked on the right tower of the castle.
The blueprints that we were using to build this playground. This is the largest playground that this company has ever designed. The company is run by a father-son team that got their start when the father decided to design a park that his son could play in because there were no decent parks where they lived.
There were a lot of volunteers working on this project. There were so many different things happening all at once. Every portion of what would ultimately be the most amazing playground that I've ever seen in an open-access public park was being manufactured at once. The parts were not pre-cut. We were measuring and cutting every individual piece ourselves using a tape measure, a pencil, and a tablesaw.
Another picture of generous volunteers doing their thing for the kids of the future.
After 4 hours of work all of the volunteers enjoyed a lunch of pizza and potato salad while the 2nd shift started where we left off. There were 3 shifts working throughout the day and each received a meal at the end of their shift. Here we're waiting in line for our pizza.
Here is a picture of a typical Yuma sunset. Arizona sunsets are unequaled in my opinion. I wish that I had been on the edge of the mesa to catch this beauty in all of its glory, but this will do for now. You can see a couple of palm trees in the evening sunlight near the lower middle portion of the picture.
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