A Light in the Sky

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. There’s some of our favorites. Up next, a story from a regular contributor, Richard Muniez. Today, Richard shares with us the story of a magical moment in his life when he was young, his first time being a satellite. Take it away, Richard.

If you stop and think about it, it’s really funny how memories work. I’m not saying funny, “ha ha.” I’m saying funny strange. When I stop and think about it, before six years old, my memories are, they’re kind of spotty at best. But there is stuff that sticks out more than others, and that sticks out more than some of the other ones, is the first time I ever recalled seeing a satellite. I wasn’t even five years old yet, and we were going into the mountains. Now, when I talk about the mountains, what I’m talking about here is a tract of land in northern New Mexico. In years to come, we’d follow Highway 17 up and around Cumber’s Pass and come in through a different road. Now, this led up to our summer range, and this is where we took our cattle in summer. But this time we took the road up through Osier. Now, at the time it was nothing more than a large water tank for the steam engines that used to move between Antony Too and Chauma. The other thing I recall about Osier is the station itself. At the time, it wasn’t open. But in this particular memory, what had happened is we’d started out for the mountains, and it was already late in the day, and it’s been very stormy. What this was was a family and extended family trip, and we were going to go up to the mountains. We’re going to say what we called the Green Cabin, a pretty nice cabin. The reason we had its name was, guess what, it was painted green. We. As I’d mentioned, it was pretty stormy. It had rained very heavily. It had rained so heavily up the mountains. In fact, we kind of bordered our trip up into the mountains. We had two-wheel drive pickups. The soft mud was threatening to get them stuck. So, unable to go forward, unable to go back, we stopped and spent the night at Osier. The old station was unlocked, so we took refuge there. I recall everyone bringing in their beddy, and we found a corner to sleep in. A fire was started in the old stove, and a mill was prepared. We ate and everyone sat around talking. I liked listening to the old-timers talk. I almost told such interesting stories. I remember my old granny talking about coming out here with the Mormon expansion. My grandfather talked about coming out here as a boy from Lebanon. Well, later that evening, the strum cleared out and the skies opened up. Washed by the rain, the stars were hard and bright, and I remember Echo was supposed to be passing over. I remember someone said, “Echo?” “Yes, that balloon satellite they put up a few weeks ago.” So we all went out into the night to look for it. As a four-year-old boy, I had no idea what an artificial satellite was. Oh, I’d seen TV shows and stuff like that. So what I was expecting to see was a full-size, 1950s-style rocket thundering overhead. Of course, that’s not what I got. The Project Echo satellites were launched in 1960 and 1964. The idea behind them was one we take almost for granted today. Now, way back in 1945, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark, the same guy wrote “Two Thousand and One, a Space Artisty,” came up with the idea of using satellites as a means of communication. The following year they tried some experiments using a more natural satellite, in this case our Moon, to reflect microwaves for communications. Well, once Sputnik was launched, Clark’s ideas were right on the verge of becoming reality. Now, the first thrill attempts at using this idea. But, pretty simple. Put a big aluminized balloon up in space and bounce the signals off that. Now, it took two tries to get the first Echo satellite up, the first one on May 13th, 1960. While that satellite ended up in the Atlantic, the next attempt came a few months later, this time on August 12th. This time, the satellite settled into an orbit some thousand miles or so above the Earth. So what we have here is a one-hundred-foot-across aluminized balloon miles above the Earth, catching the sunlight. This made it a really easy target for the eye to spot. So we stepped down to the cool mountain there, and I remember I looked up and there was the universe sprawled up before me. I almost got dizzy looking up, standing there on a loading platform an H train station. I stood at the edge of infinity. Knots and tangles of stars were overhead, and a ghostly cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, and stars of every color and by the thousands blurred into it. I’d never seen anything so glorious. “You see the light from those stars,” I remember Dad saying. “They’re so far away, light left before you were even born. They’re so far away, they may not even be there anymore.” Now, the idea of the speed of light meant nothing to me. But if they were that far away, then how far was far? And suddenly I felt very small and very lost in it all. It thrilled me. My cosmos had just grown amazingly big, and I was part of something so much bigger than me. Now, as a young kid, the horizon is always incredibly close. As a child, my universe ended at the mountains, the Ring in the Sand Loos Valley. There was little beyond it. I never put two and two together yet, and realized there was more to my world than I knew. And now, with a single sentence, the universe had gotten very, very big for me. We all appeared into the sky, each quietly searching for something. Finally, after several minutes, someone pointed, “There! There it is!” I looked, and here was a star moving quietly across the sky. I watched it travel like some magical force among the stars, and that in years to come, I learned so well. The star move is so much quiet and dignity. It amazed me. I remember it be several seconds. Riven remote breathe. So I watched the move. It flashed, and then it faded away in through the night. And even at four years old, there was a part of me that wished I was up there riding along with it. Today, I’ve seen God knows how many satellites flying over. And like that four-year-old boy, I still wish I was along for the ride.

And a terrific job by Monty on the production of that piece and the editing. And again, a special thanks to Richard Muniez, who’s a regular contributor here on Our American Stories. Check out Richard’s blog at WilliamAlban.wordpress.com, and check out Richard’s other stories at OurAmericanStories.com. Just look up Richard Muniez, M-U-N-I-E-Z, in the search bar. He’s got a great one on the first Black lawman in Colorado, the Russian MiG jet, and many others. Richard Muniez’s story about a light in the sky in the beautiful mountains of New Mexico. Here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. And any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.