Remember what it was like to be a kid?
Sometimes I like to hearken back to those days of yesteryear, usually whilst sipping at a tall cool glass of lemonade. Pink lemonade. The kind that tastes best with a few cubes of ice. For maximum effect, it should be enjoyed beneath a shade tree, and it should be spiked with vodka. But, I’m getting carried away with myself.
I was in the “gifted” classes when I was in grade school. Why, I couldn’t tell you, but it certainly did a fantastic job of teaching me to be easily annoyed with kids who weren’t like my circle of friends, sequestered away to a different area of the school from everyone else.
As smart as we supposedly were, we did fantastically stupid things, and with astonishing regularity. I can remember, as if it were yesterday, the time Jeff and I tried to make napalm in his back yard using cactus, kerosene, and swimming pool chemicals. The stupidest of all, however, was the time we tied a lizard to a model rocket, figuring everything would be cool, and that we would have made the world’s first reptilian astronaut. (Please note that in the part of Florida where I grew up, lizards were like rats. They were everywhere. Inside the house, splattered all over the road every ten feet.)
This was a big rocket for such small boys. Jeff and I recycled cans and bottles to get enough money to buy a few engines. On the first launch attempt, we realized that there wasn’t enough gusto there to get our little reptilionaut airborne. Not to be defeated by gravity, I jumped on my mother’s big yellow three-speed, which I had commandeered for the mission since it had saddlebags, and rode it home as fast as I could to get more wire.
When I returned, speaker wire in hand, Jeff was trying to feed grasshoppers to AstroLizard. AL wanted no truck with it, however, and sat there like a bump on a log. Or a lizard on a log. More accurately, a lizard strapped to a rocket.
My plan was to use an internal engine, as well as four additional engines strapped to the outside of the tube. The wiring was a bear. We went through several dry runs before we finally figured out how to get all of the igniters to go off at the same time. (Okay, so it wasn’t down to the microsecond, but it was pretty darn close.)
To the launching pad we went. Jeff had tied and super-glued fishing weights to the opposite side of the rocket from the lizard, in a fit of genius. I had missed the possibility that the rocket would go up, and u-turn into the ground, putting AL at risk of sudden deceleration trauma. We were set. Goddard had nothing on us. NASA would hear of our bravery and genius and put us through Space Camp!
The rocket was staged. The winds were low. The sky a beautiful blue, interspersed with feathery cirrus clouds.
Contact.
With a mighty roar, the engines ignited, catapulting our brave reptilionaut off of the launching pad and up into space! Success! A white trail of smoke traced its way upward, the individual rocket trails helixing as the rocket spun. A report echoed out as the parachute deployed, and we started running for position to catch it as it returned to the ground.
Neither of us wanted to touch it once we saw, and it dropped to the ground.
Firstly, the strapped-on external engines had burned the bottom of the rocket to a smoking crisp. The engines were missing, as were the directional vanes. That wasn’t the worst of it.
Apparently, rocket engines deploy the parachute of their host by sending a blast explosion straight up. AL was in the direct path of one of these explosions. AL was no more. He had ceased to exist, as if he had vanished. To be accurate, it was as if he had been vaporized, since that’s what happened. The white rocket was red with lizard parts. One of his clawed feet had caught in the parachute silk. Further evidence of his existence was not found.
Later that afternoon, Jeff and I gave AL a hero’s burial. We buried him (his foot, anyway) in a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box in the park. We marked the spot with a pair of sticks tied into a cross with stereo wire.
AL was my friend, if only for a short time. Every time I see a lizard, I think of him. Or her. I didn’t know then how to tell the gender of a lizard, and I don’t know now. It doesn’t matter, anyway.
Then, there was the time I got stuck underwater in the “mud” in the bed of a polluted river. But that’s a story for another time.
