The Comet ( A Memoir) | Jane Hertenstein
Mark Twain once wrote, “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley’s comet.” Twain died on 21 April 1910, the day after the comet’s closest sweep. The last time we had a visit from Halley’s was in 1986. I will not live to see it again.
Technically, I didn’t exactly see it in 1986 either.
I believe it was the springtime when we went out to view the comet. This was before Internet and live blogging. For amateurs such as ourselves we had to read the newspaper to figure out the optimum time to catch a glimpse. The best time was before dawn. So sometime in the middle of the night my friends and I decided to go comet hunting. We had to borrow a car and what we came up with was an old shortie school bus. Next we had to pool our change to come up with gas for the bus. Then we had to get out of the city, away from the light pollution.
Little did we know how far we’d have to go.
We drove I-55 past the Saturn rings of suburbs and warehouses that circled the city. Past the Des Plaines River, a geographic marker, which meant we were out of Cook County and past Joliet—yet the sky was still twilight! We were running out of time—soon it would be getting light. So we took the next exit.
Though we were definitely away from subdivisions, we could still see the ethereal green glow of Chicago in the distance. We kept driving looking for dark sky, taking narrower and narrower roads, bumping over broken pavement and then down dirt roads. Finally we parked. There was not a single house or person around. It was now or never to see the comet.
We tramped over open ground and in the near-dark sighted a mound, more like a heap of dirt or slag, so we climbed up for what we supposed would be a better view. I lay down on the rough hillside next to a guy I had a crush on. I could smell the dew around us—and something else, nose tingling and acrid, like plastic burning. Anyway, I imagined it being romantic, lying together, waiting; he reached over for my hand. We didn’t spy a comet, but I felt a cosmic flash and heat radiating from inside of me.
Slowly the sky lightened, and we came to realize we were sitting on a toxic waste dump outside the Joliet Arsenal Plant.
My friends and I hurried to get back into the city before rush-hour traffic stopped us in our tracks. We were on Lake Shore Drive when we ran out of gas. Had we been paying attention to the gauge we might have noticed we were running low, but back then we were ALWAYS running on empty. Who was to say we wouldn’t make it back on fumes? I remember sitting in the right lane with traffic building and cars honking, afraid of getting rear-ended any minute while my boyfriend and another guy walked to go get gasoline for the tank. They returned with a plastic jug just as a city tow truck pulled up to get us off the roadway.
We made it home, comet-less and possibly contaminated from rollicking around on an industrial Superfund site. A few years later the arsenal closed down and was turned back to prairie and Mike and I got married and had a baby girl with more or less all her limbs in tack and toes and fingers accounted for. Since Halley’s other comets have come and gone unseen. For my husband and me the memory of a crazy night out comet-watching is like a fuzzy, white streak against a fast and far-receding past. It will not come again.
Technically, I didn’t exactly see it in 1986 either.
I believe it was the springtime when we went out to view the comet. This was before Internet and live blogging. For amateurs such as ourselves we had to read the newspaper to figure out the optimum time to catch a glimpse. The best time was before dawn. So sometime in the middle of the night my friends and I decided to go comet hunting. We had to borrow a car and what we came up with was an old shortie school bus. Next we had to pool our change to come up with gas for the bus. Then we had to get out of the city, away from the light pollution.
Little did we know how far we’d have to go.
We drove I-55 past the Saturn rings of suburbs and warehouses that circled the city. Past the Des Plaines River, a geographic marker, which meant we were out of Cook County and past Joliet—yet the sky was still twilight! We were running out of time—soon it would be getting light. So we took the next exit.
Though we were definitely away from subdivisions, we could still see the ethereal green glow of Chicago in the distance. We kept driving looking for dark sky, taking narrower and narrower roads, bumping over broken pavement and then down dirt roads. Finally we parked. There was not a single house or person around. It was now or never to see the comet.
We tramped over open ground and in the near-dark sighted a mound, more like a heap of dirt or slag, so we climbed up for what we supposed would be a better view. I lay down on the rough hillside next to a guy I had a crush on. I could smell the dew around us—and something else, nose tingling and acrid, like plastic burning. Anyway, I imagined it being romantic, lying together, waiting; he reached over for my hand. We didn’t spy a comet, but I felt a cosmic flash and heat radiating from inside of me.
Slowly the sky lightened, and we came to realize we were sitting on a toxic waste dump outside the Joliet Arsenal Plant.
My friends and I hurried to get back into the city before rush-hour traffic stopped us in our tracks. We were on Lake Shore Drive when we ran out of gas. Had we been paying attention to the gauge we might have noticed we were running low, but back then we were ALWAYS running on empty. Who was to say we wouldn’t make it back on fumes? I remember sitting in the right lane with traffic building and cars honking, afraid of getting rear-ended any minute while my boyfriend and another guy walked to go get gasoline for the tank. They returned with a plastic jug just as a city tow truck pulled up to get us off the roadway.
We made it home, comet-less and possibly contaminated from rollicking around on an industrial Superfund site. A few years later the arsenal closed down and was turned back to prairie and Mike and I got married and had a baby girl with more or less all her limbs in tack and toes and fingers accounted for. Since Halley’s other comets have come and gone unseen. For my husband and me the memory of a crazy night out comet-watching is like a fuzzy, white streak against a fast and far-receding past. It will not come again.