America’s Great Observatories — the Hubble, Chandra, Compton and Spitzer space telescopes — have peered into the unknown and made breakthrough discoveries about newborn stars, dark matter and the age of the universe itself.
But these telescopes, whose era began in 1990, are aging, if not already dead, and there is no budget or political will to replace them. This sobering reality was underscored this month when two were beset by technical problems, including the Hubble Space Telescope, that temporarily halted their science.
Shrinking budgets and delayed projects means astronomers will lose some of their key eyes in the skies before NASA can launch new telescopes. It will make some research impossible.
The remoteness of the trail is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, there are razor-sharp mesas and ghostly valleys, making for unforgettable scenery. But this being rural Colorado, the weather can be unpredictable. Heat makes the trail brutally uncomfortable in summer; the snow and ice make it impassable in winter. As a result, it’s only open for two months a year — May and October.
“These canyons are rough, desolate, harsh,” explained Zebulon Miracle, a geologist who leads dinosaur walks for guests at the Gateway Canyons Resort, an unexpected luxury outpost in the middle of the red rock peaks, 53 miles from Grand Junction.
The lingerie manager in the long-gone Michigan department store where I worked spent as much of her wages on store merchandise as she did on her rent. On the other hand, she could forgo expensive lunches for the 35-cent grilled-cheese sandwiches always available behind the secret swinging door to the employee cafe.
When car plants close, we mourn the loss of factory jobs, and for years afterward, former workers gather in union halls and bars near plants and mills, telling stories of a more prosperous time. When stores close, though, we don’t really think about the department managers, sales clerks, stockers and janitors who created the special retailing world where not just customers but also workers could escape their routine lives and aspire to the promise that shiny new goods offered.
Unsheltered echoes how many of us, of various generations, are feeling these days — cheated out of a future that was never really owed us to begin with and exhausted from attempting to get others to understand how we see the world. But it also makes space for the small moments of comfort and joy that are so often missing in a time when we wield cynicism and irony as shields to protect our softer feelings.
I’m not sure if this is a novel or a series of short stories, articles, blog posts or semi-autobiographical jottings, but whatever the hell it is, it’s funny. It’s a funny book in the same way that, say, Gulliver’s Travels, or Three Men in a Boat, or the collected articles of Fran Lebowitz are funny books. It’s a novelty, an oddity: neither a 19th-century style realist novel nor an avant-garde piece of experimentalism, but a nice little comedy squib, with just enough heft and bite.