If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

[Preface: yes, another semi-science-related post, but -- thanks to Gina for reminding me -- I felt the need to pay tribute to the Leonid Meteor Shower with my own story. After this, you might realize why I like science so much and why I think that everyone should, too. Also, play the Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking mashup video if you want to add another dimension to this post.]

This story takes place in Canada, at the cabin my grandparents used to own on a cold, Northern lake named Factor Lake. My grandpa, industrious man that he was, had somehow found out about a plot of land available on some obscure Canadian lake during the course of the contacts he made as school superintendent in Greater Minnesota. The plot of land did not have a road leading to it; and it certainly didn't have electricity or working toilets. It was just a parcel of land sitting on one of the countless glacial lakes of the region. But he bought the land and built a cabin there and made damn sure to make treks out with his family each summer.

By the time I started making regular summer visits, at around age five or six, there was a dirt road winding through the woods that led to the cabin. It had some form of electricity, albeit rudimentary, and it had an outhouse. The very definition of the rustic cabin, but it had character going for it. It had and still does have a special place in my heart. I remember the anticipation building up each summer before the trip. I remember my heart pounding as we seemingly inched closer on the twisty rural roads as logging trucks barreled past. I remember pulling off the main highway onto the entry road and opening the windows, fingers sticky with jolly ranchers, to let in the piney fresh air. And I remember seeing my grandpa putzing around the cabin, fixing this or that in his own way, as he greeted us with a warm smile as our car approached. My grandma walking around the corner, wearing her floppy hat and dangling charm bracelet, greeting our arrival with a wave and a smile. This was Canada.

My days at the cabin were spent lolling about playing with the neighbor's old, friendly Golden Retriever, torturing minnows and other helpless bait, or picking blueberries with my grandma. Evenings were spent at the fishing spot -- the Second Narrows -- watching the tips of our rods come alive as the walleyes nibbled on the poor minnows. My dad and I fished as my grandpa ate sunflower seeds and jokingly admonished us for our sometimes mismatched expectations:results when it came to the size of the fish on our line. "Give it a kiss and tell it to go and get its big friends," he'd say. After cleaning the fish, my dad deftly carving out the hunks of meat we'd eat for breakfast 9 hours later, while I squeamishly poked at the entrails and the heads, we would sit on a yellowing couch and my grandma would knit, my grandpa would doze, and my dad would read some of the books we brought or a decades-old National Geographic from his childhood.

[interlude: play this song for more space-themed music. I promise I'm getting to the space part of this post soon. Thanks for hanging in there. In another blast of unwarranted nostalgia, this is off one of the first CDs I ever owned, Spacehog's "Starside"]

If I didn't fall asleep on the couch, I would walk up the creaky wooden stairs to the attic, where we slept under posters labeled "The Butterflies of North America" or "Wildflowers of Southern Ontario." You know the kind. I could faintly hear the sound of the waves lapping the shore as I drifted off, my hands still smelling more than faintly of fish guts, happy. Sometimes the clinking of silverware on bowls would wake me up with only one thing flashing in my mind: ice cream! Maybe that was the first time that I realized that adults like to have fun, too. I'm not sure, but I am sure that I raced downstairs every time I heard even the slightest evidence of ice cream consumption below. Another time my dad woke me up with just, "Joe, you've got to see this."

Everyone is groggy when they are awoken, but kids seem to be excessively so. Maybe it's because in their minds, nothing is so important that they have to be woken up. Parents are probably the opposite. I can remember going into my parents' room as a kid, both of them immediately wide-awake as soon as their door creaked open, wondering what calamity befell their child.

So I was a groggy eight year old when my dad woke me up that night in Canada. He told me to put on my shoes and a jacket and come look at the shooting stars. I followed, groggily curious as to how stars could be shooting, down the uneven steps of the cabin and to the dock. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I looked to the sky and almost immediately recoiled in surprise and fright -- the stars really were shooting! More than shooting, they were rocketing across the lake, as if shot from an unseen, unheard cannon. I could hear the black water lapping at the boat and the dock, but I could see nothing else. The lone light was the cabin's single bulb swaying in the wind far, far away from where I stood, unable to move and scared of the enveloping darkness.

I tucked into my dad's arm and eventually dared myself to look back up at the stars. They were still arcing brilliantly across the sky. I began to feel less scared and more awed at what I saw. Flashes of light darted regally across the sky, the monstrous band of the Milky Way stretched from one of the lake end to the other, over the Second Narrows and on and on forever. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I began to see even more meteors, more stars, and less black emptiness. The sky was full of activity, more than I could have ever imagined.

I've spent a lot of nights since in Canada looking up at the sky. It's the same sky as I have over me now, but nothing in the city approaches the all-encompassing darkness of the sky around Factor Lake. Spending those nights simply letting myself get wrapped up in the sky, in space, grounds me. Sitting in the library today, only a concrete sky above, hunched over a dimly lit contracts casebook, I was reminded that it never hurts to take a look up at the night sky. You never know what you'll find.