Life as a Craft: Wright Bros. cont.

Sitting in Panera, I am passing up the opportunity to take a glorious picture–one of the sunset from atop the steepest hill I have ever seen–to capture the day instead. (I shall go back and get a picture from the hill at night, as that is what I saw last night and prompts tonight's adventure.)

We started out at around 9:30, half an hour after the AF Museum opened. My dad decided to try to find the apartment where he used to live. We missed a turn, and found a place to turn around. And wonderfully, this was the kind of place I want to turn around in no matter where I go. The street we turned onto was residential–Oakfield Road, I believe–and in the "old money" part of town. We drove past huge tutor homes, with rolling, lush green yards accenting classic white plaster and dark timber. The roofs were every imaginable shade of blue and green slate. They almost reminded me of scales, like from the fish you see in children's books. The roofs of these homes seemed to have their own story, their own artistic qualities. They could have covered the lawn.
We drove by a high school, in similar tutor style, with huge windows and vaulted ceilings. It seemed to have materialized from a story. No, rather, from a collection of stories. It was the school of stories, where you learned the things that would save your life later in the story. Where you were prepared to face the world of dragons and evil wizards. Where your professors had vague pasts, and everything they said teemed with wisdom and life-experience.
Anyway, it was amazing. I wanted to take pictures of every house, but unfortunately my camera was in the trunk.
After returning to the normal world, we found my dad's previous residence, remarkably unchanged from thirty-or-something years ago. I took pictures of my dad in front of his old apartment building, the sign for the small complex, and of him standing in front of the next-door donut shop. And also of him standing beneath the sign, which read, "Stan the Donut Man." We then headed to the museum.
I realized that what I like isn't history, it's beginnings. The beginnings of flight amazed me, but as we moved on to metal-sheathed aircraft, the planes lost their appeal. They just weren't the same.
After completing the "Early Years" Section and skimming through WWII, I convinced my dad that we should jump to the end of the museum, where the "Space and Missiles" section was, and work backwards. He had spent days in the museum before, and still hadn't seen the end. (Also, a good bit of history had past since then.) A ten minute walk, and I found myself gazing at this... capsule thing. It was a capsule that had taken some guy to an altitude of 101,000 feet.
And that's when it hit me.
I know that.
I've seen it before.
Not the capsule, but what they were doing. A cramped tank with little windows to let you see what was on the outside. To let you explore the unknown world around you.
I know that.
I've done that before...
When I was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, my parents replaced the skylight in our house. The old one was nearly opaque from pine pitch and made out of plastic. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me keep it. I ran to my friend, told him my idea, and we started planning. For the next week all I did in class was draw and design. Finally, I had finished the plans for a home-made, two-person, powered... submarine. My plan was flawless, breathing snorkels, emergency backup air supplies, aquatic wings for maneuverability, and a contained lawnmower engine in back to power it. And to see the world, an old, desperate-for-cleaning plastic skylight. I was going to explore the incredible unknown worlds of local lakes in my two-by-four planked discovery tank.
That was the closest I ever got to it. My lack of money and approval from my parents hindered my progress, and eventually my mother threw the skylight out. But I had been designing discovery craft for years, and I continued it for years. I was always fascinated with building discovery capsules with tiny windows...
Then I got to the rockets. I was seeing all the things I had dreamt of building as a kid: liquid fuel rocket engines, solid fuel rockets... My friend (same one) and I also had plans to build a rocket-bike (shortly after the ditched submarine plans). I had an old toys-r-us bike that I had stripped the parts off of. We were going to braze steel pipes onto the chain-stays and fly down the local runway at incredible speeds. I had researched rocket fuel, and we would fill the pipes with a mixture of paraffin wax and aluminum oxide, the main components of the solid fuels that NASA (I thought) used. Fortunately, while the aluminum oxide was only like $7 for a small canister, shipping was $35 because it is a hazmat item. If it wasn't, I'm not sure that I would be here today.
Besides that run-in with rockets, I had designed countless liquid fuel rocket engines. Here at the museum, I got to see everything I had dreamt of in real life. How they really did it. What it really looked like.
Moving on from the space section, we went to the Cold War section. This is trivial; there was only one thing there I was really fascinated with: a cut-away turbojet engine. Again, something I had designed countless times, always seeing in my head how it would work, figuring out what had to happen, and working out the bugs. And here it was–what I had always hoped to design and build one day–cut away to reveal its simplicities and intricacies. It was like being shown the solution to a problem I had been trying to solve for years. This is how it's done. All I felt was reverence. Reverence for the people who had seen it through and actually built one. And the little kid in me was so proud to know that engine so intimately, to think of all the time I had spent pondering how it would work, and to see it so familiarly. I didn't need to build it anymore; I had figured out how it worked, and then been shown that it worked.

After that we went to a restaurant called Palermo's. We found it in one of those "local attractions" guides. Driving up to it, we didn't know what to expect. It was in a run-down part of town; a flat, beige building housed it, along with an auto glass shop, a chiropractor, and a vacant suite. Across the street from it, a Budget Inn from the seventies sat empty. One couldn't tell if it was open and simply vacant, or if it had gone defunct ten years ago. Anyway, a small lit-up sign above the entrance is all that let passers-by know there was a restaurant there. We pulled into the parking lot and were surprised at the number of cars. odd.
What we found inside is a local's secret. It was only 5:30, and the place was packed. At 6, the last table was taken. It was an incredible Italian place, full of people who knew everyone who ate there on Friday nights. The kind of people who all turn and look to see who just walked in the door. I have never felt so out of place in a restaurant. But the food was amazing. We got a 16-inch pizza with meatballs that was delicious. I can't really say why, but I think it was just that the ingredients were so fresh and healthy. And for desert, tiramisu. The first time I ever had it, and it was amazing.
Ah, I've been writing for like two hours, and I need sleep for tomorrow. Going to visit the Wright Cycle Co. Yeah, the Wright Brothers's bike shop. For real. Anyway, I'll come back to this later.