The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Nikita Khrushchev In My Garden Nikita Khrushchev reached down into my house in Wilmington the other morning and made me get up at 4:50 o'clock. And, out in the...
...Theoretically, that is a terrible time at which to be called out of the warm nest of sheets and blankets...
...And when we stand and look, as Edith and I did on that moonlit morning, it seems as if there were a new star up there, a quick, nervous and restless star...
...To be sure, Khrushchev had an ally in the person of my very effective and efficient wife, Edith, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be counted among the Communists though she may have just a touch of the dictator...
...Our relations to it, at least, have been forever altered...
...Everything else up there in the sky was as we have always known it...
...But now we begin to see the possibility of flying out and shaking hands with the stars and planets...
...And here were we, alone in the stillness, searching the far spaces...
...But actually, when I came wonderingly into the world of consciousness, my sensation was of delight...
...Sputnik I had come from the northeast and flashed off toward the southwest...
...The Hebrew prophets, the Egyptian astronomers, the Greek philosophers saw the great galaxies slowly turning precisely as they are turning now...
...When we said goodnight to Khrushchev, it was comforting to turn back through our garden, which was still homelike and familiar though so strangely transformed...
...The full moon was low and bright in the west and seemed closer than 1 had ever seen it before...
...Just one great planet—it must have been Jupiter—burned low on the horizon...
...Even while I was fumbling about in search of winter clothes, I became conscious of the great moon slanting down toward the west and of the magic pattern of shadows in the garden...
...But the garden immediately about me was being transformed by this nocturnal illumination into a landscape quite different from the common scenery of daytime...
...Through long ages, the secrets of the heavens have slowly been revealed...
...And flowers in the garden, plants we had tended for years, with which we were intimately familiar, seemed astonishingly large and bright...
...It was easy to understand why spacemen imagine that a quick jump will bring them down on its gleaming surface...
...It is something new in the universe, a manmade creation with human limitations and peculiarities...
...In a moment, it was gone—and Orion, the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia remained, as they have eternally, outlined in soft points of light...
...And then it happened...
...But then suddenly, as we looked, there appeared a brilliant flashing body moving swiftly across the sky past all the ancient configurations with restless and unbelievable speed...
...In the soft stillness of the night, the crunching of my shoes on the gravel gave out a really thunderous sound...
...But the undisciplined alarm clock exploded at 4:30...
...But Sputnik II was expected to reverse this course...
...It had been foretold that Sputnik II would burst upon us at 5:07...
...This world right here, in America, in Delaware, in my own garden, was so lovely as to demand all my attention...
...It was really an astonishing experience...
...Then came a wild and foolish thought...
...The poets and song-writers alone would make up a formidable army...
...Maples which still flaunted their golden glory looked like giant bouquets of brilliant blossoms...
...She drew me along the driveway...
...But the sky, for us, will never be the same again...
...We human beings have shouldered our way out from our little planet...
...We were looking away from the moon and up into a soft, deep sky...
...They have given a bitter meaning to the very word "satellite...
...The shadows of the trees that had shed their leaves were utterly fantastic...
...Soon we reached an open space, away from the trees, where we had a clear view of the south and cast...
...From the beginning, men have looked and wondered...
...It was Edith, of course, who called me back to the business of our expedition...
...I am sure that if I had looked the next day I would have seen no such roses and chrysanthemums as bloomed on every side there under that magic light at 5 in the morning...
...I wondered what the Russians wen-thinking when they looked up from their gardens to sec Sputnik II flashing through the sky...
...And, out in the unbelievable loveliness of my moonlit garden, I actually saw Sputnik II, bearing its Bolshevik pooch Laika, shoot like a brilliant star across the soft and spotless blue of the sky...
...When at last we emerged out of doors, I forgot all about Sputnik and Russia and the poor little dog way up there in the sky by himself...
...And then suddenly it occurred to me that the Bolsheviks are not the right people to make the first contact with a satellite so closely linked with our most romantic experiences and imaginings...
...For the rest, the blue was patterned only by the faintest of distant stars...
...Suppose that the moon should actually be in danger of Muscovite conquest—imagine the hosts which would volunteer for its defense...
...We spoke in whispers—as if there were fairies about who might be disturbed...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 47
