Following the People Who Follow the Meteors

We all shared one thing in common: A yearning to step briefly outside of our lives cluttered with work, school and other daily distractions, to remind ourselves that in the cosmic scale of things, none of that stuff matters much.

How much the urge gnawed at us, however, depended where along the mountain we stood.

The last of the Leonid meteors were streaking overhead Tuesday night. Unlike the night before, when clouds obscured the view from Los Angeles of the annual meteor storm, the sky was clear this evening.

Scores of other wannabe astronomers, and I, ventured toward Mt. Wilson Observatory. We were the less dedicated watchers, the ones who did not bother driving hundreds of miles away from the light pollution of the city for the most intense portion of the two day meteor shower, which can be seen without a telescope only once every 33 years.

In places like the Mojave Desert, up to 50 meteors per hour were spotted blazing across the Southern California sky Tuesday morning. The darkest parts of China basked in interstellar fire showers of more than 2,000 per hour.

Such visions blazed in my mind as my car headlights pierced the forest night on Angeles Crest Highway, just above Glendale. In typical Angeleno fashion, I sought immediate gratification; pulling over at not much higher than 1,000 feet above sea level into the first turnout I saw. The blare of AM talk radio from the car speakers announced my presence to a flock of others also parked there.

As eyes that had been scanning the sky glanced my way, a young boy’s voice rang out: “There’s one! Oooh!”

I could feel icy stares of resentment bore through me. A few stargazers who missed that split-second sighting had obviously not seen a meteor yet, a fact not helped by the descending mountain chill.

“Whoops. Sorry,” I said under my breath, reaching to turn off the radio. Then, I wondered: “What’s the big deal? They’ll be plenty more.”

But there weren’t. I later learned that the tail end of the storm revealed, at most, five meteors per hour.

“It hasn’t quite lived up to expectations,” said Deborah Segall, of Glendale, who arched her neck at the sky for roughly 30 minutes with her two sons, Luca, 9, and Jordan, 14.

Clutching her arms against a gust of wind that came down the mountain, Segall suggested to her sons, “Let’s just say we saw something.” She was hoping to fire them up to tease their father, who had pooh-poohed the expedition’s prospects for a meteor sighting and stayed home.

“We’ll tell your father this: ‘Wow! You missed an incredible experience!’ ”

The view was not much better for Phil and Sue Merritt of La Canada. They were there with their 9-year-old daughter Becky, among a crowd of others who had since showed up with rock or rap music blaring from their car speakers.

Sue Merritt was almost sure she spotted a meteor.

“It was kind of short, though--so fast,” she said. “That’s the problem with all of this. It only lasts a fraction of a second. On TV, they make it look like there are tons.”

*

Roughly 15 minutes after they arrived, Phil Merritt offered: “What do you say we go to Penguin’s now and get some ice cream? Or hot chocolate.”

“Yeah!” Becky beamed.

“So much for nature and the universe,” Sue Merritt said, with a shrug.

“What kind of show are they putting on here?” she joked. “This isn’t like the movies.”

Perhaps that was the problem. Maybe the influence of Hollywood has conditioned many of us to accept from our space debris nothing short of awesome spectacle in close-up, or Armageddon-like brushes with disaster. Where was the threat of mass death and the destruction of the world, for Pete’s sake?

The Leonid shower took on significance for me only when scientists and corporate heads around the world began worrying earlier this year over the possibility of seeing that some of the roughly 500 satellites orbiting the Earth would be knocked out of commission by the meteors. Some meteors are as tiny as sand grains, but travel at such speeds that they are capable of riddling multibillion-dollar space hardware with the force of .22-caliber bullets. Now there’s something I’d pay to see.

It did not happen, though. Nor did any other notable disasters, outside of a Japanese woman’s fatal plunge into a Tokyo ravine Tuesday morning while peering at a cloud-covered meteorless sky there. Sitting on a wall with friends, the woman apparently was blown off balance by a strong gust of wind.

A strong wind also rustled through the forest trees as I drove higher in search of a better view of the meteors. At 3,000-plus feet, shrouded in darkness, I encountered one small pickup truck.

Bundled in blankets halfway inside their camper shell were Beverly Kidd and her 13-year-old daughter Jenni, both of Arcadia. They had seen five meteors, having lain on their backs for almost two hours pondering what was now a swirl of stars overhead.

“We saw the dust trails,” Beverly Kidd said. “They were nice. If you blink, though, you’ll miss them.”

But the meteors were beside the point. Happy to leave bills, dinner dishes, and homework behind for a night, the two were lost in themselves. All night, they talked and sang Beatles songs together.

“Do you know any?” Jenni Kidd asked. “We’ve done 10 already. How about: Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . . “

Higher still, I continued along the dark, windy highway, passing others similarly parked alone and seemingly content in their isolation. But I had not yet seen one meteor.

At Mt. Wilson Observatory, elevation 5,710 feet, the sky seemed to explode with stars, shimmering into infinity.

Francis Bennett of Hollywood, and Diane McCullough of Mt. Washington, were among a handful of meteor seekers who bothered to come this high up, roughly one hour away from the Los Angeles basin. A lifelong astronomy enthusiast, the thirtysomething Bennett frequents this spot for hours at a time some nights.

“There’s a whole world up there,” he said, pointing out with zeal the Orion constellation, slices of the Milky Way and the planet Jupiter, which sparkled like a miniature sun.

Bennett also noted how the Leonid meteor storm held thousands around the world spellbound during the 10th century, when it was first documented by astronomers. Back then many viewed the experience religiously.

“There’s a meteor now,” Bennett said, eyes alive as he traced its 45-mile-per-second trajectory with a flick of his finger.

I missed it. No matter. The three of us stood in silence for a few minutes, watching a parade of commercial jets on the horizon slowly dip into the city below us.

*

A long night still ahead, the couple left to search for a darker spot from which to marvel at the sky.

“Too much light pollution here,” Bennett explained.

I stayed put. Not by choice. My car alarm had mysteriously stopped working, something I did not notice until it started wailing obnoxiously into the mountain night.

Unable to deactivate it, I sat inside the car. The radio was not working either.

Maybe a meteor struck a satellite after all, I wondered, searching the sky.

Then, I saw it--just beyond the large observatory satellite dish that was apparently interfering with my alarm and radio signals.

First white, then a faint orange, the meteor zipped into view and disappeared in half-a-second. It was very nice, but now that I’d seen one, I was ready for that hot chocolate.