You travel to this solo expeditionary excursion in an Otis, vintage 1965 installation. My building is a quintessential Manhattan mixed-use commercial and residential behemoth, boasting 702 units. With a population varying between 1,500 and 2,500, the building offers many potential eyes. A person could expect that the signal free nighttime event like a rare Leonid meteor shower (occurring once every not-very-often) (100 years!) would draw a crowd.
The newsies announced all week that the best time to catch the magnificence of meteors streaking and expiring across Manhattan’s night sky would be between 4 and 5 am. At the appointed post-witching hour, I dutifully elevatored to our unofficial 35th floor sky deck, despite the waa-waaah of the door alarm, from which platform I could observe all prospective astral doings, equipped with my Mercury 1115 lightweight 7×35 extra-wide angle binocs.
Despite the hour, the Gotham sky was a harlot’s cheek of diffused smudgy rose and inchoate dusky magenta. Dead-center, above, an indeterminate, uncommitted Persian blue. Not your best hue, either. Patchy and distracting disappointments for what should be, ideally, pitchest black.
Normally one of NYC’s fiercest defenders, I was disgusted that she couldn’t muster a dark backdrop for her once-in-a-century pyrotechnic space-travel drop-ins. Not another soul on the new, still-squishy licorice tarmac. No one dotted the rooftops or viewing stations of any of our high-hulk neighbors, either. Where was that vaunted esprit of escapade so dear to the ink and brag rights of Apple corers? The sole explanation one could dredge up was the mattress-thick sludge of mid-August air, making a venture outside without A/C life-support intimidating for the faint-fevered or self-indulged. But come on. Isn’t a potential light-studded spectacular worth a little shvitzing?
Adding to the unsettle was the difficulty of focusing. It’s not like ogling a neighbor’s bedroom, the which one could at least focus and glean some smattering of compensatory eye-fill. None of that. I was staring around at an undifferentiated mass of, well, muggy nothingness. It was akin to going to the doctor with a first breast x-ray. Absent a baseline reading of what was there before, a first x-ray compares to nothing, and is just about meaningless.
As it turned out, after a half hour of intense peering with expensive coated optics plastered to my eye sockets, I had to admit defeat. Not a flaming streak. Not a comet tail. Not a UFO contrail. Nadarissimo. Not even the scintillating ember of a cigarette on a parallel rooftop, a last nicotine immolation before Mayor Mike comes after and hunts down the errant rooftop miscreant for smoking under the bowl of all Creation.
Packing up the mighty Mercury, I philosophized. We’d given it the college try, and would pursue it perhaps again. Some other decade. From a bovine-dung-decorated field somewhere in Zimbabwe, which affords a lot more chance for actually enjoying a black sky, from which one could actually eyeball a bumper crop of faint blitzing, kamikaze-formation, flaming hard-rock airmail. Or maybe just hire J.K. Rowling to give me the Quidditch high sign.
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