It is a sign of the here-too-long drought that has been plaguing folks from “Texarkana to El Paso, Oklahoma down to Old Mexico and there’s Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antone,” as Charlie Daniels sang, back in the day when he was a rocking long-haired country boy and not a shill for the nut wing. Texas might “sure make you feel at home” but no doubt its rivers and lakes are gettin’ low.
I couldn’t see rivers and creeks for the dirt while I was traversing Interstate 10 last week while on my way to San Antonio from Beaumont and back. Now the disgusting drought that has expanded through this blazing hot Texas Summer and a new relic of the past has risen to the top because of that same drought. I speak of a large, spherical piece of the doomed Space Shuttle Columbia.
It isn’t so surprising that a piece of the Shuttle has surfaced, even a relatively large one, on the edge of Lake Nacogdoches which is in the heart of a sizeable chunk of East Texas over which the spacecraft broke apart while returning from space eight years ago. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know people would be finding the Space Shuttle Columbia for years. I lived in Waco at the time and drove, while on assignment as a reporter, to where another large unrecognizable part of Columbia lay on a grassy highway median just outside Palestine, Texas. That is about 110 miles from where most of the remains of the astronauts were discovered.
Interstate 45, between Dallas and Houston, in a rough geographic sense divides the prairies and savannahs of east Central Texas, and the Pineywoods of East Texas. East Texas holds the forest lands of the Lone Star State. This is the area that those who know nothing of Texas cannot comprehend due to a lack of rock-filled mountains and mesas. But this is the area where I was born and raised, and spent most of my life here. I knew those sometime thick forests would hold for years and years what was left of that ill-fated flying machine and its amazing crew of American and Israeli spacemen and women.
While the Columbia will forever remain another of the tragedies of space travel it also helps those who dream of the future of our Universe and beyond our lonely planet. How many people — that we know of — have flown in space? Not many at all when you stack them up against the number that hasn’t crossed into that magic land where fat guys like me could even feel light as a feather.
The more that is found of Columbia will help put together the tragic but very useful puzzle of what happened to that day in March 2003 over the cusp of that wooded southeastern area of the United States. I may have mentioned I once wasn’t at all into flying in a plane. Once I learned what happened in many of the airline mishaps over time and the safety innovations that came about because of those investigations made me a much comfortable and, to some extent enlightened, air passenger.
At least the whole drought isn’t a bad thing. But I think it’s now done its good deeds and I sure wish the heck that it would cease and desist.
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