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The fallen sky. An intimate history of shooting stars

2010; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1945-5100.2010.01035.x

1945-5100

Howard Plotkin,

Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs

The fallen sky. An intimate history of shooting stars , by Cokinos Christopher. Jeremy, P. Tarcher , Penguin , 2009 , 518 p., $27.95, hardback (ISBN 978-1-58542-720-8 ). The fallen sky is a rich, multilayered book that defies easy analysis. Although it recounts in considerable detail the histories of some of the most famous and important meteorites—Willamette, Brenham, Cape York, and Ensisheim in particular—it is not a straightforward history. And although it examines in considerable detail the individuals involved in the finding and recovery of these meteorites, as well as such luminaries as Daniel Barringer and Harvey Nininger, it is not a straightforward biography. Rather, the book is more of a psychological exploration of the passions that drove these individuals. But more than that, it is also a book about Cokinos’s own passions. As he states in the Introduction, the book is an exploration of lives, including his own. “[I]n actual and often moving ways the fallen sky can reveal secrets not only of the solar system but of our hearts . . . We go out hunting meteorites, and some of us find ourselves as well.” At its core, then, this is a book of self-exploration, of self-discovery. Cokinos bases his accounts of the histories of the discovery and recovery of the meteorites he deals with, as well as his accounts of Barringer and Nininger, on an extraordinarily thorough study of the available primary and secondary literature. An examination of his acknowledgments reveals an impressive list of archives, universities, public libraries, curators, and diverse persons relied on for information. His accounts show a deep understanding of the material, and are written with real feeling. They are, by and large, well-told stories. The longest historical chapter in the book (79 p.) is on Harvey Nininger, and constitutes a mini-biography. Starting with an account of Nininger’s “epiphany on Euclid Street,” when he observed a brilliant daytime fireball, Cokinos deftly describes how Nininger came to combine a new-found interest in meteorites with a love for travel and adventure. By leaving his job as a professor of biology at McPherson College in Kansas and deciding to devote himself to finding, buying, collecting, and selling meteorites and writing about them, he transformed his interest into an enterprise. Cokinos goes on to describe the main events in Nininger’s career—his early meteorite searches, his move to Denver, the creation of the American Meteorite Laboratory, his dream of landing a university position and of creating a National Institute of Meteoritical Research, his move to Arizona, the opening of his American Meteorite Museum, his dispute with Lincoln LaPaz over the discovery of the Norton County meteorite, his interactions with Brandon Barringer at Meteor Crater, his failure to move his museum to the crater’s rim, and his subsequent move to Sedona, Arizona. Although Cokinos alludes to the fact that Nininger is “his own best hagiographer,” and that he engaged in “personal myth-making,” he apparently is so taken by him that on occasion he falls victim to the charm of his storytelling. For example, he repeats without questioning the oft-told story of Nininger’s 1928 encounter with George P. Merrill, the head curator of the Department of Geology at the Smithsonian Institution, at which Merrill supposedly told him “[I]f we gave you all the money your program required and you spent the rest of your life doing what you propose, you might find one meteorite.” According to the story, Nininger replied that the next time they would meet, Merrill would buy a meteorite from him, but when they did meet again, Merrill did not buy one, but two. To me, this story sounds like Nininger at his “personal myth-making” best. Would Merrill really be so discouraging to an enthusiastic meteorite hunter/collector? By the time of his meeting with Nininger, Merrill had been informed by another meteorite collector, Stuart Perry, that he intended to donate some of the meteorites in his collection to the Smithsonian. Merrill naturally offered encouragement to Perry, and it seems inconceivable that he would not have done the same with Nininger. Prior to Merrill’s death in 1929, he helped Nininger by providing him with Smithsonian services to section meteorites he had found. These services, offered promptly and generously, were of significant importance to the development of Nininger’s career. It seems more likely than not that Nininger’s later difficulties with the Smithsonian caused him to color or “misremember” his early encounter with Merrill. On the whole, Cokinos’s assessment of Nininger is sound. He presents him as “complicated . . . a study in contradictions,” one whose “fervor led him at times to skirt the ethical edges.” Although Nininger succeeded in sharing his enthusiasm of meteorites with the public, he fell short of his wish to be fully accepted by the scientific community. He felt the fact that he was doing practical work instead of theoretical was responsible for keeping him out of the fraternity. Cokinos correctly concludes that Nininger “was a pivotal figure in the study of meteorites, helping to create that science and helping to create a community of meteorite hunters, dealers, and collectors” (though the claim that Nininger helped create the science of meteorites needs serious qualification). Following this biography is a chapter on meteorite collectors and dealers, in which Cokinos meditates on what drives their passion for collecting. Trying to move beyond thinking of them as simply being eccentrics or obsessives, he delves into some murky waters of psychology, exploring such concepts as “exuberance” and “hypomania.” This in turn leads to a discussion of how dopamine is produced in the brain, how stress produces cortisol, and how in combination these two chemicals conjure up a sensation of “transcendence.” As well, we are told that collecting is bound up in the Freudian category of the “oceanic.” Does all this really help us understand the passion for collecting meteorites? If not, Cokinos informs us further that the urge to collect is rooted in our evolutionary past—“After all, we evolved as gatherers on the plain.” This chapter struck me as a strange hodgepodge of pop-psychology, both confusing and not convincing, and the least satisfying chapter of the book. As an integral part of his attempt to understand the passion that drives meteorite hunters, Cokinos retraces their footsteps. This leads him from the street corner on which Nininger experienced his epiphany, to the house of the current owner at the discovery site of the Willamette meteorite, to the edge of the Kimberly Meteorite Farm where the Brenham meteorites were found, to the Regency Palace Museum at Ensisheim, and to the coast of northwest Greenland, the site where Peary found the Cape York meteorites. These are not simple sightseeing trips, however; for Cokinos, they become sacred, almost mystical experiences. Coming across the cairns that Peary built, Cokinos undergoes an “almost out-of-body experience.” Taking a small piece of the Willamette meteorite he had earlier found by a driveway at its find site, he ritualistically offers it to Greenland’s waters. Years later, he will take a small piece of burnt wood collected at the excavation site of the Cape York “Woman,” and use it to smudge his face “in a ritual of thanks.” The fallen sky is not just a book about the passions, successes, and heartbreaks of the meteorite hunters whose lives he examines; it is also an intimate exploration of Cokinos’s own as well. This is based on his strong conviction that their lives and his were somehow tangled, “interrogated,” that passion and heartbreak were things he shared with them, and that he could learn about them through his own experiences (and learn about himself through theirs). In this regard, time and time again he candidly reveals intimate details of his personal life: the dissolution of his 13-year-long marriage, his taking up with a new lover, their travels together, the death of his mother, his looking for and finding a new job, his move to Utah with his lover, and the renovation of their house there. But is it really the case that Cokinos’s personal revelations can not be untangled from the histories and experiences of the meteorite hunters whose stories he tells? Are they really crucial in helping us to understand them? Of what help, for example, is it to learn about Cokinos’s cheating on his wife prior to their separation? Or that on a tenting trip with her in Wyoming’s Wind River Range he could not bring himself to go to her as she stripped and stretched out on a sunlit rock? Or that he and his lover spent an evening cuddled together in bed at a château near the site of the L’Aigle meteorite fall? Or that they made love at the village of Nördlingen at the Ries Basin? Are such intimacies really relevant? Do readers of MAPS really want to be privy to them? Cokinos’s entanglement with his meteorite hunters reaches its height when he becomes one himself. He accomplishes this by joining the ANSMET team during its 2003–2004 field season. The 86-page chapter devoted to this is the longest in the book, and succeeds in painting a vivid picture of his life on the Antarctic ice. In great detail we follow him as he picks out his Extreme Cold Weather gear at Christchurch, New Zealand, arrives at the McMurdo Station, and unpacks his books, his notebook, his portable stereo, and his photo albums with pictures of him, his lover, their home, and Harvey Nininger (“meant to inspire”). He is thrilled when he bags his first meteorite: “Hot damn!” he exclaims, and does a meteorite dance. Finding two more meteorites that day gives him a sense of accomplishment, of belonging. Yet he cannot stop wondering how he measures up to previous polar explorers. But who, he wonders, could feel worthy compared to the likes of Douglas Mawson, who sewed the rotten bottoms of his feet back on? But the thrill of finding meteorites starts to give way to feelings of tiredness, queasiness, and bewilderment. Antarctica begins to wear him down. He encounters difficult nights and groggy mornings. In his tent, he reads The odyssey, jots notes, listens to love songs and Bach’s cello suites on his headphones, and takes Benadryls and aspirins. He begins to count the days gone, the days to go before he will come home. Five weeks into his projected 6-week stay, Cokinos celebrates his 41st birthday with a candle in his dinner steak. But earlier that day, he had broken down crying when he suddenly thought of his dead mother. The next day he calls his father and stepmother, and cries so hard after hanging up that his stomach hurt, and he is scared. On the following day, as he describes his crying fits, his insomnia, his feeling that his trip was a big mistake, and the depth of his depression, he is quickly given sedatives. Phoning a doctor at McMurdo, he admits to feeling “a little” suicidal. The result: “The doctor and I agree: I should be pulled from the field.” Told with unflinching candor, Cokinos’s description of his Antarctic experience and ultimate breakdown is engaging and spell-binding. In many ways, Antarctica is the culmination of Cokinos’s quest. By becoming a meteorite hunter himself, he succeeds in concretely linking his life with those of the meteorite hunters he so admires, and feels he can learn something about himself through the experience. What does he learn? For one thing, that attempting a journey—or a life—“with only wonder in your knapsack” is a mistake. But most importantly, that “home is more than where you start from; it’s what you make, it’s where you return . . . Whatever marvels adventure brings, they are nothing besides the clarities of home.” As might be expected from an English professor who teaches creative writing, Cokinos’s prose is not only well-written, but crisp and often lyrical. His descriptions of meteorites are far from prosaic: Willamette is “rock-hard Swiss cheese with an attitude;” a slice of Brenham is “a silver sponge that soaks up honey light;” the Cape York “Tent” is “shaped like an overgrown, legless pig;” and Ensisheim “might pass for the remains of a dinosaur’s number two.” There are times, however, when Cokinos’s lyricism runs away from him, as when he describes the Antarctic team waiting to drive their snowmobile in The Wall of Death, a steep, deep windscoop: “‘Fuck yay!’ I say, waiting for a clear interval, and I’m suddenly an environmentalist’s nightmare, a screaming, hollering, slobbering machine-riding goober… caroming circles of sheer speed till I’m the last one on it and I accelerate up, up, up the steep side… perfect for hitting the lip and, oh yes, hell yes, going airborne, landing in a rocking thump.” And there are times when Cokinos freely invents either dialogue or situations to add color to his description of certain events. Imagining the boy who, according to legend, was witness to Ensisheim’s fall, he writes: “He was, it seems, alone in a wheat field the day of the fall. Or perhaps he’d not yet arrived at the field. Perhaps he walked with a woven basket on his back and carried a pitchfork. A rope around his waist would have kept his tunic tight against the autumn chill. He was not, as legend has it, tending sheep.” Unfortunately, there are some curious shortcomings in the book’s production. There are no maps, though ones of the locations of the Cape York meteorites and the Antarctic strewnfields, for example, would surely be helpful. Nor are there any photos. This is strange, since Cokinos tells of taking photos himself. In one place he describes in detail a photo he took of the ANSMET camp “breaking the horizon with yellow Scott tents, silvery poles strung with wire, red and black fuel drums, the yellow snowmobiles…” Surely a reproduction of this photo would capture the scene better than words. Although there are extensive end notes, there is no Bibliography. A Glossary of Terms and a Meteorite Chart at the end of the book are so brief as to be practically useless. At a hefty 518 pages, The fallen sky is a rich book of the history of meteorites and meteorite hunters, as well as an unflinching account of one person’s eight-year-long journey into self-exploration of heartbreak, passion, wonder, and connection. Although Cokinos did not find it strange to yoke all of these together, not all will agree. I recommend this book be read, as it has a lot to offer, but read judiciously.