The other thing we wanted to see at the winter carnival was an astronomy program. We walked a couple of blocks down route 302, crossed the street, and looked around the municipal building. Nothing on the side. Front doors locked. Around the back was a station wagon with its tailgate up and a big telescope sitting on the sidewalk next to it. Nobody was in sight. Arlene laughed and said, “This isn’t New York City.”
The University of Southern Maine had brought its inflatable planetarium to Bridgton, set up in the lower floor of the municipal building. Normally they put it in a gym, or other building with a high ceiling, so it can get up to its full height. Today it was spherical up to the ceiling, and had a flat top. It’s a dome of opaque cloth, with a tube leading to the fan which keeps it inflated and a tube leading away from the dome for a light-tight exit. When we got there they were just finishing a showing. Several kids were crawling out of the exit tunnel. We crawled in and found spots on the floor to sit down around the edge in the dark. After a minute or two our guide came crawling in, turned on the projector, and started up with an introduction to what’s in the sky this time of year. It certainly wasn’t like being in the Hayden Planetarium in New York or the Boston Museum of Science, but after our eyes got dark adapted (which for goodness sake wouldn’t have been any sooner in a big city planetarium) you could get a pretty good idea of what constellations were where in the sky and how to find your way around the constellations.
When we left, the guy who owned the telescope on the sidewalk, a founding member of the Bridgton astronomical society, was starting to pack up. He had worked on the LEM, the lunar lander module, for the Apollo project. One week when he was at Grumman on that project he had bumped into astronaut Scott Carpenter at the water cooler, Bobby Kennedy at his motel, and knocked the briefcase out of Richard Nixon’s hand at the airport.
I guess just because someone’s in a small town at the moment doesn’t mean he’s never been anywhere else. When I think about it like that, I have to remember walking into a chamber of commerce information place in someplace out of the way in southeastern Idaho, maybe Rexburg, where the woman behind the desk was wearing an “I climbed the Great Wall” T-shirt.