I’m at the edge of the atmosphere in a capsule. Yeah, think Apollo mission capsule. Don’t know how I got up there. Don’t remember the launch or anything. I’m looking out the window, getting farther from earth.
“Fuck,” I think to myself, “I don’t know how to control this thing, and if I keep going, I’ll never be able to make it back.”
My plan? Exit the capsule and do a free-fall drop all the way back to earth, of course. Shouldn’t be hard–I’ve got a space suit on…right?
Wrong. T-shirt and khakis are more like it. Still, I’m unphased by my lack of preparedness and ready to exit this capsule. I’m ready to make a journey that is pretty much guaranteed death. There’s a metal tub in one side of the capsule that looks something like a trough you’d find on a farm. I slide the trough against some kind of jettison chute, line myself up, and push along the wall to slide it out of the capsule.
Deep breath now. I know it’s going to be the last one I take for about three minutes or so. I keep thinking to myself that once I’ve broken enough atmosphere, I’ll have all the oxygen I need and all I’ll have to do is make sure I land in a nice big deep body of water.
I’m really happy that my dream ignored the fact that there are hot and cold spots in the area I dropped through…the boundary-layers between the thermosphere and the mesosphere can get awful fluxy. (We’re talking 250 degrees Fahrenheit to -150 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to fry exposed skin nice and crispy and then deliver it to the ground as a big hunk of ice) Anyway, my dream ignored this.
I’m holding my
breath in my open trough. I have an empty milk jug with me, which I brought in case I needed one more breath before I broke atmo. I would eventually find myself needing way more than that.
As I fly out into space, I see earth, and damn, it’s cool. I would imagine that next to this dream, the only think cooler would be ACTUALLY BEING in space. No picture or satellite video compares to what I saw out there (which is interesting, because my mind only knows what it’s like from those same pictures and videos. Just like creating an elaborate dream-building, the mind didn’t fail me here.) It was absolutely breathtaking. Under me was the Indian Subcontinent, the Himalayas, the Great Desert north of the Tibetan Plateau…anyway, I missed the Earth (badly) and I was flung in the other direction.
I was surprised that gravity wasn’t affecting me more, but then I quickly realized that it was…though I was locally at 0G for all intents and purposes, I was slowly wrapping myself around the edge of the earth, but I was too far away. At my trajectory, I would have slowly spiraled around the globe in low-earth orbit, which was completely unacceptable given that I only had the one milk jug. I’d be out of air long before I was inside the stratosphere, and DAMN the pressure inside my body. My eyes were starting to hurt. My lungs hurt bad. I breathed out half of my full breath to compensate.
I knew I had to correct my path and do a straight drop onto the earth, but I also knew that I needed a landing site to aim for. The Pacific Ocean, (which I was passing over the western shore of now, and there’s the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and all the tiny little islands that make up Micronesia) didn’t seem too friendly. I wanted to land on the edge of a Great Lake–at least I’d know the territory and hopefully it wouldn’t be too cold.
Still winding around the planet (there’s Hawaii, and in the distance, the green-brown edge of California…) I figured that the mass of the trough would be enough that if I propelled off of it, I would send the trough flying and, with the right kind of push, kill my orbital momentum and slowly drift toward the planet. But I had to wait until the right time. Too soon or too late and I could end up VERY FAR from my target, which I determined to be the southern curve of Lake Michigan. I’ll I’d have to do is swim to Chicago once I hit the water. Easy.
Now I’m over the continental U.S., (The Pacific Shore, the Badlands, the Rockies) and my body calls for air while my lungs prepare to burst from the stale air still inside me. I let the lungs have it their way because the pressure behind my eyes hurts more than the lack of air. Also, I’m feeling something painful in my bowels that I’m pretty sure must be a burst organ. It doesn’t hurt THAT bad, but then again, my body is under a lot of stress right now. “Adrenaline is probably coursing through me,” I think to myself.
At this point, I’ve admitted to myself that this trip is probably going to kill me, but it doesn’t matter to me anymore. I’m having so much damn fun up here that I’m going to do my best to get home. Even if I die hitting the surface, I’ll be the first guy ever to clear the whole atmosphere without so much as an oxygen tank. I’m smiling at the thought.
I do as my angry lungs tell me and purge the rest of the air from my chest. This helps the pressure in my chest and the feeling in my bowels again, but the bad side of that trade is that my body is panicking from lack of air. My eyes hurt too. I’ve been squinting as hard as I can from the time I left the capsule for fear that they’d be ripped out of my skull from the negative pressure. I’m losing it now, starting to dim out. Now I’m over the Great Plains. It’s time.
It’s as hard to function in 0G as everyone says it is. This is far different than a “flying dream,” where you can propel yourself where you want to go. In this dream, my mind has set up the zero-grav environment pretty accurately, as far as I can tell. Each motion produces an irritating frictionless anti-motion, making it hard for me to position myself on the edge of the trough so that I can kick off of it. What’s worse is that my fidgeting has caused it to tumble into a spin, so now I not only have to kick at the right time, but also at the right angle.
I NEED AIR, and I don’t care about the pressure anymore. I grab the milk-jug and stupidly unscrew it. The air FLINGS ITSELF OUT into space, making the spin on my trajectory even worse. (Duh…I didn’t even think about the fact that the air exiting the milk jug’s top would function as a tiny little rocket. Apparently my mind did though, because now I was super-fucked.) I sucked at what little air remained (not really anything), and watched the earth and space spin under me. Where was I? Above Iowa? Illinois? It didn’t matter. I had no air and no bearings. The spin was awful. I shook my head, kicked off, and prayed that I would die on Earth instead of being flung further into space. Leap of faith.
Now I’m in slow free-fall as a head toward the planet. I see the great lakes shining like jewels and grin a grin of victory until I realize that my trajectory reversed a little. Now I was moving slightly west.
It didn’t matter–the most I could do was try and use my shirt as a sail to direct myself, once the air got thick enough to do so, that is. I passed a sort of layer of mist and tried to breathe. Ouch. It burns my lungs badly (ozone?) and I push whatever I sucked in back out. There’s no air for me yet.
Now the Earth is coming at me faster. I see the Great Lakes disappear over the horizon to my right, putting me somewhere over the Great Plains. I’m looking for a big body of water, but of course, there aren’t any out here. I’m moving quicker now. Quicker. I see a cirrus on a collision course with me.
I pass through narrow damp white puffs, and once I’m clear I can make out patches of forest and field. I can see major highways like little hairs stretching across my field of view. I can see big cities like bacteria colonies spreading outward from their positions on tiny blue/green ribbons of water. Faster now. I breathe in.
There is no better feeling than the cool air I’ve just sucked into my lungs. I made it. I must be in the stratosphere again. Now I’ve got another problem though–where am I going to land?
I don’t really get a choice. I’m being flung to the surface full-force now, and the last thing I remember is seeing a tree-line and thinking, “Boy, it would be nice if I didn’t hit those.”
“You okay?” A kid in a cowboy hat asks me. “Mister, you okay? Where’d you come from, mister?” I look up. I’m in a cornfield, freshly plowed under. Broken yellow stalks and warm black dirt surround me. I look at the kid, probably in his late teens. I’m breathing. I can sit up. That pain in my bowels is there a little bit, but I’m alive and I can walk. Miraculous.
I’m trying to think about the shape of the land I saw before I hit the ground. I had been flung west of the Great Lakes, but by how far? Did I land in Wisconsin? Minnesota? I look up and ask the kid: “Am I in South Dakota?” He nods.
“But where’d you come from? Almost looked like you dropped from the sky.” I tell him my story as we walk toward the edge of the field. It’s late afternoon, and I look at the position of the sun and walk the other direction. “Where you going?”
“I’m going East,” I tell him. “I gonna walk home.”
I have a cell phone in my pocket (how convenient) and I call my Dad and tell him I’m in South Dakota. He asks me how and I let him know that just 15 or so minutes ago I was sailing around the top layer of Earth’s Atmosphere. He doesn’t believe me, but I don’t care. I tell him I’m walking home and I’ll talk to him in a few days.
I’m walking down a state road, recalling my adventure. I see some girls at a farm stand selling vegetables, I wave to them and keep walking. It’s really beautiful out, and as I walk with the sun to my back in the river region of South Dakota (somewhere around Sioux Falls, judging from the landscape), I smile, knowing that the Guinness Book of World Records is going to have a place for me.
Other than a little discomfort in my stomach, I feel like a superhero…I’ve just touched the black of space and came back to Mother Earth like a bug hitting a windshield.
It doesn’t get much cooler than that, people.