Tag: opportunity

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Touching Opportunity

This week, a lot of people have taken a chance – an Opportunity, if you will – to look to the heavens and thank the little robot that could.

The story’s well-known by now. How the planned mission of the Mars rover Opportunity was for 90 days. How, like other rovers before it, it kept going long past its expiration date – by more than 14 years, in fact.

And now, like other rovers before it, it’s gone silent. Nothing had been heard from it since last June, when a Martian dust storm covered its solar cells. After hoping that another wind would clear the rover and allow it to recharge, NASA finally declared Opportunity “dead.”

“The last message they received was basically ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark,’” science writer Jacob Margolis tweeted. The words were Margolis’s poetic interpretation of the June signal, not a literal sentence from Opportunity. But the “last words” added an extra touch of heartbreak to the moment, turning it from the shutdown of a machine to the silencing of a beloved explorer.

Does that sound silly? I don’t see why.

Caring for things is what we do. Even when they can’t care back.

We read books or watch movies and anguish over the fate of people who never existed, except in our minds.

We name cars and say goodbye to childhood homes, so interwoven with our lives that we can’t imagine their absence.

We become part of a story. We invest a little, or a lot, of ourselves in it. And when a good story ends, it touches us. It leaves us a little different for the experience.

But with a good story, there’s always one chapter left, even after the volume is closed. The one that we write.

Having taken this story into our hearts, what do we do with it?

That, too, may sound a little odd. Most of us, after the age of six, don’t try to don a cape and cowl and fight evil on the streets after watching a superhero movie. One does not simply walk into Mordor after reading or viewing The Lord of the Rings, or search crowds for Rhett Butler after completing Gone With The Wind, or build up a high-tech loadout after reading Tom Clancy. (OK, there may be some exceptions on that last one.)

But we do take Lessons. Inspiration. Examples. Even hope. The stories we invest in, the people and experiences we treasure, all teach us something. And maybe even inspire us to a next step.

It might be the simple reassurance that, even if they can’t fly or shoot energy beams, heroes may already be among us, looking just like you and me – could maybe even be you and me.

It may be the reminder that fighting evil is a hard and grueling task, but that even small actions can add up to huge differences, even without the aid of a magic ring or an Elvish sword.

It can even be the lesson, taught by a machine of our own making, that we can be capable of so much more than we believe. That we can keep going beyond everyone’s expectations, even our own.

Maybe even far enough to one day thank Opportunity in person.

The skies don’t have to be the limit. The story can go where we choose to take it, both inside us and beyond us. That’s inspiring to me as a writer, as a space geek, and even as a human being.

Care. Follow where it takes you. Write the next story.

After all, Opportunity is where we choose to find it.

 

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Another Story

My name is Scott Rochat, and I am a notebook addict.

It clicks in without fail, every back-to-school shopping season. Ten- or twenty-cent spiral-bound? Fifty-cent composition book? Drop a few in my basket every shopping trip and never mind the growing stack at home until the sale’s over.

My co-workers would laugh if they knew. After all, they’ve seen how quickly I go through the things at work. My desk isn’t quite the Great Wall of Hastily-Filled Notepads but I’m a strong second-place contender.

But the ones at home – these are different.

Granted, sometimes they’re an emergency reserve. Reporters don’t really have an “off time” and when a call comes from the desk, I need to be able to grab something and run. But that doesn’t quite account for the whole Leaning Tower of Spiral.

There’s been a lot of other reasons over the years. Fantasy football prep. Roleplaying games. Scattered notes for columns and parodies. All of it reasonable, all of it true – and all of it, maybe, putting off the real reason.

Namely, the book.

Sure, there’s a book. Or there should be. Ninety percent of people in newspapers plan to “write a book someday” and 10 percent are liars. Heather’s pushed me to do it since we were dating; friends and family, colleagues and readers have all added their voices every so often. “You know, you really ought to …”
I know, I know.

I don’t disagree. I have some ideas kicking around. And since the age of 5, I’ve known I was going to write something – fantasy or mystery, young adult or non-fiction, a new thought with each passing year.

And each year, the idea waits a little longer.

I’m not quite sure what it is. I’m obviously not a writing rookie. I’ve churned out literally hundreds of news articles and columns, dozens of off-kilter parody songs for theater friends, even a couple of children’s plays. But the book still looms ahead, forbidding and massive, like my own personal Rocky Mountain range.

Or maybe it’s my own Great Sand Dunes.

If you’ve ever been to Alamosa, you know what I’m talking about. Tremendous piles of sand deposited over countless years by an odd meeting of wind and earth. If you haven’t been, picture a gigantic section of George Lucas’s Tatooine picked up and dropped into Colorado, just in reach of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

It’s bizarre. Beautiful. And a little imposing.

Heather and I camped nearby for our first anniversary, about 14 years ago. We looked at that high ridge and knew we had to get up it. But we weren’t sure how much we could push ourselves – even then, her health wasn’t great – and sand isn’t the most forgiving hiking surface, giving you two steps forward, one and a half steps back.

But two things worked in our favor. First, this was “monsoon season,” the week in July when afternoon rains left the dunes more stable than they would have been. Second, as we got higher and higher, we only occasionally looked out at the valley. Heather’s focus was on me, just ahead. Mine was on her, just behind. Each urging the other to make just a few more steps.

Between the circumstances, and the shared tunnel vision, we made it. We found the view from that ridge was even more beautiful than we’d expected.

And we also found there were a whole lot more ridges behind the one we could see.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe any imposing journey is just a matter of steps and circumstance, going just a little farther while you can, as you can. Always with the hope of achievement – and the promise of yet another journey behind.

It’s still an intimidating thought. But there’s some hope mixed in with the intimidation. After all, plenty of people hike the ridges, write the pages, do the difficult. Who’s to say there can’t be one more?

Who, indeed.

This calls for another notebook.

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That Thirteen Something

I don’t have a lot of superstitions. I find black cats adorable, broken mirrors are just a mess to clean up, and I could step on a sidewalk’s worth of cracks without screwing up my family’s spines any worse than they already are.

But I have to admit, I’m getting a little edgy about the number 13. Or to be more accurate, about 2013.

Something in this year has it in for us.

Granted, Heather and I have gone in for long streaks of bizarre luck at times. Our honeymoon, for example, was marked by a torrential downpour that washed every “Just Married” inscription from the car, a Mexican restaurant that left us both ill, and a local bird population that repeatedly mistook my wife for a bombing range. You know, the usual.

But this last January … well, where do I begin?

There’s the back I strained (though thankfully not outright pulled) while helping my sister-in-law move to Lakewood. Naturally, work was missed.

There’s the flu that bombed Heather and Missy just as I recovered from the back strain. Naturally, more work was missed.

Then, of course, the flu jumped to me after three straight days of caring for Heather and Missy. Naturally … ah, you’ve heard that one.

Having the bathroom pipes leak through the kitchen ceiling added a bit of spice to my own bout with the flu. (Rain on the kitchen table gives a home such atmosphere, don’t you think?) And I shouldn’t leave out the joys of getting Missy the antibiotic she needed to speed her own recovery … only to discover she was brilliantly allergic to the medicine in question.

Have you ever seen a young woman turn into a human strawberry? I really don’t recommend it.

The irony is that I used to dread Februaries, the half-forgotten tail end of the winter season. Now, I’m leaping into the month like a welcoming bath after a long day.

It’s got to get better – right?

The funny thing is, the belief that “it’s got to get better” can be a big part of making it better. There’s been a few studies of lucky or unlucky people over the years and they seem to reach the same conclusion: more often than not, the lucky make their luck.

“Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune,” said writer Eric Barker, himself citing researcher Richard Wiseman. “These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.”

In other words, people who look for the best, even while undergoing the worst, tend to find it. They don’t give up.

The idea reminded me of the Lloyd Alexander fantasy novels I read as a child, where the character Llonio the Lucky kept his nets on the river and his eyes on his surroundings and was able to reclaim all sorts of odd objects as a result – all of which proved to be useful, once a little imagination was applied.

“Trust your luck, Taran Wanderer,” he tells the main character at one point. “But don’t forget to put out your nets!”

My own nets have caught a lot of wonderful things over the years – a good family, a good job, friends I love and value. (Still no $3 million dollar fortune, alas, but I suppose you can’t have everything.) And if there’s been one good thing about this latest streak of trouble, it’s been that it let me spend more time with Heather and Missy, maybe even catch some quiet in the midst of chaos.

After all, nothing that hit us was irreparable. Nothing happened that couldn’t get better. And that’s pretty lucky, too, now that I think about it.

Even so, I may keep a careful eye out this year. Just to be thirteen – uh, I mean, certain.

Sigh.

Well, there goes February.

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Riding the Dips

“OK, Missy, get ready!” I shout to the small figure in the passenger seat. “Got your hands up?”

“Yeah!”

Just the slightest touch of gas and VROOM! VROOM! Our Hyundai rides through two dips in Gay Street like a champ, popping up and down in the world’s shortest roller coaster.

“Wooo!” our voices echo through identical smiles.

Now that’s a ride!

I’ve mentioned before that when you travel with Missy, our developmentally disabled ward, even simple things can be a lot of fun. But even before we met, I knew about riding the “ripples” in north Gay Street.

For those who don’t get up that way much, there’s a series of drainage channels that cross the road in that neighborhood. As a kid, I used to think of these dips in the road (as opposed to the dips on the road) as “reverse speed bumps,” especially after seeing cars new to the area creep through them at 5 mph or less.

I was an adult before I knew those things were built to hold water. But I was still a teenager when I learned the twin secrets of the dips:

  1. You went through them more smoothly if you applied a little more speed, not less …
  2. …except for the ones at each end of the run, which would smack your undercarriage like Mike Tyson if you didn’t watch the road.

The result: a combination of brains and nerve, learning to pick out which spots were opportunities and which were threats.

There are worse life lessons to have. Especially these days.

Let’s face it. A sense of proportion isn’t much in style. Everything has to be the end of the world, with or without ancient Mayan calendars to prove it.

I’m not saying it’s new. I was, after all, a child of the ’70s and ’80s, when we all got warned about the razor blades that could be slipped into any Halloween treat without a wrapper. (The real danger, then and now, was generally from cars not seeing you on a darkened street.) But it seems to have hit a fever pitch over the last decade or so. Maybe even an apocalyptic one – anyone else noticed a theme to the popularity of the Hunger Games, zombie fiction, the “Revolution” TV series and so on?

Now obviously, this isn’t a world of cotton candy. Real dangers are out there, real problems need to be solved. But when we over-fortify our airports for fear of dying in a terrorist attack (odds: 1 in 1.7 million) while seeing people step outside to watch a tornado (odds of dying: 1 in 60,000), something’s a little out of whack.

It’s time to learn from the dips. Scout the ground. Learn where the dangers really are. And learn which risks are actually opportunities in disguise.

Missy reinforced that last one for me.

When my wife Heather asked if we could become her guardians, I was terrified at first. What if Heather’s health failed? What if my job went away? What if we couldn’t hack it, if we ended up screwing up a life so dependent on the lives of others?

But eventually, after a lot of talking and a lot of thinking, we took the plunge. No holding back, hit the gas.

And what looked like a canyon turned into a sweet spot. Ups and downs, yes, like a small roller coaster, but no damage. No regrets for taking the ride. None at all.

I’m still glad we drove ahead.

Because if we hadn’t, I’d feel like a real dip.