Today I went shopping for a spaceship. Last week it was a bathysphere; next week it will probably be a mechanical mole for exploring the caverns under the earth, or even—Heaven help me!—a Time Machine. Science fiction? No, just a program based on the theory that Families are the MOST Fun, and dedicated to the proposition that there’s more real satisfaction in creative do-it-together projects than in all the packaged, passive entertainment in the world.
As a practical demonstration of this theory, my son and I went shopping for a spaceship. We were determined not to come home without “the makings”—even if it cost us all of two dollars. In the hope that you, too, may soon be touring the salvage lots and junk yards in the wake of a rocket-builder (junior grade), may I give you the benefit of my findings?
Do not let the fascinating jungle of odd-shaped storage tanks, mammoth rubber tires and assorted useful pipe-lengths distract you from your original purpose. (Male parents are most susceptible to this sort of jungle fever.) Remember also that you have to consider materials for your backyard spaceship in the light of strict scientific utility. For example: will this metal barrel, black-painted and slightly rusty, repel or attract the sun’s heat in deep space—thus freezing or, alternately, boiling the luckless pilot? We debated the question.
“Do you suppose we could find out about it in the encyclopedia?” asked Kerry.
“I’m sure of it. Remember when we were writing songs about birds? If we could find out about the Least Bittern and the purple Grackle, we could find out about anything.”
“ ‘The Indian Grackle can talk or cackle’,” quoted Kerry, recalling our light-hearted venture into ornithology. “Let’s make a poem about this black barrel.”
I obliged to the best of my ability:
“In a black-painted spaceship you’re likely to boil
Unless you are wearing a refrigerated coil.
Is a shiny spaceship more likely to freeze ya?
Let’s look it up in Kerry’s encyclopezia.”
We were recalled to the serious business at hand by Kerry’s discovery of a ship’s ventilator of noble size. “This could be the airlock,” he said, eagerly. “Or do you think it looks more like a saxophone? From Mars, maybe?”
“From Jupiter,” I said glibly. I have learned to make these large statements. As usual, it provoked an interested question.
“Why Jupiter?”
“Jupiter is the largest of the nine planets revolving around our sun. So naturally they’d have the largest saxophones.”
“Which is the smallest planet?” asked Kerry, with the fellow-feeling born of being underweight.
“Mercury. It’s closest to the sun, so it’s also the warmest planet.”
“What a place for a hot sax,” commented my son, standing on tiptoe to sing into the horn of the ventilator. This interesting effect was interrupted by a plaintive voice.
“Say, Ma’am, do you want to buy this ventilator?” Mr. Lucio, the salvage merchant, who had been lurking nearby among the coiled wire-rope, was getting impatient for a sale.
“No, but I think we’ve decided on that barrel.”
“Got yourself a real buy, Ma’am,” he enthused. “Full fifty-five gallon capacity. Split, it’d make a dandy water-lily and fish pond.”
“Fish pond!” Kerry looked at first horrified, then outraged. Even so might the skipper of the Queen Mary have received the comment that, split, she’d make a good gravy boat. “That’s going to be a spaceship!”
“How much?” I interposed hastily.
“Three dollars and you take it away.”
It was my turn to look outraged. “Three dollars!”
“For a spaceship?” a wide grin split the black-smudged face. “Ma’am that’s dirt cheap! I’ll personally guarantee you won’t get a spaceship in the whole Los Angeles area for less.”
“Too much,” I persisted. “I’ll have to have an entrance port cut in it—”
“I can get that done for about a dollar-fifty,” he urged.
I looked around. “That clean wooden barrel over there—how much for it?”
“Two dollars. But it won’t stand up to hard use like the metal one.”
“We’ve got a wonderful alloy,” I explained. “Looks just like ordinary grey paint. One coat and the ship will be heat and cosmic ray-proof.”
Kerry developed the idea enthusiastically. “Two coats, and the ship’s invisible. That’ll be a help when we’re approaching an uncharted planet that might be hostile.”
Mr. Lucio fought his incredulity. After all, I could see him reminding himself, science is inventing some remarkable things.
“What’s this new alloy? You got it patented?”
“It’s a mixture of grey paint and imagination—” I began.
“And boy! are we loaded!” beamed Kerry. “Let’s take the wooden barrel, Mom.”
“If you had two, you could make that dumbbell-shaped spaceship they showed in the science-fiction mags,” said Mr. Lucio; and he and my son fell into shop-talk with the ease of two veterans who had matched orbits with the fastest ships in the Interplanetary Patrol.
Why don’t you build a spaceship in your back yard? The parent lucky enough to share such a creative experience with his children is having a kind of fun that can’t be duplicated. There are dozens of starting points for hilarious adventure. If Outer Space doesn’t appeal, how about a little deep-sea exploration? An amateur (waterless) bathysphere can unlock the treasures of the sunless valleys of the sea to anyone with an encyclopedia or library card (for the technical background), an imagination (for the frills) and a barrel (for the bathysphere). This same second-hand barrel can also serve as earth-digging Mole, Time Machine and submarine—all for the original outlay of $2!
When creating your bathysphere, clothesline or cord will do nicely for the pretending block and tackle; the swaying branches of your apple, avocado or maple tree are a realistic ship’s deck, and you can “lower away” your intrepid submarine explorer to twenty-thousand leagues in no time at all. (And with no danger and no effort for the smallest arms, since the barrel rests safely on the grass during the whole adventure.)
As for the perils of the deep, we have found that orangeade and cookies are a sure cure for “backyard bends,” space sickness and any other strange diseases our young explorers may contract during their voyages in, under or off the earth.
Facts are fascinating when they’re served with a garnish of fun. How deep is a fathom? How do we brace our frail metal bubble against increasing water pressure, and just how much pressure will it have to stand as it sinks into the green depths? Most exciting—what are we going to see, on the way down and after we reach bottom? Younger brothers and sisters are enchanted to take the parts of Pasquale Squid and Angela Angelfish and other marine performers; or may, if you are the romantic-type parent rather than the scientific, be recruited as sea-serpents or the Fish-men of sunken Atlantis.
Be prepared for challenges.
“People living under the water? Mother!” objects Lynn, who at ten, is a militant materialist. “Who ever heard of a city under the water?”
“Lots of poets and writers and people who read their books,” I am able to reply, having done a little research. “Take Lyonnesse, for example. To say nothing of the whole continent of Atlantis. And Mu.”
While my daughter vanishes into the house to check on this fascinating bit of mythology, may I suggest that you be ready for your children? Read ahead so you can answer their questions well enough to keep the game going, yet provocatively enough so they’ll want to find out some answers for themselves. It is a pretty good kind of education, don’t you think, when a child runs to look up a point in the encyclopedia because he “just can’t wait to find out!”
The child who hasn’t been too interested in reading will soon be pestering you for help with the hard words as he races through an article on his spacial, immediate project. Besides a priceless training in the methods of acquiring and applying data, your child is developing in hi
mself a scientific thirst to know—and know accurately. Such habits will keep him happily and creatively employed in the years to come. There is no temptation to join a street corner “rat-pack” for the boy who is busy building a spaceship in his own backyard. And who knows? Someday he may build one that will lift his fellowmen to the stars.
You will find, as I did, that your children are learning about people as well as about things, on these adventures. It is heartwarming to discover how kind people can be. Weavers are pleased to demonstrate their excellent craft; bee-keepers reveal tantalizing glimpses of a world of order and drama; owners of produce markets take time to explain the reasons why growers “pick green” to ship, different methods of drying fruit, and which potatoes should be boiled and which baked. (They are also most generous in the matter of offering vegetable trimmings as fodder for the pet duck.) Many interesting facts about the world we live in—yes; but more valuable, the experience of helpful, friendly intercourse with our fellowmen.
An eminent lawyer to whom we talked, enjoyed the chance to mystify and then enlighten small questioners about such phrases as “habeas corpus”—“you are ordered to produce the body”—a dusty legal phrase which suddenly came to life when he interpreted it in terms of an innocent man snatched from his work and thrown into the evil-smelling gloom of his lord’s dungeons, maybe to be forgotten there. To such a man the words “habeas corpus”—which meant that his lord was now required to produce this man within a reasonable time before a court for trial—such words would strike into the despairing darkness like a shaft of clean sunlight, promising justice and the hope of speedy release.
Recounting the development of personal freedom, the lawyer brought alive for us the men who fought and suffered and dared greatly, that other men might walk without fear. And for several days thereafter our back yard rang to the spirited sword-rattlings (wooden) of the Barons, while a chubby King John laid down his scepter and reached for a placatory pen instead. The garage, doubling for a Bastille, was stormed with shouts of genuine enthusiasm and dubious French—(Lynn revealed a surprising ability to spout a jargon which sounded more like French than the real thing). Another day, Minutemen sprang from behind the avocado tree to meet the fire of red-coated mercenaries.
And so it goes. Our busy doctor accompanies his ministrations to a sore throat with such an absorbing account of why he is doing what he does, that a small patient forgets to be nervous and begins to glimpse the wonder and satisfaction of a life devoted to the relieving of suffering. Then we go home to read about the Jungle Doctor and Grenfell and Nightingale, and our back yard becomes by turns sweltering Africa, icy Labrador and an improvised hospital in the Crimea.
Another day the television mechanic calls to fix the set, suggests the exciting possibilities of electronics, and leaves a handsome gift of burnt-out tubes for the “control panel” of the spaceship. From all these people and many more, our young explorers are discovering the gracious community of friendship in the course of their back yard adventures.
I was thinking about these things as we paid the salvage man for the barrel and rolled it over to the car.
Kerry said, “Mr. Lucio thinks the people on Mars will be friendly, Mother. Different, probably, but friendly.”
And suddenly I could see, radiating from a small boy building a make-believe spaceship in his own back yard, the very Essence of life—creative, curious, kind—reaching out toward whatever alien form that life might take, to recognize and greet it in the universal language of good will.
About the Author
Elizabeth Chater was the author of more than 24 novels and countless short stories. She received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. from San Diego State University, and joined the faculty of the latter in 1963 where she began a lifelong friendship with science fiction author Greg Bear. She was honored with The Distinguished Teacher award in 1969, and was awarded Outstanding Professor of the Year in 1977. After receiving her Professor Emeritus certificate from President J.F. Kennedy personally, she embarked on a new career as a novelist with Richard Curtis as her agent. In the 1950s and 60s she published short stories in Fantastic Universe Magazine and The Saint Mystery Magazine, and she won the Publisher’s Weekly short story contest in 1975. She went on to publish 22 romance novels over an 8 year period. She also wrote under the pen names Lee Chater, Lee Chaytor, and Lisa Moore. For more information, please visit https://www.elizabethchater.com.
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