Journey With the Comet

by Dana Wayne Haley

  Just to the north, Leona noticed the impressive Nile—the Earth’s longest river—on Africa’s east coast, running northward nearly 4,200 miles through Sudan and Egypt to the ancient cities of Damietta and Alexandria near Port Said, where it emptied into the Mediterranean Sea: facts that Leona memorized from a lesson on ‘major rivers of the world’ that Miss Hutchinson had recently taught. Her thoughts turned to Egypt and soon she was seeing the ancient Pyramids. Not long thereafter she was at the tomb where a teenage pharaoh named King Tutankhamen was interred. How she knew that this particular tomb was now his home, she did not know; but somehow she knew that it was.

  —2—

  Northward, the staggering vastness and deep blue splendor of the Mediterranean Sea caught her eye; and then further north Leona was drawn to the majesty of Europe’s Swiss Alps. She followed that mountain range through France, into Switzerland; and—after recalling that fictional Heidi lived in Zurich—Leona remembered that Hans’ daughter Helga lived in Oslo, Norway. When Hans returned Leona’s book Anne of Green Gables to her in late September and told her that Helga “just loved” Anne’s story, she gave him her second most favorite book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to take to his daughter. “Helga must have it by now,” Leona thought, and she decided to find out. So she headed to Oslo and somehow went directly to Hans’ home. She peered into a window, only to see a young girl lying on her bed reading a book; it was Leona’s book. A smile came to her face and she said: “I hope you like this book too, Helga; at least, as much as I did.”

  After Leona returned to the Alps to complete that journey, the 8-year-old allowed the Earth to turn slowly on its axis and was soon flying over the biblical city of Jerusalem; and soon thereafter she was over the Caspian Sea—the Earth’s largest inland body of water—on her way to look for Bengal tigers in India. In the meantime Leona realized that in this land was the Taj Mahal, a palace built in 1648 near the Yamuna River as a monument of eternal love for Princess Mumtaz Mahal. She then directed her attention to that distant destination. The wonders that she had so far beheld were now almost being taken for granted by Leona, as she became desensitized by the ease with which she was able to control her journey. Upon continuing her travel, that all changed when she spied a breathtaking sight: a lovely yellow, black-striped Bengal tiger dragging a huge water buffalo with its powerful jaws. That sight shocked Leona back to the reality of her blessed comet and journey.

  “I wish Mama and Papa could be here to see all this,” she thought. But they weren’t, so she continued her journey.

  The 8-year-old remembered one of Hans’ stories about India and decided to head to Calcutta on its east coast. After marveling at the daring snake charmers there, she decided it was time to leave India in favor of nearby China and its many wonders. On her way she flew over the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal and noticed snow-capped Mt. Everest off to her right, its 29,000-foot peak protruding through the clouds. As she came to Tibet, Leona recalled hearing rumors of a tall, elusive, ape-like creature the natives called Yeti, or abominable snowman. She also recalled that the native Indians of North America called it Sasquatch, or Big Foot.

  It wasn’t long after flying over Tibet that part of the 3,900-mile Yangtze River came into view. Leona crossed it wanting to see the Great Wall of China and the vast Gobi Desert where the wall abruptly ends, and she did just that. She then recalled overhearing Miss Hutchinson tell the 6th-grade world history class that the 13th century Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai built the largest empire known to man by conquering all the land between the Sea of Japan and the Caspian Sea. Leona also overheard the teacher talking about Confucius, Shangri-La, the Forbidden City, and China’s many dynasties; however, she could only remember the Ming Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty by name.

  “But I’ll remember them all, and why they were important, when Miss Hutchinson teaches world history to me,” she thought. “The only thing I remember is that porcelain—or fine china—was perfected during the Ming Dynasty. I know that gunpowder, paper, printing, and the compass were also invented by the Chinese, but I don’t remember when.”

  Suddenly Leona laughed out loud when she recalled the reason she was eavesdropping on that class in the first place. She was working on an arithmetic assignment at the time and she thought she heard Miss Hutchinson say Han’s dynasty, so that caught her attention because she didn’t know that her friend Hans had a dynasty. After listening for a while longer she heard the teacher mention the Han Dynasty in China, and the little girl finally realized that Miss Hutchinson wasn’t talking about the Norwegian sailor after all. When she stopped laughing, Leona decided to follow the meandering Yangtze by zooming in on its origin, the Kunlun Mountain in the west, and tracking its flow through the remainder of China until it emptied into the East China Sea near the famous port city of Shanghai. She also recalled Miss Hutchinson teaching the 6th-graders about that city and its commercial trade with the United States. In addition, she spoke of traders who docked their cargo ships in major west-coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, shamefully kidnapping drunkards who staggered out of local bars; and then, after sobering them up, forcing them to work as indentured ship-hands on the vessels bound for Shanghai.

  “It’s where the word shanghaied—or kidnapped—comes from,” Leona recalled hearing her teacher say.

  After studying the Yangtze and the primitive villages it passed through, for what seemed like hours, Leona’s thoughts immediately drifted to the Amazon River in South America, the Earth’s second longest river, causing the Earth to begin rotating once again. As it did she noticed the tiny peninsula of Korea on the east coast of China, and the island of Taiwan sitting in the Pacific Ocean, a few miles off the coast of China. To the north of it she saw the much larger island of Japan, and below it were the Philippine Islands. About halfway between Asia and the Americas she spotted the small island chain of Hawaii. Leona thought about exploring all of those exotic lands, but decided against it, saving that adventure for another time.

  Chapter 31

  Dream On

  For some reason Leona now turned her attention southward toward Australia, a country having the unique distinction of simultaneously being the world’s largest island and the world’s smallest continent. Maybe that country popped into her head because Miss Hutchinson had recently referred to it as The Land Down Under in her 4th-grade geography class.

  Using her powers to stop the Earth and to zoom in close, Leona scanned the Outback: seeing eucalyptus trees, kangaroos, koala bears, and many kinds of unique desert creatures, each one indigenous to this part of the world. The thing that she wanted to see most of all was Aborigines: the native inhabitants of Australia, who looked like no other people in the world. From photos she saw in her world geography textbook, the little girl always thought them to be the friendliest people on Earth, maybe because of their sparkling eyes and seemingly constant smiles.

  After seeing sharks and sea snakes swimming in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef on the east coast, Leona was satisfied with her Australian excursion and started the Earth turning again, renewing her search for the Amazon. Within a few seconds she stopped the Earth’s rotation one more time when the Western Hemisphere came into view. Although the little girl had trouble recalling exactly where the Amazon River was located, she knew enough to look for the longest river in South America. Once found, she saw that the Amazon’s origin was near the Pacific Ocean, high in the Andes Mountain Range in the mountainous country of Peru.

  Leona began following the Amazon’s 3,900-mile journey eastward, watching it flow into Brazil and finally empty into the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the coastal city of Macapa. Along the way she was figuratively lost in the splendor of the tropical rain forest of the Amazon River Basin, and marveled at the vastness of its wide flood plains. However, the most amazing sight to the curious 8-year-old’s way of thinking was a giant kapok tree reaching nearly 200 feet toward
the heavens, its many supporting trunks spreading out wide from its base in order to keep the giant upright.

  —1—

  After a while Leona turned her gaze northward toward her own noble continent of North America, until she found the imposing Rio Grande River peacefully separating the Lone Star State of Texas from the country of Mexico. And then, after finding the Alamo—where Davy Crockett, Sam Houston and Jim Bowie bravely died fighting Santa Anna’s Mexican army in 1836—the little girl turned her attention westward to Arizona and spotted the majestic Grand Canyon, using her most unique panoramic perspective to view it as no one had ever viewed it before. Her mind became lost in the giant canyon for what seemed like eternity, and then she turned westward to look for another giant: the giant sequoia, or redwood tree of California. But first she had to cross the desolate Mojave Desert in the southern part of the Golden State, where she noticed a large body of water.

  “Oh yes, I remember that from my geography class. I think Miss Hutchinson said it’s called the Salton Sea. But I still don’t understand why it’s called a sea; it looks more like a large lake to me,” Leona said to herself, with bewilderment influencing the tone of her silent voice.

  A strange, almost eerie feeling came over her when she looked down upon the desert and saw a rattlesnake coiled up on the hot, dry, scorched earth. The reason? She thought she saw little Wally crawling towards the venomous snake. But apparently not, because when she looked to see if the snake was readying itself to strike and then looked back to find Wally, he wasn’t there.

  “It must’ah been my imagination,” she thought. Even so, the little girl’s heart was pounding a hundred miles an hour. After regaining her breath, Leona continued her journey and soon was at Sequoia National Park where she saw trees that easily dwarfed the kapok she had seen in the Amazon forest, a tree that until now had dwarfed everything else. Indeed, one sequoia tree stood nearly 400 feet high, and she recalled reading that some sequoias are said to live to the very ripe old age of 3,000 years.

  —2—

  After remembering that the huge state she was now exploring experienced a tenfold population boom, thanks to California’s Great Gold Rush of 1849 and to adventurous miners they called the 49ers, Leona’s thoughts turned to the territory of Alaska, where the 1896 Klondike Gold Rush made that wilderness area the place to be.

  “Not that long ago,” she thought. “To think, they once called Alaska Seward’s Folly because President James Buchanan’s Secretary of State paid the Russians around seven-million dollars for ‘a wasteland’. If I remember right, that’s about two pennies an acre. How anyone could think that vast expanse of land with so many natural resources and abundant wildlife wasn’t worth it, I’ll never know. Regardless, Mr. Seward sure had the last laugh when gold was discovered there.”

  Leona then recalled Miss Hutchinson teaching Jill and her about another bargain their country got: the Louisiana Purchase. She remembered that President Thomas Jefferson paid only 15-million dollars to the French in 1803 for land that more than doubled the size of the United States. And now she couldn’t decide whether to head north to Alaska, or south to New Orleans.

  “Should I visit those places now? Or should I wait? Maybe another time,” she thought.

  Instead, Leona headed to Colorado to see historic Pikes Peak and the majestic Rocky Mountains. She then eagerly followed the Rockies northward for a few hundred miles, seeking out Yellowstone National Park in the state of Wyoming. Leona recalled that President Grant made it the nation’s first national park in 1872. She had always wanted to see ‘Old Faithful’, its most famous geyser—the one Miss Hutchinson said, “shoots hot water nearly 200 feet into the air”—and it wasn’t long before her wish was coming true. In fact, she was seeing it up close, closer than any tourist could conceivably get to the steamy hot water. Leona watched the geyser begin to spurt, and was surprised to see that it stopped after reaching a height of only a couple of feet, not a couple-hundred feet.

  “That’s it?” she wondered. But that wasn’t it. Unbeknownst to Leona, the geyser was just getting started. The main eruption was always preceded by smaller ones that could be as little as one-foot high to as much as twenty feet high. These little eruptions—curiously referred to as ‘pre-play’—would typically last twenty minutes, followed faithfully by the mammoth eruption. When, after a few minutes, another small eruption followed the first one, Leona kept watching. After all, even if the geyser wasn’t that big, it was still amazing to see water come shooting out of the ground. She watched a few more small eruptions, and then it happened: Old Faithful erupted with full force and fury, spewing its steamy hot water over 150 feet into the air.

  “Wow! That was amazing!” Leona exclaimed out loud, even though there was no one but her on the mysterious comet to hear her excited voice. “That was even better than I imagined,” she then quietly said to herself.

  —3—

  Further east, Leona spotted the rugged Badlands of South Dakota. She marveled at how such a barren place could produce so many mysterious natural features like rugged hills and slopes; flat-topped buttes; pinnacles that seemingly reached endlessly to the sky; and last, but certainly not least, a myriad of multicolored shale and sandstones. The wide-eyed 8-year-old curiously explored all the nooks and crannies of the beautiful, yet eerie Badlands; and then she returned to a wider view of the Earth.

  To the east of the Badlands, Leona saw what appeared to be a squiggly line drawn down the center of the United States. After zooming in a little closer she realized that it was the Mighty Mississippi River, where young Tom Sawyer and his best friend Huckleberry Finn lived out their marvelous adventures, fictitiously, of course, as recorded in Leona’s favorite book, written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Mark Twain as he was more commonly known. His books became even more special to Leona years later when she learned that not only did Mark Twain die in 1910, only five days before she was born, but he was born in 1835, both years coinciding with the return of Halley’s Comet.

  Leona recalled reading something Twain had said when he realized that the comet would soon be back. It so astonished her that she memorized it, and repeated the most memorable portions of it whenever she talked about Twain. She had no one to talk to on this comet, so she uttered Twain’s words to herself:

  “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. … The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together’.”

  After following the ‘Mighty Mississippi’ over 2,350 miles from northwestern Minnesota to the Mississippi Delta, just below New Orleans where it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, Leona remembered that it, along with its more than 250 smaller tributaries, made up the world’s third largest river system, behind only the Nile and the Amazon. And then she looked northward for the Ohio and Missouri Rivers: the Mississippi’s two largest contributors.

  After finding those scenic rivers Leona quickly decided that the five Great Lakes, four of which surrounded and almost enslaved the state of Michigan, would be her next destination. Upon flying clockwise over Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron and Lake Erie, the little girl moved northeastward to the fifth and final lake: Lake Ontario. Once there, she located Niagara Falls in Buffalo, New York, and followed its long span over 3600 feet into Ontario, Canada, while marveling at the enormous power of the falling water as it plummeted approximately 160 feet, slamming viciously into the roaring waters of Niagara Gorge.

  —4—

  The curious little girl next turned her attention to the northeast corner of the United States where her sparsely populated home state was awaiting her visit. She immediately noticed a huge lake located near the mid-western part of the state where a large bull moose was standing in the still water, sluggishly chewing on juicy aquatic plants that it pulled up from the lake bottom. It was the first moose she had ever seen, e
xcept in pictures. Although she marveled at the workhorse-size, three-quarter-ton deer-like beast with gigantic antlers, Leona deemed the enormous animal—having long, bony legs; a long, narrow, weird-looking face; an unusual-looking flap of skin hanging loosely from its throat; and camel-like humped shoulders reaching almost seven feet above the ground—to be one of the ugliest that nature could offer. Still, the docile creature was a marvelous curiosity that captured her imagination, as was the vast lake it stood in.

  “That must be Moosehead Lake,” she speculated. “I wonder if it has many bass?”

  Smallmouth bass was Leona’s favorite fresh-water fish to catch, probably because it was unusually abundant in the Kenduskeag Stream and she always seemed to catch lots of bass there. Regardless, her thoughts now turned to her father’s birthplace: Basswood Ridge. Although she had never been there she knew from her father that St. Stevens was just across the St. Croix River from Calais, Maine, and that Basswood Ridge was just to the west of it. Not quite knowing or even caring how, she soon located her father’s old home, recognizing it from the family photo he carried in his wallet. It was not too unlike his new home in Glenburn, with large fields and wooded areas surrounding it.