Camp Strange

James Doohan died yes­ter­day. My two young boys would tell you he played “Scotty” on the Star Trek orig­i­nal series. They would tell you he ruled the Engi­neer­ing depart­ment, car­ried more brains and guts than tools, and knew how to mas­sage life into fad­ing dilithium crys­tals. They would tell you how he saved the Enter­prise from cer­tain warp core breach death, from Klin­gon and Romu­lan tor­pe­dos, from the bad choices of Cap­tain Kirk him­self. Scotty was The Man. My boys would tell you some­thing else, too. Scotty was the only Star Trek char­ac­ter they met in real life.

A cou­ple of years ago, when my boys first dis­cov­ered Star Trek, I saw an ad in the news­pa­per. “Meet James Doohan” ran along the bot­tom of the page, in heavy black Hel­vetica. Why not? I thought. I grabbed the boys and we drove through the south canyons, to a book store stuffed in a new sub­ur­ban strip mall. We parked between two white SUVs, in front of a cell tower shaped like a palm tree with antenna fronds and a hard green plas­tic exte­rior. Palm tree from the future, I thought. Just like Star Trek.

James Doohan sat at an ele­gant wooden table. He didn’t wear his engineer’s uni­form. He wore beige Dock­ers and a blue knit sweater and had a few extra pounds and wrin­kles, but it was Scotty just the same. A line snaked through the store, old men and young men and moms and teenagers car­ry­ing new Star Trek Orig­i­nal Series DVDs and copies of Doohan’s Beam Me Up, Scotty book, all ripe for auto­graphs. My son, then 9, car­ried rolled blue­prints of the Enter­prise I bought off of eBay, and my youngest boy, then 7, car­ried his Scotty action fig­ure. We were set.

Scotty greeted each fan with a hand­shake. I watched him lean close to hear each name, and he took time and care sign­ing each book and DVD. Some peo­ple made Star Trek jokes, or asked about William Shatner’s behav­ior on set. Some stood qui­etly, shook his hand, then left with­out so much as a whis­per. One man wore a Klin­gon com­mu­ni­ca­tor and addressed Scotty with the stan­dard Klin­gon grunt, Heghlu’meH QaQ jaj­vam — “today is a good day to die.” My boys stared at Scotty, didn’t notice the huge Harry Pot­ter dis­play or the cafe sell­ing fresh choco­late chip cook­ies. They watched and lis­tened as Scotty spoke with his crazy old world accent, as he focused on each indi­vid­ual per­son, one by one by one.

Soon it was our turn. 9 rolled his blue­prints out on the table and pointed to the engi­neer­ing section.

“Would you please sign my Enter­prise blue­prints, Sir?” Two rows of books framed my boy, as if he stood in one of the star­ship cor­ri­dors. He spelled his name slowly, and Scotty smiled and bent down, scrib­bled a per­sonal note and a sig­na­ture in great flour­ish. 9 thanked him, and then paused. Oh, no, I thought, here it comes.

“Uh, Sir, may I ask a ques­tion?” I closed my eyes and bit my tongue and sent a quick prayer to who­ever might be lis­ten­ing that 9 didn’t put Scotty on the spot. The old man nod­ded and grinned. 9 plowed ahead, asked a ques­tion about a spe­cific time-traveling episode where Scotty pulled a mir­a­cle out of his uni­formed butt, saved the Enter­prise, the crew, a lost-cause planet, and the whole friggen uni­verse at large. “So,” 9 con­tin­ued, “how is this pos­si­ble?” He didn’t stop talk­ing, pointed out the tem­po­ral incon­sis­ten­cies, the ways in which sci­ence declares These Things Impossible.

Oh man, I thought. Here it comes. I waited for Scotty to tell 9 that these things sim­ply aren’t real, they are fig­ments of some writer’s imag­i­na­tion, and he just acted, just pre­tended to fix a star­ship. 9 knows this already, I knew. But who wants to hear it from an idol?

Scotty motioned for 9 to come closer, to lean his head in for a big secret. 9 did, tipped one ear toward Scotty’s mouth, and to this day I remem­ber word for word what he said.

“Son, all of these ideas come from the future. All of the peo­ple of Star Trek used the power of their own minds to dis­cover what might be pos­si­ble. Now it’s your turn to think about the future and to work at going boldly where no one has gone before. You can make these things possible.”

He leaned back as 9 nod­ded his head. 7 held out his action fig­ure, and Scotty signed his own minia­ture chest. And me, I mouthed Thank You at Mr. James Doohan, and lifted my hand in the Live Long and Pros­per Vul­can salute.

I don’t know any­thing more about James Doohan other than his work on the screen and that three minute inter­sec­tion of galac­tic won­der. But in my heart, I know he changed the world for three sim­ple peo­ple, made us think about the ways we can chal­lenge our present, pull it into a won­drous future.

Thank you, Scotty. I miss you.