Camp Strange

Birdie reads a Star Trek cookbook

When my youngest son, Mar­tin, chased gap-toothed girls through a dusty school­yard, he car­ried a tiny Star Trek shut­tle­craft in the front pocket of his jeans.

“Vroooooooooom! Ba-ba-ba-ba-bing! Bing!”

The shut­tle­craft — tor­pe­dos armed and ready — made the noise of a boy’s pursed lips. It flew grace­ful arcs, one hand over head, around body, swooped low to the ground. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew Mar­tin ripped the very fab­ric of space itself, rip­ping it into two, three thou­sand par­al­lel uni­verses. The edge of the galaxy never felt closer than when Mar­tin careened around a corner.

“Phasers on stun!” The fam­ily dog raised one foggy head from a deep after­noon slum­ber, body pressed into cool tile, her eyes unable to quite focus on a home­made weapon fash­ioned out of duct tape and toi­let paper tubes held two inches from her skull.

“What did you do with my tri­corder? Answer me, alien from Zeta 3!”

Sissy must have given some invis­i­ble answer, ’cause Mar­tin jumped her old body, jumped clear onto the sag­ging couch, then dropped, rolled from cush­ion to floor in Cap­tain Kirk’s best move, as if he were prac­tic­ing good fire-avoidance tech­nique. Phaser and shut­tle­craft never lost attack pat­tern. Four sec­onds later — a true tem­po­ral anom­aly — I saw him out­side the kitchen win­dow, chas­ing the neighbor’s black cat, toi­let paper tube set to one level beyond sim­ple stun. The cat reacted in typ­i­cal ennui, hold­ing his ground, his hair unruf­fled, his expres­sion enig­matic and aloof. We don’t have to travel far to find aliens.

I found that shut­tle­craft in the garage one recent after­noon as I was look­ing for a box of nails. It hid under the cor­ner of a heavy wooden box. I noticed the uneven sur­face of the box first, then the plas­tic body of the toy. I yanked it into the dusty air. I burst into tears. It had been a full year, even a bit longer, since Trek ruled Martin’s life. I set it on the ledge over the kitchen sink. I set it among the vit­a­min bot­tles and my grandma’s beloved tacky fig­urines. It looked out of place next to the pale pas­tel Vic­to­rian girl hold­ing a para­sol. It looked lonely next to the ginkgo biloba.

Dur­ing that magic time, Mar­tin wore a captain’s uni­form every sin­gle day, wrist-ends frayed, chest pilled and faded to a gen­tle rust. He wrote the Star­date at the top of each school assign­ment. He knew more sci­ence than any other kid in the third grade, too, under­stood big words like “dimen­sional” and “veloc­ity” and “quan­tum.” He wrote his own Pledge of Alle­giance to the Fed­er­a­tion of Plan­ets — got sus­pended for that one — and argued every philo­soph­i­cal point at home and at school using tenets from the Prime Direc­tive. On his birth­day — Star­date –318876.26713974896 — I baked a shut­tle­craft cake, served it with recipes I found in a Star Trek Cook­book. His friends didn’t “get” it, but Mar­tin rev­er­en­tially served them plates of good­ies straight from a Repli­ca­tor I fash­ioned out of a dead microwave oven.

The shut­tle­craft let him pre­tend he was on the Away Team, the tiny group sent to mon­i­tor a new planet, a new sit­u­a­tion. Two inches square of our world’s finest plas­tic gave him con­fi­dence. It gave him some­thing big­ger than him­self to keep front and cen­ter when other kids teased, when they dan­gled their rich trea­sures like x-boxes and ipods in his face. He didn’t need that stuff. He didn’t even want that stuff. He had Trek.

When Gene Rod­den­berry penned that first Star Trek episode, when William Shat­ner and Leonard Nimoy donned those tight, futur­is­tic paja­mas, when Patrick Stew­art closed Hamlet’s dusty cov­ers and took the captain’s chair — they reached into a hun­dred mil­lion tight chests, a hun­dred mil­lion jaded beings’ tired minds. They reached into a point so deep inside us we didn’t know it existed. They yanked us into a bat­tle for our own identity.

Who are you? Are you a war­rior of peace, a woman, a man bent on sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery, bent on bring­ing new peo­ple together? Do you stare at the stars, at the set­ting sun? Do you won­der why? Why are we such a vio­lent species, yet why do we have such a huge capac­ity for love? Why do we feel the sore edges some­thing miss­ing? Are you a per­son of unusual ori­gin, or strange pro­cliv­i­ties? Then, man, you’re Trek. You’re part of the sister-and-brotherhood.

I remem­ber my first Star Trek, remem­ber sit­ting on a scarred wood floor and pop­ping in a video­tape — new tech­nol­ogy back then — and watch­ing Kirk and Bones save our cor­ner of the galaxy. I was twelve years old, lonely and lost, a strange middle-school sax­o­phone player, unteth­ered to this kind planet. Trek pulled a bit at my soul. I remem­ber hav­ing my mind blown by Spock’s rue­ful obser­va­tion:

“It is curi­ous how often you humans man­age to obtain that which you do not want.”

I quickly for­get Trek. Cute boys, catty girls, band prac­tice, SATs to con­sider; the life of a teenager is rife with aca­d­e­mic obsta­cle and point­less social drama. I found it again five-and-a-half years ago, when Mar­tin could count his age by the five fin­gers on one hand and two on the other. We watched Star Trek: The Orig­i­nal Series first, a cou­ple shows a week, thanks to the won­ders of Net­flix. Mar­tin was hooked — so was his older brother, Louis, a then old man in a 9-year-old boy’s body.

From Star Trek: The Orig­i­nal Series cheesy 70’s porn-like music and short-skirted fash­ion to The Next Gen­er­a­tion and Lieu­tenant Tasha Yar’s stacked early 90’s ‘do to Cap­tain Janeway of Voy­ager’s fierce and author­i­ta­tive pantsuit, we fell into a funny rhythm of aware and some­times sub­con­scious mim­icry. You can gauge which cast we fol­lowed if you look at our fam­ily por­traits. My hair rose in Uhura’s bee-hive cre­ation, then Yar’s stacky ‘do. I grew it out to look like Janeway, which is where it sits today, just past my shoul­ders, usu­ally worn in her seri­ous updo. Mar­tin and Louis wore out one home­made uni­form after the other. From Sci­ence Offi­cer to First Offi­cer, my boys chose new men­tors each sea­son. Mar­tin chose Wes­ley Crusher for a long time. Louis picked Cap­tain Picard. My sewing machine soon began to spew clouds of black smoke in protest. It would have required Scotty’s engi­neer­ing finesse to fix it. I bought a new one.

One month, one week. That’s how long it took, if you strung the episodes together and sub­tracted the hikes upstairs to make pop­corn and fetch glasses of lemon­ade. One month, one week digested in one-hour incre­ments, spread over four years, two episodes a week. When it ended I didn’t quite know what to do. We moved on to Baby­lon 5 — a great series in its own right. But it wasn’t Trek.

A win­try New Mex­i­can snow falls tonight, and Mar­tin roams the neigh­bor­hood with four best friends, run­ning off after din­ner in boots and padded frost pants, run­ning into the future more quickly than any star­ship caught in a tem­po­ral flux. He’s run­ning into him­self, run­ning into hid­den cor­ners I will never find.

I’m wear­ing the Cap­tain Janeway uni­form I crafted from two old Sal­va­tion Army prom dresses, one red, one black. It, too, looks a bit frayed, sun faded, loose in some places now, tight in oth­ers. I’m a Starfleet cap­tain tonight. I’m Janeway because she wore the Voy­ager pants, and I wear the slacks — a lighter ver­sion of pants, I’m afraid, here at home.

I’m wear­ing the col­ors of peace, sci­ence, and explo­ration. I’m wear­ing the color of mem­ory, of sum­mers spent dis­cussing tem­po­ral shifts, of win­ters bun­dled under com­forter and piled on the couch. I’m wear­ing the col­ors of time that slips away too damn fast, of time that I can only travel to in my mem­ory. I don’t know how to cap­ture it for­ever, except to tell you about it, to hope that some­how the writ­ing of these adven­tures will help me remem­ber when I’m 95 years old, thin and frail in my Janeway cos­tume, in a nurs­ing home, per­haps, or in one of my sons’ homes, a box of tis­sue in my Ready Room. I want to remem­ber. I don’t mind the tears. I’m Cap­tain Janeway tonight, look­ing into a swarm of uneven space before me, the view screen a bit hazy and chaotic, know­ing that my crew will some day find their way home.

After wash­ing the last dish, I glanced at the ledge above my sink. The shut­tle­craft was gone. I stood still. Did I lose it? Did it fall into the old-fashioned sink when I wasn’t look­ing, tum­ble into a vor­tex of left-over din­ner water? I looked at my right arm, at the frayed wrist of my uni­form. The thin sound of boys’ laugh­ter pours into my plastic-covered win­dows. The thin sound of mem­ory, of love. I peek out­side, and a hand races past me, a raised gloved hand car­ry­ing a tiny plas­tic piece of the future. And my son’s deep­en­ing  voice cuts the wind, as strong as any Shake­spearean bard.

“Space. The final frontier…”