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![[POP: Zines]](http://static.wired.com/zines/images/pop.prgrm.zines.gif){kind=small}
hen I was in seventh grade, I was a model rocket freak. I would trundle down to the hobby shop every weekend, with my allowance and lawn-mowing money burning a hole in my pocket. I'd plop the money down on the counter & ask them to get me the mosquito, or the arrow, or the tumor, or whatever catchy named rocket they had for the money I had.
Needless to say, I didn't fly the best rockets around. I was an A engine kinda guy. Nothing fancy, the rockets were really cool and tiny, you could do double stage without completely losing the rocket to the clouds. You could trick them out with extra-long tubes, or extra fins, and you wouldn't be risking your life having a rocket shoot out in the wrong direction.
The flights were short, giving you more chances to shoot again. Plus, the engines were WAY cheaper and came in packs of four instead of three. In short, A engines rocked.
Some days I would go out with a friend who was a little more daring than I was: He'd shoot Bs. We'd have to chase the rocket half way across the park, only to have its parachute get stuck & have the entire thing come crashing down to the ground, ruining that extra-nice paint job he had put on (he had an airbrush & we would really deck our rockets out), snapping the balsa fins, sometimes even bending the reinforced cardboard tube. What was the point? Anyway, my birthday came around. I asked for rocket stuff. I got engines, a new launcher (a really high-tech kind with a light on it so you knew it was armed), and a beast of a rocket called the "Nova Payloader."
It was like nothing I had ever seen before, it had a clear space in the nose to put "experiments" in, to see how things were affected by high altitudes. The rocket was really tall & thin, so it could effectively pierce the stratosphere. This fire-breathing, knee-weakening - yet educational - piece of cardboard & balsa ran on ... C engines.
I put the rocket together quickly, not really going into the detailing on the body, just a quick two-tone paint job - detailing is for those A-engine babies, not us C-engine men.
The most impressive thing about the "Nova Payloader" was that, due to the delicate experiments you would inevitably be carrying in the clear cargo section, it came with not one, not two, but THREE parachutes. This motherfucker meant business.
I dragged out by dad & my friend the weekend after my birthday, we were all dressed in heavy coats, with scarves and everything -
it was November. We went to the park - a huge park in my hometown (home to the unfortunately named "Mount Trashmore"), it's about three blocks long and two blocks wide, with trees only around the perimeter, the perfect place for shooting rockets. I set up my new launcher, did a few test launches with smaller rockets - testing wind speed of course, then I slipped a C into the beast, and put it on the launching pad.
"Hey, aren't you going to put something in the cargo bay?" my friend asked.
"Oh, I almost forgot," I had planned to find a bug on the ground once I got to the park. I searched the earth in vain. It was 20 degrees out, what bug is going to be out for a stroll?
So there I was, in the middle of the park, the "Nova Payloader" sitting on the launching block, my friend and my dad standing on the sidelines, and me ... without a bug to send into space. I searched in my pockets and found ... a paper clip.
"I'm going to see what happens to metal when it goes up real high!" I called out to the audience, brandishing the paper clip - dressed in full spacesuit - above my head. The anticlimax was almost audible. I opened up the cargo section, slipped the paper clip in, uncoiled the launch trigger, inserted my key (the light turned on) and started the countdown. "10 ..." I called out, "9 ... 8 ... 7 ... 6 ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1!" I hit the button, and in a sulfuric cloud of smoke, the beast leapt into the air. In seconds, it was completely out of sight.
"Where'd it go?" I called to my friend, wiping the smoke out of my eyes. Wide-eyed and helpless, he pointed to the sky.
It felt like hours as we stared up into the endless blue, waiting for the rocket to come back into sight. Finally, we saw it, drifting slowly, three huge parachutes floating proudly above it.
Both of us started running after the craft, following it as it slowly rocked back down to Earth.... Slowly slowly slowy it got larger and larger. It kept drifting further and further away, and we just ran after it. It seemed like we ran for miles, watching the "Nova Payloader" make its way to us. I glanced ahead of me, just so I had a bearing of where I was, since I had been running with my eyes on the prize.
Trees.
I stopped short, about five feet away from the trunk of one of the perimeter trees, a huge old Elm tree (this was before Dutch Elm Disease struck our town hard). My friend stopped too. We both looked up. Just in time to see the three majestic parachutes catch on the uppermost branches.
It just hung there. Suspended. My heart fell. I felt sick. I looked away and slowly walked back to the launching pad.
Not long after that, I lost interest in rocketry, but I still drive by that park and I remember the feeling of loss caused by a C engine and three parachutes attached to a cardboard tube with a clear section filled with a paper clip.
by Daniel Sinker
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