I heard this piece on the radio as I was driving along the beach at Cape Canaveral National Seashore, a half-hour before dawn. I went to school in New Bedford, where I grew fond of visiting Horseneck Beach early in the morning, so Dennis Downey's voice caught my ear.
This piece was very moving, and not just because of its apposite context, timing, and shared sense of place. It was simple and profound.
When it finished, I left my car and climbed over the dunes toward the beach. I heard the sound of waves' ebb and flow, but couldn't see them. Dawn broke then, projecting rays of light from beyond the curve of the earth, across the ocean and the beach. Sunlight illuminated three nearby radio towers, each powerful enough for your voice to reach a person in space, and to receive their voice falling down from the sky. Not far down the beach, another tower was finally made visible beside which stood the final Space Shuttle.
Downey gave that moment its meaning to me: a shared sense of place and history; a perduring purpose to why we experiment and explore; our need to communicate our discoveries about life across time and space.