Thou Shall Not Bear False Hypothesis (Continued)
By: Kase D. Johnstun
“Then what?” she said. She raised her palms in the air and opened her mouth and eyes widely. This gesture did not seem supportive.
“Then I will place the sulfur pebble in the snow, and it will start to get hot and a fire will start,” I said.
“You can run outside and grab a handful of snow but be back at this desk for the judges in five minutes.” She waved her hand back over her shoulder, shook her head, and turned and walked away, hand still over shoulder and head still shaking when she rounded the corner back into the main hallway.
I took off. I knew that if I could just get a handful of snow, I could redeem myself. Sure, the day hadn’t started like planned. Sure, my project now resided behind Gifford’s. And sure, the display board could burn up with the snow, but the encyclopedia said, “…having a piece of the sulfur rock could start a fire even in damp conditions.” Outside, two stories beneath the main science-fair hallway, I looked up through the windows and saw students’ heads bob back and forth in front of their boards. Maybe, just maybe, I thought to myself, I could have spent more time on the project, and maybe I wouldn’t be standing outside on the playground looking for a solid chunk of snow that was big enough to last until the judges got to me.
I scooped up a handful of snow, covered it with my other hand, and ran back inside the school toward the dark corner of the auditorium.
Ten minutes later, I stood in front of my poster-board project. It wobbled from the wind of the slightest fart, and the large bright red lettering stood out against the card stock – THIS ROCK CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE. The words were scrawled across the entire poster board. They covered the space reserved for records of tests, re-tests, and explanations of results.
“So tell me about your project,” one judge said when she leaned over and looked into the cereal bowl. Her eyes squinted to find the tiny sulfur rock that sat slightly left of center at the bottom of the bowl, alone.
The spiel about the rock dripped from my mouth. I talked about sulfur and how it’s part of matches and gunpowder and stuff, and I talked about being lost in the wilderness with no wood and stuff. But no one came around to see the magic I imagined the day before.
“It can? Tell me why,” said the second faceless judge. He squinted and wrapped his fingers around his chin.
“Because it’s sulfur rock,” I said. He marked his clipboard and rolled his eyes.
“So how could it save your life?” the nice lady judge asked.
I filled them in on what World Book Encyclopedia said. The brains and writers behind the encyclopedia backed up the statement. Just to cap off the conversation and make the judges leave astounded, I added, “It worked for me.”
“I highly doubt this would be possible without a match or, at least, another large sulfur rock to make a spark?” the first judge said.
This idea of a match had arisen twice that day, and although I don’t remember reading the word ‘match’ in my extensive research, I realized it may not just spontaneously combust when it touches snow.
“Of course it needs a match to start, but the magic of it is that it will burn even in snow.”
“What if you don’t have a match?” Gifford yelled, and then snorted. What the hell, now Gifford is a judge? Gifford? He struggled for D’s and was asked not to come back for eighth grade. Now he is some super scientist?
At that moment, my chin dropped. “Well, I guess if you didn’t have a match...” My voice died out slowly.
The judges just moved on and left the tiny sulfur pebble in the middle of the cereal bowl, framed by the wobbly and bent poster board, and me in the corner of the stage – pissed off at Gifford.
A year later, a special on TV talked about wind tunnels, and their uses blew my mind. Newly-built planes are placed in giant wind tunnels to look at how air-flow conditions affect performance and to give engineers insight into any flaws within the structure. NASA uses wind tunnels to test many of their airborne crafts. The way the engineers built new wind tunnels specifically for the craft they wanted to test and the way in which structural flaws were made apparent just by mimicking what would happen in flight were simulated by a giant fan that pushed the wind through the tunnel. Making a wind tunnel would be a great science-fair project. That’s what I decided on for the next project. That would win me something. Avak could have first place. Third place would do me just fine.
A week before the science fair, I stood next to my grandpa in the middle of his immaculately clean garage and held two large white buckets filled with the hopes of science-fair redemption. I would not be placed in the corner of the auditorium stage again, not be shoved behind Gifford Umschied, and not have a science-fair project that put me in a situation to lie.
“Hand me that saw,” grandpa said. He pointed toward his large wall of tools. Nails protruded from all walls in his garage. The nails held anything from shovels to tiny wire cutters to saws of every size and dental variety. Beneath each nail hung the tool, and beneath each tool a traced black outline of the tool, assurance that his tools would be placed back in the exact spot by his grandsons, placed back in its outline. He stood and waited. He tried to be patient. He brushed down on his tiny black mustache and then pulled his few gray hairs back on his head before losing his patience. “Can’t you see it, it’s right there.” He pointed again toward the saw and saw outline.
“Flip that bucket upside down, Kase.” I flipped the bucket upside down. “Hold it so it won’t move.” I held it so it didn’t move. First, he took a hammer and the sharp end of a chisel and made a slit big enough on the bottom of the bucket to get the edge of the handsaw in. Then, my hands held the bucket, and he sawed off the bottom of it. This left the bucket open at both ends.
“I worked close to the tunnel while at Hill Air Force Base,” he said between sawing the first bucket and the second bucket. He placed the second bucket down on the ground, and with his dark hands he chiseled and then sawed out the bottom of it. A second cylindrical-shaped piece of white plastic sat on the ground in front of us.
“Hold this,” he said. I held the industrial-strength glue and grandpa slowly molded the wider open ends of the plastic buckets together and created a three-foot-long tunnel. In order for the glue to dry, it had to wait an hour. We used this time to head inside for fried potatoes, white bread, and ketchup. No matter what we ate at grandma’s house (which officially turns from my grandpa’s house to my grandma’s the second you leave the garage and enter the kitchen), we wrapped it up to eat with our hands (mainly tortillas and beans). Grandma had quickly fried up sliced potatoes in a grimy, cast-iron skillet. She placed a plateful of fried potatoes in front of us along with sliced white bread and a bottle of ketchup.
The three of us scooped up potatoes with a fork, folded the white bread in the palm of our left hands to create a bun-shaped object, dropped in the potatoes and lathered up the two with ketchup. The simplicity of the mixture of heavily-salted and greasy fried-potato slices, the cold sweet taste of ketchup, and the Wonder Bread-turned-tortilla symbiotically confused and pleasured the mouth. I sat between my second set of parents contently, slathering, gathering, and devouring potatoes and bread. They didn’t hassle me with questions about school, sports, friends, or girls. We just ate and laughed.