Launch on the Shriek
Summer of '87 in the Plumas National Forest. Homemade rockets trailing TOW wire into the thunderheads, a railgun sketched on a diner napkin, and a crew of techno-shamans chasing the hum. Thirty-eight years later, the scheme finally launches right.
Tinkering with Time, Tech, and Culture #45
In the summer of '87, the Sierras weren't just mountains, they were a goddamn invitation. Afternoon thunderheads rolled in like uninvited guests, fat and furious, dumping sheets of rain that turned the Plumas National Forest into a slick, electric soup. Mycal Johnson, a lanky Chico State CS major with long brown hair that curled defiantly in the back like it had places to be, had declared it his laboratory. His eyes, sharp and scheming, sparked like faulty capacitors, always three steps ahead, mapping out the chaos before it unfolded. People either loved him or hated him; there was no middle ground with Mycal. He was the guy who scheduled everything: homework blocks squeezed between playtime benders and calculated hangover recoveries, turning college into a perfectly timed algorithm of mischief and deadlines. He treated it all as a three-word anthem, "celebration of life," where lectures were libations, late nights were liturgy, and every scheme a toast to the wild pulse of existence. "Techno-shamans," he called his crew, me, Joe from the ██████ labs, and a rotating cast of wide-eyed undergrads who'd traded keg stands for kilowatts. We weren't chasing grants or glory; we were chasing the hum, and Mycal always had the plan, the scheme, or the adventure locked and loaded.
It started with the VLF rigs. Surplus military radio kits, jury-rigged with stereo headphones and alligator clips, tuned to the Earth's belly growls. Whistlers, they called them, those eerie warbles sliding down magnetic field lines from lightning strikes halfway around the globe. We'd hike to a granite outcrop, strip naked under the downpour (because why not? The rain was our baptism), and paint runes on our chests with charcoal and creek mud. Sigils for conduction, invocation for the bolt. Mycal, ever the orchestrator, would check his wristwatch, homework done, hangover cleared, and grin that lopsided schemer's smile, muttering his anthem under his breath like a mantra: "Celebration... of... life." Then the rockets: Mail-order F15 solids, fat as beer cans, lashed to balsa frames with duct tape prayers. At the tip? A spool of TOW wire, hair-thin copper lifeline, salvaged from demilled anti-tank missiles, unspooling like a spider's dare to the gods.
"Launch on the shriek," Mycal would command, his voice steady over the wind, left eye tracking true for now. The rocket screamed skyward, trailing its filament tail into the bruise-black cloud. If we were lucky, and luck was a plasma filament vaporizing just right, the lightning answered. A billion joules slamming down the wire, melting it to slag at our feet, the air ionizing into ozone hymns. We'd measure the melt, high-five through the static fuzz, and chase the euphoria: that bone-deep buzz, like the planet had whispered a secret in Morse code. One strike, and we'd dance in the crater it left, barefoot on scorched earth, toasting with warm Sierra Nevada bottles with yeast rings on the bottom. Mycal would already be plotting the next tweak, maybe a better spool tension, or a midnight debug session back in the dorms, his hair frizzing wild in the humidity like an antenna for the storm's afterglow, always framing it as another verse in the great celebration.
Joe, the lab rat with sticky fingers and a grudge against bureaucracy, sketched the railgun on a rainy diner napkin over pie. "Why beg the storm? Steal its punch." Parallel superconducting rods, pinched from a collider project at ██████ , cryogenically pampered in a backpack dewar of liquid nitrogen. A Teflon slug, copper-bottomed, as the payload. Tension the web for aim, flip the switch on a whistler peak, and let Lorentz ride the plasma wave. Mycal loved it, another scheme in his endless queue, a high-octane hymn to the anthem. We built it in a borrowed garage off Esplanade, sparks flying like arguments, the air thick with solder fumes and manifestos. "Build whatever," he preached, etching runes on the barrel with a steady hand, even as the third beer tipped his left eye into that telltale wander, losing track of its twin like a drunk compass. The haters called it reckless; the lovers called it genius. To Mycal, it was just the next adventure, slotted between finals and a Friday forge, a raucous stanza in the celebration of life.
The test? Biblical fail. Storm gods don't like hubris, or maybe they just didn't like the schedule. Switch flipped, and instead of skyward thunder, the rig buckled, rails arcing into a white-hot kiss, the slug punching a fist-sized crater into the granite hillside fifty yards off. Gravel rained like shrapnel; a pine splintered, showering us in confetti chunks. Mycal, eye fully adrift now in the adrenaline haze, barked the extraction: "Hangover protocol, move!" We bolted, laughing maniacally, leaving no trace but bootprints and a legend. Joe got canned for the coils, but landed bigger gigs. Mycal? He boxed the remnants, wire spools, fried circuits, and stashed them in the Phys Sci building's basement, a time capsule for the next fool generation, proof that even a crater could be celebrated. The railgun became zine fodder: Rail Guns Circa 1987, self-printed on dot-matrix, a love letter to the edge, complete with footnotes on timing the next one "post-recovery, full anthem volume."
Fast-forward to the early '90s, and that box waited like buried treasure. Another Chico kid, let's call him Grenade, a transfer with a soldering iron for a soul, pried open the storage closet during a late-night lab rat scavenge. Dust motes danced in the fluorescent hum as he unearthed the TOW wire, mile after mile coiled like a serpent's hoard. Whispers followed: "Weather study," the old profs muttered, winking over coffee in the faculty lounge. "Rockets to call the lightning, Mycal's old scheme, all in the name of that 'celebration of life' bullshit." Grenade pocketed a spool, dreamed of his own thunder calls, but life pulled him elsewhere, code, circuits, the hum of servers over storms. The rumor lingered, a campus ghost story, binding generations in electric kinship, with Mycal's wild polarities echoing in every tale: Love him for the plan and the anthem, hate him for the wander in his eye when the scheme went sideways.
By the aughts, the shamanic spark had migrated west, to the alkali flats of Black Rock. Mycal, older now but no less alight, hair curling long gone, but schemes stacking like Git commits, found his tribe in the dust: Reared in Steel, a Petaluma forge of mutant iron and mutant dreams. No more begging bolts from clouds; now it was propane they tamed, liquid fire in steel veins. The crew built monsters: Medusa's heads, serpentine and snarling, petals on towers blooming in LED-veined fury. But the heart? The nervous system. Mycal coded it in the glow of a laptop screen, Raspberry Pi as his staff, SainSmart relays as runes, scheduling the flames like he'd once timed the thunder: Homework for the hardware debug, playtime for the burn, hangover buffer for the dust, all under the banner of his eternal anthem.
The crown jewel: Fire Kathedral, a 44-foot steel spire trailer-towed to the playa, crowned with 88 valves, pilot lights flickering like vestal virgins, igniters poised for the rite. Web GUI for the wranglers, slinging bitmasks over WebSockets: set 0xf0f0 to sequence the whoosh, timed delays choreographing the blaze like a conductor's flick. MIDI input? The killer app, notes cascading to relays, velocity twisting flame heights into symphonies. Pedal a bike in the crowd, and the spires breathe with your sweat; a DJ drops the bass, and the Kathedral roars back, petals on the Flower Tower unfurling in harmonic fire, Medusa's mouths hissing counterpoint, Brass Ring looping brass belches in the beat. Mycal slotted it all: Pre-burn calibration (homework), radical acceptance principle jams (playtime), and a post-purge for the propane haze (hangover), a full-throated celebration of life in code and combustion.
First burn on the Kathedral, 2019, dust storm howling like a Sierra gale, the air crackling with that old ozone tang. Mycal hunched in the tech tent, fingers flying over the Pi, left eye steady under the string lights. Thunder rumbled distant over the mountains, a freak cell, spitting lightning that painted the horizon in vein-blue forks. The crowd pulsed, glow sticks tracing runes in the dark. "Sync it," someone yelled, half-joke, half-prayer. Mycal grinned, patched a VLF listener into the MIDI stream (a hack from the old days, app'd on his phone). Whistlers warbled through the headphones: shriek, drop, boom. He mapped it live, notes triggering valves in echo, flames leaping as if called. No wander in his gaze; just the plan unfolding, wild as ever, the anthem alive in every flicker.
The plaza ignited. Eighty-eight effects bloomed: pillars of fire twenty feet high, swirling in plasma ghosts, the heat a living thing that warped the night. Revelers danced naked in the updraft (old habits), painting each other with ash sigils, the storm's rhythm bleeding into the propane pulse. For a heartbeat, it was '87 reborn, no crater, no fail, just conduction. Lightning forked overhead; the Kathedral answered, a cathedral of controlled thunder. Mycal watched from the shadows, hair curling in the heat haze, already scheming the next fork: Maybe a velocity map for eye-wander effects, or a rune-etched Pi case, all in service to the celebration.
November 2025 now, and Mycal sits in a quiet Petaluma workshop, repos open on dual monitors: fire-controller-web humming with forks from global burners, midi-2-relay docs crisp as a fresh printout. The zine's digitized, archived at archive.mycal.net and www.group42.net, a wink to the kids who'll find their own wire boxes. Joe's long gone, but his napkin sketch lives in the code, Lorentz in lines, not leads. The railgun? It never cratered a hill; it just took thirty-eight years to launch right. From thunder's dare to flame's embrace, it's all the same call: Harness the chaos, or let it harness you. Mycal's still scheduling it all, work, play, the occasional wander, with a scheme for every storm, his three-word anthem the steady beat beneath it: Celebration of life.
And in the Sierras, come summer, the storms still roll in. Whistlers hum. Somewhere, a rocket waits.