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She remembers the cold and the earth shaking
By BRADY DENNIS
Published January 28, 2006
She remembers how cold it was that morning when her mother woke her up in the 5 a.m. darkness.
Darcy Vetro Ravndal was 10, a fifth-grader at Floral City Elementary in Citrus County. Shortly after dawn, a bus carried her class across the state toward Kennedy Space Center. Her mom had come as a chaperone; her sister, a second-grader, tagged along too.
Darcy remembers how her group - maybe 20 people, including Floral City Elementary teacher Theresa Manning - stared across the stretch of water toward the launching pad, waiting to feel the earth shake. She remembers the crackle of hand-held radios several teachers had brought to listen to the broadcast.
She remembers the high-pitched voices of fifth-graders counting down along with a NASA official. 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...
They felt the earth shake. They saw smoke. They saw fire.
But the 10-year-old didn't comprehend what she really had seen. The deep sense of tragedy would hit her years later.
This is what stood out most that day to a little girl from Citrus County: the puzzled looks on grownup faces, the way they hurried the kids back on the bus, the swarm of National Guard troops blocking the gate to the space center, the grief counselors waiting when they arrived back home.
The little girl is 30 now, a mother of two who works at a biodefense research center in Tampa. This week, she tried her best to remember the details of that cold, sad January day in 1986.
But she also mentioned another trip. A decade after the Challenger disaster, when she was in college, she climbed in a car with her mother and sister and headed to the Cape to watch another launch.
"The traffic was so bad, we got off an exit on I-95 and watched from side of the road," she said.
She remembers listening to the broadcast on the car radio. 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...
The earth shook.
The three of them slipped back into the car and drove home, relieved.
[Last modified January 28, 2006, 01:39:07]
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