Russell Baker’s favourite column

April 14, 1996
100 Years of The New York Times: Sunday Observer – May 18, 1975;Spaced Out

By Russell Baker
From 1973 to 1987, Russell Baker wrote Sunday Observer for the Magazine. He selected the column adapted here as a favorite.

I am sitting here 93 million miles from the sun on a rounded rock which is spinning at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour, and roaring through space to nobody-knows-where, to keep a rendezvous with nobody-knows-what, for nobody-knows-why, … while off to the north of me the polar icecap may, or may not, be getting ready to send down oceanic mountains of ice that will bury everything from Bangor to Richmond in a ponderous white death, and there, off to the east, the ocean is tearing away at the land and wrenching it into the sea bottom and coming back for more, as if the ocean is determined to claim it all before the deadly swarms of killer bees, … can ge there to take possession, although it seems more likely that the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere may collapse first, exposing us all, ocean, killer bees and me, too, to the merciless spraying of deadly cosmic rays.

I am sitting here on this spinning, speeding rock surrounded by four billion people, eight planets, one awesome lot of galaxies, hydrogen bombs enough to kill me 30 times over, and mountains of handguns and frozen food, and I am being swept along in the whole galaxy’s insane dash toward the far wall of the universe, across distances longer to traverse than Sunday afternoon on the New Jersey Turnpike, so long, in fact, that when we get there I shall be at least 800,000 years old, provided, of course, that the whole galaxy doesn’t run into another speeding galaxy at some poorly marked universal intersection and turn us all into space garbage, or that the sun doesn’t burn out in the meantime, or that some highly intelligent ferns from deepest space do not land from flying fern pots and cage me up in a greenhouse fo rscientific study.

So, as I say, I am sitting here with the continents moving, and killer bees coming, and the ocean eating away, and the icecap poised, and the galaxy racing across the universe, and the thermonuclear 30-times-over bombs stacked up around me, and only the gravity holding me onto the rock, … and as I sit here, 93 million miles from the sun, I am feeling absolutely miserable, and realize, with self-pity and despair, that I am getting a cold.