A warm, wet rainstorm—the notorious Pineapple Express—hit Western Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving in 1986.

This underground arena features switches that trigger lasers, and a carpet bomb of the entire lower and upper levels.

I was surprised by […] the unusually tall windows, […] through which long telescopes were once turned on eclipses of the sun and the moon, on the intersections of the orbits of the stars with the line of the meridian, on the Leonid meteorite showers and the long-tailed comets flying through space.

It took me hundreds of dives to master even the simple jackknife.