The new Ray Bradbury sculpture/statue is now in place and dedicated in his home town of Waukegan, Illinois, a lakeside town about 30 miles north of Chicago. Designed by Zachary Oxman and made by E & E Metal Fab. near Harrisburg, the ‘Fantastical Traveler’ memorial was unveiled for Bradbury’s 100th birthday in August 2019. It’s only had local media coverage, so far.
Locally funded by $125,000 in donations, the memorial heralds a planned 3,500-sq.ft. Ray Bradbury Museum in the town’s disused Carnegie Library. In the meantime the town hosts an annual Ray Bradbury ‘Dandelion Wine’ Fine Arts Festival.
The work was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s 1971 celebratory poem for NASA’s Mariner 9 mission…
If only we had taller been
The fence we walked between the years
Did balance us serene
It was a place half in the sky where
In the green of leaf and promising of peach
We’d reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky
If we could reach and touch, we said,
‘Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead
We ached and almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
If only we had taller been
And touched God’s cuff, His hem,
We would not have to go with them
Who’ve gone before,
Who, short as us, stood tall as they could stand
And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole
O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s hand come down the other way
To measure man and find him Good
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that
Short man, Large dream
I send my rockets forth between my ears
Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!
