Cloudward Bound!

A photo of me in the sky like a cloud!

Like most great men, I - ANDY LAM! - often find my inspiration in nature. I do not mean in the way that a 19th century romantic poet may have done (although I am famed both for my romantic nature AND for my wonderful poetry skills) but rather in the way that scientists may find their inspiration in the nature that lays before them. Also like many great men, I have been bitten by the bug of flight but have become BORED with the various approaches available to me: Airplanes? Boring! Kites? Boring! Jetpacks? Boring! Hot air balloons? Boring! Dirigibles? Boring! Helicopters? Boring! Gyrocopters? Boring! Gliders? Boring! Those weird pedal-powered things? Boring! Rockets? NOT boring but also not good for short distances! A bunch of helium balloons? Boring! A flock of birds tied to a basket? Boring!

You see, most of the ways of flying really are boring. But would happen if someone super-smart like me looked at this problem with fresh eyes? Well, that is just what I have done and I have come up with a way to fly that is not boring. First, I thought about boats. The are very heavy and yet they do not sink. I have looked for some reason for this to be the case but after pouring through literally a million books and papers I find no logical explanation for this seemingly impossible fact. Somehow, something that SHOULD sink to the bottom of the sea is able to bob around like an apple in a pail of water. What, I wondered, would happen if you put something in the air that should fall up into the sky and it didn’t fall but floated and bobbed around like an apple in a pail of water? That was the question I set myself to solve.

In looking up in the air I see that there are many things that are heavy that fly around: airplanes, kites, jetpacks, hot air balloons, dirigibles, helicopters, gyrocopters, gliders, those weird pedal-powered things, rockets, helium balloons and birds call came to my mind but they are all boring. I wanted something that wasn’t boring and then it hit me - there are already giant NATURAL things that are in the sky. Do you know what I am talking about? Let me give you some clues: they are white. They are giant. They are fluffy. Yes, if you guessed clouds you would have guessed right! Clouds became my inspiration!

I set out to study clouds. This meant going into the sky. I had to use a boring thing (in this case a flock of birds tied to a basket) to get up to see the clouds up close and personal. The birds flew and flew, I had a whip to make them go but didn’t need to use it, they knew just what I was trying to do and they zoomed me up up up up up up up into the sky to the clouds. There was a really good one that we flew to and I looked at it very closely. I could see that it was truly gigantic, that is was white and it was fluffy. We went into the cloud. It was wet inside and grey. I made a lot of notes in my notebook and told the birds to bring me back to the ground.

When we landed I knew what I needed to do. Step one: Make myself truly gigantic. This was not hard. I simply asked my engineers to make a machine that would make me gigantic. They worked on it for a while and came up with a brilliant idea. They made a machine that had a beam or a ray and when they fired the beam or ray at me I started to grow. I grew and grew and grew and grew and grew until I was the size of a mountain I think. Even though I was big, I was still my normal self and they said my mass to volume ratio or something was perfect for being a cloud. It was true! I could float very easily! I was gigantic and that made me happy.

Next I needed to be white. I don’t mean caucasian but really really white. Guess what? That was super easy too! All I needed to do was get a bunch of White Out (which there is a lot of left over since people switched to writing on computers instead of typewriters!) which I got for a really good price. I stood in the field near my compound and stripped off all of my clothes. My team put ladders all around me so they could reach me since I was so gigantic and they started to paint me with the White Out. It took a very very long time since White Out only comes with a teeny tiny brush and there was a lot of me to cover. They were troopers though and eventually got the job done.

So now I was giant and white. There was only one thing left to do: I needed to be fluffy. Fluffy. Fluffy. What would make me fluffy? Why cotton balls of course! I sent a team of shoppers to the drug store and told them to buy all of the cotton balls they could find. And some glue. They ended up having to go to a lot of drug stores to get enough cotton balls to cover me and make me fluffy like a cloud. They did it though and soon they were back on the ladders gluing the cotton balls all over me! (Now I probably should have thought about this a little harder a little sooner because I could have saved time and money (but I have so much of that that it hardly matters) by thinking of a way to make myself white AND fluffy at the same time and I think the cotton balls could have done that. Live and learn I always say!)

Finally they were done. I was gigantic, white and fluffy - just like a cloud. It was time to test my theory! I jumped as high as I could and, just as I expected, I soared into the sky! I was floating as happily as a cloud, drifting high above the ground. Down on the earth I could see people and cities and trees and roads and buildings and cars and baseball diamonds and football fields and rivers and tennis courts and parking lots and shopping centers and rocks and schools and factories and farms and bridges and ships and trains and everything!! It was amazing!

I floated like this for a long time. I was having the time of my life up there in the sky! When I was bored I decided to come back down to the earth. That was easy too! I just turned over and pointed down and started to “swim” through the sky back to the earth. When I got there I started pulling the cotton balls off. Then I went to the ocean and sat in it to wash off the White Out. Then I asked my engineers to change the machine that made me gigantic so it could make me my normal size again. They twisted a bunch of knobs and flicked a bunch of switches and when the ray or beam hit me this time I shrank back to my normal size. Then I got dressed.

It was a pretty amazing adventure and a pretty amazing scientific achievement. I will probably be on the cover of a bunch of magazines and stuff since I was the person who had the amazing scientific adventure. Sometimes it’s hard to be a great scientist and explorer and adventurer and artist and everything else I am great at but when you get to do something like this - fly in the sky in a way that isn’t boring - it’s all worth it!

Back on the ground but with my head still in the clouds, I am . . .

ANDY LAM!