The gratified principal presented them with an old DeSoto station wagon to take them to distant track meetings, with the coach as their chauffeur.
Before we can make contact with the group, the swarm of watches takes off again, and the main group is gone, stringing its way out along the distant track.
The change was evident enough on April 21 when Brown's Hotel, the pub where Thomas jotted verse and took his beers at a corner table (now dwarfed by a wide-screen television tuned, one recent afternoon, to horse racing from a distant track), was sold at auction by Tommy Watts, 73, who had owned it for 34 years.
He recalls, as a child in Norwich, running down a dirt road in his pajamas, looking at Sputnik 2 track a distant path in the predawn sky.
But a double play quickly erased Cairo, and Derek Jeter flied out to the distant warning track in center, where Brandon Inge landed on his backside for the catch.
His center fielder, Austin Jackson, had kept it alive for him on the first pitch of the top of the ninth, racing on a full sprint to the distant warning track at Comerica Park, fully extending his left arm for a twisting, over-the-shoulder catch.
I really wanted to keep the "Distant Planet" track in mind when I wrote this song, but I hadn't heard it again since, so I could only really go from that one memory.
The narrative of his final hours has been one of enduring fascination, laced with cryptic references to shadowy mercenaries, big-power machinations, airplanes parked on darkened runways and distant monitors tracking radio communications as the DC-6 made its fatal, final approach.
The closing track, 'Distant Dreamer', is an epic, orchestral stab of longing.
A deeper-diving Alvin, he said, could not only explore the sites directly but could wire the ocean with sensitive detectors meant to track distant seaquakes.
With Tiros, which circled the planet every 98 minutes, forecasters suddenly had a riot of observational data, and the accuracy of their predictions soared as they began to track distant storms and fronts.
