The Power of Testimony

MARK BOUMAN || 39
us, savoring the moment before adding, “Concentrates it enough to see
things two miles away.”
He nodded happily as we gaped at the mirror. “Yep, two miles. Don’t
look into it or it’ll blind you. It gives out as much light as one hundred
twenty thousand candles.”
Jerry and I both blurted the obvious. “When are you gonna turn it on?”
“I’ll hook it up and we can try it out,” he answered. I’d never heard
him happier. As he began to fiddle with the searchlight, Sheri wandered
out to watch.
“What is that?”
“It’s a searchlight from a destroyer!” I bragged.
“What’s a destroyer?”
“A ship,” I said impatiently. “Now let Dad work.”
It took Dad a while to get everything ready. He never seemed in
doubt about what to do but moved around the searchlight quickly and
purposefully, adjusting and tightening and lubricating, ignoring our
questions until we stopped asking.
Finally it was time. Dad had run a thick cable from the searchlight
to a nearby generator.
“This’d be useful on a ship—​it’s what it was made for, after all.”
He looked at his audience, winked at Mom, and flicked a switch on
the back of the searchlight.
“And . . . There. It. Goes.”
We stared, stunned. It was brighter than the sun—​the brightest thing
I had seen in my life. The beam of light was like a solid thing, like a
bridge of brightness you might be able to walk on wherever it pointed.
No object was too far away for Dad to touch: the bottom of the driveway,
the stop sign down Blakely Drive, the radio tower on the far hill.
“Don’t get in front of it,” he warned. “You will get burned.”
He spun a small wheel with a handle attached to it, and the eye of
the searchlight narrowed to a small hole. Then he spun the wheel the
other way, and the light expanded.