A writer reflects on dreams of space, 40 years after moon walk

by Gary Nelson - Jul. 19, 2009
The Arizona Republic

Ask any writer, and he will tell you it can hurt to look at the old stuff.

The indelicate phrases, the clanging words, the half-baked notions of youth - there's a reason those old clips molder in the dark all but deliberately forgotten. Someday, I tell myself, I'll go through all of them, throw out the junk and save the two or three worth keeping.

So, I didn't expect much when I went rummaging for one of the really old ones, a yellowing relic from my first summer in a newspaper office.

It was 1969. Judy Garland died. Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge. Jimi Hendrix fractured the national anthem at Woodstock. America began its long retreat from Vietnam. Charles Manson went berserk.

And man walked on the moon.

You can't spend a summer like that in a newspaper office, with the teletypes ringing and the typewriters clacking and the back shop redolent of sweat and hot lead, and not get hooked on the gig. Every summer since has also been spent in a newspaper office, though the teletypes and hot lead vanished long ago.

I didn't do any actual reporting on the moon walk. That was done by the Associated Press and UPI and the big newspapers and TV networks.

Our paper, the La Crosse Tribune in western Wisconsin, ran with the wire-service copy and then left it up to a 20-year-old intern, namely me, to bloviate on what it was all supposed to mean.

My little essay, written with intense passion and all the rhetorical tools I could muster, does not, when viewed through the prism of these 40 years, fail to disappoint - but not in the way I expected.

Yes, the writing is indeed juvenile and overwrought. And some of the premises are ludicrous, as when I laid down this gem:
"Man dreams: Will his exploration of the beyond yield to him a new planet to which he can transfer his starving population before it suffocates in a dead atmosphere or dies from drinking the water he has poisoned?"

'Twilight Zone'?

And there was the bit about some day meeting "other races of beings who have long ago learned (or never needed to learn) how to see each other as members of a kindred people instead of as mere inhabitants of a particular small segment of their home planet, divided and apart from the rest."

Those thoughts, I suspect, arose from having watched too many "Twilight Zone" episodes as a kid. In truth, the odds favoring either scenario are roughly equivalent to those of bumping into George Clooney at the Laundromat.

The real disappointment, however, springs not from the essay itself. Although better writing has appeared in print, so also has worse. And, in the glow of that summer's moonlight, could a little fantasizing not be forgiven?

No, it was not my words that failed. It was us.

Toward the end, I wrote this:
"Man dreams that he will rediscover the feeling of closeness with God that comes only from being humbled in the face of an awe-inspiring and endless universe.

"He dreams that he will come to know the rest of the 3 billion people on this tiny sphere as his fellow mates on a celestial vessel coursing the void of space, and that he can do the things that need doing to correct the wrongs he has done to his companions."

A human bond
These, I believed, could become the true legacies of Apollo 11: A deeper and more charitable spirituality, a common human bond, a cessation or at least abatement of the lunacies and fallacies and follies that even then, 40 summers ago, had pushed us to the brink.

It was not wrong to hope for such things. But I might as well have asked for castles made of stardust.

To begin with, it was not for the purpose of unifying or edifying the human family that the United States had pushed to the moon. The reasons were nakedly political and military, with poetry only a residual effect.

A mission born of such motives could not, in itself, perform the magic for which I wished. Back home on our little planet, even as Armstrong's boot met the ageless dust, the fighting raged.

40 short years
Forty years is a long time and a short time. It is long enough for a youth to turn gray and yet short enough that the old man can sum up its course in a few short sentences, though volumes are needed to fill in the details.

In the lexicon of those 40 years we find Vietnam, Cambodia, India-Pakistan, Nicaragua, Congo, Lebanon, Israel, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, and Iraq again. We find an ominously changing global climate, a popular culture suffused with vulgarity and the idolatry of celebrity worship and an economic system driven to its knees by collective and individual greed.

In Arizona, we find a hateful and deepening schism over the natural and predictable consequences of placing one of the world's richest nations in direct proximity to one of its poorest.

In a day when intelligence has never been more vital, we find a public discourse, much of it cloaked in the cowardly anonymity of the Internet and talk radio, more akin to playground taunts than to adult conversation.

So much for learning anything from those achingly beautiful pictures of our fragile little world, "coursing the void" in my verbiage of old.

And, getting back to what kicked off this polemic in the first place, we find a space program that not only has failed to reach the stars but that for decades has not aspired even to the moon.

That is not to say we should go rushing back. Heaven knows, there's enough work here on Earth.
But doesn't it seem odd?
Forty years ago, we watched the black-and-white moving pictures from another world as they appeared on our TV screen and I took photos of the images as they arrived, thinking somehow I was watching the world change.

Five successful efforts and one nearly disastrous Apollo mission followed Apollo 11, the last in December 1972 - all done with technology less sophisticated than what most of us now deploy on our cellphones.

And then we stopped.

It was partly money and partly lack of interest and partly a lot of things, I suppose. Been there, done that. What else is on?

And for all the memories and ruminations stirred up by this 40th anniversary, for all my angst over the fumbled dreams of a youthful newspaper column, I end this one with a question that hangs, without answer, in a void of its own:

Who ever would have thought that going to the moon would be something we used to do, long, long ago?