Moondust (48 page)

Reviewing all these thoughts, I knew what to do about Armstrong, this intensely private man who's worn his special place in our mythology of ourselves with such dignity, who's had the decency not to crowd our imaginations or diminish our fantasies by fixing them with words he struggles to find. Who's refused to auction himself to our idolatry or give in and tell us what we want to hear; who sees the worst of us, but still allows us to look at him and see the best of ourselves. So I told him what I wanted to know: the fourteen minutes he spent on the lunar surface on his own, utterly alone, staring out at a meticulously shifting Universe, full of unimaginable forces and giant, inscrutable, unstoppable bodies, but no
mind
like his … was the feeling like any he'd had before? Like sex? Like swimming in the sea at night? Going out without your parents on Halloween for the first time? Like he'd imagined all along, with no surprises? Did he feel alone, like a representative of the Earth, or closer to the stars? Did he leave us just for a moment and feel like Dave Bowman in
2001,
or want to tell Houston to fuck off and shut up
and let him just be there for a while? Did he feel adrift, or cosseted, or get the urge to do anything mad, like when you're standing waiting for the subway and get a fleeting impulse to jump and test the truth of mortality? Did he feel nothing at all?

And when he got back, did he feel longing? Relief? Irritation? Disappointment? The astronauts' nurse, Dee O'Hara, spoke of a kind of rage the early astronauts felt at being back in the realm of gravity, how they were always looking up and bumping into Earth's piteous furniture. Does Armstrong know what he thinks and feels about the adventure which asked for eight years of his life, then stole the rest? Does it make him want to scream? Cry? Smile? Laugh? Was it worth it? Does he wish he'd done something else instead, the way the iconic actor Paul Newman (on the screen as Butch Cassidy that year) wishes he'd become a marine biologist? Would he like to go again? Having had a privileged view of infinity, how does he feel about joining it when his time comes?

And I knew that Armstrong wouldn't, couldn't, answer these questions, but was struck by the pleasure I took in this knowledge, as in the realization that my “childish wonder,” far from being an impediment to understanding Apollo, had been the whole point of it; that perhaps it should be the point of more things, more often. Hours passed as I sat at the screen and it felt like a catharsis, the purging of a year spent finding different ways to ask the same question – because I could now see that in the end, everything boiled down to this: What was it like to stand on the Moon? I hit the send button and it was gone.

Nearly three decades have passed since I last gazed down from the steep hill upon which my junior high school once sat. It's a bright, cool January day and the sun is low; leafless trees cast long shadows across sidewalks and cars float slowly through the streets below. Again I wonder how it is that memories can seem so distant yet still feel like yesterday. I've returned to San Francisco many times over the years and in this moment am surprised that I've never made the short drive over the bay to revisit Orinda before now.

The Senate Watergate committee was in full swing and President Nixon on the ropes the week we started at the new school in August 1973, and everything in our lives seemed to change. The year before, we'd been running around calling the girls names, and they us, pretending we didn't like each other when really we did, but at junior high we were suddenly going to parties with each other like bantam adults, invited in pairs,
and at one I saw a couple disappearing into a bedroom, which shook me a little. The transformation had been so abrupt: how had we known to do this and who had decided that we would? In a new “health education” class, a studiously hip young teacher who let us sit on the desks as if we were at a be-in warned about VD and drugs, telling us that if you injected heroin three times you'd be an addict, and that at the huge California Jam festival, which Deep Purple headlines down the coast at the Ontario Speedway, “pushers” were sticking people with junk-filled needles at random in order to get them hooked. As with most things, I had no idea whether to believe her or not at the time, but later wasn't surprised when both claims turned out to be untrue.

Watergate had hung over the country like a cloud of noxious gas and left a haze of heightened cynicism in its wake, which combined with the oil crisis and rising unemployment to make the world feel much less stable than it had. Awful though the Vietnam War was, it had provided a focus for dissent and its corollary, hope, in comparison with which the new problems seemed so formless and hard to grasp, so
macro.
The California sun still shone and we still had fun, but the stakes of our lives had been raised in ways that we couldn't yet appreciate and that were already being reflected in the gritty realism favoured by a new wave of American film directors like Scorsese and Bogdanovich; in the pre-1963 nostalgia of George Lucas's
American Graffiti
and Samaritans comforting people outside
The Exorcist
as the spiritual revolution turned in on itself. More seriously for me, my hero Evel Knievel became a laughingstock when he attempted to “jump” Snake River Canyon in a rocket, a stunt which made him look like a cheap circus daredevil and reeked of desperation. I'd thought the arcs he traced through the air on his bike were about flight, but this was just showbiz. He'd lost his way, too.

The hills are softer and rounder and more closely huddled than I remember, beautiful in a way that I couldn't see as a child, and just in case anyone still doubts that the real victors of the Cold War were estate agents, the place is now called “Orinda Village.” Amazingly, my old playmate David from the day of the first landing is still here, newly divorced but little changed and
living in the same street, and so is the old clapboard house where those ghosts of ghosts drifted across the screen that day. When the Golden Age was done, we had to move because Dad had left his job and couldn't find another to satisfy him. We spent the summer building a retaining wall to stop the garden slipping into the creek that ran through the back, in which I spent hours catching frogs and newts while savings dwindled and Mum grew increasingly fraught, and when the work was done, we left for England in the summer of 1974, where a blistering heatwave was followed by three months of solid slate skies and rain. The foundations of the retaining wall are still there because Dad had designed it well – in the way of his generation, who've always seemed to me more rounded than my own. Two years older than Armstrong, he could build anything, but what he dreamt of being was a writer: all my life he was working on a book that, like Apollo, was never finished, and I wonder as I stand waiting for the dusk to come whether it's coincidence that finishing this one has felt so strange? I mention this because there was a point towards the end of my travels when almost everything, not least the lunar programme itself, began to look like part of the peculiar dynamic between fathers and sons – from JFK and his tyrannical, supercompetitive father onward. In the end it has to be about more than that – and if I had to capture the spirit of the spooky adventure in a word … for astronauts, dreamers, doubters, conspiracy theorists … the word would be
desire
– but it's part of the story all the same. It'll take me months to realize this, but when I set out on my return journey to Apollo I was within weeks of the age that my father was when
Apollo I
set down in the lunar dust.

I spent a while at the old house, as the woman who lives there now explained that her kids never played in the creek because she thought it might be dangerous. These days it's hidden behind a fence and as I look around I seem to see fences everywhere: I thought my visit would feel like a homecoming, but in the event it feels more like a catharsis.

The question I started out with remains. Why had I wanted to come back to the time and place of Apollo? Why had Pete Conrad's death and Charlie Duke's “only nine” affected me the way
they did, impelling me to go and find them, fueled by anxiety that these people whom I'd barely thought about in the intervening years would soon be gone? For eighteen months this has vexed me, but suddenly the answer seems obvious: that the astronauts represent a time when the world seemed to reflect my own innocence. Bad things happened, all the time, in spades, but for a brief period people tried to convince themselves that these horrors stood against the natural order and run of humanity, as opposed to constituting its most perfect expression – that progress in the broadest sense could win the day, was liberating and inevitable. For me, the custodians of this radical and optimistic notion were the lunar astronauts and the flower children, both of whom promised bright futures that were later discredited and abandoned; that disappointed, yet retained a latent, almost involuntary, hold on the imagination. Little wonder that we as a culture return to them constantly, can't leave them alone. Like the curious decade that spawned them, they carry the fascination of the unresolved.

Little wonder that at about the astronauts' Moon age, the age they were when they flew, I'd wanted to find out what they and their era were worth, what they'd left us with – if anything. And in Apollo's case, it's clear that the answer had nothing to do with engineering or technology, that what it did, via Neil Armstrong's upstretched thumb, was afford us the enormous privilege of seeing ourselves for the first time as
small
. It's no coincidence that when I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact that they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he. Then, no matter what else I might be feeling, I also feel lucky, because in a cosmos of infinite scattered moments, each one I can lay claim to and use well seems precious. For me, this is the surprise collective lesson of the Moon men. No one was changed, but everyone was galvanized. Whatever they took with them, they brought back tenfold, like coals crushed to diamond. Through Apollo, the Moon did what it has always done: it shone fresh light on what was already there.

* * *

And still one surprise remains.

Against form and expectation, Armstrong got in touch, saying that he would be willing to try to answer my questions, making me laugh by adding that he would be more inclined to address matters of “fact” than “questions of opinion” – a much clearer distinction for him than it is for me, I suspect. In the months that followed, he proved unfailingly courteous if typically cautious in his responses, yet the truth is that the technical details of Apollo have been so extensively catalogued that few original “facts” remain for even him to disclose.

There was one particular exchange that I cherish, though. It followed my observation that in 1999 the reprinted edition of a book called
Chariots for Apollo
by Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff had revealed how close Armstrong's
Eagle
may have come to an unhappy end in the moments after landing, when a slug of frozen fuel became trapped in a pipe, causing a buildup of temperature and pressure that threatened to set the ship off like a hand grenade. Their story has engineers at Grumman headquarters scrambling for blueprints and ideas, guessing that they had five minutes, maybe ten if they were lucky, to sort the problem out. Someone suggested they “burp” the engine, but that carried a risk of tipping the module over, and studying the options, the engineering manager said, simply,
“Get them out of there.”
Yet just as concern was turning to panic on the ground, telemetry indicated that the fuel plug was shifting on its own. By this account, very few people have known how close
Eagle
came to recasting Tranquillity as a graveyard even before the One Small Step could be taken. How different America and the Sixties might look to us now if it had.

I'd mentioned to Armstrong that I've never seen this story anywhere else and had asked whether it was true as reported. He replied that although he considered the book in question “a case study in creative writing” (heinous crime!), the blockage was real and “we did have some discussion with Mission Control … [but] we were not unduly concerned about it.” This doesn't necessarily mean that the authors were exaggerating,
because Houston may have kept the seriousness of the situation from the crew, and in any case we have Michael Collins's word that “Neil never admits surprise.”

Of more interest to me, though, was the First Man's response to a supplementary question about “the strange, electronicsounding music” that Collins reported him taking to Luna, to which he offered a piece of trivial information that gives me as much pleasure as anything I discovered in the course of my research. He told me that he took Dvo
ř
ák's
New World
Symphony, but that the electronic sound I referred to was the theremin music of Dr. Samuel Hoffman, specifically an album called
Music Out of the Moon,
which he'd committed to tape from his own collection. The theremin was an early form of synthesizer, played by moving one's hands through two invisible radiostatic fields to produce a kind of unearthly quaver,
eerie,
like the pleadings of an alien choir. Now mostly associated with Fifties sci-fi movies such as
The Day the Earth Stood Still
and the Beach Boys' “Good Vibrations,” along with a few moody modern groups like Portishead, Armstrong's decision to make it part of his own sound track struck me as at once deeply, deeply eccentric and absolutely
perfect,
and ever since, when I've thought of Apollo, I've thought not of the first step or the raging Saturn, but of him and his little band drifting out there towards the secret Moon, spinning slowly to distribute the heat and spilling spooky theremin music out at the stars, who think it's just as weird as I do – and it occurs to me that in the final analysis this might be as good a way as any to remember Apollo, as a kind of collective dream, a tale from a comic book come to life. I'll drive away from Orinda thinking that it might be a while before we see anything like it again, but finding a rare peace in this knowledge. It's time to go home.