by Chris Jones
There were more cradled in the oak trees around them. And more still in the corner of a nearby pasture.
Jim Wetherbee, who had volunteered to head the recovery operation, was already on his way from Houston. Soon he would pay a visit to the Coday brothers. Over the next five days, Wetherbee’s team found the remains of all seven astronauts. With each new nightmare report, police tape went up. Reverends issued last rites. The remains were carried away in hearses driven by local funeral directors and later flown to Delaware for identification. Finally, they were returned to their families.
But in some way, those astronauts had arrived home long before, in the instant they had found rest in the East Texas hills. They had traveled millions of miles and somehow, as if by fate, they had wrapped their way around the world and into the arms of these wide-open spaces, the big sky country that astronauts usually come from and to which they inevitably return: to places like Lufkin, Hemphill, and Littlefield, all of those prideful small towns that the wind has scattered across the landscape like seeds. From space, when darkness spreads across them, they light up one by one, looking so much like stars laid against the night.
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Don Pettit was born and raised in Silverton, Oregon, another one of those seeds, another one of those stars. There are farmers there and loggers and Pettit’s father, Virgil, was their doctor. He did a little bit of everything, from pulling out gallbladders that looked like bags of marbles to delivering babies, all for what his patients could afford on that particular afternoon. He would receive letters from the American Medical Association suggesting strongly that he raise his rates, but Dr. Pettit always believed that fast pennies were better than slow dollars, and besides, the way he ran things made him feel good. Don, the youngest of his three sons, would go down to the office and watch him work; he took the theory of his father’s practice to heart. He also took to pulling out the old, brown skeleton that sat jumbled in a bottom drawer and trying to piece it back together. It’s hard to know, exactly, but maybe that’s where Pettit the Younger picked up his tic for making parts into their intended whole. Later, one of his brothers gave him a two-speed transmission for his birthday, and Pettit still remembers it as the best present he’s ever received. He spent entire afternoons taking it apart and putting it together until he could knit it through by touch.
Transmissions gave way to windup clocks, windup clocks to the logging equipment that he repaired during his summers off from school.
Not surprisingly, when it came time for Pettit to head to university and choose a course of study, he picked something that would give him puzzles to solve: chemical engineering at Oregon State University in nearby Corvallis. There he pulled apart problems instead of machines, honing his natural bent toward analytical thinking, but he was also being encouraged to tap the unconventional streak that ran through him, mostly by a professor named Dr. Octave Levenspiel. When devising a conundrum about gas molecules and entropy, Dr. Levenspiel would find a way to make it about canaries in a cage. Teaching the fine art of approximation, he would ask Pettit how many barbers plied their trade in New York City. Like a magician training an apprentice, he taught Pettit tricks. He stretched him, too, and groomed him for big dreaming—engineers had picked up from God in building the world. Suddenly all of the things that Pettit was obsessed with as a kid—airplanes, electric trains, and rockets, especially—came back into play, part of the larger equation. Nothing was out of his reach, not even space.
He had spent countless childhood nights staring through his brother’s cheap telescope, trying to pick out planets that looked more like fuzzy footballs. And he had listened again and again to John Glenn describing how earth looked from orbit, the astronaut’s voice scratching through a free floppy record that came with Pettit’s new pair of Red Ball Jets.
A throw-in with his sneakers made him want desperately to look over Glenn’s shoulder and enjoy the same view. With the help of Dr. Levenspiel, childhood fantasy seemed that much closer to coming true. The universe started to look like that old two-speed transmission, like just another machine for him to find his way through.
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Like Pettit, Ken Bowersox came of age under orbits. When he was eight years old, he sat in the front seat of his father’s car, the pair of them tooling around their hometown of Bedford, Indiana, glued to the radio broadcast of John Glenn’s trip around the earth. Along with a million other Midwestern kids, Bowersox decided over those fantastic few minutes that he wanted to become an astronaut. Unlike most of the rest of them, he never changed his mind. A few years later, in junior high school, his class was given boilerplate career handouts that outlined the best way to pursue every job then invented. Bowersox immediately grabbed the sheet that pointed toward space and committed the directions to memory: he needed to attend a military academy or a college with a strong foundation in engineering, complete exemplary military service, and finally seal the deal with time served as a test pilot. In that moment, his life’s course was charted as precisely as if he were following points on a map.
His first stop was the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. At first glance, with its grassy courtyards, mature trees, and collection of redbrick colonial buildings, the campus looks like any other upmarket Eastern school. But deeper inspection reveals all of the small things that separate it from Harvard or Princeton. Through the blankets of cold rain that so often lash the Chesapeake coast, students’ white caps stand out against dark skies and uniform coats; a guardhouse watches over the front gate; cannons and anchors are scattered about the yard; a massive bronze bust of Tecumseh takes another beating from the elements. Founded in 1845, it is the navy’s answer to West Point, where smart kids with short haircuts find the resolve to captain ships. Their rivals in the air force might dismissively refer to the school as Canoe U., but not surprisingly, the academy has proved this country’s most fertile ground for harvesting astronauts. To date, more than fifty have been born here as if stamped from a factory mold—which, in some ways, they have been.
Bowersox, like the students before and after him, began his four-year Officer Training Program on Induction Day, the start of the daunting “Plebe Summer,” a seven-week boot camp for incoming recruits. From their first hours on campus, midshipmen are taught how to wear their crisp new uniforms and how to salute. They also take their oath of office, promising to abide by the academy’s honor code: “Midshipmen are persons of integrity,” it begins. “They stand for that which is right.” The rest of their summer days begin at dawn with a rigorous program of exercise and drills; lessons in seamanship, navigation, and boat handling; as well as training in small arms. (It is not the usual orientation week by any stretch.)
The rest of their undergraduate education is built on a similarly strict regimen dedicated to making them fit for command. The 4,000 students are divided into thirty companies; for the next four years, they eat, sleep, study, drill, parade, and compete as a well-disciplined unit. All hands are up at half past six. Each day is filled with six hours of class. Each student takes a core curriculum in engineering, science, mathematics, humanities, and social science. In between, they march to meals en masse. Afternoon athletics are mandatory. (It’s not unusual to see a group of uniformed midshipmen running around with logs or boats hoisted over their shoulders.) Twice a week, there are yard drills and parades. Without fail, lights are out at midnight.
It’s a demanding routine that Bowersox slipped into easily. He liked the discipline of it, the feeling of falling into bed exhausted, having squeezed the most he could have out of a day. He thrived academically, became addicted to long, solitary evening jogs, and demonstrated a quiet leadership. On those rare occasions when he needed a boost, he stopped by the campus museum to look at the portraits of those academy graduates who had gone on to become astronauts: Alan Shepard Jr. (1945); Wally Schirra (1946); Jim Lovell, Tom Stafford, and Donn Eisele (1952); William A. Anders (1955); Charles Duke Jr. (1957); and dozens more since. In the displ
ay cases nearby, there remains the small blue Naval Academy flag that Shepard took on board Apollo 14, and the sheet of brown paper inked with gold block letters (BEAT ARMY!), carried on Geminis VI and VII. These artifacts gave him hope, as if space wasn’t all that far away.
He was also picked up every time he walked in and out of Bancroft Hall, the giant, cathedral-like dormitory that he called home. There, lost among the stone columns and the vaulted ceilings and with the last of the day’s light shining through stained glass, he listened to the echoes of choirs singing before supper. He took in the vast mural of the Battle of Santa Cruz, bombs splashing in the water. And there in Memorial Hall, reflected in its polished wood floor, he saw the battle ensign flown by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie, on September 10, 1813. In tall white letters, the commodore had stitched onto a big blue flag the dying words of James Lawrence, captain of the USS Chesapeake: DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP.
By the time Ken Bowersox threw his white cap into the air at his graduation, class of 1978, those five words had been stamped onto his heart like a tattoo.
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After earning his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from a more conventional school—New York City’s Columbia University—in 1979, Bowersox headed to the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and over the course of two long, demanding years, he learned how to fly. Almost immediately, he was posted to Attack Squadron 22 on board the USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and still, more than four decades after its christening, the world’s largest. During its historic service, it has blockaded Cuba, patrolled the Mediterranean, anchored off Vietnam (ultimately playing an integral part in the evacuation of Saigon), charted course through the Suez Canal, and made a historic 30,565-mile trip around the world without refueling or replenishment. It is a monster, and in the cockpit of an A-7E, on the deck of the navy’s most storied ship, cruising the Western Pacific, Bowersox found himself exactly where he had wanted to be.
Despite sharing his post with 4,600 crewmates, he soon learned that life on a ship was an exercise in loneliness. Waving goodbye to families gathered on shore, the sailors and pilots lined up on deck routinely headed for voyages six months long. On those rare occasions when they visited land, it was sometimes hostile, and they were almost always strangers to it. And for as long as they were at sea, the satellite phone was off-limits except for emergencies, and mail from home was usually a month behind, an information lag that gave aches. Like marooned castaways, the sailors were separated from their former lives and loved ones by thousands of miles of bottomless ocean. Together, they became hermits and monks.
The pilots among them became projectiles, too. Landing on an aircraft carrier, even one as large as the Enterprise, was like getting fired out of a cannon into a very small net. The runway was short, narrow, and moving, probably forward at speed, and probably with tremors and rolls thrown in for good measure. Each time he came in for touchdown, Bowersox would turn in toward home, listen for corrections to his flight path, make sure his wheels were dropped, and deploy his tail hook—the flimsy-seeming catch that, if everything went the way it was supposed to, would grab hold of the arresting gear, four steel cables lashed across the decks. He would hit the deck with enough force to blow out smoke, and just in case his tail hook missed the mark—just in case his A-7E became a “bolter,” in navy parlance—he would land with his engines at full power, giving him just enough juice to take off again if he went unstopped and reached the front of the ship. Otherwise, he would fall into the deep end of the ocean, and all of his dreams might drown with him.
More than three hundred times, Bowersox slammed down on the deck of the Enterprise. And more than three hundred times, he came to a jarring halt. He had it down so cold, it began to feel as though he was pulling into his driveway, another night safe at home.
Eventually, however, the Midwestern boy in him decided that it was high time to get his land legs back. Having become all too used to staking his life on a length of steel cable, he chose to fly as far as he could from life at sea.
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The desert draws out the peculiars, mostly because it takes a special breed to live in a place that doesn’t want the company. That’s why we bring our worst prisoners here, stashing them behind high fences and miles of suicide country, and it’s why we put signs on the roadside warning late-night drivers not to pick up hitchhikers, especially those still wearing jumpsuits and foot restraints. But it’s also why so many more come here by choice, even if it’s sometimes a desperate one. They like that darkness falls harder here than anywhere else in the world, the last drops of moonlight swallowed up by the sand, their headlight beams disappearing into the black. They like the emptiness. They like the echoes. They like that their radios sometimes go out. They like the mystery of what lurks around the next bend. They like the ghost towns, this landscape of sagging rooflines and boarded-up gas stations. And with it, they like the good feeling that comes with surviving in a place that has sent countless others packing. It’s as if they like being surrounded by the starkness of failure, because that makes even their smallest successes feel that much more like triumph.
Perhaps that’s why, too, we’ve always made this place our proving grounds, blowing the almighty crap out of sound barriers and land-speed records and chunks of New Mexico. Of course, there are plenty of other, equally good reasons for exorcising those demons out here. The chances of hitting a house with a mistake are slim. There aren’t too many spying eyes. And there are the great salt flats that stretch far enough into the horizon to compensate for the biggest touchdown miss. But even those salt flats look small next to that larger truth: when engaging in a business in which things often don’t work out—like flirting with the laws of thermodynamics—it never hurts to stand shoulder to shoulder with a long line of hard-luck cases. Because then, even at your loneliest, you’re never really alone. That’s why the Southwest will forever remain a pioneer’s territory, and that’s why it’s crawling with astronauts and the men who might become them.
It doesn’t hurt that in the waiting until they get to touch space, space will touch them. Living in the desert is like a test drive for life in orbit. Here, like nowhere else on earth, the line that separates up there from down here is blurred, a vanishing point lost in all of that highway shimmer.
East of Flagstaff, Arizona, down a long, straight road that forks off I-40, just a few miles past the Mobil filling station and the Meteor Crater RV Park, there’s a spot that marked first the death, and then the birth, of all that’s happened since. Over a rocky crest that rises out of the featureless plain, a hole suddenly opens up, 550 feet deep and more than 4,000 feet across. (If it were a football arena, more than two million spectators could sit on its slopes and take in twenty games at once.) This particular hole was made 50,000 years ago by a massive iron-nickel meteor, which struck the desert hard enough to turn graphite into diamonds. Out of that impact was also born a boundless fascination, first recorded by one of Custer’s scouts, a man named Franklin, in 1871, and later shared by curious sheepherders, ranchers, miners, geologists, and, ultimately, astronauts. The Apollo classes came here to test-run spacesuits and buggies, because it was only a small leap between the crater’s landscape and the moon’s. From the edge of that hole, the universe feels almost uncomfortably intimate, the way it did that morning when Columbia and its crew returned to earth.
The reality is, it’s part of the natural order of things for objects to fall out of the sky. Every time we launch into space, we’re defying the universe’s most basic mechanics. Meteor Crater is a reminder of that. So are the myriad strange bits of asteroid lore hidden in the pages of old newspapers, like the story of that evening in 1954 when Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, found Heaven in her lap. (The Southern lady was in repose on her couch when a meteorite weighing almost nine pounds crashed through her living-room ceiling, bounced off the top of her wireless, and settled in the crook of
her matronly hips.) Or, more recently, there was an afternoon in 1992, when a twenty-seven-pound intergalactic hailstone had eyes for a red Chevy Malibu in Peekskill, New York.
Every time something like that happens, a string is tied between us and the stars. When something the magnitude of the meteor that tore a hole into Arizona comes down, that string is more like a corridor, as if a portal has been opened, or a beam of light has been left to track across the night sky the way the glow from Las Vegas banks against clouds, luring gamblers from hundreds of miles around. Whatever it is, it’s a magnet, helping the desert draw out not just the peculiars but the downright alien.
There was the reputed 1947 spacecraft crash and Martian capture outside Roswell, New Mexico, which now boasts the UFO Museum and Research Center and the UFO Hall of Fame, as well as an impressive collection of souvenirs: little green men, both inflatable and stuffed, and alien-themed T-shirts, shot glasses, antenna balls, bibs, key chains, bumper stickers, ties, caps, mugs, welcome mats, bandanas, and pots of German chocolate topping. There is Area 51, a long way off Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway, defined by a lonely black mailbox and signs announcing that deadly force is authorized in the elimination of trespassers. And there is the windswept little town of Rachel, Nevada, and its A’le’Inn, marked by the roadside presence of a flying saucer hanging from an old Chevy crane, and with its smoke-stained walls lined with photographic evidence of unearthly visitations in Chandler, Arizona, and Pacific Palisades, California, and Kanarraville, Utah. (Rachel’s ominous population sign—HUMANS 98, ALIENS ?—also invites a second look.) Roll in the Southwest’s collection of observatories, air fields, government labs, and plain old black magic, and it’s no wonder that Don Pettit and Ken Bowersox were finally drawn here, too. It’s pit-stop city for star chasers.
