Moondust

by Andrew Smith

  “Well, I mean …” Charlie starts.

  “We’ve tried to talk to him about what we believe is the Truth, but he’s really going a different way.”

  “But we’re still good friends,” Charlie returns.

  I comment on the way that, the further we get from Apollo, the more avant-garde it’s coming to seem and Charlie agrees.

  “Well, to me, I think the wind was taken out of the sails of manned Deep Space missions because we didn’t discover any life out there. If we’d turned the camera on Mars and there’d been little green men looking back at us, we’d have been there by now.”

  We so badly want to believe that we’re not alone, don’t we? With a pang of envy, the thought occurs to me that the Dukes are lucky, because they don’t think they are. I tell Charlie that a few weeks ago there was a huge gold harvest moon and I spent ages trying to imagine standing on it. He listens, then scrunches up his eyes.

  “Yeah, I still do that, too,” he says. “Yeah. Wow.”

  Then he has to dash back to the gutter guy, while Dotty and I talk about her boys. I ask whether she thinks the relationship between them and their father healed completely? She says that she thinks it did, that the three of them just got back from a golf trip together and that they’re very close. One son is now an airline pilot, the other in business, so both followed in their father’s footsteps to a degree, but I wonder whether the unhappiness surrounding their early years had any long-term effects?

  “Well,” she says, “I know they made decisions, both of them, to be a more present father than their father was. And they’ve followed through with that, really wanting to be there, so that affected them some. And I think that they … neither one of them do I see raising voices or getting angry with their children like Charlie did, so that was probably a decision, too. So even though these were negative things, the boys took some positive things from them. And I don’t see any effect on them with their relationship with their daddy at all.”

  We talk about the time toward the end of the Seventies when she hit rock bottom and tried so many different ways to pick herself up, including drugs. Only with great difficulty can I picture Dotty toking on a spliff, I tease. Is that part of the story true? “Oh, yeah, it’s true. I say that to help some people identify. It was more a part of the party life, which most people realize is not really going to bring you deep fulfillment either. Then came the money. I think that’s really why women went into work, because your worth was judged by how much money you made and so women keep fighting that and getting more money so they can be worth more. I feel sorry for the women who are where I was, so pulled in different directions, always striving, striving.”

  I know she’s talking about a struggle which hasn’t gone away for most women, the competing pull of children and work. Dotty and her contemporaries were in the front line of that one. With Charlie gone, I now ask for her feelings about the Moon.

  “Well, I can see lots of benefits from going to the Moon. But for me, the most important benefit was to open doors for Charlie to be able to speak about God. I mean, if you go out and just speak about going to the Moon, you could start getting prideful and think, ‘Oh yeah, I’m better than everybody else, look what I’ve done.’ And that’s not good, you know, to build that ego. But when we had a purpose in speaking about the Moon – to lead people to the Lord – well, okay, I can support that. That really gives a value to it. Walking with God, and especially the joy of bringing someone else to God, is like walking on the Moon to me.”

  Michael Collins noted the way he avoided discussing danger with his wife, admitting, “I suppose I was afraid to measure the depth of Pat’s resentment and hostility toward this Apollo which held us both captive.” In the course of our conversation, there have been points where Dotty’s own resentment has threatened the Madonna smile. And this may be presumptuous, but it seems to me that she’s found the most ingenious way of bringing under her own control this thing over which she had none, and which ruled her life in the most callous possible way. Apollo is still a part of their lives, but now it passes through her, and takes its meaning from her.

  Charlie comes back and catches the end of his wife’s last thought, and I’m amused to note the slightest hint of impatience in his voice as he asks, “What was that?” and receives his lecture on the pridefulness of talking about the Moon with no higher purpose. He cocks his head to one side, not quite ready to sign up for this one.

  “Well, I … no,” he says evenly. “There’s an opportunity to share that experience, darling, ’cos it motivates people and it gives them an opportunity to dream and think and set goals.”

  He pauses for a moment, then continues.

  “There’s nothing wrong with setting goals, nothing wrong with having objectives in life – but if your goals are your God, then that’s a problem. If money’s your God, then you’ll never have money enough. And there’s nothing wrong with money. I mean, God gave us all that stuff. But if your focus is wrong and you put that above God, then that’s where the problem comes.”

  Now Dotty’s the dissenter. Her jaw sets slightly.

  “But if you just talk about the Moon and nothing more, it would get to be like a Hollywood star or something and your ego would build up more and more and more and more. If your whole life revolved around what you did thirty years ago, I think that your ego would be affected tremendously.”

  I just manage to slide in with the question “Have you seen that happen?” and receive a terse answer:

  “Yeah. Mm-hmm. I have …” before Charlie shamelessly changes the subject, drawling more rapidly than usual:

  “Well, anyway, here are the book and the tape …”

  He hands me a tract he wrote about his experiences, along with a video entitled Walk on the Moon. Walk with the Son. Then we’re finished and I’m in the yard explaining my plan to take in some sounds in swinging Austin before heading back south. Charlie’s a fan of country music and gets excited, giving me some advice on where to find a good “juke joint” when I get there, and I’ll spend the drive listening to Rufus Wainwright singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on a compilation I bought in Starbucks, and to my favourite country singer, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, who comes from up the road in Lubbock and owns the most heartbreaking song title of all time, “Have You Ever Seen Dallas from a DC-9 at Night?” When I get back to London and call Brian Eno to talk about his strange and beautiful sound track to For All Mankind (much of which is found on his Apollo album), he tells me it was partly inspired by learning that each astronaut was allowed to take one music cassette with them, and that most chose country and western.

  “I thought that said something interesting about how they saw themselves, which was as frontiersmen,” he says. “I also wanted to make something that didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere, that wasn’t rooted in the Earth – I wanted the roll with no rock, I guess! All the harmonic pieces I wrote for the film have a kind of unearthly country-and-western feel.”

  He adds that he loved the way one astronaut described the Moon as grey, then elaborated, “but until you’ve been there, you have no idea how many shades of grey there are.” He remembers being in a friend’s flat in Camberwell, South London, when the Eagle landed.

  “It was a full Moon that night and we looked out the window and saw it and thought, ‘My God, this is really happening.’ It was a magical moment. It just seemed incredible at the time.”

  Strangely, I remember there having been a full Moon that night, too, but an Apollo expert assures me that what we actually saw was a crescent. Either way that was eighteen months before Eno joined Roxy Music, one of the groups who would embody the shift from Sixties to Seventies. He says he’s not surprised that a lot of young people no more believe in the landings than they do the Easter Bunny.

  “It’s one of two redundant technological advances from that time, the other being Concorde. I know that one day I’ll be saying to my grandchildren, ‘Yes, we used to go to the Moon – and it only
took three and a half hours to get to New York!’ ”

  I take Charlie’s advice in Austin and spend an enchanted evening listening to a local star named Toni Price wail the best country blues I’ve ever heard. I also have time to consider how different I was with Dotty and him, asking far fewer questions than usual, happy to simply ride the tale as though it were a wave breaking toward the sun. And now I know why I enjoy listening to them so much. To me, their story is like a grown-up fairy tale, in which the world goes wild and dark, then turns out okay. I believe it in the same way that Dotty chose to believe in God – because I want to – and in the end it’s as true as anything else is true: with nothing more than Herculean effort and her own creativity, Dotty made everything all right. She’s happy. He’s happy. The other astronauts call her Lady Macbeth, but fuck ’em. She took on Luna and won.

  8

  Sons and Lunar Modules

  I thought I caught a glimpse of a faith like Dotty’s in the inner sanctum of a Hindu temple in Pune once. It felt less like a flash of light than the lifting of a veil, a stirring which was later traced to incense fog and the appealing way in which worshippers tended a big brass Shiva Lingam. I was disappointed then, because I knew that this wasn’t what anyone else in the place meant by enlightenment and that, like it or not, I’m a product of my time and specific circumstance: or to put it another way, what I know is television and rocket ships. When one of Andy Warhol’s friends asked him whether being shot in 1968 had changed him, he replied, “Have you ever seen anyone really change?” That question, so fundamental to what we are or aren’t as human beings, is finally drawing into sharper focus as Apollo 17, and the end, nears.

  * * *

  One of the great advantages God has over NASA is that, unlike the space agency, He can see you on the back side of the Moon. So when Jack Schmitt wanted to land on the uncanny far side, it was NASA who raised the objections. They understood that such daring might recapture the long-lost public imagination in December 1972, but with radio contact impossible it was too dangerous to countenance. Instead, the ship would set down in the stunning Taurus-Littrow Valley, on a flight billed as “Man’s Last Mission to the Moon.” The new ocean had become a pool of melancholy.

  Schmitt had fought like the devil to make sure that if a scientist flew it would be him, but there must have been times during training when he was tempted to ask “Why am I here?” in the most prosaic and Earthly sense. The scientist group of trainees had been recruited in 1965 under political pressure, but no one intended them to go anywhere, least of all the old-school fighter jocks Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard – who was known to geology tutors for his insolence and inattention on field trips. Then, with the glorious irony that pervades Apollo, it was Shepard’s golf-playing shenanigans on 14 that helped to take the decision out of their hands, as the labcoats rebelled, complaining loudly through the media that they were wasting their time; that great opportunities were being blown on the Biggles boys NASA kept puking into the sky (no less a figure than Eugene Shoemaker, the father of astrogeology, labelled the agency’s approach to science “completely miserable” while commentating for the BBC in London). With the organization catching flak from every angle now, the NASA brass buckled. Schmitt was in.

  The flight control staff were delighted for Jack, as were a few of the more thoughtful astronauts. Slayton, on the other hand, was livid: according to Chris Kraft, “he didn’t like any of the scientists,” regarding them as interfering eggheads who complicated missions and compromised safety – and also as the people who’d grounded him upon discovering that he had a minor heart complaint. A bigger problem still was the fury of Schmitt’s new commander, Gene Cernan, who raged against one of his crew, the luckless Joe Engle, being yanked from Apollo 17 in order to make way for the Caltech- and Harvard-educated geolo-gist. In Last Man on the Moon, which was coauthored with the journalist Don Davis and published as recently as 1999, Cernan reveals that he wishes he’d tried harder to have Ed Mitchell bumped from Apollo 14 in favour of Engle. He also alleges that Jan Evans’s reaction to hearing of Schmitt’s arrival in her husband Ron’s crew was, “We have to put up with that asshole?” (When I call her about this, she tells me that she has no memory of saying it, and told Cernan so before publication.) Neither does the Apollo 17 commander leave it there.

  “On a first introduction,” he adds, in case we’re not getting the picture, “he usually came across as unlikable, and his taciturn nature and brashness made it hard for people to get close to him. He didn’t seem to care a whit. That was part of our problem, for Jack just wasn’t my kind of guy.”

  In Cernan’s view, it didn’t help that his new LM pilot wasn’t a career aviator, “didn’t have the pilot gene,” even though Schmitt had been put through jet fighter training and finished second in a class of fifty. It also didn’t help that he was a bachelor with “as far as I could tell, no diversions whatever.” One of the jocks recalls inviting the geologist to a favourite Cape strip joint and watching in amazement as he spent the night trying to discuss rock collecting. As far as I can tell, no one even thought to suggest that he might be gay (he’s not) – that was too far off the scale. The aces just thought he was weird. In Cernan’s words, borrowed from the title of the hit movie and TV series from that time, this last flight was a case of “The Odd Couple Goes to the Moon.”

  Albuquerque sits on the magical southwest stretch of old Route 66, casually slung between the Rio Grande and the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. Before I knew that Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt lived here, the place meant little to me beyond Bugs Bunny and hot-air balloons, but to would-be astronauts of the Space Age it was the Lovelace Clinic, where prospective astronauts were pushed to the limits of endurance with arcane psychological tests and needles as long as Deke’s cigars, and armies of implements to be insinuated into the anus, as per the famous scenes in the film version of The Right Stuff, for reasons that no one could quite explain. Just up the road is Santa Fe, and near that Los Alamos, where they made, make, The Bomb and seem proud of it. But that’s all in the future for me. Right now, I’m sitting in the pueblo-style bar of an Old Town hotel, waiting for my second-to-last-man-on-the-Moon.

  I’ve been looking forward to this, because it seems to me that if anyone’s going to have original things to say about going to the Moon, it’ll be this “dour Sherlock Holmes” academic outsider with the luminous CV. More intriguing still is the fact that since reading Cernan’s view of Schmitt, the former flight director Gene Kranz has described him as “one of the few astronauts who really put a few away at our parties,” a man who “seemed to have no limit to his interests, and no end to his enthusiasms … an intellectual with the soul of an adventurer … an instigator who dropped a few well-chosen words in receptive ears and then let events roll on to what he knew would be a stormy, noisy, and wild conclusion.” Not the person Gene Cernan saw at all – more Indiana Jones than Holmes – and I’m wondering how to account for this disjunction.

  Schmitt didn’t marry until 1985 and has no children, but his career details are something else. He was the son of a mining geologist, raised around rocks and Indian reservations not far from here in Silver City. He was a key figure in geology training at NASA, helped to design many of the tools Moonwalkers took with them, and assembled some of the early composite photos of the lunar surface. He trained as a pilot, went to the Moon as an astronaut, then served as a Republican senator for New Mexico from 1977 to 1982. He’ll tell me that his politics were galvanized in the graduate school at Harvard, where he did time with Timothy Leary and any number of faculty radicals whose activities he disapproved of. Word is, however, that he was no more impressed with the myopia and short-term-ism he found at the heart of government, and by the end of his first term, the Moondust had worn off and he was voted out. Since then, he’s served on a number of official commissions and committees, was a member of the International Observer Group for the 1992 Romanian elections, and now makes his living through speaking, acting as
a consultant and serving on the board of various small companies who share his enthusiasm for free enterprise in space – and in particular for mining helium-3 (He-3), which is deposited on the lunar surface by the solar wind and considered to be a potential source of clean energy for Earth. No one has demonstrated the viability of He-3 fusion technology yet, but Schmitt’s working on it with a group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he also does some teaching. Whatever happens, he wants us to go back up there.

  Apollo’s ravishing last leap into the night of December 7 was bizarre for many reasons. Nineteen seventy-two had turned into a strange and eventful year, despite a familiar-seeming lead-in, with Vietnam still topping the news agenda as the media tried to paint the South Vietnamese troops’ chopper-hugging retreat from Laos as victory, while also reporting that 40,000 U.S. soldiers were now junkies. Concerned about his standing among students, President Nixon had sent the Apollo men Collins, Anders, Borman and Lovell out to speak to them and when they came back saying that the only hostility they’d faced was from young professors, Nixon exploded, flashing into a rage which startled his audience. Nevertheless, by the end of 1972, the president had manufactured rapprochement with China, an end to the war and a second term courtesy of the greatest electoral landslide in U.S. history. He’d also bathed the world economy in uncertainty by unilaterally dumping the gold standard, and in June, though we didn’t know it, had approved the burgling of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate. Yet the effects of these things weren’t immediately felt. What a child sensed was the deracination of Vietnam edging closer to home, imported by organizations like the Weathermen and the rock star–styled Baader-Meinhof Gang and by the IRA in Northern Ireland, where the British government had just introduced internment, and the Black September group, who killed nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.