Moondust (20 page)

By the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Moon landing in 1994, the
Cincinnati Post
was running another piece, this time headed “In Search of the Man in the Moon,” which claimed that “to most of his neighbours, Armstrong may as well be the man on the Moon.” The
New York Times
went with “In Rural Ohio, Armstrong Quietly Lives on His Own Dark Side of the Moon.” As if to confirm as much, almost no one had noticed when he and Janet, his wife of thirty-eight years, divorced a few months earlier. By July, there were rumours that he had already remarried, but no one could be sure, because the court records were sealed. The
Times
reporter found that the people of Lebanon wouldn't talk to him, but when a weeklong celebration of the anniversary took place in Wapakoneta, some townsfolk expressed annoyance that he refused to attend. Even NASA staff are recorded as taking offence at his refusal to sign autographs. All the same, the very few people who can count themselves as friends of the First Man on the Moon insist that he is warm, loyal and friendly, and I hear intriguing rumours of him playing ragtime piano at family get-togethers, which no one seems able to confirm or dismiss.

You don't need to be an amateur psychologist to find seeds of all this in his childhood. Armstrong was the eldest of three children, with a mother who looked after the home while his father
worked as an auditor for the state of Ohio. This involved inspecting the books of individual counties over the course of a year, after which the family would pack the car and move to the next county, where another rented, furnished apartment or house would be found. Making close friends must have seemed pointless and painful, especially when the family appears to have provided a secure, stable alternative. His mother was a lover of books and music, who taught him to read before he hit school and arranged piano lessons when the family could afford it. He also had an attentive father, who allowed his boy to skip Sunday school for a first plane ride when a visiting flier was in town and became an assistant scout master when Neil joined the Boy Scouts. In the early years, his passion was model airplanes, but by the time high school came, the family had finally settled in Wapakoneta and the available records suggest that he thrived. When he got a job at a local bakery, he used the money to buy a baritone horn and joined the school band; he was on the student council, took part in drama, sang in the “Glee Club” and, for a brief time, played in a jazz group called the Mississippi Moonshiners. His teachers later recalled an excellent student, a perfectionist with an enthusiasm for math, science and astronomy. A neighbour whose telescope the young Armstrong borrowed remembers him as polite, bright, intensely quiet.

He got his pilot's licence and graduated high school at the age of sixteen, then won a U.S. Navy scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at Purdue. There is a story that when the acceptance notice came, his mother was so surprised by his shout of joy that she dropped a jar on her toe and was hobbling for days. Thereafter: he was called up to Korea, where he bailed out once, had part of a wing torn off yet wrestled the plane home, and won three air medals; returned to Purdue and met Janet in 1952, but took two years to ask her out (“Neil is never one to rush into anything”); then landed a job as a research pilot for NACA (soon to become NASA) at Edwards in 1956. A son, Eric, was born in 1957 and a daughter, Karen, two years after that. When NASA took on the first astronauts in 1959, he fell for the “Spam in a can” line and didn't apply, because in an airplane, he was an artist, able to control a twenty-ton machine at
Mach 1.5 with the delicacy and grace of a painter applying his brush. Instead, he stayed at Edwards and flew the now legendary X-15 rocket plane seven times, coaxing her to 200,000 feet and almost 4,000 miles per hour. When the next intake of astronauts was announced in April 1962, though, he applied and was selected from a field of 253, one of two civilians in his group, the other being Elliott See, whose death gifted Buzz Aldrin his place on
Gemini 12.
That must have been a strange and unsettled year in the Armstrong household; three months earlier, on her parents' sixth anniversary, Karen had died of an inoperable brain tumour. Another son, Mark, was born in 1963.

In 1966, Armstrong became the first civilian to fly in space, on
Gemini 8
with David Scott, by which time he was already riling reporters. One grumbled that “He disdains all talk about people. He prefers to talk about ideas and hardware.” Immediately prior to
Apollo 11,
the
Journal Herald
of Dayton, Ohio, asked how he felt about his chance to be the first person on the Moon and the gods of language ran screaming from the room.

“I'm certainly not going to say that I'm without emotion at the thought,” he confessed, “because that wouldn't be factual … I don't think very much about the emotional aspects.”

Son Mark was more eloquent, with his “My daddy's going to the Moon. It will take him three days to get there. I want to go to the Moon someday with my daddy.” Like the rest of us, Mark would never get the chance.

It's reckoned that almost 600 million people watched the landing, in a world containing a fraction of the number of TV sets that it does today. The most curious thing about Armstrong then was the fact that even at the age of thirty-nine, he looked no older than twenty-six. As Mailer said, “something particularly innocent or subtly sinister was in the gentle remote air.” And I know how Mailer felt as I rattle into Reno on a casino courtesy bus, then pick my way between the slot machines in a lengthy search for the elevator and my room at the Sands Regency.

The place is heaving because the National Air Races are in town. Last time, they had to be cancelled because of the still-unfolding disaster in New York, but this year they're pugnaciously back and on Saturday something special is scheduled:
an Apollo Astronauts Reunion Dinner, featuring a lineup of Apollo and Skylab spacemen who will attend as honorary race marshals. Buzz will be there and so will Dick Gordon, and interest among Apollo buffs was politely enthusiastic until a rumour got out that “Neil” might appear, at which point chat-room roofs were raised and a mad scramble for seats began. The difficulty was that single places were not for sale. The only way to make it was to buy a table, starting at $1,000 and rising to $5,000, and it took me a hair-tearing week and five hundred bucks to track down a spare seat at the table of a kindly space-nut dentist named Bill. He told me that the race authorities had made it as difficult as possible for him to buy his table, because the dinner had been shaping up as a nice industry jolly until word got out about Armstrong – at which point the fans descended in pestering droves, as if pouring from some embarrassing rip in the fabric of the race-jock universe. But I got my ticket. Now I'm here.

I had a fantasy as a boy, born of being marched through casinos longing to stop and bathe in the sights and sounds and smells, the flashing lights and falling coins and free whiskey sours distributed by smiling waitresses in costumes that remade breasts as satin warheads, but not being allowed to because of my age and the strict Nevada gaming regulations, which didn't even sanction you to stop and look. When I grew up, I said, I was going to get a Harley and drift through the mountains to hit the tables in this town, and I suppose what I had in mind was the posters that hung in the shopping mall of Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson astride their choppers in
Easy Rider.

A few years after that film's release (within months of Armstrong's touchdown), we sneaked into the local cinema to see it and the scene I remember most was where the hippy drifters sit around a campfire, licking their wounds after a brush with some local rednecks, and Nicholson drawls, “Oh, yeah, they gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em” (he's right, too, because that night the rednecks sneak into the woods and kill him). Clearly, in my boy's imagination the casinos of
Reno represented the kind of freedom Jack was talking about, but now, through jaded grown-up eyes, I see only squalor, the most melancholy place I've ever been – more so than Helsinki in winter or Colombo in Sri Lanka, which has the excuse of a long-running civil war. The one-armed bandits pall quickly and the gaming tables sit in a fug of desperation, yet at nine in the morning there are people with beers in front of them, shovelling money as if in a trance. I've never seen pawnshop superstores before, nor corner shops selling Devil's Food Cake
lite.

So on Friday morning I'm pleased to be in the open air, or at least riding a bus on my way to some. The Stead airfield nestles in the feathery hills just north of Reno. The astronauts did their survival training near here, and the notorious Area 51, where the Roswell alien was purportedly held and hoax theorists claim the Moon landings to have been filmed, is a rocket's flight into the scrub and powder soil. Some of the fighter pilot astronauts learned to fly combat here, too: in
Carrying the Fire,
Michael Collins notes that twenty-two of his classmates died on the eleven-week course. Today, his heirs, plane enthusiasts, speed junkies, thrill-seekers to a man (and occasionally a woman), will skim tight circles around a series of pylons erected in the high desert, so close that they could almost reach out of their canopies and high-five each other, and low enough to the dust devils on the plain that you feel as though you're right in there among them. It's a dangerous business, an American pioneer thing that would have safety officials throwing themselves off cliffs in the U.K. or anywhere else, but by God, it's exciting to watch. This year, for the first time, they have a jet class, with eight pilots flying old Czech L-39s, which have been cheap to buy since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

What makes people fly jets or climb into rockets? I went for a twirl with a pilot from the Royal Air Force's Red Arrows display team to find out. His name was Dicky, he was twenty-seven and, like the other pilots I met that day, he had a calmness and sense of containment about him that was impressive. He'd grown up near an airport and from the age of about five would stand in his garden noting the times of the planes' passing and
what kind they were. It was a given that he was going to fly when he grew up, so he joined the Royal Air Force and there was a strange intimacy in his relationship with his plane, as though they were lovers rather than man and machine. Dicky told me that he had no desire at all to drop bombs on anyone, though of course he would if ordered to. He also taught me about the constant calculation that goes on in the mind of a pilot in relation to speeds and heights and angles, noting that it's perfectly possible to reach the top of a low-level loop and suddenly apprehend that an unfortunate miscalculation moments ago makes it a mathematical certainty that you will be hitting the runway in 4.3 seconds, at a speed of 358 nautical miles per hour. In fact, one of the Red Arrows had done just this the previous year.

What I learned, though, is that Ed and Dick and Buzz are right about fast flying. It takes no effort on my part to recall the sensations. The British Aerospace Hawk is a trainer plane, meaning that you sit in an elevated position behind the instructor, with your own joystick and throttle. On takeoff, the cramped cockpit gets imposingly hot, but with only glass and air surrounding you, you seem to be hovering, to be part of the sky – an experience more akin to riding a magic carpet than flying in the back of a commercial airliner. When you turn, the wing dips through a full ninety degrees, until you're perpendicular to the ground and intuition insists that you are about to plummet like a stone to meet it. You think that no one can hear you scream up there, but Dicky absolutely heard me. He also heard me giggle like a tickled infant when he flipped the Hawk over and we were powering along upside down, lifting our eyes to the homes and lives of all the not-pilots below. Dicky showed me how to do a loop and I flew my own, sliding the throttle full forward and pulling back on the stick in a way so counter to instinct that it takes a real effort to do it – but the thrill was indescribable. Coming over the top, I had what the pilot afterwards described as a grey-out, where the capillaries at the back of the eye are compressed to the point where vision blurs and momentarily dissolves into a grey vortex, and on the way down, we pulled four
“Gs,” which is a sensation like no other: an inescapable, stifling physical presence that pins you to your seat and takes your breath away, as though you're being crushed by some misanthropic phantom. One “G” is equivalent to the force of Earth's gravity: four “Gs” are four times that force.

But there was more. Red Arrows planes are fitted with smoke pods for use in displays and Dicky's “Red 7” had a new one which needed to be tested for stability at speed. To do this, we swooped down to 1,000 feet at 500 knots, then pulled back the stick and shot directly upward, exactly like a rocket, to 17,000 feet. The manoeuvre took seconds, but felt like aeons and as the plane gradually slowed I was left with a disorientation so complete that my mind simply abandoned ship. I was seated, but there was no pressure anywhere on my body, just a sense of floating in a horizonless, uniform, azure void, with nothing to provide perspective or evidence of where the world was, or even confirmation that it existed outside of myself. It occurs to me now that this is what Kubrick was trying to suggest in the closing scenes of
2001;
an approach to nothingness or infinity, a state in which the mind dissolves into everything, no longer grasps itself; a foretaste of the unimaginable,
the end.
Still the most intense and extraordinary sensation I have ever had, when I told Dick Gordon about it, he enthused, “Hey, you'd have experienced some zero G there!” – just like in space. Bloody right, I said, and on the way back, having tumbled out nose-first and dropped down like a brick, we made six Gs and I blacked out properly, to wake with no control over my limbs. Pilots call this “lock-in” and it typically lasts about ten seconds. If it happens to one of them while flying solo, they're unlikely to survive it, though of course they train hard to make sure that it doesn't. A little later, after a succession of aggressive “skid and rolls” at 200 feet, I was finally sick. I got the feeling that Dicky wouldn't have been satisfied until I was. My respect for pilots is absolute.