The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (13 page)

On the practical level, though, the Space Race brought it all home, literally, into our living rooms through the new medium of television. Suddenly, the notion of space exploration was no longer confined to the pages of pulp sci-fi magazines or geek publications like
Popular Science—
the geek label itself, as currently understood, was another spinoff of fifties sci-fi first used by the writer Robert Heinlein, though the term’s popularity still lay decades ahead. Space exploration was real, it was happening, and you could watch it on TV. And you could do it with no less a luminary than CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite to narrate the adventure. Like Edward R. Murrow and Howard K. Smith, Cronkite belonged to a generation of old-school journalists who started out in print and radio and led the transition to television. Theirs was a respectable profession then; journalists were trusted to give us the straight story, and no one in the sixties and seventies was more trusted than the fatherly Cronkite. He didn’t soft-pedal the truth. The Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Watergate—Cronkite calmly explained them, articulating the real-time history of a confusing and rapidly changing world.

But what captivated me was Cronkite’s coverage of the space launches: first the timid suborbital flights of the Mercury astronauts, then the Gemini missions, followed by the climactic Apollo voyages—the trip around the moon and then the momentous landing of
Apollo 11
in July 1969. “Uncle Walter” was our witness through all of it, and never more so than during those early morning vigils in my living room when, in his company, I waited through yet another endless delay in the countdown due to some technical glitch or quirk in the weather. He always had a trove of technical details to share, his droning recitations of statistics and flight specs making the interminable holds tolerable, even interesting, for a bored and sleep-deprived youngster up at a brutally early hour. On those occasions I bonded to Walter, wanted if possible to
be
him someday. I often pictured myself as the fearless purveyor of truth, bravely resisting a jostling, angry crowd as I reported on the political unrest in some foreign hotspot. A lot of my peers have similar recollections of Cronkite, surely linked to our collective experience of monitoring those early launches. We believed in Cronkite then, like we believed in a lot of things that, with time, have grown to seem much less certain. “And that’s the way it is,” he’d famously say after his evening newscast, and we had no reason to doubt him.

The early days of the Space Race were on my mind in July 2011, as I followed the successful launch and landing of the orbiter
Atlantis
. With that—the 135th and last flight of the space shuttle—another phase in the brief history of space exploration came to an end. The shuttle era had begun with the launch of the orbiter
Columbia
thirty years earlier, on April 12, 1981. That date was the twentieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, the first time a human had ever traveled beyond the planet’s atmosphere. However short, Gagarin’s journey was a feat of evolutionary significance. Though rarely discussed in such terms, it was the first time since life had left the oceans for land billions of years ago that DNA-bearing organisms had penetrated a new and alien environment. Many attempts to leave the sea had surely occurred and failed, but only one had to succeed for life to gain a permanent terrestrial foothold. The same may be true of our first halting steps into space.

Gagarin’s flight is more often remembered for its geopolitical importance. The evil Russkies were about to beat us in space, it seemed, and at the technology game in general. In schools and on the launch pads, we had to respond posthaste if we wanted to save our cherished way of life from the Red Menace. The Soviet success pressed Kennedy to make his clarion call: America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And so it came to pass. For a couple of decades, much of humanity dared to believe our future did lie amid the stars. That aspiration seems charmingly naive and innocent now, in this age of ever-diminishing global resources, looming environmental catastrophe, and in flagging belief in our own capabilities, reflected in our diminished imagination about what the future can be.

With the end of the shuttle program, NASA seems to epitomize this uncertainty; indeed, some would say that it lost its guiding vision (and justification for existence) when the Apollo program ended in 1972. In this, the space agency is not unlike the rest of America. As a people and a country, America has lost its way; the future is no longer viewed as an uncharted vista, beckoning us with its promise of exploration and discovery, but as a prospect of dread, as something to be feared and delayed as long as possible. In the current political and social climate, denial of the future has become pervasive; many political and cultural leaders now seek to return to some delusional golden age that never existed, some Reagan-era fantasy where it is again Morning in America. It is not going to happen, and it never has happened. America veered off course decades ago, though only now are we beginning to see the consequences of our lack of vision. The future is not only coming, it’s already here. And I am concerned that we are facing it not as a challenge, but as a threat.

Although Kennedy’s challenge to America was inspiring and certainly stimulated much technological change, I can’t shake a feeling it was fundamentally flawed. I believe it reflected a failure to understand the impact of imagination on the unfolding of history. Kennedy’s vision appealed to a kind of chest-beating patriotic fervor about America and its greatness, but what were its practical benefits? We did go to the moon and back, repeating the trick several times. We also collected a lot of rocks and learned a lot about our technological limits. But beyond that, what did we gain? Certainly not the extraterrestrial foothold that many intuit to be the next step in human destiny.

In fact, we achieved nothing even close to that until three decades later, when the first piece of the International Space Station was launched in 1998. The ISS has garnered much less attention than the Apollo program. The space station may not be as inspiring or as sexy as the lunar program, but it is potentially far more significant. I have often wondered how different the twenty-first century might have been if Kennedy had given careful thought to the real goals of space exploration. What if he had called for a permanent manned space station instead of a lunar program whose consequences were pretty much limited to proving that, yes, ’Merica could do it? If Kennedy had made such an orbital base the country’s goal, we now might be mining asteroids for the bulk of our water and minerals, generating all of the world’s energy from solar-power satellites, and maintaining bases on the moon, possibly on Mars, and even in orbit around the outer planets. Instead he chose machismo over substance, threw down a technological gauntlet to the Russians, and pushed the Cold War to further heights of hostility.

Hindsight, of course, is always sharper than foresight. But our lack of clarity in understanding the significance of space exploration, not only for humanity but for earthly life, represents one of those bifurcations in the time-stream that will have serious consequences for the survival of our species and the larger biosphere. My fear is that we’ve reached that fork and taken the wrong branch. As a result, the future before us is not one of colonizing the solar system and eventually spreading earthly life throughout the galaxy. Instead, what we confront is an era of dwindling resources, ever more repressive political systems, the rising hegemony of know-nothing fundamentalism, and the accelerating contamination of our planet as we lurch toward a tipping-point that could destabilize the homeostatic feedback mechanisms that have kept Earth hospitable to life for the last 3.9 billion years. Ironically, we face the prospect of drowning in our own waste even as many deny that what is piling up around us is waste.

I’m quite sure that the actions we take—or fail to take—over the next decade will be critical for the continued existence of earthly life. I also believe that in fifty years we’ll look back and realize we made the wrong choices. We will have also failed to construct an escape hatch. I doubt this will mean an abrupt end to life here, although it could. But instead of remaining an island of life for millions of years, Earth will remain livable for at most a few centuries. We could still avert that fate if we woke up, but the chances of that look rather dismal. My fear is that it is too late to change course.

Fifty years of manned spaceflight is a tiny slice of time when we’re considering evolutionary processes that have played out over eons. Whether we’ll ever raft our species and other life forms beyond the planetary surface remains to be seen. Though our tentative efforts to date may not prevail, perhaps others will. As a Big Picture person, I find some consolation in the belief that our world is not the only place where this grand experiment is underway. Life surely permeates the cosmos, and though our pathetic steps may fall short, others elsewhere will someday succeed. Still, it’s a cold comfort here on earth, particularly for those with children.

Chapter 11 - First Loves: 1962

In the fall of 1961, at age ten, I started fifth grade at Paonia Junior High School, leaving behind Paonia Elementary and its undemanding teachers. Some of them were the archetypal “sweet old ladies,” others were kind of scary, and a few were slightly nuts. I had a lasting tie to my first school through Mrs. Mordica, a beloved first-grade teacher who lived alone in a tiny house across the street from ours. Years after I had moved away, I would stop by and say hello to her on my holiday visits. By then I must have looked pretty scary myself with my thick beard and long hair. That didn’t matter to Mrs. Mordica, who I always felt could see past appearance and judge us by our souls. One year I returned and learned that she’d passed on. I can hardly imagine all she must have witnessed in her life, and the knowledge that died with her.

In fifth grade I met a new set of teachers, but the old pattern held: some were good and some were not. I was still deeply into the Catholic religion at the time, but over the years ahead I’d learn there were different kinds of priests as well.

I was what some called a “good doggon,” meaning a faithful Catholic who regularly goes to mass and confession. My father was a good doggon, too. Though not a Catholic at first, my mother eventually joined the church and always had the mindset. She even taught catechism; I was in her class. I was also an altar boy. Living a block or so from the church, I was regularly tapped to serve early morning mass on weekdays. I hated being rousted out of bed at 6:30 to get ready, especially on icy winter mornings. The only other people there were the two old women who maintained the sacristy, setting out the priest’s vestments, the communion wafers, the ciborium, and the wine, in preparation for mass. They seemed incredibly ancient to me, wrinkled and bent over, invariably wearing scarves, like the peasant women from Eastern Europe I’d seen pictured in the
Book of Knowledge
. I regarded them as just part of the furnishings, like the statues or the crucifix over the altar.

It was a small parish, and the priests didn’t have a lot to do, so at times I’d hang out with them on summer afternoons. Some were interesting, others forbidding. Some were probably also alcoholics, though that’s a guess. The first priest I remember, Father McGrath, was by far the scariest. He was an Irishman who lived in the rectory with his elderly mother. Lacking any sense of humor, he had a rather dour outlook on life, and on little boys in particular. To him, almost everything was a mortal sin, but especially masturbation and impure thoughts, as he often told me so in a rumbling, gravelly brogue like the voice of doom: “It is a
moooortal
sin, Dennis!” It never occurred to me that I might just discontinue the practice; instead I learned to live with the guilt. I was relieved when Father McGrath got shipped off. I was still a horrible person, but at least he wasn’t around to remind me of it. His replacement, Father Hickey, was also an Irishman, but a basically nice guy who didn’t seem to think less of me when I confessed my various thought crimes. I had to wonder what he missed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred at the height of my involvement with the priests and the church. The conflict began in mid-October 1962 when an American spy plane spotted new bases in Cuba being built for an arsenal of Soviet nuclear missiles. The Soviets must have felt justified in parking their weapons so near the American mainland after the United States had placed similar ones in Europe, within striking distance of Moscow. The two-week confrontation pitted Kennedy, the young, untested president, against Nikita Khrushchev, the wily, experienced geopolitical strategist; it ended when both leaders agreed to a secret deal brokered by United Nations Secretary-General U Thant. In return for the Soviets dismantling their systems in Cuba, the Americans lifted their naval blockade, vowed not to invade Cuba, and secretly agreed to deactivate their missiles in Italy and Turkey.

During the fifties, we’d grown used to living in the shadow of nuclear holocaust. Its apparent inevitability created an anxiety that permeated the culture, much as the threat of terrorism does today. Many families built bomb shelters in the back yard (though we never went that far) even as the nation became numb to the notion that the world teetered, perpetually, on the nuclear brink. The Missile Crisis made us realize, however, that mutually assured destruction could actually happen; pushed to the wall, our leaders might just be crazy enough to blow up the world. In my belief that the end could not be averted, I calmly prepared to die. I had accumulated quite a few sins and wanted to get my account cleared before I departed. Fortunately, the priest at the time was Father Hickey. When I showed up at the rectory and asked for confession he was happy to provide it, but he also tried to comfort me, saying that he didn’t believe the two leaders would come to nuclear blows, and that if it came to that God himself would intervene to stop it. What else could he say? Then again, for all anyone knows, maybe God did.