Roads From the Ashes

by Megan Edwards

  And so we bade farewell to Big Bend, that place of wonder that is not quite Mexico, not quite Texas, not quite civilized, not quite safe. We hadn’t quite run out of money, gas, food, or even rocky ledge. Even the Iguana had cooperated, and I hadn’t quite missed a deadline. Not quite, and life was good.

  Chapter 13

  Location, Location, and Gnats

  Miraculous Cure by Optical Illusion

  After we bade farewell to the peccaries, the Rio Grande and the Starlight Theater, we headed north. We turned east at a place appropriately called Junction and set our sights on Dixieland. As a tiny child, I’d lived briefly in Virginia, but as an adult, my real-life exposure to the American South was limited to a week in the Smoky Mountains.

  It had been a perfect destination. I had just concluded my own civil war, and, divorce final, I wanted the taste of new surroundings. I flew to Atlanta and emerged from the airport in the only vehicle the rental agency had available. A suitable witness to my midlife Appomattox, it was a red sports car. Foot to the floor and radio blasting, I drove north into Tennessee, into a universe of tourist traps and dulcimer music and mountains covered with rhododendrons.

  I did it all. I filled my carpet bags at Pigeon Forge factory stores and drank Jack Daniel’s in Gatlinburg night clubs. I hiked through the clouds to the top of Mount LeConte, and I rode a raft down Nantahala rapids. It was a week of glorious reconstruction.

  Otherwise, my acquaintance with the south was drawn from Gone With the Wind and the nightly news. If Georgia was ever on my mind at all, she was antebellum splendor, and Mississippi was a scratchy newsreel of civil rights marches. Louisiana was nothing but Mardi Gras, and Florida was where the boys were. Alabama? Arkansas? Red mud and overalls. I’d traveled the world, but I was an ignorant Yank when it came to Dixie.

  We came to a halt in Birmingham. The Phoenix One’s brakes had failed, and we spent three days in a Ford truck garage, reading old magazines and talking to Jewel, the bookkeeper, and Mark, a truck salesman. Jewel loaned us her car so we could have lunch at a nearby mall, and Mark told us how Alabama wasn’t as boring as the surface suggested.

  “We don’t have much in the way of mountains,” he said, “But we’ve got caves to make up for it.” When he ran out of spelunking tales, he regaled us with stories about people who’d been miraculously healed by looking at optical illusions. Even so, the hours crawled.

  “Your mechanic is good, but he’s slow,” said Mark, summing everything up on the third day. “I sure hope you didn’t need to be somewhere.”

  “In fact, we don’t need to be anywhere,” I said, but I realized I’d been acting like it, making it clear that anywhere but where I was would be an improvement, and that three days in a Birmingham truck garage was nigh on close to hell. Our hosts had been apologetic, but I was the one who should have been saying I was sorry. Where did I need to be, after all? Nowhere but where I was. Jewel had cleared a table for me in the office lobby. I had my computer, unlimited quantities of coffee, a comfortable chair, and even a good story teller to keep me company.

  Suddenly I saw things differently. One minute my surroundings were oil-encrusted purgatory, but when I looked again, danged if it wasn’t the nicest sort of spot. It was nothing less than a miraculous cure by optical illusion, and, almost as soon as it occurred, the Phoenix was ready to roll. Bidding farewell to Jewel and Mark, we drove north on Interstate 65, and turned east at Decatur. We were headed to Huntsville.

  A Little Graveyard on the Moon

  Huntsville, which before 1940 was merely the “Watercress Capital of the World,” burgeoned in the post-war years to become the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, and U.S. Space Camp. Redstone Arsenal, the army installation which had built missiles for the war effort, provided the land. No longer a little green hamlet dozing in the hills, Huntsville is Rocket City, and the first thing we saw when we drove in from the west was a life-size mockup of the space shuttle.

  The first famous foreigner to be connected with Huntsville was the English poet Alexander Pope, and the town even enjoyed a brief spell under the name of Twickenham, Pope’s English home. Nowadays, Huntsville might well be renamed to honor another European, Wernher Von Braun. Germany’s premier rocket scientist came to Alabama in 1950 and never looked back. Thanks largely to him, Sputnik, and the launching of the space race, Huntsville never looked back either. You can find the remnants of antebellum splendor if you look, but postwar space mania holds the day.

  After we parked in the small campground located in a grove of trees next to the Space & Rocket Center, we hooked Marvin to his leash and set out to explore. The Center was already closed for the day, but it was easy to see the larger artifacts of Rocket Park through the chain link fence. An impressive stand of missiles rose like a stately grove of limbless trees.

  We skirted the perimeter, and our attention was quickly drawn away from the carefully preserved specimens inside the fence. All around us were shards and fragments of nose cones and fuselages, propellers and fins, a thousand decaying remnants of the space race, half-hidden in the grass. Some were covered with kudzu vines, soon to be lost under a veil of green. The chariots of the space pioneers rested in this silent cemetery, and we picked our way through their rusting remains as darkness closed in around us.

  A full moon rose as we walked back to the Phoenix. “There’s a graveyard up there, too,” I said pointing. “A little pile of human debris that proves to alien archaeologists that the moon once hosted visitors from another world.”

  “It seems so long ago,” said Mark, “So long that the machines that made it happen look like the ancient relics of a dead civilization. I wonder what happened. Why hasn’t anyone returned?”

  It was a good question. Didn’t we all assume back in 1969 that within a few years humans would be making regular voyages to the moon or even living there? Now that the barrier had been broken, what was stopping us? Soon there would be commercial flights and domed colonies and business ventures and even holiday space cruises. Humans had gone the distance and made it back alive. Anything was possible. Certainly no one dreamed that we’d greet the new millennium with no more than the same little pile of litter on our very own satellite.

  But what did we know? Technology doesn’t always grow in a straight line, as I was reminded every time I prayed to the modem gods and thanked the black box for its efforts at cellular data transfer. It’s trimmed and shaped by politics and circumstance, espaliered by fad and necessity. Maybe the conquest of the moon was an ego trip, inspired by nothing more than a rabid desire to be the first to plant a flag on extraterrestrial soil. Maybe it was nothing more than a Cold War campaign, designed to intimidate our enemies and rally support on the home front. Maybe the moon was as frivolous a goal as our desire for true mobile communication. Once achieved, maybe it had been tarred with the lethal brush of “No Viable Commercial Application.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out more tomorrow,” I said. “This is the place if anywhere is.”

  Give Me Screaming Frogs

  The next morning, we arrived at the main entrance of the Space & Rocket Center just as the guard was opening the doors. “You were wise to come early,” he said as he waved us inside. “You’ll have it to yourselves until the school buses start to arrive.”

  We worked our way through the exhibits inside, and then headed out to Rocket Park, the outdoor museum we’d seen through the fence the evening before. By the end of the day, we’d toured Redstone Arsenal and visited Space Camp. We’d walked through the history of American space travel and admired the latest project at Marshall Space Flight Center, the International Space Station. We’d gazed up at triumphs like the Saturn V that blasted astronauts to the moon, and we’d stared at relics from Apollo 13, the ill-fated mission that nearly ended in disaster.

  We’d watched children bounce in seats designed to show them the effects of lunar gravit
y, and observed others wearing lab coats as they experimented in a “clean room.” We’d peered into the large water tank that provides astronauts a simulated weightless environment, and we’d walked through the forest of missiles, rockets, and supersonic planes.

  We expected all that, of course, but we weren’t expecting another curious thing. Behind everything we saw there seemed to lurk the presence of Wernher von Braun, the man who built the rockets that bombed London, the man most responsible for the footprints on the moon. Surrounded by stunning technological achievement, I was struck with the astonishing accomplishments of the man with the camera-ready smile.

  “He reminds me of Walt Disney,” I said to Mark as we looked at the shrine to his memory in the museum. “He had bigger dreams than most mortals and the right combination of brains and charisma to pull them off.”

  In fact, Wernher von Braun knew Walt Disney, and he even served as a technical adviser for Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and several Disney television productions. Wernher von Braun liked anyone who helped him promote his own penchant for shooting rockets into space, and he liked anyone who would promote space travel among the masses. His was an expensive vocation, and he needed the coffers of a super power and the blessings of its taxpayers to fund it.

  That’s why, in 1945, when it became clear that the status quo was no longer an option, Wernher and a hundred or so of his colleagues decided to surrender to the United States. Even though the Americans were happy to find this enormous mass of brain power falling into their laps, things weren’t smooth sailing for the German missile geniuses. Detained for months after they arrived on American soil, they referred to themselves as POP’s, or “Prisoners of Peace.”

  By 1950, Wernher von Braun had emerged in Huntsville and launched his illustrious career as an American hero. He had his share of detractors, of course, those who considered him little more than a long-distance war criminal and the worst kind of hypocrite.

  But here’s what I think. I think he wanted to shoot rockets into space, and he wanted that more than he wanted anything else, including kind thoughts and flattering epithets. He had not only the skill to design missiles, but the ability to find sponsors with the deepest pockets in the world. Once he’d sold them on his dreams, he knew how to keep them wanting more. Sputnik and the Cold War helped, but I have the sneaking feeling that Wernher von Braun made use of whatever events came his way. His trajectory was truer than a rocket, his destination as clear as the brightest moon. He had a burning desire.

  I have no idea whether I would have liked the man, but I do have a weakness for someone who sees his path and follows it, whose laser-straight determination won’t let him be sidetracked by mundane distractions, even big ones like World War II. The obstacles he conquered were enormous, and the money he needed to follow his dream was beyond imagination. He did it anyway, and from his example I drew a second wind.

  My ambitions seemed so tiny next to his, my budget so small. I didn’t need to travel to another world. All I wanted was access to this one. All I asked of communications technology was the very thing it promised, a life free of identity with a physical location, an address in the ether. I wanted to roam like Odysseus without being lost, travel without vanishing, sally forth without forsaking community.

  It was the first time in the history of the planet that such a life could be contemplated. Before the birth of electronic mail and the rise of the Internet, a truly mobile life required the sacrifice of connection. Living without an address was living on a fringe. It meant dropping out, escaping from the status quo, reneging on the picket-fence security deal Americans have with society. It connoted tax evasion, law breaking and anarchy. Such an existence carried Easy Rider appeal, but those who chose it for more than a summer or two got failing marks in citizenship.

  A life of travel was a boy’s life, too. Men were the rovers, the gadabout warriors who only wanted home when the going got tough, when they needed a back rub or a bandage. Girls were the hearth-tending Penelopes who kept the home fires burning, made calico quilts, baked peanut butter cookies. Until my adventuring spirit was released by fire, I’d led a corseted existence, a life of tight stays and shallow breathing. I bought curtains and made chicken soup. I wore panty hose and carried a purse. I hadn’t hated it, but when it was gone, I knew I could never stuff myself back inside the girdle of my former life.

  I’d burst forth, but whose path could I follow? Who had gone before me to show me the way? I was no hobo soldier. I couldn’t trade nylons for camouflage fatigues, dishes for mess kits. I liked flowers and comforters and clean hair. I liked books and computers and cozy nights. I was no bungie jumper, mountain climber, jungle tamer. I had a hard enough time loving the cliff side.

  But I did have a mission, and as I stood looking at the man who bridged the lunar gap, I saw clearly that I had no one to follow except others who had walked right off the map. It wasn’t trappings that made the mission. It was the path, a path that wasn’t there until the trailblazer defined it.

  I wanted to be as close as next door and a thousand miles distant. I wanted the simplicity of life with no purse and the complexities of technology to make it possible. I wanted an all-American life packed up to go. I wanted an office on Flathead Lake, and a bedroom with a view of redwoods. I wanted to dine in the Blue Ridge Mountains and fall asleep to crashing Acadian surf. I wanted packs of wild peccaries and kudzu-covered nose cones. I wanted a back yard with oceans for fences and a family that circled the globe.

  I wanted my life’s journey to unroll in space as well as time, and my grail was the technology that would connect all the dots in the world with me, even when I was a moving target. If I could do it, I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to relish the benefits. I couldn’t be the only one whose heart beat faster at the thought of being at work, at home and on the road, all at the same grand moment.

  I looked again at the man whom even a world war couldn’t deter. He had known that his task went far beyond mere technological know-how. He’d been the salesman for the Apollo program, the cheerleader of the space race. It wasn’t enough to design machines to do a job. Part of the innovator’s task is to create the market, to ignite enthusiasm, to fan desire.

  Why are there no new footprints on the moon? “Too expensive” is one answer we heard that day. “No need” is another. They were the same reasons Mark and I might logically have chosen to sell the Phoenix and rejoin the ranks of commuting suburbanites from which we’d sprung. What was the point of pursuing a truly mobile existence? Why try to fashion a complete life on the road? It’s too expensive. There’s no need. The ends of rainbows are for songs and simpletons.

  If the pursuit of dreams is folly, then I was a first class fool. I’d spent a year learning how to survive on a roll, and, having achieved an acceptable level of competence in that arena, I’d progressed into genuine living. My former life had been centrifuged into compartments, each with a timeline, a wardrobe, a separate address. How could I return to that life of pigeonholes and labels when I had only begun to plumb the possibilities of an unsliced life? I liked having my whole life with me wherever I went. I’d learned the power of here and now. I’d caught a glimpse of the possibilities the virtual universe held for wanderers and dreamers and a woman without a purse. Expense and practicality be damned. I wanted a black box that really worked.

  Mark jolted me out of my reverie. “I almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “You know that little pond we discovered out where the space hardware is scattered in the grass? I took Marvin there for a walk this morning, and we discovered something amazing.”

  “What?” I asked, thinking immediately of lunar landers and rocket fins.

  “The frogs who live there scream,” said Mark. “They hear you coming, and they shriek. Then they jump in the water and hide.”

  Did I mention that I also want screaming frogs? I do. I want it all.

  Splendor in the Swamp Grass

&
nbsp; The screaming frogs of Huntsville were my first taste of the biotic ebullience of the American south. The mosquitoes in Arkansas were so big the natives celebrated them with an annual festival. I would have celebrated the fireflies, myself. They put on a nightly light show that beat any Sugar Plum fairy I ever saw. Woodchucks sat with twitching whiskers by the sides of roads, and squirrels the size of badgers darted in the pines.

  At the other end of the spectrum were chiggers and tiny flying insects known as no-see-ums. The former lurked in shrubbery until a warm body passed nearby. Then they’d jump aboard, burrow under epidermal layers, and continue a life cycle that could be interrupted only by a thick application of nail polish to the affected areas.

  “Ya gotta suffocate ’em,” an Arkansan told us with the grim authority of experience. “Otherwise they keep secreting acid to dissolve your flesh, which they then slurp up. That’s what itches.” The nail polish remedy worked, although I’m happy to say I know this second hand. Mark had colonies in seven places after he climbed on the roof of the Phoenix while it was parked under a low hanging tree.

  Chiggers were available any time, and mosquitoes emerged at dusk. No-see-ums and spiders attacked under cover of darkness, all of which meant there wasn’t a moment in the summertime South when we stopped swatting or slapping or scratching.

  But we didn’t stop watching, either, and the fauna grew ever denser the farther we got down the long thumb of the Floridian peninsula. By the time we got to the Everglades, the water boiled, the land crawled, and the sky was dappled with birds.

  One day, at that crepuscular hour that beasts love best, Mark, Marvin and I took a walk near Cypress Lake, not far from Orlando. In the gathering darkness, we caught sight of an armadillo in the grass. He was trundling along in his little suit of armor, oblivious to everything but the ground in front of his little pointed snout. Two humans and a dog were less than fifteen feet away, but the armadillo noticed not.