by Irene Gallo
“What, darling?”
“I love you, mother.”
June blinks fast, and shimmering tears overflow. She wipes them from her cheek with the palm of her right hand and smiles. “I love you too, Carol. I love you more than all the moon and stars.”
When the bottom of the sun has just touched the horizon, June pulls into the parking lot of a beachfront motel, the Astro. She comes out of the office with a key for room six. “Your father and I used to come here when we first met,” she says.
They make martinis, which otherwise neither of them drinks, carry them on a walk on the golden beach. They return to the room, and hear that the lunar module containing Aldrin and Armstrong is orbiting the moon.
“It seems nearly impossible,” says June, watching the screen.
After the news, they go back to the beach, greeting others out strolling and gazing at the still-virgin moon, all of them charged by the event that they cannot even see that unfolds in the heavens at that very moment.
They meet a woman whose curly hair matches the color of the moon and the surf spray lit by moonlight, standing in a rush of foam that swiftly recedes. She rattles the ice in her glass of Scotch. “My life bridges two eras. I was born in 1888. We rode horses or trains.” She wriggles her feet more deeply into the sand, as if to root herself. “When I was a young woman, I lived right outside Dayton, Ohio. During 1903 and 1904, the Wright brothers made hundreds of test flights from Huffman Prairie, down the road from us. Everybody from miles around would call the neighbors out, and we’d watch those flying machines circle round and round. And now look! They’re flying circles round the moon. I just feel … a part of it. Yes, a part of it.” Another wave rushes in, soaking the rooted woman’s dress, but not knocking her down. June and Carol steady her, extricate her, and make sure she returns safely to her family’s room.
On the morning of July 20, 1969, the beach in front of the Astro Motel is full of strollers, sunbathers, and children. June finds a radio station that describes Cocoa Beach as a carnival. The announcer gives them up-to-the-minute reports of “the moon shot” against a background of clattering teletype machines. They sit on the patio, watching and listening.
When they settle down in front of the black-and-white television, the beach and the road are eerily empty. The parking lot of the Astro Motel is full.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t even think that the Astro might not have a color TV,” says June, but it doesn’t matter. The moon is stark shades of white, gray, black. Space is intensely black.
Everything unfolds beautifully. Both humans and computers compensate for errors; they are flexible and hyperaware. When Aldrin says, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” both of their faces shine with tears. Nestled together on the couch, they raise their martinis to Chet and to all those who made it possible.
The moon landing broadcast lasts only about ten minutes. When it ends, the astronauts prepare for their moon walk, which begins at six-thirty in the evening. The second broadcast, in which the astronauts walk on the moon, is three hours long. The fuzzy picture and storms of static immerse Carol in distance, emphasize the technical difficulties overcome by human ingenuity, obliterate a millennium of myth and legend, and fill her mind with a million questions. By the time it is over, Carol is wrung dry. Her chest aches. She doesn’t remember ever being in the grip of such powerful, unrelenting emotions for such a long period of time.
* * *
The next morning, after Carol has flown back to the East Coast on the red-eye, the capsule splashes down. A picture-perfect engineering triumph.
For one of the first times in her life that she can remember, her heart feels full, as if it is expanding to encompass everyone around her. As she takes the metro bus home, the faces of the others on the bus seem meaningful in a way she does not understand, but accepts. The time she spent with June, without any deep talk at all, satisfied some unknown yearning. It has given her a bass tone, that of the world around her—the suburban streets, the hiss of air brakes, the wheeze of the bus door opening and closing—and a bright fanfare, that sounds like sunlight sifting through leaves and dappling the sidewalk at her bus stop, comprised of everyone going about their morning business, her mother’s increasingly dear face, and the footprint on the moon.
She no longer needs to know why her mother has done the things she has done, has made the decisions she has made, or why she has not ever spoken of them. The dark twist, this morning, does not matter. This side is enough.
It is more than enough.
December 1970
All is monotone: infinite shades of gray, black, white. Silver, ivory, charcoal. Great blue-black rivers of shadow flow down a distant jag-peaked mountain, but then, in an instant, all is obscured by cloud.
Snow closes round Carol, coalescing out of air colder than she has ever experienced. She has never known a wild winter; Boston’s weather is tamed by streets, machines, humans, cozy rooms, ready food.
She is alone in deep nature, a voice that speaks to her in strangely powerful articulations of shape and color, in shards of deep, whirring sound. She pulls her scarf over her numb face and stands still.
Snow on the craggy slopes of the mountain puffs upward like the spray of surf as, nearby, stands of bare cottonwoods roar almost as if they possess a voice, a mind, the urge to sing. The slow, majestic harmony that her mind and eyes modulate is something she has not experienced since she was a child.
She wouldn’t have heard the truck if not for the muffled jingle of its chains. The narrow road is so snowed over that she’s practically forgotten she’s standing on a road. The truck stops next to her and a woman rolls down the window. Wild black hair escapes through gaps in the green scarf wrapped haphazardly round her head and neck. Mittened hands grip the wheel. A mutt sticks its brown head out over her shoulder. “Headed to the lodge?”
Lodge? That sounds expensive. “Hitching. Is there a good place to pitch a tent around here?”
The woman laughs. “Unless you’re trying to set some kind of survival-camping record, tonight wouldn’t be the best night for that. Get in. We’ve got plenty of room and lots of food.” She gives Carol an appraising look. “Free.”
“Thanks. I’m Carol.” Carol tosses her backpack in the back of the truck and climbs into the cab. The dog settles on her lap. She has been swept from a possibly spectacular night of immersion in powerful beauty. Or, given her amateur outdoorswoman status, death by hypothermia.
“Heat’s broken. I’m Ishwari. ‘Goddess’ in Hindi. In case you’re interested. I live at the Lama Foundation over there on the mountain—you’ve heard of Baba Ram Dass?”
Carol shakes her head.
“Timothy Leary?”
She laughs. “Yeah.”
“He came through a few months ago and left a huge stash of Owsley acid. Dennis Hopper—”
“The movie Dennis Hopper?”
“That’s the one. He bought the Mabel Dodge Luhan place a few months ago and turned the place into a wild party house. I’m bummed about it. That’s where we’re going. The lodge has a lot of good vibes. When Dodge bought it in the teens, she turned it into an artist colony. D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Carl Jung—all kinds of cross-fertilization. Well, I’m here to try to keep the vibes good. Coke never brings good vibes, y’know? Well, here we are!”
They pass through heavy, wooden gates that stand open, beneath an iron bell set in a graceful adobe surround. She stops next to a snow-swathed entryway. The dog leaps out; Carol retrieves her pack.
Ishwari says, “You can share my room tonight.” Carol follows the woman through a maze of rooms full of people and Ishwari opens the door to an oasis of quiet. A small fire burns in an adobe fireplace. The room is adorned with warm, glowing colors. Carol would like to fall into the low, narrow bed and sleep for a week. She’s been hitching for almost that long. She left MIT in a bit of a huff, unable to find a grope-free mentor, one who would take her
own plans and vision seriously. She had a bus ticket, but always travels with a pack that will help her stay self-sufficient in any situation. When the bus broke down outside of Boston, she stuck out her thumb.
And here she is, outside of Taos, New Mexico.
“Is there a phone here?” she asks Ishwari.
“Line’s down. Sorry. Well, let’s join the par-tay! Hope you like tofu chili.”
Ishwari leads her to a large room with another adobe fireplace. Once white, it is now dirty and marred, but beneath all that Carol can see its perfection. She edges close to the fire. About twenty-five people or so are hanging out. Two women sit on a nearby couch, one playing a mandolin and one a flute. The smell of strong pot is in the air. A young man has crashed on the floor in front of the fireplace. Men and women alike are festooned with beads. Some wear spectacular silver and turquoise pieces. Headbands and long hair are ubiquitous, as well as hats. A woman in a fringed leather jacket sits cross-legged on the floor, nursing a baby. Through a large arched door, at a round table, bikers in black leather play poker and drink whiskey.
She is definitely not in Boston anymore. She’s back in the west. She feels comfortable, at home. “Nice scene,” Carol says to the guy standing next to her, warming himself by the fire.
“Toke? Yeah, this is Hopper’s place.”
“I gather it’s gone downhill.”
“I think he plans to restore it. Want a beer?”
Fifteen minutes later, Carol says, “I’m tripping. Right?”
“We all are. Didn’t want you to get left out.”
“In the beer?”
“Yeah.”
She hands it back to him, smiling. “I’ve probably had enough for now. Thanks.”
Carol hasn’t dropped acid very often, and never with a bunch of strangers. Well, except at Grateful Dead concerts. But she feels oddly safe, despite the shotguns on the wall and the bikers in the other room. Well, better to enjoy it than to spend the night trembling under a bed.
She dances, weaving sinuous tracks among the tracks of the others. Some follow her lead. The flute changes rhythm, and she feels simultaneously as if she has joined an ancient dance and that she is observing herself tripping and creating an entirely new dance. She is stomping on the moon, tap-dancing on one of Saturn’s rings, stepping up and down among them as if they were stairs.
She makes her way outside and dances to the cosmos, which sounds like doo-wop, then lies on her back in the comfortable, fluffy snow for an infinity, her mind building rockets to the stars. The clouds have cleared, and she has never seen stars so brilliant.
“Hey.” Someone grabs her hand and pulls her up. “Let’s go see Fantasia.”
She finds her way back to Ishwari’s room, somehow, and grabs her pack. Ishwari looks up from the book she is reading. “Namaste.”
“What?”
“I bow to the divine in you.”
“Thank you! Namaste.”
Two full pickups fishtail out of the drive and make their way slowly, chains jingling, toward town. The few sparkling lights in the distance are Taos. The ride is splendid. They sing “Jingle Bells.” The trucks pull up in front of an old theater and everyone jumps out and troops inside. No one asks for money. Joints make their way across the rows of seats. A white man wearing a feathered hat stands up and says, “We all know Stokowski was a fan of peyote. Took it when he stayed at the Dodge Lodge—participated in religious rites somewhere up in the mountains. Worked with Disney on Fantasia. Old Walt was introduced to it at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then went down to Mexico—”
The projector clicks on. The music begins. The word Fantasia bends across his chest. “Stop boring us and sit down, Elk Who Fucking Flies, so we can watch the movie!” someone yells.
Carol saw Fantasia on a black-and-white television when she was a kid and she was scared out of her wits by skeletons flying through the sky, by Mickey’s terrifying, brainless, out-of-control replicating brooms.
This time, she loves the dancing mushrooms. Peyote mushrooms, of course. The delicate dancing faceless flowers. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” might be an old story, but it is breathtakingly of the present: robots, and how they might be able to re-create themselves and mindlessly conquer the world.
When Fantasia is over, with nary a break, the projectionist threads Disney’s Man in Space series: “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and “Mars and Beyond.”
She saw this long, long ago, sitting in her living room in front of a black-and-white TV. when a child, but this long-ago, almost fantastic vision is now real. Men have walked on the moon using von Braun’s blueprint to get there.
It is all rather breathtaking.
Her father’s arch nemesis, von Braun, explains rockets, as well as a plan to reach the moon and Mars, in his German-accented voice. An entire generation of kids have this in their brains. And, apparently, a generation of adults as well, because of his Collier’s article and other publicity.
Without this, would the nation have supported Kennedy’s declaration that the United States would put a man on the moon before the decade’s end? The technical know-how had been there—it had just been a matter of committing money.
And of educating kids.
Why, she wonders, with a lump in her throat, has she been sidelined at MIT? Why did she allow it to happen?
Suddenly, she stands and shouts, “It’s because of all these men on the moon! Where are the women?”
“Yeah!” yell some women, and then the ragtag group rises as one and cheers as wildly as if they had all been offered a free Mars bar. “Where! Are! The! Women! Where! Are! The! Women!” Ward Kimball’s Mars aliens, gawky, puzzled-looking creatures, play across their faces, imprinting them squarely with mid-century America, with its mutant tomatoes, big-finned flying cars, crumpling rockets collapsing in clouds of fire and smoke, a roomful of Ping-Pong balls released by mousetraps, an enormous genie bursting out of a tiny bottle, the secrets of the universe theirs to use and abuse.
And a ticket out of it.
“Here, dammit!” yells Carol, as cool flat spaceships that look like tops twirl neatly across their faces. “I’m here! I’m a goddamn rocket woman and that’s all there is to it! I’m gonna go back to MIT and kick their butts.”
“Whooo! Yeeeeehaw! Take us along! To the moon, Alice!”
Carol hoists her pack and leaves, grabbing a bag of stale popcorn in the lobby, still mildly tripping, and holds out her thumb as Christmas day dawns in mountain time, pale pink and green, electric blue mountains rimming the horizon. An old man in a pickup truck pulls over. When she gets in, he says, “Kin take you as far as Albuquerque. Now, you ain’t no whore, are you?”
“Afraid not,” she says, settling in. The day dazzles. Snowy fields are etched with long blue dawn-flung shadows; distant mountains ring that same white and blue, in a deeper tone, with bare brown ridges. The land gives forth harmonies not only to her eye, but to her ear, a deep and pleasing music.
“Good. My wife would pitch a fit if she knew I gave a ride to a whore.”
“I wouldn’t blame her. You’re not some kind of pervert, are you?”
“No, ma’am. And please pardon my previous question. I apologize.”
She’d run into her fair share of creeps, and thought she could tell. But in case she made a mistake, she always kept a switchblade handy, and knew how to use it.
“Apology accepted. Got a cigarette?”
“And coffee in that thermos there. You’re one a them hippies, I guess.”
“Kind of. But not really. I’m a rocket scientist.”
“I’d think you’d be able to buy your own truck then.”
She laughs. She feels light, free, happy.
Strong.
They cross a dizzyingly high bridge. “Rio Grande Gorge. River way, way down there. One of the prettiest sights around in the prettiest spot in the country. You stayin’ out at the Dodge place?”
“Just got there last night. I’m on
my way to White Sands.”
The descent to Albuquerque is through a long, stunning canyon that dips below the high plateau she’s been on for several days.
The ghost of her father sits at her elbow, smiling at her. He really is—his blond hair in a flattop, his black engineer glasses, his thin, mobile face, with laugh crow’s-feet around his blue eyes. He gives her a thumbs-up.
She doesn’t know she’s crying until the old man pats her shoulder. “There, there.”
She takes a deep breath. “I’m just happy.”
Even though she knows it was the acid, remembering this always makes her happy.
* * *
She calls her mother from an Albuquerque phone booth. “Merry Christmas!” she says.
It’s Blake. “Where are you? Your mother is worried sick!”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My bus broke down, I hitchhiked to Taos—”
“Well, you get yourself home right away!”
“Where’s Mom?”
“She’s at your Aunt Edna’s.”
“I’m going to White Sands tomorrow, but I should be home by the next night.”
“You are a very selfish young lady, Carol.”
“Merry Christmas, Blake.”
She sits on a bench for a few minutes afterward. She finds her way to the bus station and discovers that the last bus west has left.
There is no point in spending the night in the bus station.
* * *
Close to Las Cruces, she gets a ride up to the White Sands Missile Range with a navy guy who is on guard duty that night. “It’s closed Christmas,” he says. “Where do you plan to stay, anyway?”
“I’ll just set up my tent somewhere on the perimeter. Maybe on some high place. Got any suggestions?”
“Well—”
“My dad worked there sometimes, in the fifties. He actually worked for the Jet Propulsion Lab and came out here to test rocket engines. He brought me with him a few times when I was little.”
“No kidding!”
“He died in ’63. I just kind of wanted to see it again. I’m studying at MIT right now, on my way home to California.”