I saw that landing in a very special way. Forty years ago my friend Michael and I had gone backpacking up above Yosemite Valley to near Lake Merced. After some days far from electricity and the internal combustion engine, we hastily broke camp in order to be down to the valley floor in time to see the Neil Armstrong's first lunar steps televised live, to the TV in the lodge.
I am sure ours was one of the most memorable ways to have witnessed that epochal event, an event that in retrospect marked the high point of post WWII techno-liberal optimism and the beginning of a very different time through which we are still struggling.
A week ago we did a kind of reprise, this time only a hike, and at Pt. Reyes National Seashore, a less daunting but no less beautiful place than the high Sierra. We arrived from different directions, and used our two cars to set up a shuttle hike, starting at the Estero trailhead, and ending (we thought) at Limantour Beach.
Our trip of 40 years ago had gone almost flawlessly - other than the time when we entered the Land of Mosquitoes, each of us realizing he had forgotten repellent, but knowing the other 'very experienced companion' would certainly have not done anything so silly. We ended up running a mile with full packs, constantly wiping our arms and faces, until we exited that place. Perhaps the reason we saw no animals there was that they'd been drained of blood.
No equivalent problems arose at Pt. Reyes. We saw innumerable birds, a feeding frenzy of pelicans, gulls, and seals having at a school of fish near shore, one very startled garter snake, Tule elk, and a three-masted tall shop anchored off shore. The wildflowers were unending even in summer's brown grass, as we hiked along the tablelands that lay between the coastal cliffs and the mountains that rose behind us. Truly I think the California coast, where it has not been smothered by development, should be called the coast of flowers.
Forty years ago I was no Pagan, though Nature had long given me more peace and beauty than anything else in life. As it still does in most respects. Now I experienced the land more deeply still, for I could feel its energy, and know that was what I was feeling. Politics was far away, where it should be.
Everything went blessedly - until we discovered that the online map Michael had consulted and the top of the line park map I carried could be seriously deceiving. Where a crucial linking trail to the beach began was a sign saying no such trail existed anymore. And where there was no trail on the map, a well defined trail went merrily off in directions unknown. Then, when we came to the final trail far to the east of where we had anticipated doing so, a sign said it was under water. While this was certainly untrue a sit is dry season and sea level has not risen much in the past few years, those truths did not much matter. The trail quickly became jungle, with or without water. We finally went the other direction, away from the beach, eventually to hook up with a road.
One trail both maps we consulted claimed to exist, did not, and had not for years. Another trail both agreed did not exist, did, and led into places we had not planned to see. Still another trail that again both maps agreed existed ended in a impassable thicket. We saw a lot more of the Pt. Reyes landscape than we'd planned on. We arrived foot sore to our car well after dark, hiking the last couple of miles on the road we had driven out to the beach.
But somehow it was all right. We joked we had partially 'paid for' the wonderful privilege we had received 40 years before, when we awakened in a wilderness camp, and hours later, watched the first steps on the moon, and watched them "to boldly go where no man has gone before."
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I seriously don't get the moon landing. It has got to be the single largest waste of funds on triviality since men started wasting funds on triviality. It is just as absurd as professional athletes being paid to be useless. People are dying for lack of basic human necessities and we wast our money on guns, rockets and overglorified games.
I have tried in vain,(and yes maybe I'm just stupid but evidence suggests otherwise) to see a single lasting benefit to anyone from the fact that a bunch of men bounced around in spacesuits on the moon. Yes, Tang is lovely, but far from worth the price. Everytime I hear the landing mentioned as some great wonderful achievement I want to shake my head. That fat old man with the crown and scepter is NAKED people! The astronaut has no clothes...
I respectfully disagree with you, Cassaundra.
Space research is not impoverishing our culture, it is enriching it. The whole political bullshit competition is indeed foolish, but being able to see our Earth from the outside, being able to see our cultural imperatives in their relationships to our environments, is just one of the gifts it has brought us.
The poverty which wracks the planet right now is not produced by the minor expense of research and exploration, it is a direct result of primitive social and political systems guided more by greed, lies, and power-lust than any reasonable social contract, and economic systems which conceal a body of economic royalty who are really murdering psychopaths.
Without dealing with the economic feudalism in the world, abandoning the space programs will only allow the money-royalty to reach greater heights of psychotic wealth-gathering and economic feuding while even more workers are driven to the edge of survival, or over it.
If we remove the parasites from our cultures, we can afford such delightful frivolties as space travel. If we don't, we are doomed to ongoing poverty, repression, and environmental tragedy.
Thermal
Space exploration raises the bar for all humanity to know that this is what we are capable of accomplishing. That humans are not limited to scrounging for basic necessities, but that we can dream of greatness and even achieve it. I will not forget the pride I felt at the ripe old age of 11, watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. Somehow, very little has seemed impossible since then.
We get consistently mired down in our day-to-day worries and needs, wars and diseases, jobs and healthcare, laundry and groceries. The quicksand of the ordinary. Yes they are the realities that confront us every day and we need to face them, but we also need to rise above them as well. We need to be reminded that humanity has more potential than we can ever, ever know. And sometimes, we need to see proof.
I have to agree with Thermal, here. I certainly think we can recognize many of the military motivations of the space program, but for me, what we learn about the world outside the orbit of the Earth gives us countless opportunities about its wonders, which I see originated in the exploration of the Moon. Do we reject the insights into healing the human body that necessary come from war? I don't.
I certainly have serious concerns about spreading ecologically damaging ways of life outside the Earth in the future, but I see that as no reason to reject the entire endeavor.
But the other end of that stick is that some of the core of the environmental movement is derived from questions brought out by the space programs.
The problems of keeping people alive in space eventually lead to researching how to keep ecosystems functioning in space, which leads to attempting to operate ecosystems as closed-loop systems. These technologies, which require 100% recycling of all products and by-products of human actions and processes, are precisely the answers to the environmental problems on the Earth. Reference the Biosphere project and its derivatives.
Also, closed-loop ecosystems, once set up and operating properly, tend to oscillate out of control when stressed by outside toxins. This means that they are very effective tools for determining environmental toxicology.
Thermal
Aron G said;
I certainly have serious concerns about spreading ecologically damaging ways of life outside the Earth in the future, but I see that as no reason to reject the entire endeavor.
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