Moondust (40 page)

I tell him that Scott now lives in London and was splashed over the U.K. tabloids not long ago, following a liaison with the beautiful newsreader Anna Ford. To my surprise, Schmitt looks aghast.

“What, is he not married to Lurten anymore?”

Uhm, I don't know. I guess not. Anna Ford took the newspapers to the Press Complaints Commission for running paparazzi photos of her and Scott on holiday.

“Ooooh. I thought they were still married, so I … so Lurten …”

It turns out that Schmitt had been trying to contact the Scotts about a reunion and even he, a Moonwalker, couldn't make contact. So thanks to Dave Scott I'm seeing something I never thought I would see: Jack Schmitt caught off balance.

“Well, Dave is an extraordinarily bright guy,” he concludes. “He was probably the best trained of the pilot astronauts up to his flight. He was very, very cooperative with the geology programme I put together for the later missions and I had great respect for Dave as a professional. It's an unfortunate decision that he made in respect of the envelopes and I wish him well. I hope that he's doing fine.”

I wonder if he is? At this point, I don't expect even to clap eyes on Scott, but we'll see.

Jack shakes my hand warmly and drifts back to the tiny office that he didn't want me to see, as I ghost away up the
Turquoise Trail to Santa Fe harbouring a sense of dissatisfaction which I'm at a loss to explain. Schmitt has been interesting, instructive, helpful, yet some unvoiced expectation of mine hasn't been met and this unsettles me, because if there's one thing I've learned so far, it's that expectations are the enemy; I try not to have them. So like Alan Bean and geriatric dog, I can see that the problem is mine and am thus drawn back to a question I left lying like a discarded cigarette butt in the Mojave Desert sand. What do I want from these people? Why am I here?

And plowing through the autumn dust to Santa Fe, I realize that I know.

The Moonwalkers are interesting because of what we've invested in them. For me, this means that here we have nine men, nine left from twelve, who will eventually crumble away to eight, seven, six, five … none … who travelled further, saw and sometimes felt things that perhaps no one ever had before, or will again in quite the same way; who then had to come back and dissolve their queer odyssey into some kind of Earthly existence, trying to make peace with us and the everyday. They had to relearn how to live a life, try to find new meaning in it and in this tiny corner of a vast cosmos which it had been their obscure fortune to confront. And just as they travelled to the Moon only to find the Earth, I've come to find them, but what I seem to be seeing is myself and everyone else reflected
in
them, finding that the thoughts and questions the Moonwalkers provoke when we look at them are more valuable than any answers they might attempt to provide; that our fascination is not about them, it's about us. I also understand that for me, there may be a heightened dimension to this exchange, because although it took me a while to notice, when they got back nearly all of them were about the age that I am now.

The drive to Santa Fe is beautiful and I love everything about New Mexico, which feels somehow secret and discrete, even though there are times in the high desert when the earth and sky seem to spark and commingle and you could swear that it goes on forever. They say that in the badlands to the south you
can even now find spots to stop and feel sure that no other human being is within thirty miles of you, and that some areas are still being settled, while to the north and east are mountains which glow so red at sunset that wandering Spaniards called the range Sangre de Cristo,
Blood of Christ
. Fewer than two million people live in a state of 122,000 square miles and a Republican lawmaker recently introduced a bill to establish an annual “Extraterrestrial Culture Day” in commemoration of the Roswell incident. And that's still not the most unusual thing you'll find here.

For, halfway up the Turquoise Trail is the tiny hippy village of Madrid, where shacks-turned-craft shops offer “Navajo, Tibetan, Aboriginal” souvenirs as if these words referred to near neighbours, while also meekly announcing themselves as “FOR SALE,” and homespun 9/11 memorials beseech “May we know peace one day.” I spend a long time looking at a notice board which advertises meetings of the “Madrid Free Forum” and the First Church of Science, and discussions on “alternatives to water” (if they crack that one, I hope they tell NASA) and gigs by crusty bands sporting David Crosby mustaches, who look as though they've not only heard a few Grateful Dead albums in their time, but smoked them. As a stringy old boy in a washedout Quicksilver Messenger Service T-shirt sways down the middle of the road with a coil of rope over his shoulder and a Bud in his hand, tourists in SUVs like armoured personnel carriers slow down to gawp, point a camera, then speed off as if the inhabitants were bears in a wildlife park. Places like this flinch in backwaters across the globe, harrowed little sanctums where the hippies sought refuge when the Sixties finally ended in 1972.

Early that year, a United Nations report on the health of the global economy saw no reason to doubt the foundations of our charmed lives, but there was change blowing in the wind. As so often, we knew before the economists: the evidence was there on Friday night TV, where
The Brady Bunch
and
The Partridge Family
turned the collapse of the nuclear family into whimsy, and in the cinemas, where Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange
and the eco-parable
Deliverance
were shocking audiences with their
bleak assumption of humanity as an essentially destructive force. Meanwhile, my radio brought new groups like Steely Dan, who were named after a dildo from a Burroughs novel and sounded so acid and detached that you couldn't imagine them ever believing in anything, while Neil Young's
Harvest,
which all the older kids owned, seemed to ache with some unspecified disappointment. In fact, not long before, I'd saved up for months to buy the album of George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, which was designed to raise money for Bengali victims of the continuing hostility between India and Pakistan, but turned into a pop presentiment of Watergate when all the money disappeared in expenses and tax. Poor George: he'd had to coax Bob Dylan out of sulky retirement and book a smack-addled Eric Clapton on every flight out of London for a week before the guitarist known as “God” managed to catch one. Rock had an aristocracy now; the fun was gone. The concert also introduced the image that would replace rockets launching and napalm falling as ubiquitous in the Seventies and Eighties – that of the starving exotic child victim – because, incredible as it seems now, we hadn't seen it before. Civil war and political madness aside (as in the Biafra region of Nigeria), there had been no mass famine through the 1950s and 1960s.

In my world, however, it was David Bowie who most effectively tapped into what was happening. Thirty-four years after his career began in earnest with
Space Oddity
(a flop first time around in '69), he passes up Gene Myers's offer of a promo flight to Space Island, but on the subject of his early Seventies work, says:

“For me and several of my friends, the Seventies were the start of the twenty-first century. It was Kubrick's doing, on the whole, with
2001
and
A Clockwork Orange
… There was a distinct feeling that nothing was true anymore and that the future was not as clear-cut as it seemed … everything was up for grabs.”

Thus, Ziggy Stardust was a parody of a rock star, herald of an era in which everything began to look like parody, and the satire I'd cherished in my
MAD
magazines seemed redundant.
Kubrick had made
A Clockwork Orange
between 1969 and 1972, precisely as Neil and Buzz, and Pete and Al, and Alan and Ed, and Dave and Jim, and John and Charlie, and Gene and Jack were making their landings on the Moon. There's a famous scene at the beginning, where Alex and his droogs confront a tramp under a dark railway arch. Reviewing it again, I remembered the old man complaining that “it's a stinking world,” but not his reasoning:

“There's men on the Moon. And men spinning around the Earth. And there's not no attention paid to Earthly law and order no more.”

This seems to enrage Alex. He and his droogs kick the drunk senseless. Only now do I see how much their white uniforms look like space suits.

I'd always wondered whether my sense that everything changed with the end of Apollo was a figment of a child's imagination. But no: the venerable historian Eric Hobsbawm is merely formalizing academic orthodoxy when, in his masterful
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991,
he divides the era extending from the onset of World War I to the fall of the Iron Curtain into three distinct periods. The second, which he calls “The Golden Age,” runs from the end of World War II, accelerating in the late Fifties, to –
precisely
– the end of 1972. The greatest period of economic expansion the world has ever seen. Like our fantasy of a space-faring future, the assumption of a world in which growth was inevitable proved sorely mistaken.

“Yet it was not until the great boom was over, in the disturbed seventies, waiting for the traumatic eighties,” says the historian, “that observers – mainly, to begin with, economists – began to realize that the world, particularly the world of developed capitalism, had passed through an altogether exceptional phase of its history; perhaps a unique one.”

When Gene Cernan left that last footprint in the Moondust on December 14, he was leaving behind everything we thought we knew about the context to our future lives. It's easy to see why the generation which followed the Baby Boomers and includes some of their offspring had a propensity to be so much
more cynical, or at least less idealistic, than their parents. The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland called us “Generation X,” supposedly the first to reach adulthood with broadly lower material expectations than their parents, and while this is a blunt and unwieldy label, it contains a core of truth. Social scientists have often identified Gen X with people born between 1961 and 1972 and if many of us grew up sneering at hippies, it was because we felt that the hippies let us down. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction: failed expectation.

So the 1960s may have been three years gone, but
The Sixties
died as Cernan clambered up the spaceship
Challenger
's ladder, ending an adventure which perfectly embodies the candescent era in which it took place – the upheaval, uncertainty, optimism, energy: the feeling that a world could be, was being, remade. This, I think, has something to do with the aura that still surrounds Apollo. It will be many months before I'm able to quiz Cernan on his bittersweet place in the Moonwalker canon, but when I do, the setting couldn't be more fortuitous or bizarre.

Elements of the space age world that Cernan left behind linger on, of course. The day I drove to Los Alamos, there was a story in the local paper about forestry workers being banned from thinning ponderosa pine in some areas, because the trees are still radioactive from Cold War nuclear tests carried out up to 1961.

In a Santa Fe bar one night I met an English scientist who worked at the nuke-producing National Laboratory in Los Alamos. He told me that the facility there is run by the University of California, because it used to be secret and scientists didn't want to work directly for the government, and that the place contains the highest proportion of PhD's in the world, with average earnings four times those of Albuquerque. (I checked and it was true.) He said that his own work was on an energy conservation project, although I wondered whether this might be a front, and over a couple of beers we chattered about the town and the lab and The Bomb and the ever more threatening noises around Iraq at the end of 2002, then turned to space and a
piece of insider information that I hadn't previously heard: that Shuttle astronauts are given a 1 per cent chance of dying on a flight; that, statistically, this is given as their chance of failing to return. To this he added a further observation that the International Space Station, that hymn to narcotic space, was expected to require 150 flights before reaching completion in 2010. Then he frowned and took a slug of beer as the Appalachian blues singer we'd come to see wailed in the background.

“And that means that they expect to lose at least one of those,” he said.

On February 1, 2003, it happened. The shuttle
Columbia
broke up as it reentered Earth atmosphere, killing its seven crew and prompting a period of soul-searching in space circles. My Space Frontier Foundation pal Rick Tumlinson will suggest that the reaction to
Columbia
's loss owed much to 9/11; that before, opprobrium would have rained down on NASA even as the debris was settling over Texas, but in this climate the astronauts were seen as martyrs and their deaths borne stoically as part of a bigger national picture. For the first time in a decade, questions were asked about America's space programme and the people who ran it. The constant mantra has been
Where are we going?
And now, if rumour is to be believed, an answer that would have been unthinkable a year ago is waiting in the wings. The “space community” is beside itself with excitement. When Gene Cernan and I finally arranged to meet, we knew nothing of this and every time I think about it, I can't help but laugh. Better yet, it's only weeks since China put its first astronaut in space. It's all coming together. If there's a good day to be meeting the self-styled Last Man on the Moon, this is it.

It's Tuesday, January 13, 2004. We'd originally settled on Wednesday, but last week Cernan got a call from the White House asking him to be in D.C. for a speech President G. W. Bush is delivering at NASA headquarters on that day. The details of the speech have been widely leaked and these leaks suggest that the president will announce a return to the Moon, followed by a crewed mission to Mars. It seems almost unbelievable and is exciting stuff, though my first thought upon hearing the underground rumblings was that Ronald Reagan and George Bush
Sr. both trumpeted similar plans, which came to nought. And that 2004 is an election year, at the start of which the incumbent's popularity ratings are poor.