Traveler’s Journal – The End of the World

When I was a kid my family didn’t take many vacations. We never did the Disney thing. We never made it to the Grand Canyon. Unlike Carol and Mike Brady (or Fred and Wilma Flintstone for that matter) my folks didn’t see much value in schlepping off to Hawaii in the middle of the winter. We never did any of that stuff.

In general, I suppose, it was money. But it was also about being busy with other things – boy scout camp,  our cabin with the porta-potty on Beaver Lake, manhunt with the Colemans from next door. Raiding the collection of Playboys stashed under the porch of the apartment building down the street. Stealing beer after my dad’s campaign fund-raisers.

With Disneyland, I’d like to think that our disinclination to go was evidence of an early onset political realization on my part that Mickey Maus was a false prophet of joy whose only kindness was providing the smiling face for a soulless corporation that has been driving poor folk, the Third-World over, into poverty and desperation with their cartoon factories for several decades. But that’s likely bullshit. More to the point was that my Mom knew it was faster, easier and cheaper to sate my annual 10-year-old rollercoaster jones with a trip to the decidedly downscale “Ghost Town in the Glen,” located a few hours from our home in upstate New York, than it was to drive the three crazy-making days to Florida.

The vacation we did take, several times, was to Washington, DC. And those trips were cool. There aren’t many kids who would get excited at the thought of visiting the National Archives to see The Constitution, but I guess I’ve always been a bit off.

But the memory that stands out most from those trips was going to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. From very early on I was completely taken with all things astronomical and have remained so my entire life. In my early 20s that predilection sent me into a five-year-long dysfunctional relationship with a deeply insane planetarium director. But that’s a different story and it ends with me setting fire to her cat. Let it be.

According to my mom something happened to me on that first Smithsonian trip when we walked into the main hall and I saw the Apollo 11 Lunar Command Module hanging from the ceiling. According to her I just stared up, slap-faced speechless, eyes agog and mouth agape. It was the kind of look that some kids get when they see dinosaur skeletons, or some middle-aged men get when they see firm, young pop-star breasts bouncing in rhythm at an MTV awards show. It was a stare that said something about God and witness and creation.

I stood there, neck craned and mouth wide, staring at the spaceship’s intrinsic coolness until my older brother, JP, shook me from the reverie and towards a model of the Lunar Lander in which we could crawl around. Even then I knew that flopping about in a Lunar Lander was a damn sight better than an entire chain of Space Mountains.

But it was when we were leaving the museum, and passing through the museum shop, that I saw a couple of photos which, I can honestly say, changed my life. One was of the Earth itself, floating blue in a sea of darkness. The other was taken from the Command Module of Apollo 11 and it showed the Lunar Lander ascending from the grey moonscape with the Earth appearing to rise above the moon’s horizon. Even to an 11-year-old brain these photos seemed to hold some promise for a better world.

My folks bought me a poster of the first photo and it hung over my bed for the better part of the next few decades. I can’t say that I looked at it everyday and wondered, like a Dr. Seuss character, about “All The Places I’d Go,” but it did beckon with a teasing thought that all this is yours, go grab it.

Some 25 years later I was living in New York City, working as a high school teacher in Brooklyn. My circadian rhythm has always been set for late night, so I’d generally grab a couple of pints at Flannery’s from 10 until 1 in the morning, then get up at 6 for work. When I’d come home in the afternoons I’d flop down in the Lazy Boy and idly flip channels until I fell asleep for a several hour siesta before getting up, doing my lesson plans and starting the routine over again.