July 20, 2018

     Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

     It was on this day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. For me, his was one of those where-were-you-when events, along with 9/11, JFK's assassination, and the Red Sox finally winning the World Series.
    I in the Navy, stationed at the Presidio in Monterey, California, studying Vietnamese. Not the old Spanish Presidio downtown, but on the army base perched on a hill overlooking Monterey Bay. This area had once been as barren as the moon. Then the bacteria got its act together and there was vegetation and dinosaurs, followed by mastodons, sabre toothed cats, then Indians. The Spanish organized the Indians, who rebelled and turned Mexican, until the U.S. made them Americans.
     The Americans built a language school in Monterey to facilitate their adventures around the world. I happened in on the one in Southeast Asia. We enlisted men lived in two story wooden barracks that climbed the hill until they reached our wooden classrooms. Our teachers were refugees, educated people who had fled the north when the Communists took over.
    Vietnamese has a simple grammar, unfortunately complicated by having the meaning of a word changed by its tone: rising tone, falling tone, question mark tone, heavy tone. I never got the hang of it and went around wearing a cat rather than a hat. There were nine of us in our class. We spent six hours a day reciting memorized dialogs and I don't remember what else. I was interested in languages, but not in being in the military. My fellow students also resented being dragged away from their lives for some foolish business dreamt up by old men unwilling to pick up a gun themselves, or even a grammar book.
      Apollo 11 took off on July 16th for its four day trip to the moon. About half way to the moon, our teacher brought a TV into the classroom, the first and only time this happened during our nine month stay. The screen kept switching from the earth behind and the moon ahead. It was thought provoking. Five minutes was plenty.
   During those days and nights you could check the waxing of the moon and the shrinking of earth on a TV in the rec hall, a dark and claustrophobic cave. There was always someone there keeping vigil. Lunar Module Eagle landed safely on the 20th, but Armstrong and Aldrin did not walk on the moon till the 21st, a Saturday. There were no language classes on Saturdays. I enjoyed the quiet in the barracks now that everyone was over at the rec hall. I wandered around, noticing things I had never looked at; a printed fire escape route on which someone had written funny comments. I chatted with a guy I had never talked to before. He had been reading a book about the wadis of Palestine. Everything I know about wadis I learned from this guy.
     Someone came by and said the astronauts were about to leave the module. I went over to the rec hall and watched as Armstrong emerged from the module like a white beetle climbing down a lunar module. I was nervous for him. I had been reading about the preparations for this flight for years and knew all kinds of thigs could go wrong. In fact things were constantly going wrong, but the crew back in Houston was able to correct them all.
     The rest is history. I was proud of my country. But already people were saying we should fix things here on Earth instead of wasting money on meaningless moon shots. And it wasn't long before the deniers were saying it was all staged in a studio. G ood grief!

Stagers would have baked a more believable footprint.