Leaving Orbit (17 page)

I drive across the causeway spanning the Indian River to Cocoa, a dense little town that feels like it’s been here longer than the others, maybe because it doesn’t seem as touristy. Then north to Titusville. Everyone in the area makes fun of Titusville, but I can’t really see how it’s different from anything else around here—it’s strip-mally and a little run-down, but so are the other towns. The streets are lined with motels with space-themed signs, as they are in Cocoa Beach and Port St. John and everywhere else. I suppose every area needs one town to make fun of.

I cross back to Merritt Island using a different causeway, and rather than heading toward the gate of the Space Center I take the turn for the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. This place is beautiful in a prehistoric kind of way, wetlands with palmettos and slash pine, everywhere the sounds of alligators and frogs, exotic-looking birds touching down and taking off again. Across the Mosquito Lagoon, the Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch towers stand sentinel on the horizon, a reminder of why all this is here. I’ve visited this refuge a couple of times before, and every time I come here I envision the landscape as an inch-for-inch replica of what Ponce de León found when he landed here in 1513. There are few places like this left on either coast, places where you can imagine the European explorers encountering this land for the first time.

I’ve been reading about Juan Ponce and about Captain James Cook, whose ships
Discovery
and
Endeavour
were the namesakes for two of the space shuttle orbiters. On his first voyage, Cook established an observatory in Tahiti to record the transit of Venus across the sun. He was the first to circumnavigate New Zealand, took possession of Australia for Great Britain, and became the first European to visit Hawaii. After his second voyage, he was already famous and could have rested on his laurels, but instead he kept looking for an excuse for another expedition. He set off for his third and final voyage in 1776. Legend holds that the Hawaiian natives mistook him for a god, though this has been disputed; these same natives stabbed him to death and preserved his remains as they preserved their chiefs’. Cook wrote that he intended to go not only “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as it is possible for a man to go.”

Reading about their voyages, I keep thinking how strange it is that these grand vague ideas of discovery and endeavor actually become, when you look at them closely, weirdly specific stories of weirdly specific people, adventures that take place at particular moments and under certain pressures. These were actual human beings who climbed into actual boats for actual reasons, many of those reasons being less grand and lofty than the names of their ships. Juan Ponce and James Cook and the others wanted to be rich, or to impress people, or to escape something at home, or to make a name for themselves. Taken as a whole, their achievements have less of a feeling of grandeur than of something like coincidence: if the conditions that made their trips advantageous hadn’t come about when they did, someone else would have made the trip at another time, and the contact between cultures would not be exactly what it was, the New World would not be exactly what it is. The story would be a different one.

I get back in my car and drive across the causeway to Cocoa Beach. There is a motel here that was once owned jointly by the seven Mercury astronauts, the place they stayed when they came to town to race their hot rods up and down A1A and laugh at the local sheriff and get drunk around the pool. That motel, when I stop in, is now owned by a chain. The lobby has no space memorabilia, no indication that the first Americans to go to space owned it, slept here. When I ask the young woman behind the counter, she acknowledges it’s true but doesn’t seem particularly energized by the fact. She looks young enough that she was probably born after
Challenger
; the Mercury astronauts are probably older than her grandparents, their accomplishments prehistoric and irrelevant.

The drive home to Tennessee is easier and quicker than the drive down—the trip home always seems faster, I suppose. On the way to Cape Canaveral two days earlier I’d passed through Florida entirely in the dark, but coming back I get to see the outskirts of Orlando and the swampy landscapes of central Florida. Many billboards advertise upcoming rest stops and their free orange juice. I know from reading John McPhee that the orange juice will be the same concentrate one buys at any grocery store in Knoxville, or in Minnesota, or in Siberia. Other billboards denounce President Obama. Still others implore me in more and more urgent terms not to have an abortion.

To pass the time, I listen to audiobooks—I get through the latest well-reviewed literary doorstopper and start another. I stop for lunch somewhere in south Georgia. At sunset, as a gorgeous orange light is filling my car and everything else, I notice myself: I’m sucking on a milkshake, tearing down the highway at eighty miles per hour, singing along to a pop song I’d never heard until several days ago, thinking about where to stop for dinner. For today, I don’t have to worry about my son’s nap schedule or answer my students’ e-mails. I can stop wherever I want without accommodating someone else’s preferences. I can listen to trashy music or talk to myself or think, just sit quietly in the hushed luxury of my own secondhand car, the landscape of Georgia whistling by outside the window.

I hear the “Firework” song again. “Baby you’re a firework / Come on, show ’em what you’re worth /Make ’em go, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ / As you shoot across the sky-y-y.”

I pull into my driveway in Knoxville late that night, and my house is already dark. I carry my bags in as quietly as I can. The house is tidy, the dishwasher humming and sloshing, my husband and son asleep, seemingly undamaged by my absence. I kiss them both and crawl into bed exhausted, still smelling of the swamps of Florida, the red dirt of Georgia, smelling of fast food and all the diesel fumes of all the truck stops of the Southeast. I’d feared making this trip, had felt it a necessary inconvenience to transport my eyeballs and brain down to the launch site to be able to say that I had personally witnessed the event myself. Now, having experienced unexpected and complicated things, having felt the heat and having smelled the smells, I see what it means to actually go to the Cape, to make the drive covering every inch between my driveway and the causeway, to get dirty, get drunk, get sunburned, and pee in the bushes. It was important to feel the light of the launch against my own face, its vibration pushing against my clothes. I’d thought I had to be there in person in order to get the real story; in fact, by being there, I—a tiny bit—changed the story.

Before I’m awake the next morning, my phone buzzes with an incoming text. I roll over in bed and squint at the screen with one eye. The text is from Omar.

Good morning. Home safe?

I smile. Only Omar.

Yup, I tap out with my thumbs. Got in at 11pm. Lots of traffic around Atlanta.

Soon, we will make plans to go to the launch of STS-134, the last mission for
Endeavour.
Mark Kelly has announced that he will remain on the crew as its commander. It’s scheduled for No Earlier Than April 19, 2011.

I’m sitting in my office at the University of Tennessee the Monday after I return from the launch of
Discovery
, still sunburned and sleep-deprived from the trip. It’s hard to believe I’m going to do the same thing at least two more times. I’ve plugged my phone into my computer to upload the images from the trip; as they flow by on my screen, I’m startled by how many pictures I’ve taken. A picture of my odometer as it clicked over to forty thousand, one of a sign welcoming cars to Merritt Island that reads WHERE DREAMS ARE LAUNCHED!, one of a huge peach-colored full moon hanging low in the sky, the kind of moon that must have made a tempting target for the newly transplanted spaceworkers of the sixties.

As the photos upload, I start preparing to teach my next class, Writing Creative Nonfiction. I’ve built into the syllabus a unit I call A Brief History of Creative Nonfiction, in which we spend a few weeks reading Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Hunter S. Thompson, James Agee, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer—important writers who were working in that moment in the sixties when literary journalism converged with a thread of creative writing and the genre we now call creative nonfiction was born.

On the syllabus for tomorrow are selections from Tom Wolfe, who is rightfully credited with being one of the founding fathers of creative nonfiction by helping to define the New Journalism. I open the file and flip through pages covered with my notes from previous semesters. I stop on a random page from
The Right Stuff.

Flip a chunk of pages.

Flip.

As I read, I reach down and scratch at my ankles, the raised red spots where the invisible bugs got me while I waited on the causeway. Flip.

I’ve taught excerpts from
The Right Stuff
many times, and it always leads to a useful discussion. My students respond to the audacity of Wolfe’s voice, and as the semester goes on they remember him as a key example of what we mean when we use the adjective
voicey.
It makes me proud when my students can identify little echoes of this voice in David Foster Wallace, in John D’Agata, in Susan Orlean. This semester I’ve also added to the syllabus the first chapter of Norman Mailer’s
Of a Fire on the Moon
, which we will be discussing tomorrow as well. I’ve always talked about Norman Mailer’s role in defining literary journalism and thus creative nonfiction, but not until this semester have I tried to teach an example of his work. He is generally more resistant to excerpting than most. I’m curious what students will think of the differences in the ways Wolfe and Mailer write about spaceflight; for all the similarities that come with the era and the subject matter, the differences between them are stark. For one thing, Wolfe is obsessed with
character
, clearly believes that character is at the center of everything, and he creates dozens of characters big and small: astronauts, engineers, gas station attendants, astronauts’ wives, reporters, even chimpanzees being trained for spaceflight. For Mailer, the only real character in the book is Norman Mailer; even the astronauts are there only as archetypes upon which to project his own ideas about himself.

I look over the pages of Mailer’s I’ve assigned for tomorrow. His sentences are dense, paragraphs long and wandering, scenes structured by free association rather than anything like theme or plot. I fear that my students won’t get him, that I might be the only reader who could fall in love with prose like this. For instance, about the moment of launch: