Recalling a childhood near-death experience on the path of my life
While the moon landing was happening, I lay unconscious in my father’s car on a hot summer’s day
On the July afternoon that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, I was unconscious, crumpled in the footwell of my father’s car.
I was 13, not quite a boy any more, but still fascinated by the stars and planets and by the gung-ho camaraderie of space travel. Astronauts, not hockey players, were my heroes. I familiarized myself with the acronyms so favoured by NASA: CAPCOM, CM, TLI. I was deeply attracted to an abbreviated language that seemed free from feelings, secrets, and unspoken meanings.
I had a telescope powerful enough for me to count many of the moons of Jupiter. I built plastic models of the spacecraft that ferried astronauts away from the clutches and complications of Earth. I kept a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings of their accomplishments and their daring-do. All those clean-cut men, so kind and brave, and all those beautiful machines, so purposive and modern, augured a marvellous future, one seemingly unencumbered by the gravity of the past.
That hot summer of 1969, while students clashed with authority, I was thinking mostly of travelling to the moon. The recent death of a newborn sister named Jennifer, who appeared like a shooting star and was gone, left me feeling exposed to the harshness of space.
Was the whole family stillborn? I could not say. A vacation was in order, timed coincidentally with the Apollo 11 mission.
My parents had rented a cottage on Prince Edward Island. But once arrived they seemed disinterested in the significance of the landing itself. The closest television, a little black and white model, was owned by the proprietors and they lived miles away in Charlottetown. Later that evening we would drive there to watch Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon, my parents explained. After all, there was no sense wasting a perfectly good afternoon on the seaside. So while the family lounged on the beach, I retreated to the car to listen to the broadcast of the hours leading up to lunar landing.
It was very warm and humid. To have this moment entirely to myself, I rolled the windows up and perched behind the steering wheel, where my father ordinarily sat. I listened to the ghostly voices travelling between Houston and the lunar module as it descended toward its place in history. The last thing that I recall was Flight Commander Gene Kranz running through the call and response of their final checklist to ensure that men and machine were in good shape to land. Control: Go.
TELMU: Go
GNH: Go.
Surgeon: Go.
And then, nothing, a dreamless blank. It might have been my brother who found me, my skin pale and dry, folded up on the dirty floor of the car. I felt breathless and disoriented as I was dragged out to the ground. I recall the warmth of the red earth pressed upon my face. Kranz’s reassuring words echoed faintly in my ears.
While I was unconscious, the lunar module had touched down and Armstrong had sent that memorable message back to Earth: “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
I thought at first that I would feel mad at myself for having missed the moment. But strangely, I did not.
Instead, I felt relief for those two men, so very far away, for having made their perilous journey through space. They were safe, yes, safe, I thought, buoyed by the well-wishes of others. Including those of a wounded boy who so often felt unsafe. Hanging on to that thought helped me silently endure my father’s words while he berated me for my stupidity and carelessness. How could I do such a dumb thing, he demanded?
I had no answer then but one was on its way and had yet to reach me, as if transmitted from some distant planet.
Looking into his angry eyes, I felt like laughing out loud but did not dare to do so. As I smiled to myself, I vomited repeatedly.
It felt like I was trying to rid myself of something deep inside, something that I no longer needed or wanted to be.
Later that night in Charlottetown, while I sat with my parents watching Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon, I felt my fascination with space travel begin to waver for the first time. It was not to the arid moon that I needed to look but to the dusty and unforgiving world of the here and now.
Within a few years I would gather the strength to flee the family home, never to return. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to trace the origins of that desire, which grew and grew until it felt like a commandment to leave, back to that stifling car and to the darkness into which I had briefly travelled in the summer of ’69.
What seemed at first like something for which I needed permission gradually became an order that could not be ignored. Go. And I did. Into what was then an unknown future, perilous and irresistible.