edgar-mitchell

24
The Way of the Explorer
From the center of town the echo of hymns could be heard on Sunday
morning as they issued out from under a white steeple. Perhaps I was taught
the fear of God in this setting because it seemed obvious that there was so
much to fear. But I grew out of a tradition of self-reliance and trust in
one’s instincts, those mythic values of the Old West, and as I came into
adolescence I suppose it was natural to question precisely why we should
live so fearfully. My grandfather certainly did not. He was known around
these parts as Bull Mitchell because of his livestock-trading acumen. Some
of the ranchers who would later grow wealthy (though you wouldn’t know
it by their bent and sweat-stained Stetsons) often went down to Argentina
or Brazil on business and sent back postcards with no address other than
“Bull Mitchell, New Mexico.” And he would generally get his mail. That is
to say, he was widely known, but to a child he was immortal, bullet-proof.
Above all else, he was fearless.
From the very beginning I naturally gravitated toward the male side of
the family. I have memories from when I was a young boy of a trail of red
cedar shavings strewn along the concrete sidewalks of Roswell that I would
follow this way and that, drawn along by the magnetic pull of my grandfather
as he whittled through a lazy afternoon. He would casually move
here and there, whittling, wherever conversation with friends or a cattle
deal led him. He was the center, and seemingly the originator, of his own
universe.
I recall the wide-bodied car he owned in later years, a 1946 Ford, and
how he drove it between stationary objects. The once-proud, bulbous fenders
were wrinkled, crimped from my grandfather’s habit of driving through
narrow spaces where only a horse could pass. But he felt entitled to go
wherever he chose, and that the car was obligated to take him. The condition
of its body spoke volumes of his nature: a 19th-century man set in the
vertiginous 20th century; a man born out of time.
Just a mile or so down the road from where I was raised lived a man I
imagine was not unlike my grandfather—a man who is now considered the
father of rocketry. This was deep in the bleakness of World War II. Across
an ocean, his German successor, Werhner von Braun, was busy designing
the rockets known as the V-I and V-2, which were arcing across the
English Channel and detonating when they collided with downtown
London. Each day as I walked to school along the white gravel road I
would pass the quiet country home where a mad scientist was said to live.
He was, quite literally, a rocket scientist. He was also America’s first, and
his name was Robert Goddard.
The house was generally quiet. He had recently moved from Massachusetts
(some say he was invited to leave), and now worked and studied in austere
isolation—far from sensitive populations and their demands for quiet and