edgar-mitchell

Sea of Grass 25
safety. Though I have no recollections of rockets flaring into the night
skies or the ignition of exotic new fuels, there were stories that circulated
among the natives of Roswell—stories of fire and brimstone igniting the
heavens, strange machinery, and a quiet, reclusive mind assembling it all.
This was a man who would loom large in my imagination, a man of the
proportions of my grandfather. He was mythic, and I now see how his life
ran so counter to the setting he must have found himself in. Here was a
man of science, a man from that vast ungodly world beyond the perimeter
of Roswell. By any standard, Robert Goddard was part of the scientific
lore of the times. Whenever I walked by his farm it was always quiet, yet
Wernher von Braun’s rockets would continue to terrorize Londoners. The
efforts of both would lay the groundwork for what was to occur after the
detonation of a terrible new weapon, just outside another small town in
New Mexico, that produced strange cerebral clouds in the vast distance. I
recall what was the luminous glow from early tests at the White Sands
Proving Grounds of the bomb that would bring the war to an abrupt end,
and initiate another quiet, cold one. Of course, all of this was well beyond
my field of understanding and experience at the time, and unbeknownst
to me then, I would one day be very grateful for the work of my neighbor.
When I was 13 I took an ad hoc job at the local airport washing fragile
airplanes made of light framing and lacquered cloth. When I was 14 I
soloed in one of those planes myself, and experienced for the first time the
sense of freedom found only in the seat of an airplane: release from the
Earth. And it was during this time in my life that I developed my own
interest in science. Early on I sensed I was an engineer by nature. I came to
understand farm machinery, as explained to me by my father, and airplanes,
as explained by local pilots and mechanics. I came from a selfschooled,
intelligent lineage that wanted me to have the finest education
affordable. Because we couldn’t afford much, sacrifices would be made. I
was also blessed with the attentions of rural school teachers who devoted
special care to a student they believed would one day leave this town. And
in 1948, that’s what I did.
The administration at Carnegie Mellon must have thought a cowboy
from New Mexico would make an exotic addition to their student body; I
probably was, in that Pittsburgh society. Though I didn’t excel my first
year, I was a serious student. At times I would see myself as I believed
others might see me: a cowboy with jug-handled ears and straw in his teeth;
simple, but earnest. And every now and then I played to their expectations.
I used time efficiently in those days. I carried an extra course load,
pledged Kappa Sigma, met and dated my future wife, Louise, and when I
began to run short of funds, took a full-time job in a steel mill, cleaning
slag from burned-out blast furnaces. With an equally impecunious friend I