edgar-mitchell

Sea of Grass 33
description of reality in order to better understand it. Reality was there,
somewhere, in the form of an intricate landscape to be explored and understood.
But l came across those who thought the exactness of the mathematical
approach was actually embedded in nature. They believed that
only by reducing nature to its bare elements and uncovering the inherent
mathematics could one gain true insight into the territory they chose to
explore. Only the mathematics could point to the next step. These were
brilliant scholars, but we stood at opposite intellectual poles. There seemed
to be something stirring my intellectual vision, perhaps my own intuition
guiding me in another direction. What came to me most naturally was an
understanding of synthesis, the relationships and patterns existing across
disparate disciplines of thought, not the tedious process of splitting intellectual
hairs.
Life in these days was stimulating and varied. At night I would come
home from campus, weary but happy, to a young and noisy household. In
the last month of summer we retreated to the coast of Cape Cod, and in
the winter we all would ice skate upon a makeshift pond I fashioned out of
lengths of wood and plastic, and filled with water from a garden hose (the
local ponds for skating were considered too dangerous for children). Once
a month I headed out to a Navy air field just south of Boston and climbed
into the seat of a plane in order to maintain a certain level of proficiency.
By dusk I was back in the lap of domesticity. These were good times in
almost every way, but Louise and I were having more difficulties, as the
silent traumas of being the wife of a test pilot who aspired to be an astronaut
were starting to mount. And I was too ignorant, preoccupied, and
simply too insensitive to understand her plight. It never occurred to me, as
I forged my own role in this male-dominated world, that I was displaying
many of the rigid characteristics of my patriarchal grandfather. My military
service had been the result of circumstance, but I’d unexpectedly
found a home there. Louise faithfully and lovingly supported my ambitions
and stabilized the family. Such dreams might lead to glory or widowhood,
and she and the children were silently in need of stability and
tranquility.
Precisely what an astronaut did and what he would face in the vast
frontier of space was still a looming unknown, not only to the public at
large, but to those of us in the space industry as well. The challenge was
exhilarating, but the sheer lack of convention in our lives was at times a
burden. We had never been firmly grounded in any of the communities
we’d breezed into and out of after our brief tenure had expired. We were
always off to another distant setting so that I could further my understanding
of what I might find, were I ever to make that climb into space one
day. I was pushing my family from one venue to the next so that I might
fulfill the most exotic of dreams—that of being an explorer in the latter