I’ll never forget the first time I read “The Rocket Man.”
It was 65 years after it was published by Ray Bradbury in The Illustrated Man. With my legs tucked beneath me in a metal rocking chair, I held the frayed, mass market paperback on my lap. From my position, I could see bright pinpricks of stars too numerous to count through a central courtyard with an open roof. It was not uncommon to see the gentle glow of the Milky Way on an evening with a new moon. No light pollution reached out to the agricultural fields where we lived in Haiti.
The short story is of a man on earth traveling again and again into space for three months at a time leaving his wife and son behind. Each time he returns, he takes to the garden, “digging like an animal” in the dirt. I remember none of the specifics of my reading except that rocking chair and the small paperback with yellowed pages, but I can feel the sensations nearly physical in their proximity. Fear commingled with awe. Grief before loss. The weight of mortality.
And this line...
“Mother wasn't afraid of the sky in the day so much, but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and sometimes I could almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never finding it.” -Ray Bradbury, The Rocket Man
The story was written more than a decade before the first U.S. mission to the moon. What little science is in the story doesn’t make much sense. But the tension and sometimes pain between the feeling of earth underneath the fingernails and limitless, unknowable possibility was unmistakably, precisely human.
This duality has brought me to tears twice in my life that I can recall. Once when I read “The Rocket Man” and a second time in 2019 listening to NPR.
I had grown up following space exploration with my parents, both scientists. The first launch I remember was of Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars Rovers, in 2003. That year, my dad and I built a model of one of the rovers out of K'nex in the basement trying to match each detail of the diagrams we found online. At school, I presented to my 6th grade class about how the landing gear would inflate upon arrival and showed a video simulation.
[Above Illustration by Samantha Gottwalt in Spirit and Oppy]
I followed the Rovers through my childhood after they landed on Mars and began sending photographs back to earth. But overtime I forgot about the unknowable possibility they traversed on Mars, focused as I was on the dirt.
Until, one day, listening to my daily NPR, there was a story that crumpled me.
Oppy, as NASA scientists affectionately called the surviving rover, was submerged in the largest dust storm they’d ever seen on Mars. The dust covered her solar panels and it had been months of waiting and hoping the dust would blow off as it had in weaker dust storms before. Now, in February 2019, after many attempts, NASA was unable to reestablish a connection and declared the mission complete.
The final message to the small rover, somewhere in the Martian world, was a song by Billie Holiday. There is perhaps nothing like music and poetry that positions us so squarely between the vast expanse of space and home in ourselves.
This tension awakens again and again in us with new art like the Netflix series Away, The Martian, and the recent Prime Video documentary Good Night, Oppy which had me in tears at the end. And it’s mirrored in the real-life exploration of the newest Mars Rover, Perseverance, and its small helicopter pal, Ingenuity, who are currently exploring Mars.
I was so affected that day I heard the last song played to Oppy, that I sat down and wrote the story as a picture book for children. My own contribution to our human history of duality. Spirit and Oppy is a story to the girl I once was, to the future scientists enthralled in Perseverance’s journey, and to all of us balanced on the precipice between dirt and eternity.
In honor of the new release of the documentary Good Night, Oppy on Prime Video, direct orders of Spirit and Oppy are 20% with free shipping when you use the code “OPPY” through December 13, 2022 while supplies last.
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What I’m loving right now:
Good Night, Oppy (Prime Video)
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey (book)
Always a Relic Never a Reliquary by Kim Sousa (poetry)