When I was very young my father showed me a rock. Well, it looked like a rock, and indeed it was a rock, but it wasn’t just a rock. It was, he said, a moon rock. A moon rock! Yes, a moon rock. This rock, this irregular block of stripey gneiss that we could hold in our hands and turn and scrutinize, this grey-black hunk of silent hardness flecked with small bright shiny bits and dark matt bits and weighing just about as much as you’d expect a rock of that size to weigh, once upon a time would have weighed almost nothing at all in our clunky earth units as it circled our planet and shone at night like a beaten silver coin. All the people who have ever lived and who had eyes with which to see might have looked up and seen this very rock in the boundless black night.
It was almost too much for me to hold in my head, the romance, the magic of this object. I kept it in my room and showed it to my pals, and explained how my father had been friends with one of the NASA astronauts who had given it to him as a souvenir and a lucky keepsake. I let them touch it, but only with their fingertips. I told them how it glowed at night in the darkened room, and glowed brightest when the moon was full.
It has become a modern commandment that you shouldn’t lie to your kids, but this is hogwash. Everyone lies and everyone is lied to, and often for the most splendid of reasons, and I have never for a moment been anything but grateful to my dad for transforming a plain old backyard rock into a sacred relic, for sprinkling my life with moondust, for doing what dads should do and simply telling me a story. Without stories, our lives are just arid collections of facts, tired old rocks without atmosphere. Life with him was never that.
I thought of him when I read about the American moon trees this week. Apollo 14 launched on 31 January 1971, and five days later Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell hopped around or played golf or whatever it was that astronauts did on the moon back then. There’s always one poor sap who has to stay in orbit while the others have all the fun, and on Apollo 14 it was one Stuart Roosa, who consoled himself by bringing aboard, among his personal effects, a collection of some 500 seeds, 100 each of Sycamore, Redwood, Sweetgum, Douglas fir and Loblolly pine.
It was by way of an experiment to see how orbiting the moon might affect them, and after their safe return the seeds were planted in NASA nurseries and lovingly tended. Later the seedlings were transplanted to various locations around the southern and western states in ceremonies to commemorate the American bicentennial in 1976. There’s a Moon Sycamore outside the capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama, and two Moon Douglas firs growing in what is mysteriously referred to in the Moon Tree register as “a private residence” in Salem, Oregon. There’s a Moon Loblolly pine at Lowell Elementary School in Boise, Idaho, and a Moon Sweetgum at the birthplace of Helen Keller, which made me wonder: what did Helen Keller make of the moon?
She would have had a fair notion of what a tree is – you can touch it, you can wrap your arms around it, you can feel the coolness of its shade – but how do you adequately describe the moon to someone who has never seen it? The moon isn’t an object we can touch – it’s an idea, a hallucination, a magician’s promise. It’s an overlooked wonder, a useless miracle. It’s a story we tell ourselves, when we remember to.
You may be wondering what the experiment yielded. Did the trip to space affect the seeds and the trees they became? It did not. The trees that grew from moon seeds fared identically to trees grown from earthbound seeds, which is to say that few of them are still alive. We take life for granted, here on earth, but life is only abundant in the generality. An individual life, whether it’s a Loblolly pine or an armadillo or your dad, is a tenuous thing, a small commonplace miracle no less miraculous for its smallness and commonplacidity.
Most of the trees have died – some just never flourished, some were struck by lightning or infested with borer beetle. But the plaques still stand, and in most cases when the moon tree died a new tree was planted where it stood, one that may never have been to space but which is no less glorious for that. I like the thought of adults and children coming across a tree beside a plaque, staring up in wonder at its at its branches and trunk, at its leaves and fingers, marveling at the Moon Tree, being helped by an untrue story to more truly see the thing that’s right in front of them.
The Times, 29 Feb 2020