Notes from my Knapsack 7-18-19

Notes from my Knapsack 7-18-19

Jeff Gill

 

Looking at the Moon

___

 

July 20, 1969, I was on my great-aunts' porch in Chicago.

 

They had an enclosed area, surrounded by windows, a former porch that was more of a cold room in winter and a very hot one mostly in the summer, except long after the sun went down and especially when the wind was in the east, and blew in off of Lake Michigan, just a block and a half away.

 

As little kids we were not quite understanding what was going on, but picking up from the adults how important it really was. I was seven, nearly eight, and besotted by America's space program, so I might have had a little more direct investment in it, but I'll admit the small black and white TV with a loop and rabbit ears on the back, blurry even without switching to the lunar images, kept the majesty at arm's length. I kept watching, though, because my beloved great-aunts, a pair of never married schoolteachers back when that was a thing, were riveted to the story, and so was I.

 

We switched back and forth from Walter Cronkite to Frank Reynolds, and honestly I'm not sure which we were on when Neil Armstrong finally came out and made his cautious journey down the last steps into history.

 

What I do recall that Sunday night was leaning out a window and looking at the Moon overhead, and thinking "there are people up there." It made the lunar surface closer, somehow.

 

In the last thirty years, I've done many tours of the Newark Earthworks, and had more than my share of opportunities to simply enjoy and reflect for myself on the grounds, the lines the earthen walls inscribe towards the horizon, and the arcs of Moon and Sun from their rising to their setting. Somehow, two thousand years ago, Native Americans living here were able to record and project and plan those movements so that they could encode into their walls and alignments the movements of the heavenly bodies.

 

And I've wondered often: did they wonder, those Native American scientists and leaders and everyday people, if other humans could ever stand on the surface of that circle? Did they envision it as a sphere; how clearly did they project its orbits?

 

The comparison of the only other octagon and circle connected earthwork in all of North America, just sixty miles southwest of us in Chillicothe, offer a tantalizing hint that, in their adjustment of the geometry of the octagonal figure, they understood enough about latitude that they may well have known they stood on a sphere. Two thousand years ago, not far off of when Egyptian and Greek scholars first calculated the same reality from solar geometry across a comparable stretch of landscape.

 

And if the Earth was a sphere, it wasn't that big a leap to infer that the disk of the Moon was in fact the face of a sphere in the skies. They might well have known that here in Newark back then: but to somehow travel across the heavens, and stand on it and look back at us?

 

Yet it's still hard even for me, a youthful space program fanatic, to imagine that we did it, and the living memories of those who did are passing us by. It's amazing, incredible, and perhaps will again become unbelievable.

 

My hope out of these fiftieth anniversary observances is that we find out how important it is for us to believe not only in the reality of the moon landings then, but the importance for the human spirit in landing there again, and learning more about the neighborhood in which we live.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he was not quite eight when he watched Walter Cronkite explain the blurry pictures on a black and white TV. Tell him how you remember that night, if you do, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.