One Small Step

Neil Armstrong died today at the age of 82. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. As he stepped from the lunar module onto the moon’s surface, creating the first footprint in the gray dust, he uttered the historic words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He had worked on what he was going to say all the way to the moon and during the decent. But when the moment came, he flubbed the line he’d planned – “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” – the exclusion of the article rendering the statement self-contradictory (“man” without the article is the same as the generic “mankind”) You can hear the pause between the phrases when he realizes his mistake, but he (rightfully) carries on. This was history, not a grammar class. And who didn’t know what he meant anyway?

I watched the landing in a mansion in the hills of Berkeley, California, which that summer was serving as a bizarre hippie commune. The house was owned by a professor at the University of California who was doing research in Poland for the summer. Two female students were serving as house-sitters, but they had extended the occupants to between ten and a fifteen at any one time (I don’t think anyone ever knew for sure) in the six-bedroom house. A gardener came once a week to care for the lawn and citrus trees and raspberry vines. A lot of brown rice, cheap wine, marijuana, and LSD were consumed. Conversations stretched into the night, though none of any consequence. One night I dropped some acid and for a stretch of time wrote several pages of poetry into a notebook. The next morning I tried to read what I’d written, but whatever it was it was neither legible nor language.

We watched the moon landing that night in the relatively small TV room that looked out over an expansive view of San Francisco Bay. I can’t recall whether the TV was black-and-white or only the broadcast of it. And I can’t remember how long the whole landing and first moonwalk was. But it was riveting and as surreal as any drug trip we might have been on. After Armstrong had stepped onto the moon, we stepped out onto a balcony overlooking the bay where we had a good view of the moon. The idea of there actually being humans up there walking around was more hallucinogenic than any drugs we might have taken. And we hadn’t taken any.