Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Port town fatalism helps some see beyond the wreck debris
FOOTNOTE
By MARK LANE
Among the space shuttle debris that fell in the fields and farms, roads and woodlands in Texas was a flight helmet. It fell on the property of James Couch of San Augustine County, who camped 5 feet from where it landed so he could guard it until it´s retrieved.
The helmet was dented and discolored but recognizable in the news photo. It is on a bare patch of ground with tape zoning the site. If not for the helpful explanation in the caption, one might mistake this for an archeological dig. Damaged and in the dirt, the helmet looks little different from something that might have belonged to a hoplite.
And like most folks, I´m left gaping at a culture´s best creations twisted into wreckage by forces unimaginable. It´s easy to feel like an archeologist trying to imagine a battle or beachcomber happening on pieces of a shipwreck.
The language of space flight borrows heavily from sea and shore. We call them spaceships. We boast of being the pre-eminent spacefaring nation. You can see the signs from Interstate 95 urging tourists to stop at America´s spaceport.
When NASA´s words are sea metaphors, there is a heft to them lacking in vocabulary drawn from military acronyms, systems analysis and civil aviation. We are conditioned by the experience of thousands of years to regard the sea as unforgiving, capricious and casually murderous. This puts us in the right frame of mind.
A plane crash is a rare event. By contrast, every habitual beachcomber has happened upon a stray piece of boat or ship and wished a story could be coaxed from the artifact.
I once met a woman from Iceland who made beautiful sweaters, preserving the customs of her home. She told me how each village had a customary design. In the old days, fishermen wore these designs and so could be carried to the right place should their bodies end up washing up on shore. That´s the practical fatalism of a port town and it was knitted into their very clothing.
This part of Florida is the first port town of space travel. And though our missing travelers are identified by more sophisticated means, there are similarities.
More than those who can´t see vapor trails across their skies, we know the risks. The wreck of the Challenger wasn´t a television feed for us. Its vapor trail hung in our sky for what felt like a long time. Its parts washed up on our beaches.
Like the people of any port town, we are sadder when we see wreckage, yet also less surprised by it.
After the wreck of the Columbia, (and let us keep the Stoic language of the sea and call these “wrecks” rather than “disasters”) newspaper editorials around the county called for a thorough inquiry, a careful examination of the wreckage and a continued commitment to manned spaceflight. Sound enough advice. They passionately countered an argument seldom made. Surprisingly few people have argued for an end to space exploration.
Most of the country seems to have adopted the port-town view. That the elements are harsh but content to kill us only once in awhile. The rest is but a matter of design and craft.
Human advancement has depended on learning fairly narrow lessons from wreckage. We mourn our dead, move helmets and the like to museums, write a few songs and go on. It´s the only way we can still think of ourselves as a port town. It´s the only way we go any place new.
We seem to know this in an instinctual way. It may be port-town fatalism, but that´s why I assume we will stay in space.
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