Washington is feeling so close, rather suddenly. Work ran a bit late last night and Boise is still a pretty good hike from Salt Lake City, so I mostly kept moving. Mystery Machine seemed willing enough to rise to the occasion of Idaho’s 80mph speed limits, but damn it gets loud. Utah south of Salt Lake was dramatic canyons. Further north were giant rolling hills and grassy mountains with a lot of farming. It was beautiful.
Into Idaho, the interstate was up on a plain with mountains disappearing in the distance as the stars came out. Towns were far off the highway. Except for the occasional “Interstate Oasis” (collection of truckstops right on an exit every 75 miles or so), there was so little around that the night sky took over. Like if we didn’t hold tight to the road, we might fall into it. Whoever wrote the opening lines to Deep in the Heart of Texas should come double-check I-84 in rural Idaho under a new moon (almost) for good measure.
Speaking of stars, in lieu of photos for today because I only took the one, I have another podcast review. I listened to a few episodes of the Washington Post’s Moonrise. It begins the story of the space race and the US mission to the moon much further back than Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard” speech, which is where that story often starts.
Instead, host Lillian Cunningham opens with the rise of early sci-fi writing in the late 1800s which started gaining significant traction in the 30s and 40s as a pop-culture escape — first from the Great Depression, then World War II. As a quoted historian said, “Every change in policy began as a culture shift.” The political capital to shoot rockets into space with people in them would not have been available had people not started to dream about it first.
As scientists on both sides in WW2 harnessed “make stuff fly really high” technology for terrifying weapons, looking to send people into space was a dream that there was a better, unifying instead of dividing, application for such developments. And through the circulation of sci-fi writing like John Campbell’s Astounding magazine and other works like it, people started thinking about it.
Controversial Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun is largely credited with the most influential work on rocket technology and liquid fuels — which the Nazis used for war by creating the V-2 rocket, but von Braun had always wanted to use his work to go to the stars. After the war, the US brought him and his team over to augment our own research into rockets, again, primarily for weapons technology as tensions with the USSR rose sharply. This week’s episode ended school children learning Bert the Turtle’s signature “Duck and Cover” maneuver and the USSR launching Sputnik, bringing terror to the everyday lives of regular citizens. But along with that fear, a curiosity about all the secrecy combined with rising anti-government sentiments that allowed for things like the incident at Roswell. That, of course, dovetails nicely with Bundyville that I was listening to the other day.
Usually I’m following podcasts long after they “got cool,” so I’m unfamiliar with sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for next week’s episode. But I am totally hooked on this story, and I could think of no better environment to listen to it than barreling through the rural southwest under the clear night sky.