Moon Landing

A lot of far-out and groovy events took place in the 1960s when I was a girl growing up in southern Alberta. On the music scene, the British Invasion hit North America with bands like the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Troggs, Herman’s Hermits, and, of course, the Beatles. I played my 33 vinyl discs of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold your Hand” so many times it dulled the needle on my record player. Me, cross-legged in my leopard-skin print pants, shaking a head of unruly hair and singing along at the top of my lungs with Paul McCartney and John Lennon. This was down in our rumpus room amidst the black and white speckled furniture — my dad’s latest craze. Electrolux had a new spray painting kit you could attach to the vacuum cleaner. No wooden furniture in our basement was spared. No coffee table, bookshelf, end table, or picture frame, not even my piano. 

There were some tragic affairs in that era, too. The Vietnam War continued to rage. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were all assassinated in the sixties. Charles Manson and his cult went on a killing spree at Sharon Tate’s house in California. The Charles Manson thing especially rattled my parents and their friends. Any boy without a crew cut and any girl wearing long straight hair, they began to eye with distrust. But for me, stampeding into my teenage years, these dreadful events were all simply headlines on a newspaper thrown at our front door each morning. They didn’t seem real, and certainly not as important as my horse. Or later in the decade, the boy I slipped down to the coulee with, where we sampled our first dizzying taste of tobacco, hands shaking as we struck a match to light a cigarette butt we’d found on the sidewalk.

Still, an event that was impossible to ignore, and one that was the single most blown up sensation of the century happened in the 1960s, right smack in the middle of the Cold War. Humans, after decades of dreaming about it, were about to put the first man on the moon.

It was July 1969, and the Soviets had recently botched an attempt at a lunar landing. The US was determined to trounce them. This was one big universal pissing match. At the time, however, not unlike today, you couldn’t find many citizens of the western world with a critical thing to say about the obsession. Yes, the population explosion had become a huge concern, but the worldwide economy remained in fair shape. No one questioned spending billions of dollars on such a worthwhile pursuit as space travel. Even if people on earth still starved. Even if the Chinese had just suffered the deadliest famine in human history, and a civil war in Nigeria had resulted in devastating hunger and mass fatalities. In the summer of 1969, at the age of 15, I was blissfully unperturbed by the gravity of these world events. I do, however, have clear memories of the lunar landing, because of something else extraordinary that happened that day. 

My boyfriend, who later became my husband, sang in a high school rock ’n’ roll band. Someone had given the guys permission to practice at the city park band shell — some kind, city politician, who took pity on their parents. It was early afternoon on a Saturday. Guitars screeched and drums pounded from the stage. I stood outside gazing up at a greenish coloured sky. Unusual. Then I noticed a large cumulous cloud charging down from the north like an enormous, angry polar bear with a dirty belly. It quickly darkened the sky overhead. The wind whipped up. The leaves and branches of the trees shuddered. A lid flew off the garbage can.

I ran to the band shell for cover. The boys quit their instruments. Within minutes, and in a vertical bombardment, hailstones, the size of golf balls, exploded from that angry beast. The skies roared. Lightning fired. We gawked, safe under shelter, watching in awe and fear as hailstones pummelled the ground, bouncing off fences and nearby cars and buildings. Pellets of ice hit the band shell roof. The sharp staccato of gunfire. Soon, the park’s manicured lawn resembled a paintball party gone awry. 

It was a good thing most of the city’s population sat inside, hunkered in front of their black-and-white TVs, eyes glued to grainy images of Apollo 11 and the NASA crew. It was a good thing, because the storm caused no casualties, only broken windows, dented cars, obliterated gardens, and flattened crops. Costly though. Big farming community. 

That weather event, that squall in Medicine Hat, was within minutes of the first footfall on the moon and Neil Armstrong’s declaration, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” 

A majority of the city’s adult population were of German descent back then. They were mostly first generation Canadians and spoke with heavy German accents. This is what they had to say, “Yah, zey should never have done et. E’s not natural. People don’t belong on zee moon. Look at vat happened — dezazter.”

Human wisdom, from my viewpoint. Maybe someone should try to convince Elon Musk.