On July 20, 1969 – 43 years ago – I was in a migrant labor camp in northern Michigan along the beautiful shore of Traverse Bay between Omena and Peshawbestown.
We had arrived on our annual trek from Brownsville, Nebraska (hoeing sugar beets), Michigan (picking cherries), and then Ohio (picking tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers) to the most beautiful part of the annual migrant circuit.
The cold, blue waters of Omena Bay made the muggy days spent in the small cabins of Lester Southwell's farm off Michigan Highway 22 bearable. Even in the hottest days of mid-July, the water off the pier was a cold blue that made you shiver when you jumped in. In the pine forests, swarmws of mosquitoes collected along the clear, cold water of gurgling creeks meandering through the green fern and moss.
We were picking black cherries after we had just gotten done with the napoleons (light red) sweets, and toward the end of the season in August, we would move on to the tarts, or sour cherries favored by pie makers all over the world. Then it was on to Ohio.
Today was special.
Not only were we picking our favorite cherries, large lumpy syrupy black sweets, but the kids and teenagers in the camp had rigged a black and white television they had bought at one of those garage sales that seemed to sprout each Friday and Saturday along the Sutton's Bay to Traverse City route where local residents knew migrants passed on their weekend runs for food and other household necessities.
They had paid $10 for the set and rigged it with aluminum foil and wire clothes hangers to acquire a somewhat discernible image of nearby television broadcasters, most notably the Traverse City CBS affiliate Channel 9-10.
During the day, while the grownups and bigger kids were off working, the smaller kids would watch cartoons and sitcoms during the day. After work, the teens and adults would come in from the orchards with their ladders and pails. In the evenings, they watched the prime-time comedy shows.
But today, July 20, we knew that man was set to land on the moon. That day, the moon waxed near three-quarters and reflected off the clear waters off Omena Bay as it merged with Grand Traverse Bay to the south. The night was clear and cool, hovering in the mid 60s.
As we kids gathered around the set, Walter Cronkite narrated play-by-play as the astronauts made ready their descent toward the lunar surface. We were all enthralled at the prospect of a man landing on the moon.
Outside, the adult males stood in a small circle around their cars parked in front of their respective cabins and talked adult talk about how much their families picked today, what was coming tomorrow, and where they would travel at the end of the cherry season when the sour cherries had been plucked clean. These were the days before the tree-shaking automatic machines replaced agricultural labor. It had been a good year.
Then, as Cronkite and CBS switched to the NASA transmission from the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong (just a blurry, bouncing image on the set), pronounced his famous words, "This is just one small...." Cronkite had to cut in and translate the staticky slurs pronounced some 250,000 miles away and finish the sentence.
We burst out in shouts and screams and ran out of the small cabin in celebration to the amazement of the adults gathered in front of the camp.
"Que tienen?" my father asked.
"La luna!" we replied. "El hombre llego a la luna!"
"The men looked up at the moon, bright and distant, in the sky.
To some of them, who had never finished elementary school and some who had spent their entire lives without getting a chance to get near one, our claims must have seemed ludicrous.
"Tan locos," they said turning back to a subject that really mattered.
It;s hard to believe that it has been 43 years since this scene unfolded in northern Michigan, or that Armstrong died 43 years later on Aug. 25.
Wapakoneta, Ohio, where Armstrong was born, is only 15 miles south of Lima, Ohio, where we would go shopping every Saturday afternoon when we left the tomato labor camp in Delphos, Ohio, between Lima and Van Wert on Highway 30. The landscape is the same, a dready flatland dotted with small farm towns where Armstrong grew up as a boy. He probably went to Lima on weekends, considered the big city around those areas when he was a boy.
I wondered why the flags were at half-staff just yesterday and asked myself whether Armstrong, who had been aboard the original moon landing when they unufrled one and left it on the lunar surface, would have wanted it to be lowered when he died.
We live, as the Chinese curse says, in interesting times.
1 comment:
Great American hero, God Bless American
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