Moondust by Andrew Smith Page A

questioners, but with himself and the anguishhe felt at being unable to recall the feeling of being there. Eventually, he got two friends to regress him under hypnosis, after which he felt sure that something significant had happened to him on the flight – that the epiphany provided no less than a window on the Universe; a clue as to its structure and our connection to it. He realized that the tightly focussed training regime of the fighter pilot and astronaut is at odds with that required of a modern-day shaman, which was how he was beginning to see himself.
    Mitchell originally conceived the Institute of Noetic Sciences as “more a state of mind than a place” and began by running it with his new girlfriend, Anita Rettig, whom he married in 1974, adopting her two children into the bargain – for his first marriage to Louise Randall became one of many to collapse soon after a Moonwalker’s return to Earth. Mitchell is hard on himself about this, blaming the anxiety and absence enforced by his career, multiplied by his own self-absorption, for a failure to understand his wife’s unhappiness. While his dream had been drifting into view, he confesses, “there were never any guarantees, and for a mother and her children, the lifestyle meant friends and playmates left behind” as the family was dragged from base to base. At any rate, the crises came fast. In the beginning, influential people wanted to meet and be associated with an Apollo astronaut, but the Moondust gradually fell away and the businessman who had agreed to back IONS withdrew, leaving the dream in ruins. Nevertheless, money did arrive in fits and starts: on one occasion, according to Mitchell, a hippy girl in a VW camper van arrived with $25,000, dropped it off and puttered into the sunset without even leaving a name. Soon they were able to initiate research into paranormal phenomena like extrasensory perception (ESP), and the health benefits of acupuncture and meditation, which was still considered pretty “farout” stuff in the 1970s. At the same time, Mitchell was forced to engage in another struggle, fighting a drift toward both mysticism and his own deification within the organization. He even felt compelled to shave off the beard he’d grown at one stage, in order that he might look less biblical.
    On the more far-out fringes of the organization, it had beennoticed that the number of Moonwalkers, twelve, corresponded with the number of Jesus’ disciples. Things were getting weird down here in Florida and, by the decade’s end, with his creation slipping away from him and five kids to put through college, he began to distance himself from IONS. In 1982, he was removed as chairman.
    Last night, a brilliant sunset flared over the Gulf of Mexico and when it had finally burnt itself out, a vast Moon hung above the glassy water in its place. Years of living in a city where the sky is seldom clear mean that I still have to force myself to look up most nights, but this night the sky wouldn’t be ignored: there she was, a soapy white, with delicate traces of blue and the enigmatic shadows which so enchanted Galileo when he became the first person to view them through a telescope in 1609. His findings caused a sensation when he published them the following year, but it wasn’t until a generation later that the Moon’s features were given the lyrical names that we still use today. To Giovanni Battista Riccioli, preparing his lunar atlas in 1651, the shadows looked like seas, and so we have the Sea of Tranquillity, Ocean of Storms, Lake of Dreams, Bay of Rainbows …
Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, Lacus Somniorum, Sinus Iridum.
Someone called them the poetry of the Moon, which rides an ellipse around the Earth, but doesn’t spin, always presenting the same face, keeping the other one hidden. Thus, the “dark side” doesn’t exist: there’s only a meteor-battered