Three days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, me and three friends were riding an east bound freight train along the northern shore of Lake Superior. It was the summer before our senior year in high school and we were on the great adventure of our lives: a hitch-hiking journey across Canada. We were intent on watching the moon landing and had boarded this train with some trepidation, knowing that there was no assurance that we would be anywhere near a TV when that moment arrived.
The train traversed total wilderness, and without roads and cities as a reference our maps were useless. There was no way to deduce how far we’d come or when we’d arrive somewhere…anywhere. Our berth was a box car, sticky with a residue of creosote. The train’s relentless bouncing and racket was punctuated at unpredictable intervals with stops beginning for no apparent reason, sometimes for lasting for hours, and then, just as inexplicably, ending. Sleep was impossible and the days blurred.
The day before the moon landing we were bone sore and down to our last can of beans. No disembarkment point was in sight and we despaired of being able to watch the moon landing. Then our luck changed. The unchanging terrain which we had gazed upon for days shifted radically from coniferous forest, to desolation; barren and rocky hills. Stranger than fiction, the landscape seemed to become moon-like. We pulled into a railroad yard in the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, the nickel capital of the world.
We climbed off the train and hiked out of the railroad yard, dazed with exhaustion but exhilarated by the certainty that soon we would be in a motel and in front of a television. The motel owners of Sudbury however, had other plans. The owners of the first two motels we came to took one look at our blackened, bedraggled faces and turned us away. The possibility loomed that we had come this far and might still miss the landing. There was no time to rely on the fickle gods of hitch-hiking so we ran down the road, desperately scanning the horizon for the next blinking MOTEL sign. Finally, just as the sun was setting, we found a room.
In the hours preceding the landing, we took showers, drank strawberry milkshakes and took naps in shifts. Crowded onto two beds in front of the television we exulted. At that moment, even though we were still miles from the Atlantic, our trip across Canada, planned for months and dreamed of for even longer, seemed to come to fruition. Our personal celebration mingled easily and naturally with our celebration of mankind’s giant leap.
The next morning we hitch-hiked out of Sudbury and a few weeks later arrived in NYC where we attended the ticker tape parade for the astronauts. There was a distinct feeling of familiarity seeing them in that parade; like encountering somebody we’d met before, miles up the road.
