The Moondust Diner was full that April evening of 1975 when Spike Tiggler launched his first appeal for funds. Most of the town was there, plus a couple of newspapermen and a photographer. Betty feared the worst. She imagined headlines like ‘GOD SPOKE TO ME’ CLAIMS GROUNDED ASTRONAUT and WADESVILLE MAN MINUS SOME BUTTONS. She sat nervously beside her husband as the local minister welcomed him back to the community where he had grown up. There was clapping; Spike gently took her hand and didn’t release it until he was on his feet and about to speak.
‘It’s nice to be back,’ said Spike, and looked around the room, giving hi-there inclinations of the head to those he recognized. ‘You know, only the other day, I was sitting on my back porch looking up at the stars and thinking about the kid I used to be, all those years ago in Wadesville. I must have been fifteen, sixteen or so, and I guess I was a bit of a handful, and old Jessie Wade, God rest her, I expect many of you recall Jessie, she said to me, “Young man, you run along screaming and shouting like that, one of these days you’ll just take off” – and I reckon old Jessie Wade knew a thing or two because many years later that’s just what I did, though sadly she didn’t live to see her prophecy fulfilled, God rest her soul.’
Betty could not have been more surprised. He was doing a number. He was doing a goddam number on them. He didn’t use to talk with much fondness about Wadesville; she’d never even heard the story about old Jessie Wade before; yet here he was, remembering it all, playing up to the folks back home. He told them a heap of stories about his childhood, and then some more about being an astronaut, which after all was what they’d mostly come for, but the message behind it all was that without these folks old Spike wouldn’t have got farther than Fayetteville, that it was these folks who’d really put him up there on the moon, not those clever guys with wires coming out of their ears at Mission Control. Just as surprising to Betty was that he did this part of his address with all the old fun and teasing she thought had gone out of him. And then he came to the bit about every man’s life being a process of escape and return, escape and return like the waters in the Pasquotank River (which was when Jeff Clayton thought it wasn’t like that on the way to the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst); and explained how you always came back to the things and places you’d started from. Like he’d left Wadesville years before, and now he was back; like he’d been a regular attender at the Church of the Holy Water all through his childhood, had later strayed from the path of the Lord, but had now returned to it – which was news, though hardly unexpected news, to Betty.
And so, he continued, to the serious part of the evening, to the purpose of this meeting (and Betty held her breath, thinking nutty as a fruitcake, how are they going to handle this bit, about God telling him to leave his football in the crater and go find the Ark instead). But again Betty had underestimated Spike. He didn’t refer to lunar commands from the Almighty, not once. He invoked his faith several times, and going back to where you came from all over again, and he mentioned the difficulties that had to be surmounted in the space program; so when he finally began to explain how he’d been turning over such matters on his back porch looking up at the stars, and how it seemed to him that it was time after all these years to go looking for where we came from, and that he planned to mount an expedition to recover what could be found of Noah’s Ark, which as everyone knew lay on the summit of Mount Ararat near the borders of Turkey and Iran, it all seemed to make sense, to be a logical progression. Project Ararat, indeed, could be seen as the obvious next venture for NASA; and listeners might even be free to conclude that NASA was being a little selfish, a little materialistic and narrow-minded, in concentrating solely on space flight, when there were other projects, closer to the heart and soul of the tax-payer, which might more usefully receive the benefit of their sophisticated technology.
He’d done a number, he’d done a goddam number, Betty thought as her husband sat down to a roomful of noise. He hadn’t even mentioned money, he’d just asked them to honor him with their presence while he shared a few ideas with them, and if they judged he was thinking straight then he’d get off his tail and start looking for people to help him. That’s my Spike, Betty found herself muttering, even though it was a rather different Spike from the one she had married.
‘Mrs Tiggler, how do you view your husband’s project?’ she was asked as they stood hand-in-hand before the photographer from the Fayetteville Observer.
Oh, I’m behind him one hundred ten per cent,’ she replied, looking up at Spike with a bridal smile. The Observer reported her comment, and the journalist even managed to say how striking Mrs Tiggler looked in her mustard dress with matching hat (mustard! said Betty to Spike, I suppose he eats primroses on the side with his beef). When they got home that night Spike seemed all charged up, like she hadn’t seen him for a year or so, and there wasn’t any question of him tucking off with his Bible on the back porch beneath the stars; no, he fair hustled her into the bedroom, where they hadn’t done much else but sleep for quite a while, and Betty, who though unprepared for this event was not at all displeased, muttered something in their private code about the bathroom, but Spike said they wouldn’t be bothering over that, and Betty quite liked him being this masterful.
‘I love you,’ said Spike later that night.
A few inches in the Fayetteville Observer begat a feature in the Greensboro News and Record which begat a small syndicated news item. After that there was silence, but Spike remained confident and recalled the bonfires he used to watch as a kid when it looked like nothing was happening until the whole thing burst into flame; and sure enough he was right, for suddenly he blazed across the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Then the TV people arrived, which set off another round of newsmen, followed by foreign TV and foreign newsmen, and all the time Betty and Spike worked hard (they were a team again, like at the beginning) to get Project Ararat under way. Reporters were given fact-sheets itemizing the latest contributions and endorsements, whether it was fifty dollars from a neighboring congregation, or a gift of ropes and tents from a well-known store. Soon there arose on Spike and Betty’s front lawn a large wooden campaign thermometer; every Monday morning Spike, paintbrush in hand, inched up the mercury.
Not surprisingly, Spike and Betty liked to compare this critical time to the launch of a rocket: the countdown is exciting, the moment of ignition a thrill, but until you see that heavy mother of a silver tube starting to shift on her haunches and shoulder her way towards the heavens you know there is always a chance that you’re in for an embarrassing and very public floperoo. Whatever Betty wanted, now she had decided to back her husband one hundred ten per cent, she didn’t want that. Betty was not of a particularly religious nature, and in her private heart she didn’t know what to make of Spike’s experience on the moon; but she recognized possibilities when she saw them. After a year of moody Bible study and her friends being so damn sympathetic she could scream, it wasn’t so bad that Spike Tiggler was back in the news again. After Project Apollo, Project Ararat – what could be more obvious than this progression, this tiny alphabetical step? And nobody, not one of the newspapers, had even suggested that Spike might be minus some buttons, crazier than a bedbug.
Spike handled it all pretty well, and never once mentioned how God had played President Kennedy in getting the whole thing rolling. This made it easier for Betty to interest people who might have been cautious if they’d sniffed anything nutsy in the scheme. Even the Governor of North Carolina was moved to forgive Spike’s brusque curiosity about the authenticity of his faith and benevolently agreed to top-table a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner in Charlotte. Betty wore primrose yellow on such occasions with a regularity which friends deemed unnecessary, not to say unfashionable; but Spike maintained that it was his lucky color. When talking to reporters Spike sometimes asked them to mention his wife’s dress, which was mustard in color, as they no doubt had observed. Some newsmen, either lazy or color-blind, dutifully obliged, wh
ich made Spike chuckle when he read the papers.
He also guested on a number of religious TV shows. Betty would sometimes quiver with apprehension as yet another salesman in a three-piece suit cued in from the commercial break with the welcoming announcement that God’s love was like the still center of a whirlwind, and one of his guests here today had actually been inside a whirlwind and could testify to the perfect peace within it, but how this meant that Christianity was a faith which kept you moving forward all the time, since you can’t stand still in a whirlwind, which brought us to his second guest, Spike Tiggler, who had in his time traveled even faster than a whirlwind but was now looking for that still center, that perfect calm, praise the Lord. And Spike, who had gone back to his astronaut’s haircut and blue suit, would keep on answering politely and never once mention – as the salesman would have loved to hear – that God had been right there, inside his helmet, whispering in his ear. He came across as good and simple and true, which helped the checks roll in to Project Ararat, care of Betty Tiggler, who naturally paid herself a salary.
They set up a committee: the Reverend Lance Gibson, respected or at least known through most of the state, a touch fundamentalist for some but not too left-field to scare away sensible money; Dr Jimmy Fulgood, college basketball star turned geologist and scuba-diver, who would give scientific respectability to the expedition; and Betty herself, chairperson, co-ordinator and treasurer. The Governor agreed to feature on the writing paper as Emeritus Patron; and the only glitch in the whole Ararat countdown was the failure to get the Project recognized as a charitable institution.
Some of the journalists with book-learning behind them liked to ask Spike how he could be entirely sure that the Ark was to be found on Mount Ararat. Did not the Koran say it made landfall on Mount Judi, several hundred miles away, near the Iraqi border? And did not Jewish tradition equally differ, placing the location somewhere in Northern Israel? At which point Spike would give a little touch on the charm throttle and reply that everyone was of course entitled to their opinion, and if an Israeli astronaut wanted to go looking in Israel that was fine by him, and if a Koranic astronaut did the same in Iraq, that was fine too. Skeptical reporters went away thinking that Tiggler might be simple, but he wasn’t simple-minded.
Another question occasionally put was whether the Ark – assuming its theoretical location could be found – might not have rotted away over the last however many thousand years, or been eaten by termites. Once again, Spike would not be drawn, especially not into revealing how he knew it couldn’t have rotted or been eaten by termites, because God’s command to find the Ark clearly implied that there was something left of it. Instead, he referred the questioner to his Bible, which the questioner appeared to have come without, but which would reveal that the Ark was made of gopher-wood, which everyone agreed was extremely hard, and therefore probably resistant to both rot and termites; then Spike mentioned examples of various things miraculously preserved down the centuries – mammoths found in glaciers, the meat on them as fresh as the chuck steak from your local Giant; and he wound up by suggesting that if anything was going to be miraculously preserved down the centuries thanks to God’s almighty will, then wasn’t the Ark a pretty good candidate?
The Reverend Lance Gibson consulted church historians at Baptist universities to establish current thinking on the location of the Ark; while Jimmy Fulgood went into probable wind and tide patterns around the time of the Flood. When the two of them pooled their findings, they began to favor an area on the south-east side of the mountain a couple of kilometers from the summit. Sure, Spike agreed, that’s where they’d begin looking, but what about his plan for starting right at the top and descending in spider-web circles so that the ground was systematically covered? Jimmy appreciated the thinking behind this idea, yet felt he couldn’t go along with it from a mountaineering point of view, so Spike bowed to him on that one. Jimmy’s counter-proposal was that Spike use his connections with NASA and the Navy to get a good set of aerial reconnaissance prints of the mountain, then they could blow them up and see if anything Arklike showed. Spike acknowledged this was a logical approach but wondered if God had really intended them to take short-cuts. Wasn’t the whole vision of the Project as a sort of Christian pilgrimage, and didn’t the ancient pilgrims always rough it? While he wasn’t suggesting they take anything short of the best when it came to tents and ropes and boots and wristwatches, he did feel they should hope to feel guided by something other than modern technology once they got up there.
The Reverend Gibson’s pastoral activities precluded him from making the trip to Turkey, but he would furnish spiritual back-up and constantly remind the Almighty by means of prayer that his two fellow committee-members were going about the Lord’s business in a far country. Betty would stay at home and field media inquiries, which were sure to be running hot. The expeditionary party – Spike and Jimmy – was to depart in July of that year, 1977. They declined to make predictions about how long they would be away. You did not seek to outdraw the Lord, said the Reverend Gibson, unless you wanted a slug in the gut.
Various supplies had been gifted by well-wishers, church congregations and survivalist stores; and as Betty opened the parcels which continued to arrive right up to the eve of departure, she wondered at how the Project was being perceived in some quarters. A few of the offerings sure seemed less than Christian. You might have deduced from a glimpse of the Tigglers’ Expedition Room that Spike and Jimmy were a couple of naked refugees being sent as hired killers to exterminate most of eastern Turkey.
They left behind a lot of old clothes, some automatic weapons, four stun grenades, a garrotte and a couple of suicide pills donated by some zealot. Their payload included lightweight camping equipment, vitamin pills, a Japanese camera with one of the new zoom lenses, credit cards, American Express travellers’ checks, running shoes, a pint of bourbon, thermal socks and underwear, a large plastic bag of branflakes to keep them regular, anti-diarrhea tablets, an infra-red night-sight, water-purifying pills, freeze-dried vacuum-packed food, a lucky horseshoe, flashlights, dental tape, reserve batteries for their electric razors, a pair of scabbard knives sharp enough to cut gopher-wood or disembowel an assailant, mosquito repellent, sunburn cream and the Bible. When Jimmy secretly checked their baggage he found the folded husk of a football and a small compressed-air device for inflating it; he repacked them carefully, with an indulgent grin. When Spike secretly checked the baggage he came across a box of rubbers, which he threw away and never raised with Jimmy. The committee discussed what the expedition should take as tokens of goodwill to distribute to the peasants of eastern Turkey. Betty thought some color postcards of Spike on the moon’s surface, but Spike felt this would be hitting the wrong note, seeing as they weren’t on a personal ego trip but going about the Lord’s business. After further reflection they took two hundred buttons commemorating the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter and his First Lady, the lovely Rosalynn, which a friend of the Reverend Gibson’s had been able to let them have at way below cost, and happy to be rid of them he was.
They flew to Ankara, where they had to rent tuxedos for the fine dinner offered them by the Ambassador. Spike disguised his disappointment that most of the guests wanted to talk astronautics and seemed positively reluctant to question him about Project Ararat. Later they proved unimpressed, not to say downright miserly, when Spike in his after-dinner speech made a patriotic appeal for extra funds.
The message Betty had sent to Erzerum via Interchurch Travel about hiring a jeep or Land Rover must have not gotten through, and the expedition therefore proceeded in a large Mercedes. East to Horasan, then east-south-east for Dogubayazit. The countryside was neat, kind of pale green and pale brown at the same time. They ate fresh apricots and distributed images of the smiling Carters to small children, some of whom seemed pleased, though others continued to press for dollars or, failing that, ball-points. The military were everywhere, which caused Spike to reflect on the strategic s
ignificance of the area. It came as news to Jimmy that only a hundred or so years earlier Mount Ararat, or Agri Dagi as the locals insisted on calling it, had been the meeting-point of three great empires – Russia, Persia and Turkey – with the mountain divided among the three of them.
‘Doesn’t seem right, the Soviets having a piece of it,’ commented Jimmy.
‘Guess they weren’t Soviets at the time,’ said Spike. ‘They were Christians like us when they were just Russians.’
‘Mebbe the Lord took their slice of the mountain away from them when they became Soviets.’
‘Mebbe,’ replied Spike, not wholly certain of when the boundaries had shifted.
‘Like, not letting his holy mountain fall into the hands of infidels.’
‘I read you,’ said Spike, a little irritated. ‘But I guess the Turks aren’t exactly Christians.’
‘They’re not as infidel as the Soviets.’ Jimmy appeared reluctant to give up his theory at the first objection.
‘Check.’
On the road north from Dogubayazit Spike shouted for Jimmy to stop the car. They got out and Spike pointed to a small stream. Gently, but unarguably, the water in it was flowing uphill.
‘Praise the Lord,’ said Spike Tiggler, and knelt to pray. Jimmy bent his head a few degrees, but remained on his feet. After a couple of minutes Spike went back to the Merce and filled two plastic water-bottles from the stream.
‘It’s the land of miracles,’ he announced as they set off once more.
Jimmy Fulgood, geologist and scuba-diver, let a few miles go by, then tried to explain how it was not scientifically impossible for a stream to flow uphill. It depended on a certain weight and pressure of water higher up the mountain, and on the apparently uphill stretch being a comparatively small section of an overall descent. The phenomenon had, as far as he knew, been reported on previous occasions. Spike, who was driving, kept nodding away as cheerful as they come. ‘Reckon you could explain it like that,’ he commented at the end. ‘Point is, who made the water to flow uphill in the first place? Who put it where He did so that we should see it as we were passing on the road to Ararat? The Good Lord, that’s who. It’s the land of miracles,’ he repeated, nodding contentedly.