That evening, I stayed in my old bedroom, absorbing its sight, its smell, and its touch. I could never be in there without thinking about the boy I had been, that boy so filled with hopes and dreams, that rocket boy. I sat at my desk, running my fingertips over the dried glue left from a hundred model airplanes built on its surface. I slid open a side drawer in the desk and looked at the rocket drawings still stacked there. I drew out the sheath of papers, turned them over one by one, studying them. My first attempts to draw a working rocket were crude, but they’d grown more sophisticated with each attempt until the final, well-drawn engineering designs. For those, I’d used professional engineering drawing instruments, gifts from my dad on my last Christmas as a Coalwood boy.
I looked at my bed where once Daisy Mae, my sweet little calico cat, had watched me do my high school homework. I got up and looked out the window to her resting place beneath the little crab-apple tree, its leafy branches waving gently in the slight breeze. As I searched the darkness, my eyes raised toward Substation Mountain, where Lucifer probably slept for eternity. He had been a tough old cat, but somehow wise. And Dandy was up on Water Tank Mountain now. I thought of him as he had been as a pup, a blond ball of fluff with a furiously waving tail stub, his snout turned up into a licking grin. Now he was gone. They were all gone except Chipper, who was quickly getting old, as squirrels do, and Poteet.
Then I thought of Mom’s painting. She’d worked on it again. Beside her fox were her other angels: Dandy, Daisy Mae, Lucifer, Poteet, and Chipper. Maybe she’d let Dad, Jim, and me join her in time.
Nothing was the same, yet it was all the same. My room, the house, our pets, each other, and all the town had changed, yet we all still existed as we had once been somewhere, if only in our thoughts and dreams.
As I went to bed, I saw a wink of heat lightning off in the distance. Then another, without thunder. I couldn’t help but think of something I’d read by Mark Twain: Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
I’m not certain even now how I knew that something was wrong. I rose in the night and went to the window that faced toward the tipple and saw the flickering of flames lighting the darkness. Water Tank Mountain was on fire.
I pulled on my clothes and went outside, and found Mom and Dad already in the front yard. The smell of woodsmoke burned my nostrils. People were coming from everywhere. There was an ugly orange scar on the mountain, and it was racing straight toward Tipple Row. “Go get some shovels, Sonny,” Dad said, his voice even but commanding.
I rushed to the basement, picked up two shovels, and ran back, handing Dad one of them. Mom grabbed the other shovel from my hands. “Get one for yourself, too,” she said.
I started to argue, saw the futility of it, and dashed back to the basement. By the time I’d returned, my parents were gone. I looked up and saw clusters of people climbing the mountain. I ran to join them.
Mine foremen were taking charge, each one directing groups of people fighting the fire. Mr. Strong spotted me. “Come on, Sonny,” he called, and I followed him. We spread out and started digging firebreaks in the brush. If fire reached Tipple Row and the Captain’s house burst into flames, it would ignite the Sharitzes’ house, and so on down Main Street. The whole town was in danger.
All night we dug, and when a tongue of fire leapt one of our breaks, we beat it down with our shovels. When a thicket burst into flames, I caught sight of the faces of the other men. All were black, just as they were in the mine. Everybody was the same color in the battle against the fire, just Coalwood men—and women, too.
Jugs of water arrived. Mrs. Sharitz handed me a jug, and I gratefully took it and nearly drained the whole thing. “Leave some for me!” someone said in a voice charged with adrenaline.
It was Rita, reaching for the jug with a gloved hand. I handed it over, and she threw it up to her lips and finished it off. She wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. I took the empty jug from her and nodded my thanks to Mrs. Sharitz. “You be careful, you hear?” she warned, and headed back down the mountain.
Rita had her hair tucked up inside a ball cap, and her face was black with soot. There was an eager gleam in her eye. “We’re going to kick this fire’s butt!” she crowed. She gave me a look. It was almost as if she didn’t recognize me until that moment. “Aren’t we?”
“You bet we are,” I said.
She looked around as a shout went up. The fire had found a small pine tree and grabbed it. People charged up after it. “I love this,” she said suddenly. “I love the battle.”
“I know.” My voice was glum. I couldn’t help it.
Her eyes flashed. “Stop it, Sonny.”
“Stop what?”
“Feeling sorry for yourself. I know you had a crush on me. I liked you, too. But our lives are on entirely different trajectories.”
Trajectories. It was a good engineering term. I’d used it often enough for my rockets. Some of them flew straight, others wobbled off at an angle, but they still got where they were going.
“I told you I’d get inside the mine,” she said.
“Dad’s already saying you’re the best engineer he’s ever had.”
She laughed, and I saw her perfect teeth like pearls against her blackened face. “He’s right.” Then she threw herself in my arms and kissed me. Though she smelled of smoke, her lips were like velvet. “There!” she said, as if that cured everything for all time.
And then she was gone into the acrid clouds cascading across the mountain. I heard more yelling and charged off in that direction, my shovel at high port, ready for action.
Slowly, slowly, as the night went on, we began to win. Whooping victoriously, we closed in on the last line of fire until it came apart and separated into frustrated whorls of hot flame. We beat at them with the flats of our shovels until they flickered out, and then we came down the mountain in triumph.
I watched as Coalwood people surged together, their faces lined with soot and sweat, their raw-throated voices raised with spirited tales, some of them even true, of what they’d just done. Then food arrived, lots of it. From the trunks of cars came fried chicken and smoked wild turkey and corrugated aluminum kegs filled sloshing to the brim with gallons of iced tea. An impromptu banquet began at the gas station. Ravenous as only the victorious can be, we ate and drank until again there was lightning in the sky, not heat lightning this time, but a broken streak that cracked across the valley from one end to the other and brought with it a sudden rush of cool air that cascaded down the mountains and into our faces. Rain! It started in a patter, and behind it came big drops. The sky, tight against us for months, relaxed and gave us all it had. Some people got under the narrow roof ledge of the gas station, but most of them, including me, stood in the sink of cooling air and just let the rain pelt down on us, our faces raised to the miracle it had come to be.
I knew then, as I faced the sky, that Coalwood would go on. Its buildings might be torn down, its mine closed, its people might even die, but Coalwood would persevere. There was something about this place that maybe, as the Reverend Richard maintained, God just liked. Coalwood had nothing to fear and I guessed I didn’t, either. When I needed it, the old place of my boyhood would yet be there waiting for me with all its wisdom and purpose, if not in stone and wood and iron, then still in my memory and my heart. I closed my eyes and felt the rain against my face, and smelled the smoke of the defeated fire, and thought of Coalwood. Coalwood, as it was, and shall be. Coalwood my home. Coalwood forever.
EPILOGUE
I RETURNED to VPI in the fall of 1961 and discovered I needed all new uniforms. I had not only gained twenty pounds of muscle but had grown nearly two inches in height. My mother’s plan to get me closer to my father had instead resulted in a profound change in my body. For the first time in my life, I was physically powerful. Without breathing very hard, I could easily do a hundred push-ups and run for miles. My fellow cadets scarcely recognized me. I became quite the bruiser on
the intramural football team.
My studies at VPI’s engineering school continued. I persevered in all my classes, sometimes against my mental grain, and wrote for the college newspaper. During my tenure in the cadet corps, I joined a group of classmates who soon came to be known as the “cannon boys.” With virtually no support from the school administration, we constructed a Civil War–style brass cannon to be used at parades and football games. We had many adventures, including an incident where I was nearly kicked out of school for flagrant disregard of cadet regulations. When we fired our cannon for the first time in public at the 1963 Thanksgiving game against the Virginia Military Institute, its shock wave bowled over football players, rocked back startled fans in the opposing bleachers, and blew out the windows in the press box. The state police came running, and, as I’d practiced to perfection in my days as a rocket boy, I had to confess that I perhaps didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Our cannon was named “Skipper,” after President John F. Kennedy, who had been a PT boat skipper during World War II. My father, perhaps recalling one of his favorite maxims—“’Tis better to give than have it stolen”—provided much of the brass for the Skipper from coal mine scrap.
Every summer for the remainder of my college career, I returned to Coalwood to work in the mine. I became sort of an honorary junior engineer. My father put me through his boot camp, and Jake Mosby taught me much about mining, too. A young engineer by the name of Tom Musick especially took me under his wing. I learned more practical engineering under their tutelage than a thousand classrooms could ever hope to provide. I graduated from VPI (now known as Virginia Tech) with a degree in industrial engineering.
Jake had been correct in his assessment of my immediate future. There was no glory in store for me on the moon-landing program. Instead, with the war in Vietnam heating up, I entered the United States Army in 1965, and, after Combat Engineer Officer Candidate School, was commissioned as an officer in the Ordnance Corps. In October 1967, I joined the 4th Infantry Division in the Vietnamese central highlands, my assignment to take a team of mechanics and technicians into the bush, link up with armored units, and keep their tanks and armored personnel carriers operating in the harsh jungle conditions. My people, traversing the hills and hollows, got shot at by all sides. I was present for the Battle of Dak To, where I saw a line of American infantrymen bravely claw up a mountain against the murderous onslaught of an entrenched main-force North Vietnamese Army regiment. After victory, I watched those same grunts march back down again. Within days, the North Vietnamese moved back into their positions on the mountain. A few months later, I was at the Oasis, a tiny, exposed firebase near the Cambodian border, when the Tet Offensive was launched. I fought the first day’s battle with my boots on the wrong feet, don’t ask me why, and was rescued by F-100 Super Sabre jet bombers flown in, via Thailand, from Myrtle Beach Air Force Base. I figured my mom had sent them. A few days later, I found myself inside the ravaged city of Pleiku, looking for some of my men who’d been trapped by the invading Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces. Just as American units began to batter their way back inside the city, I found my people asleep in the Pleiku jail. We sneaked out, and away. During the months that followed, my team and I rejoined an army being torn apart, not by the enemy, but by itself. Very tired, I returned to the United States in October 1968, where many Americans, mostly my own age, went out of their way to insult me. Before I learned not to wear my uniform in public, I was threatened and spat upon. I have forgiven them, but it wasn’t easy.
My parents seemed much as they’d always been when I visited Coalwood after I returned from Vietnam. My father continued his work, as did my mother. While I was gone, she had purchased another house in Myrtle Beach and was beginning to divide her time between it and the Captain’s house. My parents seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement. I went to work for the Thiokol company in Utah. Thiokol made solid-propellant rocket motors, and I worked on the Minuteman and the Poseidon programs. I wrote a novel about my experiences in the war and then discarded it. Perhaps I will someday resurrect it, but in 1969, it was too raw and too close. Still searching for what I should do with the rest of my life, I rejoined the army and was sent to Puerto Rico. There, at the Roosevelt Roads navy base, two drunken ensigns showed me how to scuba dive. Although nearly everything they told me was wrong, and I came near to drowning, I survived their instruction, and my life began to take on new meaning. A long romance with the sea began.
I resigned my army commission and hired on as a civilian with the Army Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama. Also in Huntsville was NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), the place built by Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. I had been wrong all those years when I’d been a rocket boy, thinking Dr. von Braun was at Cape Canaveral. In fact, he and his team were in Huntsville, Rocket City, U.S.A. I tried to hire on at MSFC, without success. NASA was letting engineers go at the time, not taking on new ones. In an attempt to revitalize the space program, Dr. von Braun left Huntsville to take a new assignment in Washington, D.C. He died soon of stomach cancer. Sadly, I never got to meet him. I am told his presence in a room was like electricity. I can only imagine what it must have been like when President Kennedy and Dr. von Braun were together. I suspect there would have been enough energy to light up the night sky.
Bobby Likens, my track-laying buddy, became a doctor, according to his plan. He graduated from West Virginia University’s medical school and then became an air force flight surgeon. He also served in Vietnam. From there, he moved to Florida to be near his parents. In a small town near Orlando, he set up private practice and devoted much of his free time to assisting local youth programs. He has two children, and is now a grandfather. He continues to be an avid fisherman. When I started to write this book, I tracked him down and we shared memories of our summer with Johnny Basso. It was good to talk to him. He claimed I hadn’t changed, and I claimed he hadn’t, either. If placed inside the mine with all our tools, I believe we could still pick them up without a thought and lay track. Unfortunately, we would have to do it without Johnny. One of the best miners who ever thumped a roof, Johnny Basso died in Coalwood in 1994, a victim of black lung disease, the same affliction that killed my father in 1989.
In 1973, I became a scuba instructor, trained by Cliff McClure, who had been one of the Man High Project proto-astronauts, a group of true daredevils who flew to the edge of space in balloons. Cliff owned a dive shop in Huntsville called Aquaspace, and I began to work for him on a part-time basis as an instructor. About the same time, I also began to write again and was soon selling my work, mostly to scuba-oriented magazines. In 1975, I was called by an excited team of North Carolina divers who’d chanced upon the wreck of a U-boat off Cape Hatteras. They asked me if I’d be willing to dive on it and perhaps write about it. An extraordinary series of adventures began for me and other Huntsville and North Carolina divers, as we dived and researched the great wrecks of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. I wrote articles on our discoveries for many magazines, including American History Illustrated. I decided to take a job in Germany so that I could do more research on the U-boats. After three years of living in the wonderful little Bavarian town of Grafenwöhr, my old dream of working for NASA was refreshed when the first space shuttle, glorious Columbia, was successfully launched. Since I was thirty-eight years old, I doubted that NASA would be interested in hiring me, but, remembering my debt to Miss Riley and her belief that we must always keep persevering for our dreams, I gave it another try. To my utter amazement, I was offered a job at MSFC as an engineer on the Spacelab Program, a project that was building a canister-laboratory to fit in the space shuttle’s cargo bay. I returned to Huntsville and got busy learning how to design spacecraft. I also began to dive and instruct in MSFC’s Neutral Buoyancy Simulator (NBS), a huge forty-foot-deep water tank where the astronauts were trained to work in space suits in weightless conditions. I must have been considered at least adequate in my work. Soon, I was also
wearing the space suits in the NBS and helping to develop the procedures necessary to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s giant eye on the universe.
I also learned to fly. In the summer of 1985, I was piloting a Cessna-150 around Huntsville when I spotted a black wall of clouds advancing from the west. Since I had a plan to do some waterskiing on the Tennessee River, I raced ahead of the clouds, landed, and drove to the river, hoping the weather would clear. Instead, as soon as I got there, the storm struck, a massive onslaught of wind and rain. A cry went up that a big paddleboat hired for a company family party had overturned. I caught a ride on a boat and went out to the scene. Over the next hour, while wearing borrowed scuba gear, I searched through the submerged upside-down wreck. I found twelve people and brought them out. All were drowned. I had missed saving their lives by only minutes. I still think about them and wonder why I was allowed to come so close to saving them, but didn’t. All that I can conclude is God has His ways, and they’re not ours.
In January 1986, the crew of the space shuttle Challenger died in an explosion over the Atlantic Ocean. I had met all of the Challenger astronauts but counted Ellison Onizuka as a friend. I was in Japan at the time, negotiating with the Japanese on cooperating with them in future space activities. My work was put on hold, and I was sent back to Huntsville. I assisted briefly on the shuttle’s solid-rocket motor redesign, then requested permission to help the United States Space Camp and Academy in their plan to build a smaller version of the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. NASA gave me permission to form a small company, which I called Deep Space. Deep Space designed the Underwater Astronaut Trainer and pioneered some unique underwater space simulations. One of them, involving a French-made bubble helmet, led me to New York City to teach David Letterman, the talk-show host, how to scuba dive. In 1989, NASA assigned me the position of training manager of Spacelab-J, the first joint Japanese-American human spaceflight program. After being thoroughly redesigned, the space shuttle started flying again. NASA was back in business.