Under the Wire

Years ago, I, like most of the world, marveled at the sight of men first walking on the moon. It seemed to be the impossible now accomplished. The event showcased the technological advances our society had accomplished. I thought of my grandfather, still alive at that time who came to our region as a boy in a covered wagon drawn by horses. He now watched “One Giant Step For Mankind.” What a change.

The sights on the television seemed surreal. You could see them, but even then they were hard to comprehend. I’ll admit the comprehension part was made a little more difficult by the jumpy picture on the TV over the bar in Walsenburg where we had pulled in to watch it. My friends and I had stopped in a couple of hours before the event to get a good seat. Truthfully, by the time the men stepped out of the space craft, the table in front of me was beginning to look a little surreal, too. I don’t remember why we thought it would be hard to get a good seat, but hey, this would be a historical event. We wanted to be there to see it.

Years later, I was jolted from my innocence by skeptics who said the event really hadn’t happened. They described the event as a huge deception by mysterious forces to make us think the government was spending our money wisely. The entire “event” was staged in a studio, a school play ground or somewhere else. Since nobody had seen the moon that close before, how would we know? I filed their theory under “Things i’m not sure of, but will not spend much time worrying about.” There it remained.

Years later, another TV carried scenes of something that looked like a Battle Bot driving across Mars. My view was clear, steady and beamed to my living room by a satellite circling the earth. Being more worldly and technologically advanced than previously, I was more believing ... at first. Then, from a deep, dark corner of my brain exited a memory of the “moon walk” theory. Now suspicious, I looked closer. That’s when I noticed it.

First to catch my eye was the terrain. Red, mostly flat, covered with rocks, a few deep gullies cutting through. No trees, no brush, no grass anywhere. Heck, i’d seen that place before. It was a pasture I rented two years ago! My cows would have starved there except they had been raised on my own ranch, where it looks like that even in good years. Maybe this wasn’t Mars, after all.

I looked closer at the “Rover” carefully picking it’s way across the pasture. No fenders, the top flattened to resemble a saucer, no paint, windshield or doors. Yep, there it was, hired man’s pickup.

His motto was “if it falls off and the pickup still runs, leave it lay where it fell.” TV His ranch truck has been reduced to what now appeared on my TV screen.

I am not prepared to say what I saw was phony. Probably not. I would like to cover my bases, however, by saying this. If it was actually filmed in a pasture located in Central Wyoming, would the owner please call me? I would like to rent it next year. Our cattle seemed to do better there than they did here at home.

As for the historic viewing I thought I’d witnessed? Neither Nasa nor Michael Jackson invented “the moon walk,” nope. Give the credit to a bunch of cows.