Men on the Moon and Tina's Broken Finger

1969, the summer we stayed up at the cabin for a whole month, was the summer Apollo 11 landed on the moon.  We watched it, sort of. 

My cousin,Tina, and Janice, Linda's friend, came up with us to stay for the first week.  Friday night we had our Super Slumber Party in the trailer.  Saturday we explored around the cabin, swam in the creek, and played games after dark.  Sunday, July 20th, we went to church in Young. 

At church everyone was talking about the incredible events happening up in space.  The news was that the astronauts on Apollo 11 would walk on the moon that evening and it would be televised live on TV.  Of course we didn't have a TV at the cabin, but our friend, Jedie Flake, invited our family to come over to his ranch to watch this historic event.

That afternoon we hung out downstairs, goofing off and shooting the breeze.  Keith liked being the oldest, and he especially liked showing off when girls were around.  He scrambled up onto a branch of the tree we climbed through to get down to the creek.   Tina and I sat on logs under the tin roof of the old shed.  Keith flirted with Tina while I listened, bragging about his girl friends and all the cool stuff he could do.  We ate it up.  After all, Keith was a year older than us, funny, and very cute, (even if he was my brother.)

After awhile that grew old, so Keith found a football and tried to impress us with his throwing skills.  There was a big, grassy open area back behind grandma and grandpa's cabin.  The grass was kind of wet from an earlier thunderstorm, and it was muddy and the ground uneven, but Tina and I weren't really running after his throws anyway so we didn't fall down too much.  Keith got tired of just tossing the ball after awhile, so he backed way up and threw a really long pass to Tina.  She caught it, but the ball jammed into her pinkie finger and pushed it all the way back.  It hurt really bad!  We ran upstairs to our cabin and showed Tina's finger to mom.  It was red and already swelling.  Mom didn't know quite what to do except to fill a glass with ice and water and have Tina soak her finger, hoping that would take the swelling down.  It helped a little, and between that and taking a couple of aspirin her finger didn't hurt too badly.  Whenever she took it out of the ice water, though, it was so painful she had to put it back in.

About 5:30 we drove down to the Bar –X Ranch.    Jedie and his family welcomed us into their house and we all settled around their small television set to watch the moon landing.  They had a couple of little kids who weren't any more excited about what was happening than Julie and Sharon, so they played on the floor while the rest of us sat, glued to the TV screen, excitedly waiting to see what the moon looked like. 

The reception wasn't very good up in the mountains in the first place, but we didn't mind the news casters fuzzy black and white faces as long as we could hear what they were saying.  Finally the commentators at Cape Canaveral faded out and the first live pictures of men on the moon were shown all around the world, but all we could see was a screen full of little white dots.  We could hear the astronauts talking, and the commentator at Cape Canaveral explaining what was happening, but all we saw were snowy shadows!

When Neil Armstrong  said, “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind,” we knew that a man was walking on the moon, but we wondered if the rest of the world could see him, or if everyone was watching fuzz like us. Of course it was still exciting, but it was sure a let down.  I don't know what I had been expecting, something like we saw on the movies I suppose, but I thought the real thing was actually kind of boring.

Later, as we drove back to the cabin through the dark forest, Tina and I looked up into the sky and gazed at the moon.  It was big and bright that night, shining down on the world with all it’s might.  It was hard to imagine that at that very moment a small space ship was standing on the moon, and that people were inside, so many thousands of miles away from home.

The next morning dad took Tina back to Mesa with him.  Her finger had never stopped hurting and she wanted to go home.  I was sure bummed out about that, but I understood.  I could still remember how bad my arm hurt when I broke it up at the cabin six years earlier, and knew she wouldn't have any fun staying. When dad came back at the end of the week he told us that Tina had gone to the doctor, and found out  her finger was broken.  No wonder it had hurt so bad.