Falcon Will Give Birth to the Rover

The 1960s and early '70s were marked by the Apollo Moon Flights and by the endless Winless War. On seeing Apollo 8 with its vision of the generous Earth as viewed from distant space, Epimetheus was struck with wonder: "If the Earth is so lovely, why do we make it so ... _ugly_?" He had been drafted into the Winless War, where he was spared its worst traumas ("I won't let this stupid war kill me"), but survival could not spare him the loss of schoolmates. Why them, not me? The epic tradition, and the quest for homecoming, gave him a chance to atone. He could best understand the need for wider homecoming by immersing himself in the Homeric poets and by the slow transition to Vergil and Dante and Ariosto and other writers with epic sensibilities, all of whom prepared him for the hazards of Hades. "Easy is the going down, but winning your way back, that is the labor, that the task." The descent began with his decision to live in his car, a 1968 Ford Falcon. He expected admiration. _Not in my front yard._ Cops disrupted his nights. Resentments, hiding, embracing the psyche of a burglar, yeh, like Bilbo Baggins. Only with raging furies when cops pestered him twice too often. You have furies of your own? This book of 727 pages with 39 pages of footnotes will distract you for a day or two. Especially if you pause to note Rollo May's song of the furies being transformed to the Eumenides, or Workers of Grace. In daylight, when not grousing in a Stuffed-in-the-Box ("Work is hate made visible"), Epi found refuge in an air-cooled hospital cafeteria, where, with a bottomless cup of dime coffee, he immersed himself in the dime-a-day Laistrygone Winds, one of the world's great newspapers. (Sunday's massive leaped to a quarter.) Hour by hour he saved clips on clips for the ultimate history he would write, reveling in the wit of Jax Myth, who found joy in the whirlwinds. And give me this day my daily Snoopy to wrestle the dark and stormies to the mat, by golly. O, Epi was entirely ignorant of Thoreau's admonition, "Read not the Winds. Read the eternities." A few years later, in July 1971, Epi decided he maybe needed a new plan. He was aided by a writer's detached hint that some people take a good idea and transmog it into something that needs refinement. Epi was also moved to reconsider his planless plan by the Poet of Apollo 15, who wrote of NASA's planned lunar descent into the Plains of Descartes. The command ship was called Endeavour; the Moonship was called Falcon; they were carrying an extraterrestrial vehicle called Rover. Upon landing, the Chrissian Prophet wrote, "A little later, Falcon will give birth to the Rover." A sign! A sign! The Falcon will give birth! The Falcon will give birth! It took a while for Epi to see the joke and ambiguity, especially when he was jolted to absorb the adverbial preface: "A little later …" O Phoebos, you jester! Epi remembered his Psych 100 teacher: "So long as you can laugh at yourself, you will never go crazy; that I promise you, that I promise you." He remembered too Dr. Rollo May, who in a searching book suggested readers take travails in stride — as less than a blip in the light of eternity. O Far-Reaching Apollo! Is July 2026 later enough?