This is the dichotomy: on the one hand something from childhood. For instance, well—Superman. That is: more powerful than a locomotive . . .; faster than a speeding . . .; able to—(this is it)—change the course of mighty rivers. Like the Grand Coulee Dam. And the people come from all around to see it, the largest tourist attraction in the Pacific Northwest, families from Seattle, Portland, all the way from Bismarck, North Dakota. And FDR created the CCC, which hired Woody Guthrie to come on up and write some songs about the boys involved in the electrification project, a great building and damming and tearing down of trees along the sinuous Columbia choked with logs. And Teddy Roosevelt created the National Parks so you could camp next to the family playing Scrabble in their Winnebago at a reservoir in Utah. And it was Thomas Jefferson who sent out Lewis and Clark in the first place, along the Missouri and across the mountains, and down the same Columbia to the sea. It’s a sort of dialectic. Youth and maturity. Man against nature. Childhood or a motorboat in Utah: that’s the dichotomy.
As far as I’m concerned just about anything from TV was a more significant cultural phenomenon of the ’60s than Vietnam. The Flintstones, or Mission Impossible, or Lost in Space. I could tell you things about Lost in Space you wouldn’t believe. The carrot creatures crying Moisture! Moisture! The music that signals the invisible bog monster’s approach. Uncle Angus covered with tendrils. I don’t even know which are real episodes and which ones I made up anymore. I could tell you about the Baltimore Orioles. Roster moves, statistics, a twi-night doubleheader in August when the hot wind curls over the top of the bleachers and Eddie Murray wins the first game with a two-run double in the 8th. Between games the lines for beer and nachos are filled with laughing, smiling people exchanging jokes, weighing the season’s prospects, savoring the victory. The second game is a pitching duel, scoreless through nine, until Jim Palmer tires and gives up a run in the top of the 10th and leaves to a standing ovation. As the Orioles come to bat the crowd hums with energy, excited but not at all nervous, certain of victory in fact, because this is the magic summer of 1979 and fate is on the side of Baltimore. Inevitably, the Orioles get two men on, and with two out, Eddie Murray comes to the plate. Ed and Charlie and I are up screaming, Memorial Stadium chants in unison—Edd-ie, Edd-ie, Edd-ie—and when Eddie swings at a 1–1 pitch we know it’s gone even before the ball rockets off his bat in a tremendous arc, moving slowly and even gently through the air, perfectly visible, stage-lit against the deep green of the grass, the right fielder not moving, just turning his head to watch it go, and it’s like the perfect arc of youth, a constellation made up of baseball, booze, girls, and loud music, and even at 19 or 22 when the stars have shifted slightly to malt liquor, loud music, women, vandalism, and sports in general, that ball is still rising, old age and death are impossibly remote, and anyway those images of hooded figures and the grim reaper with his scythe are impossibly outdated, and now death is a giant incarnation of Fred Flintstone, impossibly huge, skewering passersby on cocktail swords like giggling olives, and he roams the outfield shagging flies, pulling the ball out of the sky in midflight, laughing loud as a hyena in the yellow-and-black-spotted skin he wears like a bathrobe, and even Eddie Murray can’t hit one beyond his reach as he lopes across the grass, immense and belligerent and well-intentioned, like America, clubbing his friend Barney Rubble on the head, and even if he were to slip, just once, on loose gravel near the warning track, say, we know the laws of physics, we know the parabola must start downward somewhere, and in the split second it takes to react to the home run you see that this is life, a luminous rise and a steady, frictional wearing down, a curve disintegrating in the sure pull of gravity, Eddie Murray dropping his bat and starting the slow trot around the bases, the crowd coming to its feet, the ball finally crashing into the bullpen.
And you’re rising up with a great emotional surge swelling inside you. You’re standing on the aluminum bench with Ed and Charlie stamping your feet. You’re waving your arms wildly in the air. You’re looking up, past the glowing towers of lights, at the floodlit sky. You’re yelling like there’s no tomorrow.