Riding Rockets

On a hellish July day in 1978, properly dressed by my wife and handicapped with a brain from Planet AD, I drove through the gates of the Johnson Space Center to begin my TFNG life. If NASA ever needs to test a space probe designed to survive on the surface of Venus, a Houston parking lot in summertime would suffice. Air-conditioning isn’t a luxury in Houston. It’s a life support system. Until I arrived in Houston I would laugh at those supermarket tabloid reports of people walking down a sidewalk and spontaneously combusting. But after one day of a Houston summer, I no longer laughed. It could happen.

Besides a small rocket park featuring aSaturn V moon rocket horizontally displayed near the entrance, there was nothing to suggest JSC had anything to do with space. There were no towers or gantries or blockhouses. A passerby could easily think it was a university campus or a corporate headquarters. The architecture screamed “low bid.” Except for size, every building was identical, each featuring a façade of exposed aggregate concrete. The major buildings were positioned around a duck pond landscaped with pine and oak trees to relieve the otherwise flat, boring terrain of southeast coastal Texas.

Johnson Space Center was located in the far south of Houston’s urban sprawl. It was nearly as close to Galveston as it was to Houston’s city center. The community in which many NASA employees lived was the suburb of Clear Lake City—implying a lake nearby, and a clear one at that. Wrong. Clear Lake was neither clear nor a lake, but rather a chocolate-tinted, humidity-shrouded inlet from the nearby Gulf of Mexico that served as a time-share for a couple billion vacationing mosquitoes. Obviously Clear Lake City had been named by a real estate developer. If there was truth in advertising, Clear Lake City would have been named Fire Ant City. In its abundant grasses were legions of these insects, which should be on the UN’s list of weapons of mass destruction. Fire ants have been known to kill babies, the elderly, and newly born animals (I’m not kidding). To step in one of their mounds was to understand what it feels like to be napalmed.

If only the fire ants preyed on the Olympic-size roaches, which were equally ubiquitous, then at least one pest would have been eliminated. But the ants did not. In some kind of insect pact, the ants stayed outdoors, leaving the roaches free to turn homes into vast roach motels. Every morning brightly colored exterminator trucks poured into suburbia like tanks coming ashore at Normandy. Technicians donned moon suits and slung flamethrower-like tanks to their backs to enter the combat zones of kitchens and baths. But theirs was a lost cause. The roaches thrived on their powders and gases and liquids. Even the old standby, the shoe, proved ineffective because these roaches were masters of landand air. They flew. I recall an early incident at a TFNG party where the hostess chased a four-incher into a corner and chortled with glee as she aimed her toe at it. “Eat leather, you bastard!” But as her foot came down the monster spread its wings and launched itself straight at her face. She screamed and fled, flailing her arms as if her hair were on fire. Meanwhile, the victorious roach broke off its attack, made a clattering turn, and settled on the mantle, tucking its wings back into its body like a majestically perched eagle. For the rest of the party it remained on that mantle, its antenna waving back and forth like semaphores, daring anybody to attack. There were no takers.

Looking at the southeast Texas topography, weather, flora, and fauna, I doubt a single TFNG thought,Of all the places in America I would like to live and work, I would choose Houston, Texas . But nobody was complaining. We had just been blessed with the best job on Earth. If our offices had been in a landfill, we wouldn’t have cared.