Picking Rock

Visiting the Neil Armstrong statue at Purdue University with cousins (Thanksgiving 2012).

Picking Rocks (19 July 2019)

Today’s theme song is Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon” in honor of man’s first moon landing.

Tomorrow marks the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, that remarkable event on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on the moon to spend a couple hours taking pictures and picking up rocks before returning to the Lunar Module. The next day they returned to join Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 flight crew, in the Command Module. Four days after this rock-picking excursion, 24 July 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts went hypersonic for a short time as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a few minutes later.

Picture of a footprint on the moon.

Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon was seen on television around the world. This accomplishment was, in the words of Neil Armstrong, “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”. Over the next 3 ½ years, there were five more lunar landing missions with a total of twelve astronauts physically walking on the moon’s surface, leaving footprints like the concrete replicas we’ve tried to follow in front of the Neil Armstrong statue at Purdue University.

1974 photo of original nine crew members, one year before “Greenwood 11” mission launch.

This summer also marks the 44-year anniversary of “Greenwood 11”, that remarkable voyage that launched the Lynn and Mariet Greenwood family from Sandy, Utah, to a 400-acre farm in southeast Idaho. As you can see from this picture, taken a year earlier, it was a pretty capable clan at the time, but it definitely seems like they could use a couple more farm hands...

The Greenwood 11 crew soon found out that farms are a lot like the moon- there are lots of rocks to pick. Luckily I arrived the next year, and Lyle followed two years later, because the original 9 obviously did not have enough rock picking capacity. They really needed Lyle and I to get the work done. As you can see by the photo below, we got right to work upon arrival.

“Greenwood 11” mission crew in 1978.

I suppose that rock picking was important, but we didn’t enjoy it as much as Neil and Buzz. We also spent a lot more time doing it. We would spend hours out picking up rocks and throwing them into the tractor bucket, the “rock picker” trailer, or a nearby “rock pile” (which is exactly that, a pile of rocks, usually in the middle of the field) to prepare the fields for cultivation.

We also felt that our rock picking was less appreciated than the Apollo 11 rock picking. The rocks Neil picked were analyzed by scientists and placed in museums, our rocks were thrown in rock piles, only appreciated by the rock chucks that would eat our grain. In an ideal world, every field would be free of rock piles, but our farm never reached that nirvana. In fact, despite the thousands of rocks I picked, and the thousands of rocks I’m sure that each of my brothers picked, there were always more and more rocks. We’d spend days picking rocks, yet every time we plowed, planted, or disced the field we would find more rocks.  It’s almost like this Earth we live on is made up of millions and millions of rocks, and to think that the Apollo 11 crew had the gall to bring more down here!

I remember that we would come in from picking rocks with our backs and arms extremely tired and sore from leaning over and lifting all day long. Our skin would be just covered in dirt- making our awesome farmer tans even more incredibly awesome. I saw Eugene one time looking so brown that he was hard to identify- his eyes and inside his mouth were the only visibly clean areas. But the best part was that during the next 24 hours we would constantly blow black boogers out our noses because of all the dirt that had collected in our nostrils.

“Greenwood 7” mission crew in 2017, sitting on rocks, not picking rocks.

In the past nearly 20 years since the launch of “Greenwood 7”, we’ve had many of our own rock picking adventures. You might wonder why, if I so dislike rock picking, I am always picking them up at the beach, or on a hike, or at a national park and trying to bring them home…  Oh wait, maybe that’s someone with a much greater appreciation for the beauty that is in those rocks...

Done right, rock picking can be a labor of love:).

So fellow rock pickers, here's what we can learn from picking rock.

• • We, like astronauts and farmers, are all rock pickers.
  • Black boogers are crunchy, but taste like dirt.
  • Sometimes it’s the rocks that are valuable, but often it’s the growth that comes from picking the rocks that is of most value.
  
  

Love you all!

Dad