Excerpt from The Coalwood Way - A Christmas Miracle begins...

THE COALWOOD WAY

by

Homer Hickam

Chapter 31

A Page from Jeremiah

     I woke on the couch. It was morning. I remembered bringing Dad home and Mom gathering him in. "Good Lord, Homer," she said and then walked him upstairs. Quentin was asleep in my bed, Daisy Mae curled up between his legs. I retreated to the couch.
I'd had a nightmare. I had dreamed I was asleep and all around me was turmoil, things breaking, curses, and then a huge crash. I looked around and, in the light of the early dawn filtering through the living room windows, I saw that the Christmas tree was inside, more or less erect in its stand. It was tilting at an odd angle but it was there.           Then I noticed Jim was sitting across from me on Dad's footstool. Billy Rose was also there, in a chair beside the tree. I thought I was still dreaming. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, both boys were still there. "What?" I demanded.
     "Look," Jim said and showed me his finger.
     I found my glasses. Jim's finger tip was bloody. It looked as if he'd been bitten by a snake. "What happened?"
     "I just wanted a Christmas tree," he said. "So I figured I would go ahead and put it up on my own. I got out this morning and saw Billy walking down the road."
     Billy said, "I was coming to your house, anyway. I thought maybe I could shovel snow or do some kind of chore for your mother."

     "I asked Billy to help me with the tree and we got it inside."

     "There was a bird in it," Billy said.
     "We spent a good part of the last hour chasing it. I finally chased it out the back door."
     That explained the noises in my dream. "Did the bird bite you?"
     Jim shook his head. "No, after it went outside, I came back in here and Billy said he heard another bird rustling in the tree. I reached inside to scare it out."
     "Was it a bird?"
     "No."
     "A snake?"
     "No. Worse."
     Both my eyes and brain were still bleary. "What?"
     He pointed to the coffee table where the mangled Hickam family Bible
rested. It was open and on it sat something fuzzy and gray. A page had been torn from the Bible and the thing seemed to be eating it. I blinked again and then I knew what the thing was. "Chipper!"

Chipper enjoys a Christmas snack (yes, this is the real Chipper)

      At his name, the little squirrel squawked and jumped to the top of the couch, ran along it, and leaped for the curtains where it swung, its half-tail jerking spasmodically.       "I think he's been living in that tree for awhile," Jim mused.
     "That would explain why Mom's birdseed got eaten up so fast," I said.
     "Chipper!" It was Mom, come down from upstairs to see about the commotion. She was dressed in her housecoat. Chipper stopped fussing and threw himself down on the floor and zipped up Mom's robe and then on top of her head, digging a nest in her hair.       "My little boy," she said, delighted.

Chipper looketh out at the snow on the day he returneth

     I had my eyes focused enough to look at the Bible. Chipper had eaten an entire page from Jeremiah. "Jim and Billy found Chipper," I said, giving credit (or blame) where credit (or blame) was due.
     "He bit me," Jim said, unhappily. Billy just grinned a proud grin.

     "Thank you, Jimmie. And thank you, too, Billy. I just can't thank you enough."
     Chipper came down out of Mom's hair and into her arms where she held him like a baby, his little paws curling happily. "My little boy, my little boy," she crooned to him. "I know you've been far, far away but you just had to come home to me, didn't you? You never gave up, did you?"
     Jim and I looked at each other and shrugged. The Hickam family, for better or worse, was back together again. The Prodigal Squirrel returneth.

Chipper looks for something to destroy (bless him)

     Mom looked up from Chipper, then at Jim and me. "What day is it?" she asked.
     "Why, Christmas Eve," Jim said.
     She crossed to the Captain's porch and put a critical eye on the outside world. The snow had stopped but it had piled up over the fence. The road was covered with it, too.       "The Starvation Army won't come," she said grimly. "They won't be able to get over the mountain." She took a deep breath. Chipper jumped up on her shoulder, his little rat face taking on a look of studied concentration. Mom's face did, too, although she didn't look like a rat. She just looked tired but as I watched, there was a transformation. It seemed to me that she began to glow, as if an inner fire that had been damped down had burst again into flame.
     "Jimmie," she said, "I want you to go find Jake Mosby. Most likely, he's either still at the mine or down at the Club House. Wherever you find him, roust him out and tell him he needs to get the road cleared to Welch. Tell him he owes me and if he wants to argue with me about it, he can do it later but otherwise we don't have time for his usual foolishness. Tell him the Starvation Army is coming to Coalwood and he needs to clear a path for them, no matter what it takes."
     "Yes ma'am," Jim said.
     "Put chains on the Buick so you can get around."

     "Yes ma'am."
     "When you finish with Jake, get back here. I've got to get over to Welch. You're the best driver in Coalwood. If anybody can get me there, it's you."
     "Yes ma'am. I'll get Jake and then I'll drive you to Welch." Jim spoke with fierce determination. He grabbed his coat and headed outside.
     "I want to help, too, Mrs. Hickam," Billy said. "I'll shovel you a path to Welch if that's what it takes."
     "Thank you, dear," she said. "I believe you."
      I felt left out. "What can I do?" I asked.
     "I can't use a quitter," she said.
     "I don't think I'm a quitter anymore," I replied, softly.
     "I'm not surprised. You boys don't know a thing about quitting. I
guess you haven't seen enough of it to learn."
    Mom looked out at the tipple. A towering plume of steam rose from
the shaft and climbed through the man-hoist, curling and spreading until it disappeared into the layer of thick white clouds that covered the valley. She shook her head and crossed her arms as if she were cold. "Some things need quitting, though. Not many, but some. You just got to know the difference."
     She faced Billy and me and her lips were pressed together in that way she had when she'd made up her mind about something. "But that's for another time."
     She pondered the undecorated Christmas tree. "You two want to know what you can do? I'll tell you. Do the impossible. It seems like a good day for it."

     I puzzled over her words and then I knew what Mom wanted me to do. It was impossible, of course, but I couldn't wait to do it. 

Jim, Mom, and me at Christmas, 1959. Chipper was in the tree. (photo by Dad)

Why I went to Virginia Tech

         When I graduated from high school, I guess I was pretty full of myself because I'd managed to go off to the National Science Fair and come back with a gold and silver medal.

Oh, yes, I was full of myself...

       The other rocket boys and I tucked our thumbs behind our lapels and strutted around town although that didn't last long. Getting too puffed up is pretty much a West Virginia sin. Anyway, it's hard to strut around when nobody cares if you do it except yourself.

The medal and award which in my memoir and that movie was what all the fuss was about

         After we got over being sinful in that way, we thought we'd better thank all the people who'd helped us. That's why we set up a last day of rocket launches that I wrote about in Rocket Boys and they memorialized it, sort of different but almost the same, in the movie October Sky. It was kind of a big deal and the day had special meaning to just about everybody who was there, especially me. My dad came that day and, for the first time in forever, I think he was pretty proud I was his son. I know I was proud he was my father.

Homer H. Hickam, Sr. aka Dad and Superintendent of the Mine

         What I didn't write about and what the movie people didn't show you, was when I got home that day and put all the bent tubes and corroded nozzles and splintered nose cones in a corner of the basement, and Dad had gone back to work at the mine, and Mom back to work on her painting of Myrtle Beach in the kitchen, I went upstairs to my room and sat down at my desk and realized I didn't have anything to do. There was no need to build any more rockets, there was nothing to study, and I didn't have a single plan for what was supposed to happen next, mainly because of a letter that had come for me in the spring, one that I'd picked up myself at the post office without anybody else seeing it but me. It was not a happy letter and I should have done something about it but I was in the midst of building my rockets and getting ready for the science fairs and, somehow, nothing got done.

Sonny aka the Rocket Boy

         In such times when I had determined that I'd really messed up, it was my tendency to seek out my fellow rocket boys Roy Lee, Sherman, Billy, O'Dell, and Quentin to ask them what I should do. The problem was by the time I decided to do that, they were gone. O'Dell and Billy had joined the Air Force, Quentin lived in a town three mountains away and I had no idea where he was, and Roy Lee and Sherman had gone away to visit relatives. So there I was, stuck in Coalwood and kind of in trouble. After a couple of days of lolling around, playing with the dogs and reading novels taken from the stacks Mom and Dad kept around the house, I took a job at the gas station across the street to pump gas and change oil and put fresh tubes in tires. In the photo below, you can see the gas station with cars parked behind directly across from "The Captain's House" where we lived (the big house in the center).

Our house and the gas station as seen from the mine

         My parents didn't say a word about the fact that I was still hanging about although, eventually, I suspected they would want to know what plans I might have.

         One day in July, after a day at the gas station, I came into the kitchen, my hands still dirty from changing a tire, to find Mom working on her painting. She looked over from the ladder. "What now, Sonny boy? Wash your hands before you touch anything."

         I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, petted Lucifer our old black tom who was asleep on his back next to the refrigerator, took a deep breath, and confessed everything. "Mom, I don't know what I'm going to do now."

         "I thought you were waiting to hear from the Air Force Academy."

         "They don't want me."

         "Really? How's that?"

         "Well, it's Vice President Nixon's fault."

         Mom put down her paint brush and climbed down from the ladder and threw a leg over a kitchen chair and sat. "Do tell."

        Upon her invitation, I proceeded to remind her that I had wanted to go to the Air Force Academy but Dad wouldn't let me apply because our members of Congress were all Democrats. Instead, he'd made me apply to the Vice President, one Richard Milhous Nixon, who was a good Republican and could also nominate young men for the service academies. This I had done and, just before I'd gone off to the National Science Fair, the answer had come which was pretty much I'm sorry but you don't quite fit the bill. Of course, I would eventually exact my revenge of a sort by putting "Nick" in one of my novels.*

*Vice President Nixon whom I later made a major character in The Ambassador's Son

          Now here I was, working at a gas station with no prospects for higher education. It was quite a comedown but I deserved it. I made that clear by ending my discourse by saying "I deserve this. I should have told you and Dad." Just in case she didn't understand how really sorry I was, I added a little sniffle.

         During my discussion of Vice Presidents, service academies, and my general failure to plan for the future, Mom had developed sort of a cat swallowed a canary smile. "Well, here's the thing," she said. "It's not Nixon's fault, it's your dad's for making you avoid Democrats even though, just like the Republicans, they are as rascally a bunch as ever put their hands in the pockets of the working man. However, I know a sloo of 'em and I bet I coulda got you in, not that that it would have done any good. Your eyes aren't good enough. I read the health requirements. Did you?"

         I confessed I hadn't and watched her cat-canary smile fade into all seriousness. "You want to be an engineer, you have to go to engineer school. Heard they got a good one at VPI."

         VPI was the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, sometimes called Virginia Tech. I knew it fairly well because my brother Jim was going there on a football scholarship. He'd been offered to play football in a lot of colleges but had decided at first to go to West Virginia University to play for a famous coach there named Art "Pappy" Lewis that Jim idolized. But then Coach Lewis abruptly resigned and my brother, furious that he wouldn't get to play for the coach he'd wanted to play for, switched over to Virginia Tech where a few other football players he knew had decided to go.

Brother Jim aka the fellow who could knock you into next Sunday on the football field

         Mom added, to keep me from thinking since there was really nothing to think about, "I applied for you back in March, called down there and talked to Jimmie's coaches, and they went over to wherever they had to go and got you admitted. You're supposed to show up first week in September. All the paperwork is on the dining room table."

         "How did you know I didn't get in the Air Force Academy?"

         She didn't answer, just gave me that look that told me I had no secrets from her, not while she had access to my room and, now that I thought about it, had gone to school with the postmistress of the Coalwood post office.

Downtown Coalwood in the 1950's

         And that was that. I could always count on my mother to do the best thing for me even when I didn't deserve it.

         I don't recall doing much to get ready to go to VPI. I didn't read the literature she'd left on the dining room table. As long as I knew the day and time I was supposed to show up there, I figured it would be just like when I first went to high school. All I did then was get on a school bus and ride for awhile and then get off and walk through the door where the teachers and the principal were waiting to tell all of us where to go, how to get there, and what was going to happen. Going to school wasn't that complicated.

         With the money I'd saved from working at the gas station and also previously accumulated with a newspaper route, I bought a motor scooter from Sears Roebuck. When the September date for arrival at VPI rolled around, armed with a small bag of clothes and some pens and pencils, I started the scooter up and steered it out onto the road and headed off 100 miles away to Blacksburg, Virginia. Dad was at the mine and Mom was the only one to see me off. She didn't say much. I don't think we hugged. I do remember she came out in the yard and opened the gate so I could drive through it.

My scooter looked like this. I thought it was cool. I still kind of do which tells you something.

        Once I got going, I didn't look back. Coalwood was over for me, or at least I thought it was. Although I didn't see her, I have since imagined what my mom did after she closed the gate behind me. For a while, she probably watched the place where her little Sonny boy had disappeared past the first house on Substation Row. For all I know, maybe she even shed a tear but past that, I think she turned on her heel and went into the house, there to contemplate what next she might do to save her husband and herself from the town she just could not love no matter how hard she tried. She was done with me and rightfully so. It was time for me to take care of myself.

Elsie Hickam aka The Rocket Mom

        There was, however, a small problem. By the time I'd been accepted, all the dormitories were full and that was something even my mother couldn't fix. So I had to live in town in a basement apartment with another late applier, a fellow from California named Cecil C. Childress, III. Since I was officially Homer H. Hickam, Jr., at least in alliterative fashion, we had it covered.

         "Where's your uniforms, Sonny?" Cecil asked not too long after he'd welcomed me to our little underground space. I had no clue what he was talking about but, fortunately for me, it turned out Cecil knew a lot more than I did about Virginia Tech - which wasn't difficult - because his father had graduated from there and he'd been sent, mildly against his will, to repeat that experience. The uniforms I needed, he explained, were for the military units that we were both required to join.

         "Jim doesn't wear any uniforms," I told him.

         "That's because he's a football player. They don't have to be in the Corps."

         I had no idea what he was talking about and I revealed that by repeating his last word. "Corps?"

         As in the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets which was, he explained, a completely military organization where everyone was expected to live like they were in the military and wear uniforms and march around and everything. I was astonished at this turn of events but, on the other hand, I supposed it was sort of like the Air Force Academy so maybe this wasn't so bad. The only thing was it was just so unexpected, I didn't know truly what to make of it.

The Virginia Tech (VPI) Cadet Corps which awaited me.

         And so it was that Cecil took me off to the cadet corps tailor shop, there to purchase two pairs of gray 100% wool shirts, two pairs of gray 100% wool pants with black stripes down their sides, one 100% wool blue dress tunic with brass insignia, one white crossbelt with brass couplet, one 100% wool overcoat, one dark blue cap with a shiny leatherette brim and a black leather strap at the base of its crown, one black rubber raincoat so thick and heavy I could barely pick it up, a white cotton belt with a wide brass buckle to go with it, and a pair of dress black leather shoes. I'd brought some cash money Mom had given me before I left and that just about depleted every cent.

         The white belt, Cecil explained, was called a rat belt. It was so that I could be identified as a freshmen or, according to the corps vernacular, a rat. That didn't sound good.

         A trip to the bookstore was next, there to buy with the little money I had left a liquid brass polisher called Brasso, something called a Blitz cloth and a jeweler's cloth to complete the brass polishing process, a wire gizmo called a Spiffy, and black Kiwi brand shoe polish, the only one, so Cecil claimed, that truly worked to properly spit shine shoes which, he said, I would need to do every day. By then, I was essentially in full zombie mode, just doing what I was told. Nothing seemed right but I guessed it was.

         Once back to our apartment with the purchases, Cecil looked over my paperwork to see what I'd have to do next. "You're in Squadron A over at Eggleston Hall which is in the lower quad. They'll be expecting you today. Let's get you fixed up and then you better get on over there and report in."

         "Fixed up" required the use of all the brass polishing chemicals and implements (especially to make sure my brass belt buckle was real shiny), spit shining my shoes until I could see myself in them - Cecil showed me how and actually did most of it - and tucking my shirt into my pants so that it was flat in the back without any bagging. Cecil also showed me how to use the Spiffy to keep the tabs of the shirt collar straight and properly flat, how to wear the cap squared away with the brim no more than two fingers above my nose, and, lastly, how to walk or, as Cecil put it, to "drag right" and "square corners."

         This was truly mind-boggling stuff. To drag right meant to keep my right shoulder next to every wall, and to square corners meant to sharply execute a right or left turn any time I wanted to change directions. It was, Cecil said, necessary for rats to always drag right and square corners any time they were in the upper or lower quadrangles where the Corps dormitories (or barracks as they were sometimes called) were located and also inside the dorms themselves. I don't recall if I asked why this was but it didn't matter. It was and that was it.

         After I got dressed up, my skin crawling beneath the itchy wool of the uniform, Cecil inspected me and said, "I guess it will have to do," and pointed me in the right direction. "You either go now or they'll come after you."

         I went but not on my scooter. Cecil said it was illegal for a freshman to have a vehicle on campus - something else I'd kind of missed in the literature - so that meant walking. Along the way, which was about a mile, my shirt sort of came loose in the back, and I guess I handled my brass belt buckle a bit leaving behind a greasy fingerprint or two, and I walked through some mud with my shiny new shoes (which hurt, anyway), and the wind blew my cap to the back of my head. I gave none of that any thought. The lower quadrangle, where Squadron A was located, looked like an ancient castle built out of gray stone and just as forbidding. I entered it, found the quadrangle empty, and continued to the dormitory marked with a brass plaque that said Eggleston which was where Squadron A was supposed to be.

Eggleston Hall

          There was a heavy wooden door which I opened and walked inside into a hallway that was so deeply polished, I could see my reflection. The smell of wax and cleansers was almost overpowering. Everything just gleamed. I spotted a fellow in a cadet uniform lounging beside a water fountain. He looked at me and his eyes widened. "Hello," I said. "I'm Sonny Hickam. I was told to report here. Do you know where I'm supposed to go?"

         Which was the last thing I said for a good long time mainly because for much of that good long time, I had a bucket on my head.

         But, oh, the adventures I was about to have over the next four years including building a giant brass cannon we decided to call the Skipper...

Cadet Sonny Hickam aka Skipper cannon boy

Crater Trueblood

https://www.space.com/26477-homer-hickam-science-in-crater-trueblood.html

The Moon is There: Writing About Our 8th Continent

The Moon is There:

A Writer Looks At Our Eighth Continent

Part 1 of 2

by

Homer Hickam

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Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why he wanted to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

- President John F. Kennedy, 1962

O fortune like the Moon

you ever want

but to regain

your former circumstance.

Life's equally fain

to decimate

as reinstate

the mind with games of chance

prosperity

and penury

reversing with a glance.

 - Carmina Burana; Fortune, Empress of the World

We should just go up there and mine the blame thing.

- Homer Hickam

PART 1

An Author's Commentary

What follows is not my usual. You know me. I'm the fellow who wrote Rocket Boys: A Memoir which told the story of some boys in the West Virginia coalfields who decided to build rockets. I also wrote a lot of other novels and memoirs. If I have to define myself as a writer, I would say I'm a story-teller which is kind of a West Virginia specialty.

I've told stories of the coalfields of West Virginia and stories of the Outer Banks of North Carolina and stories of the South Pacific during World War II and of the fossil grounds of Montana. My most recent novel was the story of a long trek my parents took with their pet alligator during the Depression titled Carrying Albert Home. Counting Albert, I've written five books set at least partially in West Virginia, Rocket Boys, The Coalwood Way, Sky of Stone, and We Are Not Afraid.

The movie October Sky made me out to be a rocket scientist which gave the folks who worked with me at NASA a good laugh. During the Apollo era, I was either in college or in Vietnam or recovering from Vietnam.

When I worked for the agency from 1981 to 1998, I was more of a high-tech teacher who trained the astronauts to perform experiments in space aboard the Spacelab or how to perform extravehicular activities in space, the latter by diving with them in the old Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. I wrote a little about all that in Paco: The Cat Who Meowed in Space.

However, I have always been fascinated with the moon which is why I've also written five works set on what I consider our eighth continent. They include lunar fiction that began with the New York Times best-selling novel Back to the Moon (BTTM) and followed up some years later by a trilogy of novels titled Crater, Crescent, and Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company.

But there is another work, actually my first that was set on the moon. I wrote it way back in 1993. Since I've recently being appointed to an adjunct group of the National Space Council, I think maybe it's time to revisit my work, written a quarter century ago to encourage a rather reluctant organization to head for the moon. You may recognize it best by its acronym: NASA.

 

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Reflections and Further Commentary

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After my study was published, I don't think anyone at NASA or the federal government in 1993 cared anything about it. To my knowledge, a quarter century later, they still don't. Nonetheless, being the stubborn type, and especially after subsequently writing novels set at least partially on the moon, I believe my first work about Luna contains several concepts or analogs that are important if we're really going to go back there, this time to stay. They are as follows:

•  The Evolving Construction Analog was my proposition that the best course while building a moonbase was to do it slowly over time. This was the way the South Pole Station was constructed with its components evolving from an uncrewed power-producing station to a temporarily crewed science laboratory to a full-time occupied facility. Another Apollo-type crash program is not required. Slow and steady wins the race, as the old maxim goes, and it is particularly true when building something big and costly that has yet to prove itself.

•  The Funding Analog was a way of looking at spending money for the moonbase over time. Just as in Antarctica, funding a moonbase should be spread out, the money only spent as it makes sense to do based on the success of what has come before. I also still like my idea of not putting NASA in charge but creating a Lunar Base Consortium (LBC) of government and private players.

•  The Transportation Analog was probably the one I had the most fun describing because I got to draw a lot of rockets. It also (ahem) resulted in me predicting somewhat the lift capabilities of launchers that would be coming on line a quarter of a century later. The Moonbird rocket is similar to today's Falcon 9 or the standard Delta or Atlas rockets, the Moondog is similar to the Falcon Heavy, Atlas V, or Delta Heavy, and the Moonbeast is similar to the BFR, the New Glenn, or NASA's SLS. Profit-seeking rocket companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin were not even glimmers on the horizon back in 1993 so I didn't foresee them. What I fully expected was that NASA would have to design and build all of the new American rockets through its usual set of contractors. I'm glad that's not the way it turned out.

•  The Fuzzy Boundary Proposal: While I was writing the study, I came across some references to the "fuzzy boundary" method of launching payloads to the moon and included that idea in my study. It was my reasoning that without any rushed time constraints to build the moonbase, there was no reason not to use gravity-assist to send various segments with self-landers. Had I known about the idea at the time, I would have also proposed Aldrin Cyclers that constantly make figure-8's around the Earth and the moon. These Cyclers carry living quarters and crew supplies so that any country or company wanting to hitch a ride to the moon can come up from Earth, rendezvous with a Cycler, give it a little boost, and be on their way with whatever they have, including landers, supplies, and people. I wrote at length about the design and capabilities of these cyclers in my Helium-3/Crater series which I described as somewhat steampunk in design and function.

For all my fascination toward the moon as a destination, what is it I want to see happen there? I will tell you very clearly. I want to see a new world filled with hearty individuals who desire above all else to raise their families in the manner in which they see fit while being free (if they wish) of Earthian politics and Earthian religions and any philosophy to do with the Old World in favor of the New on what I consider our eighth continent.

In other words, I want humanity to start thinking in different ways that can only occur when we truly break free not only of the gravity that keeps us bound to the Earth but the chains of our history. This is not to say everything will be perfect there. Far from it. Just as I show in my Helium-3/Crater trilogy, I expect life on the moon to be difficult and dangerous but it's through difficulty and danger that human progress is most often made.

The moon is there, waiting. I say let's just go. Ad Luna!

Coming up: Part II. The Art and Science of Writing Novels Set On The Moon.