Big Man Go Moon
Story by Georgia Hesse
As a child, I knew three dates in July worth celebration: July 4, 1776, anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence; July 8, our mother’s birthday; and July 14, 1789, Bastille Day, the birthday (as conceived ever since) of la belle France.
In 1969, I found another one: July 20, when America’s Apollo 11, crewed by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, made the first lunar landing. “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind!” said Armstrong to an earthly audience. With that, the Space Age debuted.
A few days later, squished into a very small aircraft, I was winging above the wild, green peaks of the Owen Stanley Range, the spine of Papua New Guinea. I gazed down on tangled wilderness sliced by the Sepik, the Strickland, and the Fly Rivers; down and back into the Stone Age.
Incredibly, only 36 years before, Europeans had first penetrated that damp, shadowed world to find in its deep valleys not gold but unknown, uncounted human beings. Separated by serrated mountains like teeth on an endless saw, these people had dwelt for thousands of years in isolated, tribal groups, unaware of each other, speaking 860 languages. Today, three of them are “official”: English, Tok Tisin (Pidgin, a creole tongue) and Hisi Motu.
Off the insect-sized airplane, I stepped into a frontier fling, the Saturday market day of Mt. Hagan, still swinging after its annual sing-sing (festival). Near-naked male dancers who had walked for weeks to show off here straggled through the throng, their waists bound by wide belts of beaten bark from which dangled brief fabrics (in front) and bunches of tanet grass (behind).
“’Morrow,” said my Australian guide, “we’ll find a sing- sing. Ready at dawn, right?” Right.
Hot, hot morning when it came, even before the clear, broiling globe of sun had climbed above the peak points. High grass, dirt road and, on the green-brown plain below, dozens and then hundreds of men and woman paraded, brilliant plumes flouncing on heads, the priceless feathers of birds of paradise. “Kah-mon an’ walk behind me, yeah?”
In a green bower, a crone huddled, old eyes running, flinty shoulders slumped, cheeks sunk beyond sharp bones, legs below the knees ash-gray from cooking fires, ancient, hooked nose painted red: antiquity still living.
“How old is she?” I whispered. “Probably 35,” answered my guide. I nearly dropped my Nikon. It was my 36th birthday.
Days drifted. In the Eastern Highlands, we encountered a mass of Mudmen, horrible yet humorous in their sooty skins and great mud masks shaped liked eccentric eggs. A young man leaned on his stick. We greeted him in Pidgin. The warrior pierced me with his eyes. “Who bilong him?” he asked. (In Pidgin, both sexes are “him.”)
The Aussie drew a long track in the dirt. “Faraway, faraway,” he almost sang. “Him,” pointing at me, “Him bilong America!” The tribesman’s eyes expanded until they filled his face: wonder, awe, a bit of fear. “Him?” he questions. “Him bilong America big man go moon?”
I got it. Through TV magic, this warrior from the Mountains of Heaven had watched from the Stone Age into space as a man named America flew to the moon. And I belonged him. I felt very proud.
Biography: Courtesy of Russell Johnson
Georgia I. Hesse was born on the 28 Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek at the foot of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. A B.A. graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, she then studied political science as a Fulbright scholar at Paris’ Sorbonne, then at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, France. She became the founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner (flagship of the Hearst chain) and then of the Examiner-Chronicle. Georgia holds the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government and the Chevalier de l’Ordre de la République from Tunisia. Her articles have appeared in many national magazines and newspapers and she is the author of travel guides to France and California by three publishers, and a contributor to several anthologies. Georgia passed away on February 4, 2022, at the age of 88.
