As to just what this ineffable quality was…well, it obviously involved bravery. “This quality, this it, was never named…nor was it talked about in any way.

A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. “Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)” Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole.

“It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system.

The right stuff tom wolf