Abandon in Place: Cape Canaveral, August 2010

      Page 3 - Complex 14: Mercury Atlas

 

It is Sunday, and there's nobody at all working out here. ICBM Road is, and remains, utterly deserted except for ourselves. It's as if we're the only people on the Cape.

We arrive at Pad 14, and pull off of the road in the small area that's provided for that purpose, park the car, and get out for a closer look at things. We are completely alone.

As with all the other launch complexes along missile row, the gantry at this pad is long gone, and there's nothing at all to see over the top of the scrub.

Right here in front of us, it's a different matter, though.

Signage, plaques, and an unusual-looking stainless-steel sculpture, consisting of the symbol for Mercury, superimposed with the digit 7, greets our eyes in mute testimony to the efforts and accomplishments that went down here, all those years ago.

We stop and consider all of it, giving each element in the tableau the time it deserves.

We have entered an area of Large History, and we're still too close to it to really appreciate just how far this stuff towers above everything else in our lives. Here, and further up the beach, things went on that defy description, that defy understanding.

I can easily imagine that the folks who lived in the vicinity of the Parthenon, or perhaps the Sistine Chapel, or maybe the Pyramids, may have had a similar problem gauging the true significance of the recent work done in their neighborhood.

Long shadows are hard to measure.

For those guys, as well as ourselves, it was just another pointless Big-budget Project, funded by the goddamned government with no concern for the lives of the common folk who were ultimately footing the bill for this colossal waste of precious resources.

My guess is that at some point in the distant future, almost nothing that happened during the entire twentieth century will be deemed worthy of recalling, except for what went down here, and in Russia, during the 1960's.

But I could be wrong.

Regardless, Pad 14 is where things began to really hit their stride, and gather together toward the culmination of events that occurred not so many miles to our north, along this same bleak stretch of coastline.

 

As monuments go, this one is very understated

 

 

 

 

 

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