My Visit With A Moon Tree, The Tree That Left The Stratosphere.

Apollo 14 launched in the dim evening of January 31 1971. It was going to be their third trip to the Moons surface. Five days latter while two men where walking on the moons landscape, Stuart Roosa a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper, orbited above them operating the command module "Kitty Hawk". With him, packed away snugly in his personal kit there was five tiny containers. In those containers was the beginning of a forest, five varieties of trees. Loblolly Pine, Sycamore, Sweetgum, Redwood and Douglas Fir. The seeds had been sorted and classified, control seeds were kept on Earth for later comparison.

But on some twist fate, the containers bust open on the return flight home, rendering the experiment no longer possible. Contaminating the closely monitored and controlled nature of space research.

But the fate always has a plan of special things, and so it was for our space seeds. They were given to back to the Forest Service Chief that collected the seeds for them. He sent them to two Forest Service stations one in Gulfport Mississippi and the other in Placerville California to see if they would sprout. Not really thinking they would, but they did. They have been planted all over the world, one was even given to Emperor Hirohito.

One stayed close to where it was sprouted. A man who worked in the Placerville Forest Service station brought a seed home to his wife, a cool story to tell. And there is it today, growing large and strong, glowing in lunar dust.

I got to gaze on its sloping branches with his daughter, who is the owner of the house now. She homesteads the land and rents cute covered wagon campsites to people like me. From the moon and back, now deeply rooted in the ground. May we all have a story that ends like that.

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