“It’s a dirty place,” says Earl Swift. He’s talking about the moon.
The moon is covered in fine dust, an endless desert of gray particles that smear when disturbed in the breezeless atmosphere. When the Apollo 15 mission landed there in 1971, the astronauts found that the dust meant danger for them and the brand-new rover they’d brought. The moon dirt worked its way into the seals of the astronauts’ helmets and gloves, making them difficult to remove. Dirt coated the instrument panels of the rovers, making them nearly impossible to read. Fine dirt lined the angled walls of the moon’s craters—if the rover slid into a crater, there’s no guarantee that it would ever make it out. On Earth, the astronauts had been swaggering cowboys, but on the moon, they moved slowly, crossing the barren expanse one dust particle at a time.
Swift’s eye for fine, granular detail is a hallmark of his writing. In his latest work, the esteemed Nelson County journalist and author turns that passion for detail to space. Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings tells the story of Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17, which took place in 1971 and 1972 and saw three moon rovers wheel across the lunar surface.
Even chatting in a cozy coffeehouse in Crozet, Swift can conjure the vastness and loneliness of space travel. “Forget about interplanetary colonization,” he says, “lunar colonization might not be practical.” The Apollo 17 mission took the rover as far as any human has ever gone, he says. As he writes it: “Here they’d leave humankind’s outermost footprints.”
Swift’s earlier books and magazine articles describe more terrestrial, but perhaps equally dramatic, environments—the sinking Tangier Island (Chesapeake Requiem, A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, on many Best Book of 2018 lists); points where native Americans and then colonists aimed to prosper along the James River (Journey on the James); and the beauty and the beastliness of America’s interstate highway system (The Big Roads). There’s also a book about a risky sojourn to locate, identify, and honor the remains of a crew of a U.S. helicopter downed in Laos (Where They Lay) and the tale of one ’57 Chevy told through the many stories of its owners (Auto Biography).
Swift, 62, keeps his feet on the ground nowadays. He starts almost every day with a five-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, which is near his house. Sometimes he strolls out to a protected ledge on the trail and scribbles away before returning home to write through the evening. Don’t be fooled by the steady routine: He hasn’t been to the moon, but he’s been just about everywhere else.
As a kid, his father’s job with Firestone tires took the family all around the country. Swift inherited a “geeky appreciation for cars,” he says, learning to tell the difference between a Chevy and a Pontiac based on design elements from year to year, and taking joy in the numbering scheme of the North American highway system. His father was also a huge aviation fan, and by the time Swift was 11 he could identify nearly every commercial airliner.
The fascination with cars remains: Swift has owned “six or seven” convertibles, he says, and he whizzes around town in a Miata MX-5. “A two-seater forces you to make decisions about what’s important to you—and who’s important to you,” he says. “You have to be careful about how much you pack, and you can only bring one other person with you.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Swift doesn’t shy away from technical details in describing the moon missions. When he talks about the moon rover’s drive train, his voice speeds up with excitement. Each wheel was powered by a device that produced just 1/4 horsepower per wheel, or one horsepower for the whole lunar rover. (A Prius has 121 horsepower.)
“The transmission for each wheel was made of just three parts and only two of those moved,” Swift says. “It violates all of your suppositions about a transmission.”
The rover weighed 460 pounds on Earth, but much less on the moon. When a Velcro clasp in a cord would not open up easily, one astronaut nearly picked up the entire rover by accident.
Up there, instant invention was a constant necessity. When a fender broke off the rover, the Apollo 17 team used U.S. Geological Survey maps bound with duct tape to shape a makeshift fender that lasted long enough to let the scheduled work continue.
In his younger days, before settling in Nelson to hike, write, and tinker with his automobiles, Swift traveled widely. Everywhere he’s been triggers vivid and fond memories. When he moved to Alaska in 1984 for a job at the Anchorage Times, the Last Frontier State was just right for him.
“There was a boomtown feel about the whole state. Money was everywhere and cocaine was a terrible problem in Anchorage. Organized crime was a terrible problem, too,” Swift recalls. It was “one of the most dangerous places to live in the United States, per capita, but boy, what a great place to be a reporter.”
He adjusted to wild Alaskan life. “If you’re not at the top of the food chain, you have to have a gun,” but he quickly adds, “It’s the kind of place, if you see a motorist broken down by the side of the road, you have to stop.”
After Alaska, Swift worked for the Virginian-Pilot from 1987 to 2008. Recalling his days at Norfolk’s daily newspaper, he kvells. “One of the best newspapers in the country, story for story. Best job in the world,” he says. The Batten family, who owned the paper at the time, “had installed really smart, hard-thinking management who had hired exceptionally well from top to bottom. It was a writer’s newspaper.”
The paper liked him, too, and granted leaves of absence to write books, some developed from his newspaper work.
In 1998, Swift took a 22-day sojourn on the James in a canoe, and returned with 22 dispatches from the wilderness. From his campsites, he wrote on a Tandy 1000 computer that “gave you one line of text as you typed, so you had to remember what you had typed.” The project was a big hit, and UVA approached him about becoming a Virginia Humanities fellow, a position he still holds.
His Virginian-Pilot work also took him to Tangier Island, the isolated crabbing village in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. He wrote a few stories about the island’s local life before convincing his editors that the real story was about the water creeping over the island’s shores and not receding. When Swift returned to the island in 2016 to work on his book, he says he was “completely floored” to see how much more of the Tangier land mass had gone under water. “Tangier is a test case that announces we have got a problem,” he says. “Respond as you will, but how you respond will say much about how we are going to get through this problem—or not.”
After his years in Norfolk, where he enjoyed the beach and bay life immensely, he now enjoys the trees along the mountains in Nelson County. He’s proud to have raised his daughter from age 11, with the support of “the proverbial village of friends and relatives,” he says. “Looking back, I think there were far fewer challenges along the way than there were rewards. She reordered my whole existence. She introduced me to true joy, pride, worry, and more joy.”
Swift takes about two years to write a book, and says his next project is already underway. He assures that his next book will be as different from Across the Airless Wilds as that book is from Chesapeake Requiem. Swift has to sell his next project, one he’s been working on for a decade. Much of the research is done, but he will not divulge the subject. “I won’t jinx it,” he declares.
Like in his previous work, he’ll try to become“the expert” on his new subject.
Actual experts don’t talk to each other, he explains, and are full of slights, competition, and secrets. “But they will all talk to the reporter,” he says. “You are the sum of their collective wisdom.”
“Expertise may reach its sell-by date, and it may be outdated by the time a book is published,” the author continues. “But you have exercised the ability to dive deep”—or even go to space.
