Moon walkers eclipsed need for clean laundry

All I know for sure is that I didn’t smell very good.

I’d been on the road for the better part of two months, and I can’t tell you the last time I’d been able to do laundry.

It was July of 1969, and while the world was focused on historic events on the moon, I was trying to find a laundromat.

The team of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins faced far greater challenges, but they had the advantage of knowing what they were doing. I was completely clueless.

And all of the clothes in my battered blue rucksack had their own out-of-this-world aroma. The same was true of the clothes I was wearing.

I’d stuck my thumb out the first week of June with only a general idea of where I was headed. The rucksack carried clothes, a laughable tent, a single burner stove and a couple of books. A sleeping bag, nearly as laughable as the tent, was tied to the top.

That kit had served me well through June and most of July.

I’d camped at a former Royal Air Force base near the White Cliffs of Dover, met an old man in a pub who claimed to be related to the outlaw Jesse James, taken the ferry from Dover to Belgium, been given a lift by a guy who published what used to be called a “men’s magazine,” been charmed by Ghent and Bruges and left cold by Brussels, fallen in love with the Van Goghs at Arnhem and the Rembrandts in Amsterdam, attended the Grand Prix in Zandvoort, met a girl in Holland who would later introduce me to her friends in Sweden, run into some idiotic young American college students and survived a traffic accident in downtown Copenhagen, partied all night with the young Swedes who were friends of my Dutch friend, and was now heading through Germany, hoping to connect with a buddy in Heidelberg before going on to Switzerland then a flight home from Paris.

All that was great. But doing laundry was a challenge.

It was in Cologne that I dedicated myself to restoring a modicum of cleanliness to my wardrobe. I’d been hearing scraps of information about Apollo 11, but it was only scraps.

Camped in Cologne, I probably should have been drenched in cologne to make it easier to be around me. I loaded all of my clothes except those I was wearing into my rucksack and set out on a day-long quest.

There were at least two obstacles in front of me: I spoke no more than a few words of German, and folks in that country weren’t really into using laundromats in 1969.

Most city dwellers did their washing at home and hung things up to dry on a line on the balcony or in the backyard. There were laundries, but those were for the rich. They were expensive, and they were slow.

I had what can best be described as limited resources. (I was nearly broke.) And I had no time to spare. I couldn’t wait a few days for clean clothes. I needed them now and wanted to head on down the road.

Just the same, I asked around and got some directions and set out hiking the streets of Cologne.

The directions, it turned out, were useless. I found laundry after laundry. But when I found someone who spoke English and explained that I wanted a do-it-yourself laundry, they looked at me as if I were from the moon.

The trek took nearly the entire day of blistering heat. Street after street, miscommunication after miscommunication. Until finally I found it, a place that may actually have been the only laundromat in all of Cologne in 1969.

It was more expensive than I would have liked, but it worked.

And while the dryer was tumbling, I stepped outside and found myself staring into the front window of the store next door as half a dozen black and white television sets showed those iconic images: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin setting foot on lunar soil roughly a quarter of a million miles away.

I stood there transfixed.

There was no sound, and it would have been in German anyway.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment.

While I was congratulating myself on having clean clothes, these guys were doing something no human being had ever done.

To say it provided a little perspective would be an understatement.