How To Explore Like A Girl

As her new book, Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver, comes out, world-renowned Royal Canadian Geographical Society Explorer-in-Residence Jill Heinerth reflects on what led her to a path of adventurous discovery.

- Jill Heinerth

ON FRIDAY, FEB. 5, 1971, the PA system at Munden Park Public School in Mississauga, Ont., reverberated with a special announcement. The school principal requested staff and students assemble in the library — to watch television!

As school had started that day, two men were donning spacesuits for a walk on the moon that lasted more than five hours. At about 4 a.m., Apollo 14 had landed in the moon’s Fra Mauro crater, the intended landing site of the aborted Apollo 13 mission of 1970.

Our teachers seemed a bit nervous as we watched the walk, perhaps because of a fresh awareness of the risks astronauts face. Alan Shepard seemed relaxed as he filmed Edgar Mitchell bunny-hopping down the Antares lunar module’s ladder with a Maurer 16-mm movie camera. The crew planted the American flag, off-loaded an experiments package and even hit a couple of golf balls before the day was through. It was the third time astronauts had been on the moon. I was mesmerized. “MOM, DAD, I want to be an astronaut!” I declared over dinner that evening. They were accustomed to my earnest goalsetting at mealtime. I had already expressed interest in people I had seen on TV, whether it was Jacques Cousteau, Marlin Perkins of Wild Kingdom fame or “the most trusted man in America,” CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite.

It was a transformational time, when we had no Canadian space program, no women astronauts and few positive female role models on TV. A new sitcom, All in the Family, was considered edgy, but perhaps not as influential as the forward-looking show