I was riding slowly through them, and the sensation was like walking backward through a pasture where someone has waved a wand and made all the fireflies stop right there where they were and glow steadily. Down close to the surface, it pales out into sort of a blue, a darker blue, and then off into black. And the earth reported back. In Australia, the citizens of Perth had prepared a greeting that would also serve to test his night vision. Porch lights beamed.
People spread sheets on their lawns to reflect the light.
Taxi drivers flicked their headlights. Glenn radioed astronaut Gordon Cooper at the tracking station in Muchea, asking what the flicking lights were. It was always about people. The feat was important, but never as important as the sense of the person who accomplished the feat. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe portrays Glenn as weird for his normality, but most American heroes are weirdly normal.