My father used to write for me – books about the places he hoped I might visit and the experiences he hoped I might have. Stories of private space jets in-transit to Alpha-Centauri, of ancient bones nestled in the sere hills of Colorado, of sprawling cities, of exploration. He read them all to me, and let me read them back to him, braiding these imagined land and star-scapes into the real ones of the Chesapeake Bay and our grassy yard. For me, time was not a steady march forward with one event playing out after another, but a holistic thing where future experiences could be as certain and concrete as the past.
These were the thoughts and memories that occurred (or recurred) to me as I boarded the ship 525 Earth days ago. And his were the stories – as well as a recording of his and my mother’s voices reading them aloud – that were to accompany me on my journey. The Memento-Box, a personal time-capsule for Martian explorers and other astronauts, was a Japanese invention – or at least, it was their biome and human-dynamics research team that had developed it. It was a strong-box, pressurized and climate-regulated, with specialized compartments for the Bold Traveler’s fondest memories. Solid-state chips held audio, video, digital images, and text that could be displayed on a compact, backlit screen. Hermetically sealed containers could hold seeds, dried plants, or delicate heirlooms wrapped in tissue-paper. It was a small expense in the context of the entire mission, but an essential one for the mental health and stability of the human elements.
And so my Memento-Box, locked tight between my quaking knees during takeoff and again at landing, traveled with me to this strange new world. It containing only my father’s amateur fiction, my mother’s lullabies, a handful of sandy soil and crushed oyster shells from my childhood’s driveway, dried rosemary, sea salt, and honey suckle – smells and tactile experiences I would never have again and could not live without. <More senses.>
I needed their comfort when I arrived in my dusty new universe. Earth was such a diverse place – streams, rivers, and misty towering forests in some places… vast, shifting deserts in others. Glaciers, oceans, hot springs, volcanoes, grasslands, neat orchards, and sprawling slums around impossible gleaming cities. The Earth was not just a blue marble, flecked with brown, at its surface – it had everything. Mars was not the same. Dusty, reddish orange, and capped with dry ice, Mars is a landscape of frigid desert, with sand so fine it formed its own storm fronts when lofted into the thin atmosphere. Clouds were struggling wisps, if there were clouds at all. But this sounds so harsh and ugly, when it was not that.
My first, real look at Mars was breathtaking. Intricate pink-brown rock formations carved into incredible towers and cornices by whipping winds and razor sands. Endless dunes. Mountains looming in the distance, the tallest in the solar system, the tallest known to science. Ancient river beds cracked and drier than dry. There was ancient water, liquid and saltier than any Earthly life could bare deep beneath the surface… But it would not see the light of sol.
This literally alien landscape tested my and my fellow travelers’ every limit. Our legs ached climbing up and down into the deep canyons – gorges that would make the Grand Canyon look like a mere scratch. Our skin was chapped and burned by the cold that seeped through our suits and into our marrow. We could not get warm.
I remembered D.C. summers – the hot, unbearably humid summers of the swamp the big, marble buildings and town houses had tried so hard to fill. You could make eggs on the sidewalk, and sweat clung to everyone’s brow like jeweled crown. Heat shimmered off of sticky pavement, and the air – laden with moisture and heady pollen – moved slowly in and out of our lungs. Meanwhile, just south of the city, we ate blue crabs with sticky fingers and slurped oysters out of their pocked shells. My neighbor had a pool.
Every memory was liquid water, oppressive, oxygen-rich atmospheres, and biomass. My ribcage ached for salty, bay air. Some days it was torture.
But then I would brush the keys on my memento-box, call up my father’s stories. When the sun went down, and my new world became cold and black, I would lay awake in the blue glow of the screen, reading about the red mountains and swirling nebulae my father imagined for me, fall asleep with the images behind my eyelids.
By morning, the Bay faded replaced in my heart by the rock and sand of the Martian landscape – the breathtaking beauty of a world untouched by multicellular life and complicated biochemistries.
So you see, the memento-box did not serve to tie us to the wet, rich Earth, but to forge new ones with dry, red Mars. Our memories of Earth did not hold us back, but drive us forward. Just like the European explorers, we would build a new world on the foundations of the old.
These were the thoughts and memories that occurred (or recurred) to me as I boarded the ship 525 Earth days ago. And his were the stories – as well as a recording of his and my mother’s voices reading them aloud – that were to accompany me on my journey. The Memento-Box, a personal time-capsule for Martian explorers and other astronauts, was a Japanese invention – or at least, it was their biome and human-dynamics research team that had developed it. It was a strong-box, pressurized and climate-regulated, with specialized compartments for the Bold Traveler’s fondest memories. Solid-state chips held audio, video, digital images, and text that could be displayed on a compact, backlit screen. Hermetically sealed containers could hold seeds, dried plants, or delicate heirlooms wrapped in tissue-paper. It was a small expense in the context of the entire mission, but an essential one for the mental health and stability of the human elements.
And so my Memento-Box, locked tight between my quaking knees during takeoff and again at landing, traveled with me to this strange new world. It containing only my father’s amateur fiction, my mother’s lullabies, a handful of sandy soil and crushed oyster shells from my childhood’s driveway, dried rosemary, sea salt, and honey suckle – smells and tactile experiences I would never have again and could not live without. <More senses.>
I needed their comfort when I arrived in my dusty new universe. Earth was such a diverse place – streams, rivers, and misty towering forests in some places… vast, shifting deserts in others. Glaciers, oceans, hot springs, volcanoes, grasslands, neat orchards, and sprawling slums around impossible gleaming cities. The Earth was not just a blue marble, flecked with brown, at its surface – it had everything. Mars was not the same. Dusty, reddish orange, and capped with dry ice, Mars is a landscape of frigid desert, with sand so fine it formed its own storm fronts when lofted into the thin atmosphere. Clouds were struggling wisps, if there were clouds at all. But this sounds so harsh and ugly, when it was not that.
My first, real look at Mars was breathtaking. Intricate pink-brown rock formations carved into incredible towers and cornices by whipping winds and razor sands. Endless dunes. Mountains looming in the distance, the tallest in the solar system, the tallest known to science. Ancient river beds cracked and drier than dry. There was ancient water, liquid and saltier than any Earthly life could bare deep beneath the surface… But it would not see the light of sol.
This literally alien landscape tested my and my fellow travelers’ every limit. Our legs ached climbing up and down into the deep canyons – gorges that would make the Grand Canyon look like a mere scratch. Our skin was chapped and burned by the cold that seeped through our suits and into our marrow. We could not get warm.
I remembered D.C. summers – the hot, unbearably humid summers of the swamp the big, marble buildings and town houses had tried so hard to fill. You could make eggs on the sidewalk, and sweat clung to everyone’s brow like jeweled crown. Heat shimmered off of sticky pavement, and the air – laden with moisture and heady pollen – moved slowly in and out of our lungs. Meanwhile, just south of the city, we ate blue crabs with sticky fingers and slurped oysters out of their pocked shells. My neighbor had a pool.
Every memory was liquid water, oppressive, oxygen-rich atmospheres, and biomass. My ribcage ached for salty, bay air. Some days it was torture.
But then I would brush the keys on my memento-box, call up my father’s stories. When the sun went down, and my new world became cold and black, I would lay awake in the blue glow of the screen, reading about the red mountains and swirling nebulae my father imagined for me, fall asleep with the images behind my eyelids.
By morning, the Bay faded replaced in my heart by the rock and sand of the Martian landscape – the breathtaking beauty of a world untouched by multicellular life and complicated biochemistries.
So you see, the memento-box did not serve to tie us to the wet, rich Earth, but to forge new ones with dry, red Mars. Our memories of Earth did not hold us back, but drive us forward. Just like the European explorers, we would build a new world on the foundations of the old.