Mars Site 3 Archive, #371 21 August 2110.

Max Grade, Mission Specialist 

Personal Journal Entry: Sol 10

My father and my grandfather were both working fishermen, working off the West Coast of Scotland on a six-berth boat called The Reliant. Storms that would have been unrecognizable just over a century earlier frequently crossed the Irish Sea, battering the coast with brutal intensity. 

Both men were diehards in an industry that was increasingly automated and robotized. They took pride in the physical hard work and hazards of the job. They gladly shared stories of their working lives, recounting tales with unhurried pleasure, as if they were making strong nets from fine rope, often with a glass of whisky to ease their flow. Despite all the technological leaps and bounds, in an ever-shrinking world, storytelling was still treasured. 

Both men had married highly educated women, which gave them a certain local notoriety, as if there was a proclivity for the seduction of intelligent, cultured females.

I still have cousins, aunts and uncles who claim my grandfather, Old James as he was known, drowned at sea, regardless of the number of times I have corrected them. It is a testament to how family narratives can be more powerful than the events that created them. 

My father told me on several occasions that Old James was dead before he hit the water. The whole crew saw it, boat pitching in a storm. It happened so fast, Old James didn’t even have time to cry out. He died, tipped over, and the sea took him.

His body was found the following day and the autopsy revealed a massive hemorrhage in the brain. No water in the lungs. He was almost certainly dead when he hit the water.

My father quit fishing after that, retrained at college and became a schoolteacher. But people still used his fishing name: James Younger. 

‘Just call me James,’ he would sometimes say, knowing full well that he would take James Younger to the grave.

I think he named me Max just to make sure there would be no more naming nonsense. But my friends at school called me Mac J, which morphed into J-Max when I moved to the USA to take my Masters in Geology. My mother laughed when she heard J-Max for the first time and said the name made it sound like I was a rapper. My father moaned when he heard it. But the name stuck and he never corrected anyone when it was used it in his presence.

Old James. James Younger. J-Max. What will I call my son, should I be lucky enough to have one? Will he look up at the stars and planets the way I have looked at them? 

My father and grandfather were sea travelers. They witnessed bone-shaking storms, delicate winter sunrises, bright stars in the deep darkness of cold night. Far from any shore, they saw ghostly meteors cross the vast firmament. They knew the old wonders and signs, more ancient than recorded history.

My father was the most fervent dreamer of the two men. He loved astronomy and he dreamed of Mars the way some men dreamed of unspoiled wilderness. 

My father also spoke of Mars the way some men recounted their former dreams of youth, voices burdened by time and personal choices, or quietly, with sudden grief, like a slackening and pulling – a tidal sadness shaping the heart’s rhythm.

At a certain age, a man’s life has a kind of heft, with which he can gauge his success or failure. The roads not travelled measured in relief and regret. My father reached that age with a certain quality of stoicism. It is what it is. 

But best of all, my father sometimes dreamed of Mars with a boy’s delight and when he showed me the books and the pictures he had collected, hundreds of hi-res images of vistas and craters, of NASA landers and rovers, immaculate graphs and animations, close-ups of drilled rocks and those first tantalizing signs of water on the steep slopes of highlands overlooking vast plains, he spoke with breathless reverence, he spoke with wonder.

He showed me Mars Site 1.

 “A bloody near disaster from Day Two. The whole site swallowed up by a planet-wide sandstorm. Luckily, the crew managed to take flight and return home. They called it The Longest Stopover in History in the news.”

And in hushed tones, he pointed out Mars Site 2, unoccupied because the Mars Mission 2 Crew never arrived. Their ship suffered a fatal structural failure and broke up halfway between Earth and Mars, spinning away in the great void, lost forever. No time for goodbyes or messages for loved ones. Gone forever.

“It’s all there, Max. Robots on standby in the Living Domes. They call the robots serfs. Did you know that? All the equipment. The serfs. The rovers. The automated water distiller. The ice excavator. The food stores. The nuclear power source still running. It’s a ghost site.”

“Why don’t they send another crew?”

“Politics. Superstition. A lot of people think it’s in the wrong location. They think the next site should be here. About 90 km further south. That’s probably going to be Mars Site 3 in about twenty years’ time. You’ll see it. Me too.”

“Maybe I’ll be an astronaut and go there. Maybe it’ll be me.”

“Why not? I reckon you can do anything you set your mind to.”

The moons of Jupiter and Saturn could also excite my father’s imagination, but all his passion was for Mars. It was Mars where life would be found. It was Mars where the next step in human colonization would take place. It was Mars his boyhood dreams returned to in the cradle of his sleep.

I was not an only son. I had an older brother, Peter. It seemed at first, that Peter had won the DNA jackpot as far as our family was concerned. Fiercely intelligent and academically gifted, his early life was full of promise. And for a while, his career as an engineer was in the ascendant. 

But he was also an alcoholic. His addiction took ten years to ruin his career and marriage and another ten years to kill him. In between, his drinking broke the unbreakable bonds of family, until they were a thin sliver of memory and love. 

I had no such academic gift. I had to work laboriously at school and university. Small steps. I did have my mother’s love of art and poetry. And for a brief while, I thought I might become a writer. But I loved science and exploration too and my father encouraged all things scientific in our house. Eventually the pull of science was stronger than the pull of art.

But watching my brother, I learned one thing quickly. I was going to have to work hard and I was going to have to be alert to the dangers of any kind of alcohol or stimulant. 

So, my journey to Mars began with my father’s serious ‘why not?’  It’s as simple as that. The greatest journey’s start from the simplest of steps.

We talked about our conversation over the family dinner that night. My older brother laughed out loud. My father raised his glass, to toast me. “And why not? What’s to stop Max from becoming an astronaut and flying to Mars?” 

My mother did not laugh or wave the notion away. She looked at us with her clear, intelligent gaze. “Wonderful,” she said. “Fill your boots.”

Why do I write about such things, millions of miles from home, on another world, at Mars Site 3? 

Well Mars is a cold and dim-lit place, and looking out across the blood red plains and dry vistas, I am inevitably drawn to memory, and the cradle of all memory, is home. It is a particular kind of longing and remembering, special to Mars.

I have discussed it with the other team members and they have had the same kind of experience. We call it Earth-dreaming. A sad reverie that overtakes you as you watch Mars’ brief blue sunset fade on the horizon and your inner gaze turns to Earth and home. Our fragile blue origin in the cosmic darkness.

Mars is the new world that sings of the old. And even when memory is not stirred, our dreams are lit with the green brightness of childhood, the blue vividness of youth, and all our bright tomorrows not yet made yesterday. 

I write about these things because Peter is gone, my father is gone and my mother is gone. All gone and none to know I stand here on the Red Planet.

And when I stand at the observation bay window and look out at the Red Plains and rolling hills of Mars, I whisper in love and gratitude:

Look father. Look mother. I made it. On Mars.