Plan B Officer's log, February 11, 2145
CASE and I concluded that the soil near the aquifer is safe to experiment with. Working that area also saves on piping. So we broke up some ground, fertilized, sowed alfalfa, and set up drip lines. I hope to gradually get other crops going. All on a tiny scale, of course. I already have a few fruit tree sprouts in the hydroponics lab, and I'm thinking about where I'll put my orchard once the saplings are ready to be transplanted. That will be a while. But it's another thing to look forward to.
I've set up a chicken coop, and fashioned a couple of dog beds out of cushions and blankets in the hab. Endurance salvage will keep us going for quite some time, though CASE and I do think about local construction and manufacturing materials for the future colony. No lack of sandstone. Will we find something tree-like when we go farther afield? At the moment we're sticking close to home; trying to make a home. That seems like a prerequisite right now. Elemental.
I must be in nesting mode, because I've felt driven to beautify my living space to the extent possible. I used some precious decontaminated Earth soil to start a decorative border around the hab: terraforming with bougainvillea. Inside, I turned a couple of the old cots into a sofa with CASE's help, and organized a tiny living room, distinct from the original eating area. Moved some shelves from the sleeping quarters, may Doyle and Romilly forgive me, and pooled our paltry collections of traditional books. Except for the red blanket, I've never yet been able to touch the personal items of he-who-shall-remain-nameless. Afraid I might lose it completely if I do. Not that handling Doyle's and Romilly's things was exactly easy.
I've printed some art images from the Plan B educational database and taped them up on the walls. (Yeah, walls, not "bulkheads".) I stayed away from anything fussy or suffocatingly European and went with Americana. Hudson River School. Big vistas with little human presence. That seems appropriate for a frontier establishment.
But I couldn't give up on humanity entirely. I dug out an old Willa Cather book cover I used to keep on the wall of my office at NASA. I don't know what impulse made me pack it with my tiny allotment of personal belongings - though of course it doesn't weigh much - but I'm glad I did. I always loved Cather but I think I appreciate her even more now. The plainspokenness that lulls you so you're all the more devastated when emotion erupts. The unflinching realism that makes her obvious care for the tiny tumultuous humanity embedded in her large lonely landscapes all the more painful.
Clever CASE, always good for comic relief. He observed my home décor efforts with interest and asked "What about Georgia O'Keeffe?" Ex-Marine with an art-history background, who'd have thought. "You're not feeling it," I said.
The Cather book cover is from My Ántonia: a striking image of copper-red grasses blazing in an orange sunset. (Will there ever be such grasses here? I can dream, can't I?) There's a rough path through the grasses, and two children are making their way along it. They aren't close enough to be holding hands, but the picture is somewhat blurred and there's a fuzzy ambiguity about the children's arms and hands, which seem elongated. Despite the distance between them, you can imagine the tips of their fingers just touching … or melding.
Was it some premonition that made me tape that book cover up in my office, so long ago? A vague fifth-dimensional prompting?
When I remember my encounter in the wormhole, what I jokingly called "the first handshake" but which felt like a spiritual experience, I can't help but think that this journey, with all its disasters, its horrible loneliness, cannot have been for nothing.