Pining for Here

"Homesick" is a funny word, but an appropriate one. No matter how hard you wish to be in two places, you're stuck in the one and dreaming of the other. The best you can do is swap them. At handover, 5 of 6 Crew 26 members had told me they weren't ready to go home yet -- they'd only just found their feet, and what they really wanted was another week out here to use the skills they'd so painstakingly acquired. I know exactly what they mean, although we got a much better handoff than they did, so we lost fewer days to cleaning, organizing, and learning curves. We've also stayed on-sim now for nine continuous days, where they did a kind of four-on-one-off thing, so I would say we're more fully immersed in the environment, and in the sim itself. That's a big help in getting the most out of the experience. When we leave, I hope we won't feel quite the same ache of unfinished business that they did.

But one Crew 26er told me he was done, and very ready to go home. Notably, he was the only one with kids. People here seem, disproportionately, to have fiancees or long-term significant others, or to be newlyweds. It's a kind of Neverland, easily accessible to students and free spirits and Youth Mission spaceophiles, but very remote for Mommies and Daddies, who have more complicated lives from which to extricate ourselves, and a lot more strings attached to our hearts.

The troops, of course, have it worse. I haven't lost sight of that, and I really would keep these whingey feelings to myself, except that I'm the Mission Jounalist, charged with the solemn task of telling it like it is. And it is a bit lonely here, even though we have each other.

Like a real illness, homesickness waxes and wanes and sometimes strikes without warning, and the people afflicted with it really do retreat to their beds, or to the solace of familiar activities. In our crew, Peter appears to be the worst case, which is ironic on the surface of it, because he's not married and has no children. But he does have a long-term girlfriend, and out of all of us he's certainly the farthest from his normal orbit. Bill and I are self-employed, and the Boeing corporation is paying Alex to be here, and Julie and Jim are both students. But Pete has a real, regular-guy kind of job with the local government in Norwich, England. It must seem a long, long way from here.

I'm probably the second-most-affected, which is normal and expected, because I'm the only one on this crew with kids. Kids grow and change so fast, and I know from painful experience that two weeks is plenty long enough for them to look different, to sound different when I finally get back. I'll have missed another irreplaceable chunk of their too-brief childhoods. Still, it's weird and freightening how quickly we adapt. If this situation were permanent -- if we were stranded, if somehow our old lives didn't apply anymore -- this "new normal" would fit like a spacesuit glove, probably forever. Human beings can get used to anything, no matter how badly it makes the hands ache. And that's scary.

Also scary was the time last night, shortly after sunset, when I climbed up on the Hab's domed roof to perform a signal-strength experiment at the behest of Mission Support. It's a long way up, see, and it isn't flat. This place offers a lot of variety.

Another case in point: we were visited this morning by, of all things, a journalist. He was from the Utah wire service, and wasn't really sure what kind of story he was going to write or who was going to publish it, so we showed him around a bit, answered some questions, then got on with our important business of loading Peter and myself on the ATVs for an expedition to the extremes of our topographic map, in search of a route through the Hubble Highway to Coal Mine Wash, and thence, somehow, up onto Skyline Rim. We didn't find our Northwest Passage -- I doubt those towering cliffs will admit an ATV at any point, no matter how hard we search -- but we had a great time trying.

If Julie had never hiked before coming to Mars and needed to learn how in a space suit, Peter -- perhaps more seriously -- had never driven a motorized vehicle. And we handled some pretty rough terrain today, including one deep, dry wash that nearly capsized us both. Heh. And he loved it. What better way to learn how to drive? I'm glad he got the chance today, because the late afternoon opened up another storm on us, and who knows what tomorrow -- our last day of simulation -- will bring?

All of a sudden time is very short here, and even if the weather holds we're clearly not going to accomplish all of our goals, like getting the observatory running again and installing a functional Remote Radio cable, and nursing the GreenHab all the way back to health. That part of it is hard, because you really do develop a sense of ownership at a place like this, and it becomes very important to communicate your plans to the next crew, because if you don't the knowledge will be lost, and future crews will wander around in the same haze of rootless disrepair that Crew 26 inherited when they arrived. Sometimes the knowledge is recovered or reinvented, but there's a lot of unidentifiable junk here which nobody knows anything about. And I'm sure someone, at some point, had plans for it.

Life is like that, I'm afraid. It's easy to lose track, to run out of time. Better ride while you can.