2003

I walked into the back parking lot of my apartment and caught sight of the orange ember shining steadily in the southern sky. It was the late summer and a historic astronomical event was under way. Every 26 months the red planet and our own blue one line up on one side of the Sun in a close encounter known as an opposition.

But the great Mars opposition of 2003 was particularly special. Mars happened to lie at its closest point to the Sun in its elliptical orbit right at the time of opposition which brought it closer to Earth than it had been in 60,000 years. At that moment all of humanity was closer to this New World than we had been since the time of the first human migrations out of Africa.

There was a day those 60 millennia ago on which a few brave and forgotten names stood on the coast of an untravelled ocean peering restlessly at the unknown beyond. A distant shore called them to place their lives at the mercy of the sea. We may never know for sure, but I like to imagine that the blood orb of Mars at perihelic opposition challenged them to face the perils ahead and guided them during the blackest nights on the open waters.

I took aim through the finder of my 6 inch reflector telescope and brought my eye to the eyepiece. An orange blur danced through the field of view. With restrained breath I nudged the focus knob. The haze solidified into a brilliant ocher marble rippling from the gaseous ocean of Earth's atmosphere that scattered its light in the last microseconds of its long journey across the interplanetary void.

Patience is certainly a virtue in astronomy where long hours at the eyepiece can reward the viewer with a few precious moments of steady air that snaps an amorphous apparition into crystal clarity. At the top of the ruby world was a white spot and below that was a dark streak, the barely resolvable images of a polar ice cap and a vast plain peppered with black volcanic glass. My stomach jumped as I switched perspectives. I no longer belonged to the Earth and I was no longer looking up.

I was dangling upside-down, my feet stuck to a blue spark 56 million kilometers above the cold dusty Martian ground, lost in the glare of the tiny noon day Sun above my feet. Comfortable as the mother world was I wished I could loosen her hold on me. I wanted to fall as fast as a light beam. At that speed I could be on the dusty Martian ground in only 4 minutes. Electromagnetism makes a mockery of even our swiftest spacecraft.

Like the undiscovered lands of past epochs Mars calls to me with an irresistible song across a perilous sea. I need only a ship to sail the heavenly breezes.