Читать книгу Phobos & Deimos - John Moehl - Страница 7

Have you ever been getting out of a boat, when you had one leg still in the boat and the other firmly planted on the dock. The boat begins to drift away and you feel like you are going to be torn apart. This may, in some strange way, partially describe my life where I have two worlds, or at least, like Mars, two moons. One of my moons shines over a “normal” 1950s childhood in the rural Pacific Northwest, when houses and cars were unlocked, drugs came from the drugstore, button-up jeans and a flannel shirt were dress for all occasions, water and air were clean, cars had real chrome metal grills and bumpers, and you could get a “Coke High” at the drive-in after school. This is not to paint too rosy a picture, because I did not particularly like those days when I was living them; and have equally tepid feelings of them when seen through the filter of six decades.

My other moon lights a tropical sky, a postcard photograph of a saucery moon dyed ruby-red by dust, backlighting a skeletal acacia tree on a savannah ridge. This moon casts long shadows that blur fact and fiction, reality and make-believe. The man in this moon at times laughs a belly-wrenching guffaw that mocks man’s silliness. The man in this moon cries oily tears for man’s desperate condition. This moon illuminates much, but little that is “normal”.

However, my moons are not yin and yang, good and evil, light and dark. Each moon has its own gravity and establishes its own atmosphere. Each is its own world. But, as moons, each world is linked to one planet, and part of the same system.