Seeing the Redwoods

They always ask for pictures.

Some are very precise. They want pictures from the Carcassonne Montes. Something from the wall of Basile Crater – as if both were just around the corner.

“Send me something spectacular,” many of them say, unsure of what they want, where on the moon I am, or what wonders they should want to capture.

So I send them something spectacular.

I send them a shot of my view from the toilet.

There, they can see – in most of my refuges – a cot, a cupboard, a robe on a hook. Maybe a spare space suit, some SCBA tanks and whatnot.

And they are, to a person, disappointed.

“Looks like my dorm room,” they say.

“You didn’t even put away your socks,” said another.

A few, they understand.

Had a long talk with a fellow from the middle of America somewhere. He knew.

“I’ve been to the redwoods in California,” he said. “I have hundreds of photos. But looking at those photos, it’s like looking at the world through a window the size of a stamp. The redwoods, they are everywhere. You look straight ahead: Redwoods. You look up: Redwoods. To the left or to the right, you look down, there are trunks, and branches, and roots, and leaves, and the little bits of brush that grow inbetween. You can take a photo, but you never capture a redwood. The only time you can experience a redwood – let alone a redwood forest – is when you’re there, when the dome of your eyes sees only redwoods in branch or trunk or root or leaf.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So Iapteus – “

I touch my head, and my heart.

And we both laugh and roll our eyes at the cuteness of it all.

I do it first – the time lag as we talk means we never do anything together – but I’m getting good at knowing if a response is spontaneous, or if the fart on the other end is just parroting what they see so they can get what they want out of me.

And he knew the line, spoken by a fictitious spaceman: “Space is small. Only the planets are big.”