So a majority of our group finally talked a small minority into a one-time exception to our organic policy, in order to make an application of some methyl 5-{[(4, dimethoxy-2-pyrimidinyl)amino]carbyonylaminosulfonyl}-3-chloro-1-methyl-1-H-pyrazole-4-carboxylate. When we did it we turned it into a kind of Balinese mask dance ceremony, and the people against the idea dressed as demons and cursed us, and we sprayed the stuff and left for an extended work trip. We harvested grapes in riverside vineyards and built stone drywall terracing, and saw parts of Her Desher Vallis, Nirgal Vallis, Uxboi Vallis, Clota Vallis, Ruda Vallis, Arda Vallis, Ladon Vallis, Oltis Vallis, Himera Vallis, and the Samara Valles. All these are little riverine canyons to the immediate southwest of Jones—beautiful country, reminiscent of the Four Corners area of North America, though our neighbors assure us it is also very like parts of central Namibia. Whatever; when we returned home, the land downslope to the southwest now seemed to suggest the beautiful little canyons that we knew broke the plateau even though we could not see them, canyons held now in our minds’ eye, sunken meandering gardens floored with streams and cottonwood islands. And the nutsedge was gone. Not all of it, but everything that we had sprayed. And if you catch it early enough new sedges do not have the regenerative ability of an established bed, because the nuts are not yet down there.
So we planted new ground cover under the blossoming almond trees, and life went on, the farm growing more luxuriant all the time. Of course things changed; Elke and Rachel moved to Burroughs, and later Matthew and Jan did too, complaining that among other things it was not an organic farm anymore, which made me feel bad. But the others in their house assured me that pesticide policy was the last thing they had been thinking of when they left; and I was shocked to hear what some of the other things were. Apparently I had been oblivious; and in fact, they all went on to tell me, no one else but me on the farm had considered the nutsedge problem to have been of much importance. What I had thought was a crisis and a knotty problem in invasion biology, they considered a matter of housekeeping, a mere irritant among more important issues, and, more than anything else, the bee in my bonnet.
Of course compared to the big climate shift that came later, this was probably the right way to regard it. But at the time it had mattered. Or I enjoyed it, whatever. Those were the years when everything mattered, really. We had nothing but each other. We were on our own, growing most of our food, making a lot of our tools, even our clothes, with all the kids growing up. We all grew up together. It matters, in a time like that, whether you can make your agriculture work or not.
Then things changed, as they will, and the kids went off to school, people moved; the whole feeling changed. It always happens that way. Now of course it’s still a beautiful place to live, but the feeling from those years is hard to recapture, especially given the cold, and the kids gone. I now think that kibbutz is a name for a certain time, a time in the life of a settlement, early on, when it is as much an adventure as it is a home. Later you have to reconceptualize it as a different kind of experience, as home ground or something, the whole shape of a life. But I remember the first time we had a big party and invited the neighbors, and fed everybody with only the food we had been able to grow there in our new gardens, there in our new homes. It was a good feeling. It was a good place to live.
Chapter 24
What Matters
For a long time Peter Clayborne worked in hydrology. His co-op was called Noachian Aquifer Redistribution, or NAR. He joined because he got interested as an ecologist in the work, and because he was deeply involved at the time with a woman who had been in the co-op since her teens. Her seniority was one of the things that led to problems in their relationship later, though clearly that was only a symptom rather than a cause. Seniority in their co-op created some of the usual advantages in “pay, say, and time away,” but the interests of everyone in the organization were substantially the same. Potential members were chosen for invitation by selection committees, and sometimes had to join a waiting list if the co-op was stable in size. Peter had waited for four years before resignations, retirements, and a few accidental deaths opened up a spot. After that he was a member and, like everyone else, working twenty hours a week, voting on all membership policy issues, and receiving an income share and insurances. The pay scale ran the full legal magnitude, based on work time, contributions to efficiency and productivity, and seniority. He started at twenty percent max, like everyone, and found his needs were satisfied. Some years he sank to the minimum recompense, which supported him both while working and in his time off, which was six months every m-year. It was a good life.
But he and his partner slowly drifted apart, and then broke up. It wasn’t Peter’s idea. After that he took a series of sabbaticals and did various things on them, all away from Argyre and the membership of NAR. He staffed for the duma in Mangala; he lived on a township in the northern sea; he planted orchards on Lunae Planitia. Everywhere he was haunted by the memory of his partner from NAR.
Eventually time passed and had its way with him; not so much a matter of forgetting as of bleaching, or numbing. We look at the past through the wrong end of the telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us.
It was a cold northern spring, orchards budding and blossoming all around him for as far as the eye could see, and all of a sudden he felt free of his past, launched on a new life. He decided to take a tour he had long been contemplating along the south rims of the great Marineris canyons—Ius, Melas, Coprates, and Eos. This famous long walk was to be a mark for him, a celebration of his transition to a new existence. When he finished it he would return to Argyre and NAR, and decide then whether he could continue living and working there or not.
Near the end of this trek which turned out to be a hard slog through many deep drifts of snow, though the views down into the canyons were superb, of course—he came on a Swiss alpine hut, set right on the rim overlooking Coprates Chasma, at the Dover Gate. Like most Swiss huts it was actually a very extensive stone hotel and restaurant, with a rimside terrace that would seat hundreds, but located all by itself in the wilderness, away from any roads or pistes. Nevertheless on that evening there were a lot of people there—walkers, climbers, fliers—and the terrace café tables were full.
Peter passed through the crowd and went directly to the rail of the flagged terrace, to have a look down. Directly below the hut great canyon narrowed, and the scar of the old flood marked the whole floor of it, from wall to wall. A gray remnant glacier still lay in the lowest trough of the canyon, all covered with gravel and pocked with potholes and meltponds and fallen seracs. The cliff of the canyon’s opposing wall stood massive and stratified, and the stupendous gulf of empty air shimmered and glittered insubstantially in the late-afternoon light, with the hut standing over it isolate and small. Perched on the edge of a world.
In the hut’s restaurant it was even more crowded than the terrace, and so Peter went back outside. He was content to wait; the late sun was illuminating clouds passing just over their heads, turning them to swirling masses of pink spun glass. No one noticed or cared about a solitary observer standing at the rail; indeed there were others along it doing the same thing.
Near sunset it began to get cold, but the hikers who passed by there were used to cold, and dressed for it, and all the tables on the terrace remained full. Finally Peter went to the headwaiter to get on a waiting list, and the waiter pointed to one of the two-person tables right on the railing, down near the end of the terrace, occupied by a single man. “Shall I see if he’ll share?”