Why I Wouldn't Move to a Mars Settlement

This week's Long and Short Reviews question is "Would you move to a Mars settlement?"

If I did, it certainly wouldn't be by choice.

Any urge to travel I ever had was oversatisfied before I was old enough to write about it. My parents were young and...too old to be hippies, probably too sober to be beatniks, but when I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road I thought of them. The way I was the only child in my family who could remember them: still in their early thirties, black-haired, lighthearted, full of energy. Before Mother became ill, or Dad bitter. They had skills, they could earn good livings anywhere, and although she claimed to have the same astigmatism that makes me hate driving, Mother loved to drive and did it well. They thought good things were going to happen. They were always interested in seeing new places and so I crossed the United States, coast to coast, five times before I was five years old.

A point people miss about the beatniks, though Kerouac made it clear in his stories...They were not bums or hobos. They didn't take jobs and money as seriously as their parents did, because anyone willing to do heavy labor could always earn enough to live on, but they were responsible adults, like those long-ago parents of mine. They did not mope around panhandling, or welfare-cheating, or breaking in and occupying people's beach houses. When they came to a town and wanted to park the car and stretch out on a bed, they rented a decent motel room. If they were low on money, they worked and earned enough to get to the next stage of the adventure. The "real" beatniks mucked about with booze and drugs, and some paid for doing that. The'rents had already had all the experience with booze and drugs they ever wanted but they were still keen on seeing new places, staying for a week or a month to see how they liked a place. In their way they were very careful to choose adventures that they thought would be safe and instructive for their little princess, me, too. 

I was still underwhelmed. I didn't like packing and unpacking, I didn't like spending whole days in the car, and when the'rents wanted to hit the road I usually would have preferred to finish something I was doing where I was. It never seemed to me that all those new places really wanted to be seen. What I found in a lot of places were things to be allergic to.

This was especially the case with Florida, where my Aunt Dotty had invested in rental properties but, with as sh grew older, become so choosy and suspicious about renters that most of the time she didn't have any. The taxes on unoccupied rental properties were intentionally ruinous. Aunt Dotty really liked having her own relatives occupy those houses for a month or two. I was one of a privileged minority for whom vacations in Florida were a duty. I wished they'd been a pleasure. It was hard to appreciate the fantastic diversity of bird life on the Tamiami Trail when, thanks to the daily mosquito spraying that did not noticeably discourage the mosquitoes, I seemed to go down with a "cold" on the first morning in Florida, and that "cold" lasted until the car or bus rolled into Atlanta. It seemed especially unfair because, big as the extended family was, Aunt Dotty was my very favorite relative. But there we were.

In high school I did want to spend a week touring Washington with school friends. Part of the experience was that students were "rented out" to do odd jobs for the Band Boosters, to pay $100 toward their travel expenses. Out of the question, my parents said. Two years later, on one of those vacation trips, I took the G.E.D. test in Florida and passed it, with scores high enogh to skip me into college...I had been enjoying grade eleven and looking forward to finishing the year. At least I'd get to see Washington, Mother said, since I was still sixteen and had to go to a strict church college with single-sex dormitories and curfews, and the one that accepted me was outside Washington. I didn't want to skip high school and still think doing it was a great mistake, but at the time Washington was still self-advertising as a city for people who didn't like cities, and it did suit me. I worked there, was a foster mother there, and eventually found a nice diplomat to marry, thanks in part to the cultural expectation that everybody took road trips for at least one "long weekend" each month and during the summer heat waves. "Let's get out of town! Beach or mountains?" bachelor friends would cry. Given the choice, I'd pick the mountains. And go home.

There is just something about the Appalachian Mountains. People in other places often say that their sense of "home" is about a person not a place. People from the mountains will usually allow that part of what we mean by "home" does at least include memories of people, but it's not about people. The same place remains your home when all those people, who were older than you, are gone. There's also the sense of continuity. When your elders are gone, then you're one of someone else's elders. And we'll agree that the Bible writer was speaking metaphorically in the proverb, "Drink...water out of thine own well," but taking it literally never hurt anyhting. The water from your own artesian spring, and the plants it feeds, just taste "right." Other places are all very well, are other people's homes. Your home is where you're meant to be. That's just the way it is. If other people want your real estate, well, what a pity that they're not able to appreciate their own--that is not a point in favor of even letting they hang around your neighborhood, coveting. People worth knowing love their own homes. There is neither enough gold in California, nor enough diamonds in Kimberley, nor enough oil in all the Arab countries together, to buy your home. 

As a young singer I did enjoy the short trips to towns a few miles from the church college, where groups of students, usually accompanied by some school or church employee, would sing for our suppers, or even put on shows for paying audiences. But a song I liked had the words,

"If you hear me passin' by, and you sit and wonder why,

You weren't meant to be a traveller too.

Nail your shoes to the kitchen floor, lace them up, and bar the door,

And thank Heaven for that good roof over you."

I think it's worth thinking about what people lose when they're as eager to travel as the commercial media seem to tell us we should be. They're not raising crops. They're losing any bonds they may have formed with other animals. Their idle curiosity about "people" generally may even be leading them to neglect specific relationships with persons. And I notice that while the corporations that employ yuppies try to make nomadism seem glamorous, look for people they can ship around the world and order to "grow their own roots," people are paying these "jet set" employees to travel for them. I wonder why that might be. 

I don't expect humans will ever settle on Mars, or on the moon. Never mind. I personally would not even move to a Jamaica settlement.