With the ozone instrument in place at Marble Point, we collected and re-packed our tools, spare equipment and clothes. We assembled our gear into a tidy cargo line about forty feet from the helicopter clearing and radioed for a pickup. We had about forty minutes to appreciate the remarkable area where we'd spent the last six hours of focused work.
This window of personal time was precious, dense, and fleeting.
Before astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, astronauts Al Shepard and Gus Grissom rode Mercury capsules on sub-orbital flights into space. Lifted on smaller Redstone rockets, these first two astronauts flew on parabolic arcs that crested amid the new wonders of space but which just as quickly carried them back to the Earth's surface. I imagine that in their transience above the Atlantic Ocean, Shepard and Grissom must have treasured their brief glimpses out of the tiny capsule window. Returning from the frontier of space, they must have felt with profound heaviness the tug of the Earth.
I felt like Al Shepard or Gus Grissom, given a momentary glimpse of an eternal landscape. I cherished the time I had on Marble Point, and I wish I could return to explore that ridge in the sun.
Back in Boulder, I had cut several coin-like discs from an aluminum cylinder. Carrying a sledgehammer out into the scattered moraine till of the ridgeline, I found a few favorite rocks. On each one, I placed an aluminum coin, slowly hefted the sledge in my hands, and with a focused blow, forever cast the impression of the rock into the face of the aluminum coin. The coins burned my hands when I picked them up.
Walking down from the crest of the ridge, I found small snowdrifts built of intricately structured hoar. Under the protection of small bedrock outcrops, shallow sunny swales held moist soil. There, the ground was textured in a network of small domes, as if it had been cracked in past dryness and then weathered by time. I laid down on my belly and slid up to the moist ground, liquid water soaking from the soil into the fabric of my clothes. I stuck my nose down into the soil, inhaled fully, and searched for an odor. Faint, clean mineral sand... but maybe something more? I delicately split open a small dome of soil: stretched between the halves, faint translucent strands extended and broke. With the soil dome inches from my face and the fine strands illuminated by the bright Antarctic sun, I began to believe I had found life.
I hunted along the snowdrifts and in the depressions. With tremendous joy, I found a remarkable colony of hardy, thriving moss.
It was a very special discovery and an amazing testament to the adaptability of life on Earth. Through bitter temperatures, extreme winds, and long months of total darkness, this colony of moss maintained its grasp on a tender clump of soil. It is humbling to consider the countless years of growth represented by this small dome of moss and lichen.
