The Martians

Chapter 23 Enough Is As Good As a Feast

We built our house on the apron of Jones Crater, latitude 19 degrees south, longitude 20 degrees. The apron was pretty well populated, some two thousand farms like ours scattered around it, but we could not see any other homesteads from ours, even though we built most of it on the top of a broad-backed low ridge raying down the southwest flank of the crater. We could see the vineyards of the Namibians’ village to the north of us, and the tops of the line of cypresses that bordered their pond. And down the apron the bare rock in our prospect was patched with light green squares, marking young orchards like ours.

Craters turned out to be one of the places that people homed in on when they moved out into the backcountry, especially in the southern highlands. For one thing there were a million of them, so it was easy to find empty ones. At first people sheltered inside them, in the early years often doming the craters over and establishing little central crater lakes. By the time the ambient air had become livable, people had learned that settling inside a crater is like moving into a hole. Short days, no view, problems with flooding, and so on. So the new open-air settlements moved out over the rims onto the aprons, to have a look around. The interiors became full crater lakes, or lakes and rice terraces, depending on their climate, water allotment, pan integrity, and the like. Meanwhile the aprons were developed into crops, orchards, and pasturage, wherever there were the right conditions for soil creation. Fissures raying down the aprons served as the streambeds for rapid tumultuous creeks, the water pumped to their tops, or drawn down from rim water tanks that were pump-filled. Irrigation systems were always elaborate. Meanwhile the rims themselves tended to turn into the downtowns, as they had the longest views, and access both back in to the old towns in the crater interiors, and out to the many new settlements stretching down the apron. Rim roads called High Street became common, with fully developed urbanization all the way around. For small craters, the thousands that are around one kilometer in diameter, the densely populated rim was like a large village, very homey and comfortable; everyone known by sight, that kind of thing. Perhaps a thousand people; then the apron would typically have a population of half that, or less. With bigger craters the rim towns got bigger, of course, and a town of fifty thousand people on the rim of a ten-kilometer crater was a common sight, something like the hilltop city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or American Midwestern college towns, in their characters—and there were hundreds of them. Some prospered and became bustling little cities, spilling down into their interiors, which were like central parks, with round lakes or sculptured wetlands. The aprons almost always stayed agricultural, often supplying most of the food for the city up top. All these aspects of crater culture grew up spontaneously as the pattern language of the landscape, so to speak, combined with the emerging co-op culture, and, most simply, the needs of the people in the region being met in a rational way. Of course there was some planning. People would arrive at an unoccupied crater (among the some twenty thousand still listed by the environmental court for the southern highlands alone) with permits and programs, and set to work, and the first decade’s economic activity in the town was primarily the building of it, often by people who had an idea what they wanted; sometimes with people holding tattered copies of A Pattern Language or some other design primer in their hands, or surfing the Web for things they liked. But soon enough every crater had people moving in who were out of the original group’s control, and then it was a matter of spontaneous group self-organization, a process which works extremely well when the group is socially healthy.

Jones Crater was a big one, fifty kilometers in diameter, and its rim town was a beautiful new thing of transparent mushroom buildings and water tanks, and stone-faced skyscrapers clustered at the four points of the compass. Most of our farm group had been working up in town for some time, and eventually twenty families working on various ag projects decided to try moving downslope together, establishing a homestead and entering it into one of the ag travel loops. So we asked the regional environmental court for tenant rights to unclaimed land on the ray ridge, some forty kilometers down the south-south-west slope of the rim, and when we got the stewardship permits we moved on down and lived in tents that first winter. We had nothing, really, but the tents were big house tents from an earlier era, for the most part transparent and very pleasant to live in, as we could see so much of the world and its weather. So even though we were short on many things, that winter was so nice that we decided to build diskhouses as our permanent structures, so that we would continue to “live outdoors when indoors.”

These diskhouses were based on a design by a Paul Sattelmeier, from Minnesota. They were very simple, functional, and open places to live in, and easy to build. We got on the list for a mobile mold, and when it rolled by we punched in the commands and watched it throw big pottery: round roofs and slightly larger round floors, and then the walls, which were all interior straight segments; in effect the roof rested on a kind of double M made of interior walls, located under one semicircle of the roof only; the other side was the living room, a kind of big semicircular verandah, the roof freestanding over it. The several short walls extended from the central cross-wall into the other half of the house, dividing that semicircle into three bedrooms, two interior bathrooms, and part of a kitchen. The living rooms we faced downslope to give us the long view to the southwest, and the exterior circular “wall” on that side was only a clear tenting drape, which could be left open, which is what we did most of the time, living out in the wind; or else closed if it was cold or rainy. Same with the bedrooms on the upslope side, except their drape walls were white or colored or polarized to make them opaque. But those too were usually left open.

So we threw the parts for sixteen of these diskhouses, and then put them together. If you’re willing to do the labor the whole operation is not that expensive, although admittedly we were in hock to our town co-op right to the ears. For the most part the assembly of the diskhouses was straightforward, indeed a great pleasure. Some parts just grew into place after we set the right cultures to work: Our toilets and sinks and bathtubs and tile floors, for instance, were all bioceramic and grew right into their places, essentially as a kind of templated coral. Really lovely to see.

Long before we had even started on the houses, however, we were out laying soil and planting our orchards and vineyards. We grew as much of our own food as we could in truck gardens around the tents, using complete soils trucked in, but our money crop, our contribution to the Jones economy, was to be almonds and wine grapes, both proven growers on that flank of the apron. The wines being made up to that point had a volcanic tang to them that I didn’t like, almost a sulfur touch, but that was okay; it left room for improvement. And the almonds were great. We prepped soil and planted three hundred hectares of almonds and five hundred of wine grapes, in broad terraces concentric to the rim far above us, the ag zones broken by ponds and swamps, and all of them widening as they dropped downslope, so that they made a kind of giant quilt, pendant on our little farm which lay at the top of the land in our care. It was our work of art, and we were very devoted to it. I imagine we were like first-generation kibbutzim in many respects. About twenty couples, four of them same-sex; eleven single adults; thirty-odd kids, later fifty-three. Lots of travel by all of us on the local cog rail line up to Jones, and also laterally to other farms on the apron, to socialize and see what other people were doing agriculturally, and in their settlement design. They were all artists too.

I was involved throughout with our enology, and we made a good fumé blanc eventually, but my field work ended up being mostly in the almond orchards, strangely enough. It happened because I got caught up in the nutsedge problem. Early on we found some sedge creeping out of a radial-strip swamp into the vineyards, and I had gotten rid of it by direct removal. So when the almond orchards were infested I was called on to do it again there. But this time it wasn’t so easy. Nutsedge is one of several plants I wish they had never introduced to Mars, but it’s good in wet sandy areas, so at first people seeded it to help build meadows. It’s a very ancient plant, coevolved with dinosaurs, I suspect, making it very hardy; and impervious to most attempts at eradication. In fact I’ve come to believe it regards such efforts as friendly stimulation, like a massage. But I only found that out the hard way.

I can’t tell you how many days I spent out in our orchards weeding nutsedge. We had decided to be an organic farm, no chemical pesticides, so it was a matter of either biological control or hand-to-hand combat. I tried both, so what I was doing was integrated pest management. But ineffective no matter what you called it. For many hours I sat on the low ground at the southern end of the young almond trees, in what was in effect a ragged lawn of purple nutsedge. Cyperus rotundus. If it had been yellow nutsedge there would have been people in my group encouraging us to harvest it and eat the nuts. But purple nuts are hard brown gnarled oblong fibrous tubules, white inside and ghastly bitter to the tongue. They lie about half a meter below the ground, connected to the surface blades of grass by thin shoots that break at the slightest tug, and connected to each other underground by wiry rhizomes that also break easily, leaving the nuts behind. At first I thought I was succeeding when I loosened the soil and sifted through it to get all the nuts out of it. It was slow but not unpleasant work, sitting on the dirt in the sun, getting dirt under my fingernails, looking at the friable soil for the dirt clods that were actually living pebbles. The blades above, stacked in triplet tassels, V-shaped in cross section and stiffer than grass blades, I pulled and composted. The nuts I ground up and tossed in the supercooker compost, feeling superstitious. Which turned out to be not inappropriate given what happened.

A careful sifting of soil to a depth of half a meter, throughout the entire region of its growth—and the next spring the precise region I had weeded sprang forth in a thick lawn of young nutsedge. I couldn’t believe my eyes. That was when I got serious about my research, and found out about the Sedge Grass Support Group, and learned from them that fragments of the rhizomes only five hundred nanometers long had been observed to regenerate the full plant in a single growing season.

Some other method was called for. And around that time I got to take a break to regroup as well, as our farm began full participation in one of the ag labor rings of the River League, which meant we went out on the road as nomad farm labor for two months of the fall harvests, moving from farm to farm in the ring as the various crops came ready. Other groups passed through our place while we were gone, with Elke and Rachel left behind to supervise their work. I saw nutsedge in many other places around Jones Crater, and began to exchange stories and theories with the people who had tried to combat it. It was a nice way to meet people. I noticed that quite a few of them had become fanatical on the sedge issue without actually conquering their infestation, which struck me as a bad sign. But I got home that 2 November and tried cover-cropping, on the suggestion of someone who had said, “It’s a long-term project,” in a way that made me think this was not a bad thing to have in one’s life. So it was clover in the fall and winter and cowpeas in the spring and summer, always thickly matted over the sedge, which as a result sometimes did not appear for years at a time. But then if I was late planting a new spring cover crop by even a week, a carpet of tasseled green little pagodas would shove through the dying old cover crop, and it was back to square one. Once when a cowpea crop got beat to the punch I solarized the ground with clear plastic sheets, and recorded temperatures near boiling underneath it. Some IPM folks looked at it and estimated that everything had to have been killed down to twenty centimeters; but others said two; and though the plant matter on the surface was indeed toasted by the end of the summer, the moment I took the plastic off the green carpet came shooting back.

Tilling and drying the soil for four years was my next option. But then someone visiting the farm innocently suggested a new chemical pesticide that had gotten good results for the Namibians to the north.

That provoked a controversy. Some were content to continue pursuing the various fruitless strategies of the organic battle. Others suggested we give up and let the area become a sedge swamp. But because sedge seed-disperses as well as spreading by underground growth of the rhizomes, little patches of it were springing up everywhere downwind of my orchard lawn. And the wind blows in all directions eventually. So leaving it alone was not really acceptable. Meanwhile, eight years of combat had only made the lawn more luxuriant. You could have played croquet on my patch at that point.

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.