Big news about the definitive confirmation of water’s presence on Mars dispatches my mind not to the Red Planet but back in time. Back to a dark hole at the edge of a Florida orange grove.
When we were kids growing up in Maitland, my two brothers and I dug down five feet through the sandy soil. It was behind a hedge in back of our house. We put plywood over the hole, left a small opening beneath the hedge as a door, and covered the plywood with dirt. Instant underground fort.
We’d lounge inside, resting on a bed of Spanish moss and bathed in candlelight. One evening our father whistled for us to come home. He was nearby. Sand trickled down a wall. He was walking across the “roof.” We held our breath. Then we realized he had no clue we were beneath his feet.
Looking back, I remember rubbing between my fingers bits of seashell we’d unearthed, pondering how they got there fifty miles from the Atlantic.
Now I wonder whether millions of years ago skinny barefoot boys dug underground forts on Mars, far from oceans that had had begun receding, oceans that eventually vanished. Maybe a big announcement NASA plans to make next month regarding a super-secret discovery at the Phoenix Lander site is about strange depressions in the Martian soil.
