Making Memories

Her ship touches down on the floor of the forest clearing with a crunch and a soft hiss. As soon as she turns off the motor, the sounds of the forest return to their usual program.

She steps out of the ship. She's dressed in full hiking gear; cargo shorts, hiking boots and backpack. Her most prized possession, an old reflex camera, hangs from her neck on a nylon strap. She looks around. The clearing is only slightly larger than her ship, barely twenty meters across and surrounded by tall coniferous trees, their long trunks speckled by dots of light reaching through the treetops, moving about like fireflies in the gentle sway of the morning breeze. From all around she can hear the staccato-like bird calls, couples sending Morse code love-letters across the underbrush and rivals playfully taunting one another. The nearby bushes are rustling with jolts of activity and if she kneeled down, she would surely find ants and other tiny crawlers, going about their business completely untroubled by her or her ship's sudden presence.

She locks her ship with the click of a remote, picks a destination and sets off. As she gets deeper into the forest, less light gets through to the ground, the bushes and ferns give way to layers of leaves and needles. Every once in a while, she stops and just listens. Leaves brushing against leaves, branches cracking. A call coming from one direction, answered a few seconds later from another.

Any time she comes across an interesting looking plant or fungus, she takes a picture, or several. Tiny translucent bulbs hanging from the branches of a tree, feeding off the morning dew running down to them. Woody knots growing on the trunk of a broad conifer, forming spiral patterns going up toward its crown. Parasitic vines growing high up in the treetops, their roots never having touched the ground. She also put a few leaves that had particularly interesting and elaborate shapes into a tiny notebook.

After a while, she reaches the foot of a hill. The forest is getting lighter, trees make way for rocky ground, weeds clinging to cracks in the solid rock. Lizards, bathing in the sun, scuttle out of the way as she passes them. She stops for a few minutes by an overhang. Fern-like plants are growing in the murky alcove beneath, their fronds slowly unfurling as the light of the rising sun hits them, their motion spreading like a wave through the patch.

The rocky terrain slows her progress. The slope of the hill increases near the top, leaving her half-crawling, half-climbing on the last few meters. Feeling exhausted after hours of hiking, she sits down on the rocks, has a sip from her water bottle. She takes a bite out of her lunch, making sure to leave no crumbs behind, and takes in the view. In front of her, the rock slopes down gently, falling away after a few dozen meters. Beyond, a great valley opens up, surrounded by partially wooded limestone cliffs. The mountainsides are wrapped in colored ribbons of rock, impurities in the mineral staining them pink or peach or baby blue, as if a painter had dragged a giant brush of pastel colors across the landscape. The bottom of the valley is filled with a long glacial lake, the deep blue water rippled by the wind, fuzzy and opaque. She takes photos of the lake, of the mountainsides, of birds of prey circling over the water, of the forest on the distant shore, the leaves of its trees fading to an almost turquoise shade in the distance.

And then she just sits there, taking in all the other stimuli, feeling her back being warmed by the sun while her face is being cooled off by the wind coming from the lake below, drying the sweat on her forehead, the rush of the unobstructed wind past her ears, the resinous smell of the conifer trees mixed with the chalky scent of the rocks under her feet baking in the warm midday sun.

After a while, she stands up. Dazed, winded, light-headed after the exertion and the much too long pause, everything turns dark for just a second. The hike back feels quieter, more muted, less vibrant, like the walk home after a night out, as if she had spent all her energy already.

The clearing is unchanged, but it feels different. The fresh, cool morning air is replaced with the heavy, warm quilt of the afternoon. She opens the ship and heads inside. She would love to spend the night here, watch the sun set behind the mountains over the lake, watch the stars, see if she could recognize any constellations – but this is not the right time, nor the right place.

She puts down her backpack and camera and sits down at the ship's console. A few minutes later, the ship takes off just as gently as it landed and heads into space. As soon as it is out of the planet's gravitational pull and adrift around its star, she relaxes.

Out of the porthole, she can still see the planet, slowly drifting away. Blue and green. A yellow-brown desert belt. The white swirls of clouds. Just like Earth.

After showering, she sits down for dinner, watching re-runs of old TV dramas. After that, her work begins. She begins with the photos, sorting through them on her computer. She deletes duplicates, blurry or just boring ones. The rest she prints out. From a shelf under her bed, she takes out an empty book. Starting on the first page, she glues down the pictures, the leaves and other mementos and captions them.

Dew-drinking fungi.

Peanut-shaped leaf.

Ferns waking up.

Dogfight between birds over the lake.

In between the pictures, she writes down everything else. Her hike. The sounds, smells and physical sensations. Her thoughts.

Some of the birds (sadly I didn't see which ones) had a call that created these shifting polyrhythms when they sang together.

I would've loved to search for more lizards, they had really interesting spiral patterns all around their bodies. I wonder what function they serve? Mating or defense?

The view over the lake reminded me a bit of the Rockies or Norway. I've seen vistas like that hundreds of times by now, but being able to just see so far, so much; that never gets old.

She writes for a few hours, listening to the ship’s hum and the low whirr of electronics, until the computer reminds her to go to sleep.

She closes up the book. It looks like any of the others: album-sized, marbled grey-and-white cover, black spine. She bought them in bulk.

She writes the current date on the spine and puts it back under her bed. No name, just like the dozens of others. The last in a long line of excursions, each book like a sediment layer of deposited memories. A closed chapter, one you can't go back to.

While she's getting ready for bed, the ship already plots a course to the next star system. She falls asleep almost immediately after lying down.