Moons Over Mojave

The one about taking a guided tour of the moons. Dispatch 29 begins on the porch during a lunar eclipse, where the narrator is rehearsing an astronomy talk originally successful with third graders and now, somewhat inexplicably, requested for second graders. With a synthetic soundtrack standing in for the silence of space, he sets off across the solar system. Mars offers battered Phobos and Deimos. Jupiter brings the volcanic violence of Io, the hidden ocean of Europa, and overachieving Ganymede. Titan has weather made from the wrong ingredients. Enceladus sprays evidence of its buried ocean directly into space. Along the way are shepherd moons, Shakespearean moons, backward-orbiting moons, and enough Saturnian moons to exceed anyone's responsibility to discuss them. Science gradually gives way to character. Io burns. Europa conceals. Titan improvises. Enceladus confesses. The moons become less a collection of astronomical facts than a neighborhood of strange worlds, each having found its own improbable way of existing. Then the tour returns home. Above the Mojave, Earth's shadow has moved farther across Luna, turning her copper at the edges. After everything exotic the solar system has offered, the familiar moon becomes the most affecting sight of all. The darkness crossing her belongs to us. At its center, Moons Over Mojave is about recovering wonder from knowledge rather than replacing wonder with it. The more we understand about these distant worlds, the stranger and more miraculous they become. By the end, the artificial sound of space is switched off and a coyote calls across the desert. The narrator has one final instruction for the second graders—and perhaps for everyone else: go outside and look up. We're surrounded by miracles.