On the Back Side of the Moon… The Day Never Ends

The day that never seems to end is a mockery up here on the moon. Here, on the shores of ‘Lake- With-No-Water’, the day simply never ends. Never. I knew all about ‘the dark side of the moon’ before we made the move, but I never understood exactly what it meant. I’ll explain.

A single orbit of the moon takes 27 and a bit earth days, the same amount of time it takes for it to rotate once on its axis. As a result, half of the Moon's surface is always facing the Earth. In other words, half of the moon is in sunlight 24 hours a day forever. The other half is dark. It has always been dark and it will be dark forever. No one knows what’s on the dark side of the moon. One can choose to live in one of 2 suburbs - Nearside or Backside.

Perpetual sunlight is great for our solar-operated things, like my laptop. But on the whole, it’s a nuisance. Like when do we sleep? Drawing the curtains helps, but not enough. So for a really good night’s sleep, we crank up our moon buggy and drive to a point that is almost, but not quite, on the dark side. Sort of like the end of twilight, but darker. And then we sleep. All of us. My wife and the five children. Like logs. But we wake up in pitch dark, and we have to drive into the sunny side for light. Once we piled into the buggy in our rush to reach the light, and when we got there we discovered that we had left our youngest, Danny, behind. Not a pleasant thing for a small boy. Alone in Backside… 

Of course, we could have built the house on the dark side, and I wrote the best part of a book on the pros and cons of life on the light or the dark side. We finally decided to go for the light side. It has many advantages.  

One of these, which we never knew about before we arrived and started exploring, was the tribe that lives up here. One hears about these ‘little green monsters’ in jokes, science fiction books and bad movies. These are the little green men with funny shaped heads, very short bodies, huge eyes and ears and little antennas on the tops of their heads.

We had been here for a few months when I decided to build our sleep-over-place, a cabin on the dark side. I was busy carrying piles of timber when this little green moon-guy suddenly popped out from behind a sand dune. He showed me that he was carrying some sort of weapon and pulled faces at me. I dropped the timber and sat down on the ground, patting the sand to invite him to join me.

After looking at each other for some time we both decided that there was no danger. We tried to talk to each other, but it was very difficult. His language seems to be words made up only of vowels. We are friends now and he has even brought his family to meet us, but we cannot communicate. He keeps pointing at the antenna on his head as though it is a translator but what comes out isn’t English. He is interesting and friendly. And he has solved a few problems for us. Water is the main one. We were on strict rations on the tanks of water we had brought with us and my ongoing feeble attempts to build a condensing machine. And along came Joe.

He has remained Joe and after a while even answered to his new name. I managed to tell him that we needed water and where could we find some. He nodded and led us through a series of canyons and passes and finally into an underground tunnel where there is a stream. It is not water. It tastes like that peach-flavored iced tea that one can buy on earth. It's fine to drink and a little sticky to wash or shower with. I laid a long pipe with a sand filter to our sunny-side house so we would have water on tap. And we are used to it now. We all have a peachy deodorant smell about us.  

As for food, we are Vegans. Moon-vegans actually. We grow all our food; wheat, nuts, corn, potatoes, peas, carrots and other kinds of food. All came from seeds that we bought with us and which flourish in the moon’s atmosphere. If you ever travel to here, ask for our moon-hummus. Great stuff. Moon-beans and oil.  

I work as the ‘Voice from the Moon’ for a syndicated bunch of newspapers. You can see my articles, all written by our ‘Man on the Moon’. I write about life on the moon, the weather on the moon and the food on the moon. I have strong connections with earth and answer many questions from readers about life here. Payment for my articles is deposited in my old bank account on earth. I don’t need it here. There is no money on the moon. One thing that I don’t miss is the taxman, who, despite his various attempts to reach me, hasn’t made it across 240,000 miles to collect.  The children enjoy their home-tuition lessons delivered by my wife and this keeps her busy and happy too.

We play various games of course. We have a sandy soccer field, a sandy tennis court, a 9-hole golf course with sand greens. The games are exciting. Gravity on the moon is about one-seventh what it is on earth. So a service on the tennis court is never returnable. A full-blooded golf drive is the end of your golf ball – it’s a mile or more away from the tee and if it's offline, it’s gone forever. Lately, I’ve been thinking about putting down a swimming pool. This would be great for the kids. The thought of digging it by hand in loose sandy soil is daunting, but there is no other way. Perhaps I can make something that will fit the back of the buggy and enable me to drag the sand out? It bears thought…

Finally the weather. It ranges from hot-as-hell to deep-freeze hell. On extreme days (or nights) we take the buggy and drive to the dark side for relief. My stale joke is “If we had eggs we wouldn’t have to fry them, or keep them in the fridge”.

On the whole, life is pretty good here. I don’t understand the comments that I get addressed to    “The Lunatics”.