The Moon Stroll: My Unexpected Journey Across a Lunar Landscape

The Dream of the Moon Stroll

You are on the Moon! Wow! This is absolutely incredible! Your two feet are firmly planted on the grayish, dusty surface. Your memory offers no clue as to how you got here, nor does your reason. But you don’t bother wondering. You don’t care how you crossed the 385,000 km of empty space separating Earth – where you remember being last – from this silent, alien world. The only thing that matters is that you are now here. Finally, your dream has come true! You are standing on the Moon!

You take profound pleasure in absorbing this new world around you. It feels like every photon beaming into your eyes is laced with joy. You’ve traveled across Earth many times, but this landscape is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before; it seems… otherworldly.

The horizon seems slightly smaller than on Earth, yet it stretches endlessly. There are hardly any features – craters, mountains, or hills – within sight. The horizon forms a perfect disc around you. You stand amidst a vast field of ancient lava plains. Rather than having erupted from the Moon’s interior, it almost seems as if the lava had rained down from the sky in a distant past.

The sky is pitch-black. Sparse, dim stars flicker faintly, yet your gaze is drawn to one dominant object in the lunar sky. There, suspended in the southeast, floats a gigantic Half-Earth. You can make out Europe’s western shores and the western coast of Africa. Spellbound, you stand still, watching as the old world slowly drifts into darkness and the American coast slides into the sunlit portion, with clouds swirling across the oceans in mesmerizing patterns.

Then, unexpectedly, the Earth blurs, and the moonscape is bathed in brilliant light. The Sun rises over the eastern lunar horizon. It happens suddenly, without warning. The sky remains as black as ever, yet the sun appears as a radiant hole in the darkness. What a stunning morning! A new day has begun on the Moon!

It’s the perfect moment for a first walk. You take your first leap and begin bouncing across the lava plains. But something feels off; not exactly what you expected. The gravity is lighter than Earth’s, yes, but still significant. You could jump as high as on a trampoline, but did you really have to travel all this way just for that?

Then it hits you—you didn’t plan this journey. You simply found yourself here, and now you have no idea how to return.