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"It's a goony, loony place we're coming from." -- Tonio K.
The sound was eerie. It was a low rumbling, pulsating that seemed to go right through me.
I listened again.
This time, it was even more unsettling.
It made me wonder if I was really hearing it or just feeling it through my core.
This was a creepy sound I had never heard before.
In fact, this was something no one had ever heard before.
The sound hit my ears from more than 33 million miles away, it was the wind blowing across the face of Mars.
A seismometer on a NASA spacecraft that landed on the barren, rocky surface of the planet a few days ago recorded the vibrations, the first sound from Mars.
Hearing it kind of made me sick to my stomach.
I felt a strange shudder inside.
My brain hit my consciousness with the words of Sir Arthur Eddington: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Then came words from Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men from "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll."
"I couldn't understand a thing they said, but that crazy beat, it just stopped me dead."
When I heard another rendition of the Mars sound, played a couple octaves higher, it was even weirder.
It reminded me of the odd, vacuous space noises I've heard in science fiction movies.
"To me, the sounds are really unworldly," said Bruce Banerdt, the lead investigator on the NASA mission. "They do sound like the wind or maybe the ocean kind of roaring in the background. But it also has an unworldly feel to it."
Billy Lee Riley's rockabilly tune came out in 1957, the same year the Russians sent Sputnik through the skies over our big blue world, reverberating its own spooky sounds and shockwaves through the American populace.
Hearing the unnerving Mars recordings this week, I figured I was getting a small sensation of what people back then might have been feeling.
I was shocked to read that we humans have previously picked up sounds from Venus and one of the moons of Saturn.
Add to this, a chilling documentary I saw this week about advances in artificial intelligence, robots and the associated displacement of millions of workers anticipated across the planet.
I felt like the world in Walter Cronkite's "The 21st Century" from the late 1960s television show had certainly arrived. It appears Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and "The Jetsons" were right.
Were we truly ready for it?
I wondered.
Whether we are, or we aren't, it's here.
"Jane, get me off this crazy thing!"
Thinking about all this, a day or so later, I was grateful to find myself on solid earth along the shoreline of Lake Superior, where the ice had formed over the water creating a hard, transparent lens.
I felt ragged, like I had just been to space and back.
It was refreshing to look around to see folks out doing simple things.
There were a few cars parked facing into the rising sun at a rocky point. People inside them sat with heaters running, waiting for just the right time to get out into the cold air to take a picture of the beautiful pink, blue and orange sky.
A white pine and a leaning bare maple cast their silhouettes against the scene, with the wide expanse of the lake's cold waters -- still free to crash and roll here -- lying beneath.
Along the shore, the rocks and rubble tossed up by a violent and deadly storm remained here months later. Encased in ice and snow, this scenery here might have passed for the surface of some far-flung distant world.
The confluence of the morning sunlight and the nighttime's dying darkness produced swirling colors melted and washed over the horizon.
I saw a water-smoothed pine log lying on the shore, amid the rocks and gravel.
What a strange life's travels this relic must have had.
At one point, it had been a green vibrant seedling, reaching for the skies. Growing taller all the while, it had no doubt stood for a good long time, long enough to have outlived many people, their times and their changes.
Ravaged by woodpeckers and insects, the tree was eventually felled. Somehow, it had made it to the water where it floated along the longshore current of the big lake until the storm threw it up here on the shore.
What now?
Just lie here, I guess.
There was a sublime pink glow over the top of the water, a reflection of a portion of the sky. It was the color of the pink stripe splashed along the side of a rainbow trout. Not far offshore, there was an island of cold-looking, snow-covered rocks.
Seeing these two sights side-by-side was somewhat jarring, and yet, for some reason, comforting at the same time.
Not far from me, a man stood outside his car. With the engine running, he smoked a cigarette and looked back and forth between the sunrise and the ground. It looked to me like he was hoping good things for the day ahead.
By the time I'd reached the road barricades, the icy wrought-iron gate across the breakwater and the countless signs prohibiting all types of activities, "the morning sun was shining like a red rubber ball."
It was heavenly.
Even the blues of the ghosts inside the rotting and decaying passenger cars that sat along the old railroad line couldn't overpower this glorious scene.
A crow made a low banking twirl and landed on a tree branch, making the limb bob. The old station, the big heavy doors, the kids swimming pond, long gone.
In the snow along the lakeshore, I see dog tracks heading down toward the water, which is still open a bit. The ice here looks like wrinkled plastic wrap has been stretched across the water.
Summertime tour boats sit in dry dock. A bald eagle flies so slow, its wings stretched out flat, gliding above the ice while a mighty freighter takes on ore.
Some beach sand is visible here, whipped bare by the winds, it looks like its waiting for summer too, while there are rocks everywhere locked in ice.
It's a weird existence as far as I can tell.
On one hand, the world is spinning around faster than it ever has before, with astounding developments packed thick into every single day. And then there are these quiet, peaceful moments, existing at the very same time, in the very same place.
I hope to one day gain a finer reconciliation and of the two - along with greater powers of explanation, love and understanding.
For now, on this day, I'm relieved to be resting in the things I've been taught by the birds and the animals, as well as the Byrds and the Animals.
And Bob Dylan.
"Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow."
I roll back along the lakeshore, gathering up a few more minutes of solace.
The wind is still cold and blowing - all the way from Mars.
EDITOR'S NOTE: John Pepin is the deputy public information officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan's world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula. Send correspondence to pepinj@michigan.gov or 1990 U.S. 41 South, Marquette, MI 49855.