It was the crew’s first night, we had just arrived, we were settling in. Kim Binsted was preparing to leave for four months, nervous, I think, about launching this Mars mission, a project whose actualization was so uncertain throughout the build-up—NASA nearly pulled funding, there were delays in the construction of the habitat—that at times it almost seemed if any of us were to look down, we’d see we’d collectively run ourselves off the edge of a steep cliff. And yet here we were. In the shipping container attached to the dome, she and I stood surrounded by four months of shelf-stable food, hand tools, and mountains of toilet paper and paper towels. In the shipping container, I followed her gaze to an ax leaning against the wall. And then I heard her say, “Maybe I should take this with me.”
I imagined what she might have imagined or maybe it was just what I imagined, which was the very bloody deaths of our crew at the hands of one of us who might not be as mentally sound under the pressures of isolation, or even at the hands of an intruder because, though our habitat was remote, we were still technically accessible. In any case, the fact of my isolation and vulnerability, the realization of it, and my voluntary removal of myself from life as I had known it, sharpened.
The ax. All work and no play … does what to astronaut stand-ins? Binsted and I were quiet for a few seconds, and then, for unknown reasons, I insisted she not worry about it. We might need an ax if there were a fire, I said, or some other emergency. Also, if someone wanted to kill us, they could do so in many other ways, like pillow smothering, though I really did hope not to be murdered while pretending to live on Mars. She scowled and hesitated, then finally agreed to leave it. I still don’t know why I was so confident the ax wouldn’t be a problem—it wasn’t—but I do wonder about my instincts in this case.
We were warned about the effects of isolation in small and large ways. The small ways: brief mentions during our pre-mission conference calls about tensions that arise between crewmembers and their friends, family, and mission support back home. Stories about small annoyances on previous analog missions—others’ chewing sounds, hurt feelings when movie night selections weren’t respected or worse, mocked, and the overall lack of privacy—thin walls and the fact that most space is shared space. We heard how these irritants had led to emotional outbursts on other simulated missions or how they’d been stuffed into sacks of silent grudges, to spill out upon return to Earth.
The large ways in which we were warned: the multiple hours-long discussions to discover what our breaking points would be. Would we abandon the mission if we got a sudden job offer? If someone back home got sick? If someone died? If we got sick? How sick? Mentally? Physically? If we lost faith in our crewmates or the project entirely?
And how did we plan to manage the well-documented challenges of isolation? These challenges included but were not limited to something scientists have called “third-quarter” syndrome, in which the itch to be anywhere but inside the dome with your five best friends flares hot when the end is in sight but not quite within reach. Diaries from Arctic and Antarctic expeditions suggest that it’s a special time, three-quarters into your mission. You’ve gotten used to your routines and found a rhythm, but the hard reality of being cut off from others, the demands of your duties, and the quirks of your crewmates have started to wear on you and the end to these low- to high-grade tortures is still not yet near.
Other challenges include an alienation between the crew and those back home wherein intentions and tone are misinterpreted in communications: the “crew-ground disconnect.” People’s feelings get hurt; information isn’t effectively conveyed; everyone gets frustrated. Productivity and mood can plummet.
Challenges continue and can appear in the form of obsession with micro-stimuli. Small vexations—a crewmate’s favorite catchphrase, another’s tendency to take up too much space, the subtle and not-so-subtle slights—grow macro over time in an environment without much else going on.
Here, I was guilty, somewhat predictably. As a writer, I tend to notice the little things. Minor, finely detailed irritants snuck up on me and then kept flicking the back of my head. The number of times in a row I replaced toilet paper in the first-floor bathroom. The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper, seeming to reach across an incredible distance to make such slight contact, even after I’d tucked my legs well under my chair. But what I really wondered was why I couldn’t ask her to stop.
Does all this make me sound a little unstable myself? Unsuited to live in an isolated environment with other people? Maybe. But I know I wasn’t alone. One crewmember complained of another’s frequent throat clearing. Someone repeatedly expressed exasperation over the length of time it took some crewmembers to suit up for EVAs. And another suspected that his position on the chore chart was unfair because it gave him too many back-to-back heavy tasks. Then, when he traded with one of us and found himself in an even worse chore lineup than before, he became even more frustrated. In No Exit, Sartre wrote that hell is other people. But what about “other people” and you’re hurtling for eight months through the void of space in what amounts to a metal can on your way to a distant planet?
From 1967 to 1968, Soviet researchers conducted a year-long medical-engineering experiment in which two male subjects lived in a space capsule just large enough for them and the two seats that held them. On a trip to Moscow to visit Kim Binsted in 2017, she and I spent time touring the very large facility that housed this capsule experiment as well as the Mars500 Experiment, the 520-day simulation of an entire Mars mission from “launch” to “surface expedition” to “trip back home.” When the tour guide mentioned the two men in a can, I wanted to know more. He didn’t go into detail, though he said that it was indeed an unpleasant experience for the subjects. After the year was up, both men still worked for the Soviet space program but, according to the guide, they never spoke to each other again.
Our crew got along reasonably well—I’d say functionally most of the time and even jovially harmonious on occasion—but some personalities did clash. There were a couple yelling bouts and some isolation-within-isolation events—that is, going to a room and staying there for a longer than culturally accepted period of time. We’d developed our own culture for what was socially expected, but for some of the crew whose personalities weren’t well suited to the agreed-upon social interactions, this proved to be a strain. Most of us are still on good terms, though a couple of us don’t speak to others. One of us moved to New Zealand about a year after and hasn’t been in much contact since.
Nothing quite matches the isolation that comes from being hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, cooped up with three to five other people, unable to have a real-time conversation with anyone else for two and a half years. NASA couples the problem of isolation to the difficulties of confinement inside a small space. Tom Williams, element scientist for human factors and behavioral performance in the Human Research Program at NASA, says the isolation of long-duration missions is such a challenge because human beings are adaptive organisms. We’re ready to change to a changing environment, and we thrive when adapting. “What isolation does is sort of remove that context of adaptation because when we’re isolated, we’re not … able to engage our environment in as many different ways,” he says. “So it sort of creates this barrier to allowing us to be that adaptive resilient human.”
In some ways it’s related to the boredom problem, the way certain aspects of your environment, daily schedule, and conversations smooth over, lose their texture. I distinctly recall sitting in a San Francisco beer garden with a friend shortly after my return from Mars. Then nearby and suddenly: a loud dog bark, a toothy lunge, and a pigeon quickly ascending with furiously clapping wings. I almost had a panic attack. I could barely believe the commotion while my friend, who had calmly looked on, couldn’t believe my dramatic response. But my senses hadn’t been so jarred in months.
Williams also says that, socially, isolation challenges our ability to self-regulate “because we typically learn to respond to our environment in which other people may react to us.” How unsettled I felt in the first few days back, answering interview questions from news media and from people in general. It might sound strange, but I wondered who I could trust. I had spent more than four months building a particular and insular kind of camaraderie with my crewmates. Our mission depended on our faith in and understanding of one another, our conversational shorthands, knowing when we were serious and when we were joking, and the subtext and motivations behind it all. But how to be with other people? Outside that dome, suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
We’ve all known discomfort, dislocation, sadness, loneliness, or the frustration of feeling isolated in some way or another. And here on Earth, there are many isolations, some torturous and immoral, some useful, some natural, some finite, others indefinite. Solitary confinement, for one. The separation of family members when they’ve migrated to the United States. The isolation of the sick in hospitals, the elderly in nursing homes, the mentally disabled in institutions of care. Being the only kid your age in a neighborhood. The woodland hermit, the friendless shut-in. Lonely spouses. Workers on a submarine or an oil rig or in a coal mine. New mothers, certain writers, graduate students toiling away in windowless laboratories.
The word “isolation” can be traced to the Latin insula, which means “island”; it was also the word used to describe the four-story, block-long apartment complexes in Roman cities. “Isolation” as a word runs cool and clinical. Its appearance in English in 1833 is more recent than the comparable “solitude,” which appeared sometime in the fourteenth century. Isolation is more likely than solitude to be used in a scientific or medical context as in the isolation of a chemical compound or isolation as quarantine. And perhaps this is why the word carries a compulsory connotation, a sense of a forced seclusion. Solitude, in contrast, more readily allows the possibility of choice, eliciting thoughts of Thoreau at Walden Pond (laundry facilities and a warm meal just a short walk away), choosing for himself his own version of social detachment. Solitude, at least for writers and artists, can carry a positive meaning—a state in which deep thought and productive work can be achieved.
In astronaut Michael Collins’s book Carrying the Fire, he describes his role as command module pilot, essentially dropping Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin off on the moon and repeatedly circling the block before picking them back up.
I guess the TV commentators must be reveling in my solitude and deriving all sorts of phony philosophy from it, but I hope not. Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have … I don’t mean to deny the feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am now alone, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.
I came across Collins’s book the summer between my junior and senior years of college. Though I was a chemistry major, attending a small liberal arts college in Kansas, that summer I lived in a dorm room at North Carolina State University, thanks to a National Science Foundation program that placed eager undergrads in physics labs around the country. My assigned project was to use a device called an ellipsometer to analyze the electrical properties of a semiconductor material that some people hoped might one day replace silicon in computer chips. It was a lonely summer. I talked little and walked a lot in Raleigh, a city with wide, busy streets and afterthought sidewalks. The local used bookstore, Reader’s Corner, was like an oasis. I picked up some Woolf that I didn’t read as well as Collins’s book, which I devoured. Never had I read anything by an astronaut that was so clear and unsentimental, so evocative and well written. I’d drifted away from my astronaut dreams in high school and college—it felt like kid’s stuff—but that summer, reading that book, I resolved to get my Ph.D. in physics, to recommit myself to going to space. “Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths,” Rilke wrote.
I’ve often thought back on the HI-SEAS mission as a kind of unofficial writing retreat. I had multiple weekly writing deadlines. I was reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing and talking with others about all sorts of ideas. Not once did I need to consider buying paper towels or laundry detergent or eggs or milk or anything at all. Living on Mars, where our supplies had been prepurchased, allowed me to opt out of consumerism for four months, a true joy and relief.
My days were dictated by the surveys we took, the experiments we conducted, our exercise, and our chore chart, our meals, and our personal projects. While I always felt busy, this was in many ways a simple life. We received news updates from Earth regularly, but the social-media moratorium—a real-time, interactive Facebook or Twitter stream won’t be possible on distant Mars—put Earth events at a remove.
When the Boston Marathon was bombed in April of 2013, I was shocked and troubled like so many, but my feelings about it were muted in a way. Maybe it was because in the days that followed, I wasn’t able to keep digging for more information or read commentary or talk about it with friends. I don’t know exactly why, but I do remember a distinct feeling of sorrow for the people living in such a place, on such a planet, with such violence. And when I learned in June that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Edie Windsor, requiring the federal government to treat lawfully married same-sex couples as it does opposite-sex couples, a ruling that directly affected me, an American, and my marriage to my wife, I felt buoyed and hopeful but, in all honesty, more for the people of that country rather than for myself and Jill. Was I not one of them? Was I not still of Earth? Why the disassociation? What kind of perspective was this?
At the same time I was feeling so removed from my life on Earth, I went from writing like the science journalist I had been to someone who was writing herself into a story, a story she was living in, but feeling outside of at the same time. My blog posts for various publications were coming from inside the science experiment, from the perspective of the subject, one who felt increasingly alien to her home world.
In a 2015 conversation I had with Mae Jemison, the first female African-American astronaut, I asked her about the overview effect, a sense that some astronauts get when looking at the planet that national boundaries are erased, that the Earth is fragile, and that all of humanity is united and worthy of love. She said she understood that experience, but she felt something even stronger during her flight on the space shuttle in 1992. Jemison said what she really understood was how she herself was part of a grand immensity. She wasn’t as compelled to look down. Instead, she looked out. A homecoming rather than a leaving. For her, it was cosmic.
On this planet, Jemison lives in Houston, Texas, but says someday she’d like to live in the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean about a thousand miles east of the African continent. With bats as the only indigenous mammal and unpopulated by people until the mid-eighteenth century, the islands attract Jemison for their beautiful and unique ecosystems, mountains of granite, and fusion of African, Indian, Chinese, French, and British cultures. Isolation kept the islands unperturbed by humans for most of their existence, and then, when people came, they came as a mix that created a blend wholly unlike any other on Earth.
A search of my journal during the mission reveals that I wrote the word “annoy” at least once in eighteen separate entries. At first, these entries were about noticing others’ annoyance with each other or with mission support. In the beginning, especially, we felt overloaded with tasks—already setting up and running so many experiments—and when mission support asked us to add more experiments or maintenance duties to the list, some of us became visibly frustrated.
But by early July, well within the third quarter, I noticed my annoyance observations had turned inward. I was annoyed that Oleg, my cooking partner that day, seemed to believe he was the first to make omelets for the crew, having forgotten my omelet making earlier in the mission, and holding firm even after I reminded him. Annoyed that Sian wanted to film a cooking video at the same time I wanted to use the treadmill, which would be too loud, and though we thought we had coordinated well enough beforehand, evidently we hadn’t. Annoyed at the way Excel was treating my sleep data, making it more difficult to plot than I had patience to deal with. And then this, from July 8: “petty annoyances keep cropping up. Spilled tomatoes next to the trash can, missing chocolate milk mix, misunderstandings on the stairs.”
Reading these entries now, I’m mildly disturbed that these kinds of things actually mattered enough to record in a journal, though years later, I still know exactly to what each of those mentions refers. The details are easily retrieved. They are seared into my memory with unusual heat.
NASA recommends journaling to stave off some of the psychological frustrations and challenges of isolation. Its researchers also use these diaries as data to see what kinds of problems crop up and how the best astronauts deal with them. Another way to combat isolation is to make sure crewmembers communicate directly with each other when problems arise. Before we began our mission, as a crew, we agreed that we’d address issues as they came up, and try to handle them as sensitively and straightforwardly as possible, though sometimes it was hard.
And what about my crewmate’s slippered shin-tapping that had annoyed me so much? After much thought and years later, I’ve concluded that I didn’t say anything because I sensed that to complain would lead to my being teased for being annoyed in the first place. A gentle teasing perhaps, equal in force to those taps. I think I intuitively sensed that the potential ribbing, had it come, would have been more of a compound annoyance with complicated public-social feelings, and that I’d be better off privately enduring a single-layer annoyance and working to “let it go” on my own. Though, it’s not lost on me that, six years later, not only am I still thinking about this interaction, my feelings about it, and my response/nonresponse, but also that I am publicly writing about it!
In Scott Kelly’s book, he writes about Tim Kopra, a crewmember who arrives on the space station late into Kelly’s year in space. Kopra has a tic. He tends to repeat whatever Kelly says.
“If I say, ‘I wonder if there’s any football on today,’ Tim will say, as if I had never spoken, ‘I wonder if there’s any football on today.”
Kelly writes that he considers himself fairly tolerant, unlikely to get annoyed by a crewmate, and after all, he’s made it this long. But Kopra’s echoes test his limits.
Then, after Kelly tears a muscle in his hamstring doing heavy squats and his flight surgeon prescribes Ativan as a muscle relaxant, something changes. “In the afternoon Tim Kopra floats by looking for something to eat. ‘This chicken soup is really good,’ I tell him.
“‘The chicken soup is really good,’ he says, as if I’d never spoken.
“‘Yup. I’m also going to have some of that barbecue beef,’ I say. We watch CNN together for a few minutes while eating.
“After a bit I say, ‘You know, on second thought, I don’t like this soup.’
“‘Yeah, I don’t like it either,’ Tim says. When we finish our food we each get back to our respective tasks. It takes me a few minutes before I realize I’m not annoyed by Tim’s repeating what I just said. It also doesn’t bother me when we lose the satellite signal and the story I’m following on CNN cuts out. It doesn’t even bother me when a tiny brown sphere of barbecue sauce propels itself onto the thigh of my pants. I feel calmer, more content with my surroundings than I have in months, maybe all year.”
Kelly writes that the flight surgeon mentioned Ativan is sometimes prescribed for mood and anxiety disorders, and notes that he hadn’t felt stressed out, though he eventually acknowledges that “just being here has been getting to me.” He continues: “It’s nice to feel better, and I try to enjoy the positive side effects of the drug while it lasts.”
So, perhaps NASA could add the occasional muscle relaxant to journaling and direct communication as another way to lessen the stress of isolation.
There was no denying that my brother was annoyed. On my trips back to Kansas, I’d visit Mark at the rehabilitation facility during the days when he was mostly upbeat and chatty, but once in a while I’d stick around until the evening when my parents would arrive, their nightly ritual for more than a year, and could see he was growing increasingly frustrated. I saw something familiar about the interactions between my brother and my parents—the nit-picking, the impatience, my mother’s repeated stories for each new nurse after a shift change. The three of them, together in that room. Though my parents went home every evening, their days revolved around coming back to the hospital to be by Mark’s bed. They were an isolated triad. No one else knew what it was like to be them but them, all the time they spent together, the news they watched, the Royals games, what they talked about or didn’t. The isolation of the sick and their closest caretakers. There are so many ways to be isolated in this world.
In the last year and a half of his life, Mark only went outside, only breathed fresh air, during transfers between medical facilities. This happened about half a dozen times. I asked him if they let him linger in the fresh air. He said they did not. He had visitors other than our parents, but not every day, and sometimes only a couple a week. He read books, but over time, he required a mask to get the oxygen he needed, and his reading glasses couldn’t fit over it. He listened to audiobooks, books on CD, using a portable CD player that burned through batteries, so he got the rechargeable kind and had to regularly ask nurses to swap them out because he was unable to leave the bed and do it himself. For a year and a half, he never left a bed. Bed as island. Body as island and the dialysis machine next to his bed was his body, the oxygen mask was his body, the meager portions of food he ate were his body, the nurses and doctors were his body, the television that showed him news of the world was his body, the room was his body, the hospital that contained the room that contained his bed and machines and his body was his body. Everything was so delicate, the fine-tuning of daily dialysis, the calories in and out. His dry weight was eighty-seven pounds. His legs were shriveled from disuse in his normal life but even more so from the hospitalization.
How is it possible that as his body shrank, it also seemed to extend, to encompass this collection of people and systems while in actuality he was mostly a torso, or rather, with the sheets pulled up, mostly a chin: an uncompromising underbite: a beard grown out gray and scraggly, kept unkempt it seemed to make a kind of point? His chin seemed the embodiment of his will to live even if on the thinnest of margins, to keep thinking and telling us his thoughts, to breathe in and out despite a body wasted, wasted by the removal of his bladder and kidneys due to cancer found in the summer of 2015, and the thing that eventually killed him, heart failure from fourteen years of dialysis. The removal of blood, the cleaning of it outside the body, and putting it back in—the dialysis procedure—is brutal. It leaches calcium from bones, which then circulates in the blood and deposits in the heart. Mark’s heart valves were shot—they had hardened with calcium, decrepit shutters that couldn’t keep out the storm. When your heart is failing, fluid collects in your lungs. This is why he wore the oxygen mask, looking very much like a fighter pilot in his last year of life.
He and I didn’t talk much about what it was like to be so isolated in that body and in that room, but from my parents, with whom he did discuss it, I know his psychological struggles were as significant as the physical ones. My brother and I talked on the phone once or twice a week, usually about politics or what was going on in my life. And when I visited from California, which was as often as I could—I eventually left a full-time job and was lucky enough to have contract-writing work that allowed me to travel—I’d usually bring food: donuts or cookies or jerk chicken from the Jamaican restaurant a few blocks away or barbecue brisket from farther down the street. We’d eat, I’d read him articles about politics and economics, sometimes a poem. One article was about whales and their cultural, intergenerational memory of their decades-ago genocide. Another was about trees and how they talk to one another through underground chemical telephony. When I mentioned I was thinking about going back to grad school for poetry, he said he’d also like to get a master’s degree and study history. Maybe he’d teach, he said. We both accommodated this fantasy, never calling it a fantasy. And when I asked him how Mom and Dad were, he’d tell me that the three of them didn’t have much to say to each other. He told me it felt like a deathwatch, what our parents were doing. But it was complicated. It seemed their presence carried something for him that he didn’t have to carry himself. On the few nights they couldn’t make it, he became physically distressed—bouts of hyperventilation, low blood-oxygen levels. For much of his decline, my mother told me, he was afraid to die.
The film based on the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly conveys with impressive cinematography and choice dialogue the isolation felt by a person trapped in a bed. It’s a true story of the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a stroke in 1995 and woke up to find himself with “locked-in” syndrome, almost totally paralyzed. He was a writer, though, and his nursing staff devised a way for him to communicate using the blink of his left eye. Bauby wrote the entire book that way, crafting and memorizing the pages when waking just after dawn, and blinking them to his assistant throughout the late mornings and early afternoons. He lived with virtually no body movement and severely limited-bandwidth communication, an extreme corporeal isolation. As Bauby tells it, he has a realization that while trapped in a bed in a room, he still has his memory and his imagination. He can lounge on warm beaches and be with the woman he loves, he can live out his boyhood fantasies and his adult ambitions, all in his head. I think of Emily Dickinson, her self-imposed cloistering, and how one time when her niece Martha was visiting her in her corner bedroom at home in Amherst, Dickinson pantomimed locking the door with an imaginary key and said, “Matty, here’s freedom.”
This freedom depends, of course, on your perspective: how badly you want to be of the world from which you are isolated, and what limitations your isolation entails. Who are your comrades? What are your lines to the outside? Adrienne Rich wrote that Dickinson’s was no hermetic retreat, but “a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence.”
While hospitalized, Mark told me of his dreams. In one, he was flying over the mountains in South Dakota and could swoop down and see insects and birds on the ground then swoop back up for magnificent views. Also, while hospitalized, Mark wrote a letter to Congressman John Lewis, the youngest of the “Big Six” organizers of the civil rights movement along with Dr. Martin Luther King. Lewis, who Mark met at the Democratic National Convention, was a hero to him for his activism and public service. The letter asked the congressman for his support on a bill that would offer protections to living organ donors against discrimination in health care for a so-called pre-existing condition and against discrimination in employment. The bill already had the support of a number of congresspeople, including the one from Mark’s home district, thanks to his weeks’ worth of calls and messages to the congressman’s office.
My brother could have taught a course on politics for the bedbound or for other people who, for whatever reason, can’t make it to the local protests, or for anyone, for that matter, who is a person in this country and therefore affected by legislation and the decisions of elected officials. Mark wrote the letter to Congressman Lewis and held it in his mind, then dictated it to me, but after a few passes didn’t feel like it was exactly what he wanted. We kept talking about it. We talked about it for months.
On December 21, 2016, I flew into Kansas City from San Francisco. Mark had taken a bad turn two days earlier, the day the electoral college voted in Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. He had taken so many bad turns before. For eighteen months he endured a succession of near-death experiences—a collapsed lung, repeated intubations, dangerously low blood-oxygen levels—from which he always seemed to miraculously recover. This one felt different.
It was evening, and he was more exhausted than I’d ever seen him. I asked if he wanted to work on the letter, and he nodded. At this point, even with his face mask, he still couldn’t breathe well enough to speak full sentences and he kept trying to sit up higher as if to stretch out his lungs, as if higher was where the air was kept. He’d point at my laptop screen, I’d read a sentence, he’d shake his head. I’d read another sentence. Fix this one? He’d nod. I’d offer suggestions, he’d nod. We worked this way, and it terrified me. I knew he was dying and he knew he was dying. And this letter was so important. Later that night, Mark’s blood-oxygen levels dropped dangerously low, and he began to panic, gasping for air. My parents called the priest, who had already read him his last rites but who came now, on my mother’s demand, to read the litany of the saints. It calmed Mark. It calmed all of us. That night, I slept at my brother Steve’s house. The next morning, while Steve and I were on our way to the hospital, my father, who with my mother had spent the night there, texted us that Mark had just died. When we arrived, I saw my father had been crying. My mother was composed. She said that Mark had left this world the same way he came into it, “with your father and me and surrounded by a team of doctors.”
At the funeral, one of my brother’s longtime friends, who had flown in from Denver, told me that on his last visit to see him, he got the impression that Mark had made peace with death. He told me my brother had joked that, hey, none of us are getting out of here alive. Wry and matter-of-fact, but with a look of mischief in his eyes: this is how I imagine he said it.
Go to YouTube and watch an interview with a person who signed up for MarsOne. Then watch another and another. MarsOne was a private Dutch project, now defunct, with the intent to send people on a one-way trip to colonize Mars. The idea was to fund the project by selling documentaries and other media about the participants. The finalists were people dreaming grand dreams, with a yen for adventure, at least in theory, and to my eye, a deep sense of unbelonging. They are from this planet but give the impression that they don’t feel like they are of it.
But it’s not just MarsOne finalists who veer misfit. NASA astronauts also tend to be unlike the rest. Mae Jemison told me she was different from her family. Different in the 1960s, to be a black girl growing up on Chicago’s South Side who loved space and science in that place at that time. At Stanford she double majored in chemical engineering and African-American studies, all while taking a lot of dance and art classes. “I hung out with physics students and performing arts and political science students,” she told me, “I did stuff neither group understood.”
You don’t fit in, so you search. You find yourself a group or subculture if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you might start to resent your isolation and look for conversations that stoke your anger and give you scapegoats to blame for your pain. On this oasis of a planet, there are so many ways to feel isolated, each of us with the potential to sit with the terror of being alive and possibly alone in the cosmos. Some of us are roused to connect with other people, with ideas, our shared histories, the rest of the natural world. Others tend to further isolate, to explore the extent of this loneliness, this condition of creaturely sentience on an island globe that, for all we can prove right now could be the only one of its kind so suited to these types of thoughts and longings. What if it were to be harnessed? Isolated, together, not for making us feel worse about ourselves, or nudged into purchasing or consuming as balm or blaming others for dark times, but as a way to see ourselves in a togetherness, to spin our isolation, or nonbelonging, into a bridge. Is it too much to ask?
There is a scene toward the end of the film Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s book, in which Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie Arroway, has traveled through a wormhole and landed on a kind of alien beach with shooting stars, etc., in the background. She talks to a creature who has, to put her at ease, taken the form of her dead father. Arroway asks where she is, who brought her, and why.
I first saw Contact when I was in high school and, distracted by the acting and the terrible CGI of sparkly intergalactic shores, I took the alien’s response, something about a grand cosmic connection between species, as overly contrived. But I recently rewatched the film. I watched it in the theater a short walk away from my apartment in San Francisco with Jill during the summer when, after long conversations and hot tears, we decided to end our fourteen-year partnership. The film had meant quite a lot to her. When it came out, she was home from college living in Salina, Kansas, working at a theater, feeling confused and isolated, trying to reconcile parts of herself in a world in which she didn’t feel welcome. She’d sweep the sticky theater floor earlier and earlier, just to sit down in the last row to watch it, to stare at Jodie Foster’s face again and again, unsure why.
I too, was enchanted by Foster and the character she played. I saw Arroway as a model female scientist, safely undistracted by men, always a bit detached, possessing an eyes-on-the-prize understated grandeur or just a knowing that she was bound to do something important, to be important. And so in that San Francisco theater, Jill and I watched the movie, and this time during that embarrassingly wrought beach scene, I finally heard the lines. Perhaps it was because I am still grieving for my brother or because I was just beginning to understand the end of my marriage, or because, inescapably, the rhetoric of our elected officials is being used to divide and isolate a great many types of people who live in this country and this country from the rest of the world, or because of all of it, I cried.
“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix,” the alien father figure told Arroway. “You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
What if a mission to Mars didn’t have as its main goal a barrage of scientific studies, or the demonstration that humans can build ships to send us to faraway lands and keep us alive in the harshest environments? What if it’s not driven by the fear of our eventual extinction or by opportunities afforded it by current economic systems—mining for resources, etc. Or what if it is those things, but also, in its design, it contains questions about what it means to be a human being alive and alone and unable to achieve contact with others in this universe? How do you include questions about what it means to be so isolated on this island, to yearn to connect to something beyond? How do you even begin to design such a mission?
Our little HI-SEAS habitat, just a speck of a home, was located on the island of Hawai‘i, just a speck of a landmass rising like a ship out of the immense Pacific Ocean. Plane rides to the other Hawaiian Islands are quick, but flights to the closest major cities are not: nearly five hours to San Francisco, nine to Tokyo, and ten and a half to Sydney.
What’s remarkable to me is that Hawai‘i is just one of more than a thousand islands in the Polynesian region of the Southern Pacific. It’s a region so immense—forming a triangle outlined from Hawai‘i at the northern point to New Zealand in the southwest to Easter Island in the southeast—that its coverage of ten million square miles is larger than the landmasses of Europe and Asia combined.
Even more remarkable, though, is the migration of the Polynesian people to most of those islands over thousands of years, the launching of ships onto such an enormous sea without knowing what might be out there and if they would ever come back home.
Explorers from Indonesia first left from their geographically protected shores five thousand years ago. The vessel of choice was a large, double-hulled canoe with “crab claw” or triangle-shaped sails that create deep pockets to catch the wind. For way-finding, sailors used wind, stars, and subtle changes in ocean currents. By 1,000 BC, the islands of Tonga and Samoa were settled. Over millennia, explorers kept exploring, and settlers populated hundreds of islands scattered throughout the Pacific, bringing with them non-native plants and animals like wild ginger, turmeric, bananas, pigs, and chickens. When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, almost every island and coral atoll they came upon was already inhabited.
Part of our HI-SEAS pre-mission training included attending traditional Hawaiian events, a blessing by community elders, and discussions on the relationship and history between Western science and indigenous Hawaiian communities. We also visited the Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, where I first learned about the scope and ingenuity of Polynesian explorers. Even though our habitat was stationary and isolated and on an island distant from so much of the rest of the world, in a certain light it’s possible to see the HI-SEAS project as part of a long tradition of exploration, a deep history of people learning how to move across expansive, unfathomable gaps.
At night, inside that dome, when we looked out the window we could see the lights from the telescopes on Mauna Kea, the volcano due east. And on a clear day we could see Maui. But because of perspective and the way the sky is blue and the ocean is blue, to me Maui almost looked more like a spacecraft, or another world, hovering just above the horizon—a trick of the eye and brain that made the next island over feel not so very far away.