Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  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 o
f 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 b
ooks, 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.