Making Contact

by Sarah Scoles

  The next day, when the interns return from their five-hour hike up and down a cinder cone volcano, sweat has dried in streaks through the dust that coats their calves. They rush to the trailhead’s spigot to refill their 16-ounce Dasani bottles, long ago empty. It is hot, and prior to today they have spent their whole summer in front of computers. They are not in the best shape.

  A horn honks, and Tarter’s arm waves from the driver’s side window of her Saab, parked under a pine tree. She opted out of the hike because she was afraid of hurting herself when she has to take care of Welch, who is awaiting back surgery. She’s been reading in her car all afternoon, moving her car every hour or so to follow the shady patches cast by pine trees. “Some woman with a bird came up and asked me if she could have my spot because she had a bird in the car,” she says. “I said I needed it. Who brings a bird to a park?”

  The students wave back to her and return to their passenger vans, ready to head to the next Earth wonder on their educational journey. The vans leave, dipping and turning on the mountain roads in front of Tarter. One hand on the wheel, she twists the car around an S-curve. She’s a speeder. (Once, during a previous intern trip, a police officer pulled her over for speeding. The officer let her off because a student told him that they were all “looking for aliens,” and he took that to mean illegal immigrants, a search of which he apparently approved.)

  The students’ next stop is another volcanic phenomenon. Molten rock long ago burned a pipe—called a lava tube—into the Earth. It looks like a gigantic worm tunneled through the ground, wiggling this way and that on a quest for food, shelter, or escape from whatever chases giant worms. The floor, uneven, plays tricks on the ankle joints, and Tarter hangs back with Lindsay, who twisted hers the week before.

  “What’s that?” Lindsay asks, swiveling her headlamp down to the ground. A circle of light soon illuminates a Dum Dum wrapper.

  “Why do people do that?” Tarter asks. She bends down and brings it into the beam of her own lamp. “Do we have somewhere to put this?”

  For the rest of the hike, Tarter and Lindsay diligently search for litter—subtle signs that questionably intelligent life was here—and place it in the cargo pocket of my hiking shorts. Glass, toothpicks, Ziploc bags.

  “Look,” Tarter says in the blackest middle of the cave, where the total darkness makes you hallucinate twinkling lights. She brings a scrap into the circle of her headlamp. “A roach clip,” she proclaims, handing it to me to put in my pocket.

  When we’re halfway through, the interns play a trust game. It goes like this: Everyone turns off their head lamps, teams of three people link arms, and the person closest to the wall puts their hand there and leads their partners through the darkness. It is a game a person might have played at church camp, with a different metaphor. Tarter grabs the arm of Gabe, a curly-haired outdoorsy kid who’s tan and wearing a tank top. She whispers, “Biggest and strongest. Good for balance!”

  Gabe’s steps pull the center of gravity ever forward. Our team travels forward quickly, confidently, like those blind albino newts that evolved optimized for places exactly like this. Aside from the feeling of the ground beneath our feet, it’s almost like being out in the space, surrounded by air so black it seems thick.

  In this kind of darkness, it’s hard to tell if there is anyone else out there. But I constantly feel like someone is right in front of me, and I could bump into them at any time.

  A few weeks after this trip, lightning strikes twice near Hat Creek, starting what the Forest Service soon calls the Eiler and the Bald Fires, which burn a combined 62,000 acres. The Bald Fire scores the mountains just behind the ATA, turning the horizon into an eerie permasunset. Its flames look like the erupting volcano the students drew, bearing down on the telescope. The Eiler Fire creeps along Highway 89, taking out two houses, 12 outbuildings, and the beloved Bar K restaurant that Tarter and Welch have frequented for decades.

  The only thing left of Bar K, once hotshots control the raging fire, is a pile of cinders and the wooden bear statue that once pointed to the parking lot. When Tarter reads of the news online, she sends an email to the SETI Institute staff with the subject line “the last milkshake.”

  The fires act as an uncomfortable reminder that our planet doesn’t always act like it wants to be inhabited. It changes all the time, irreversibly turning landscapes we love—the ones where we meet our spouses and stake out our careers—into carbon.

  When Tarter took that first fortuitous trip to Hat Creek with Welch and Billingham, she had not yet finished her doctorate. She was still a graduate student, just starting to do SETI in her spare time. Her actual work—her doctoral dissertation—was meandering. She had studied everything from brown dwarfs to the esoteric Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect to instrumental analysis. Joe Silk, her advisor, just kept thinking of new problems for her to solve. Every time she nearly finished investigating one of his questions, he’d say, “What about this? Why don’t you write something about this?”

  It’s a PhD student’s worst nightmare—the kind where your teeth fall out, and you free-fall naked into the exam room of a class you didn’t know you’d enrolled in. Unless a doctoral student’s advisor deems their work “finished,” they can’t graduate. Tarter wanted to be done with school for all the normal reasons—autonomy, advancement, having been in school for 25 years of her 33-year life—but there was a more practical reason, too: she had already accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. But she had to finish her thesis before she could start work.

  To finish, Tarter often came into the office after dark, a luggage carrier filled with computer punch cards trailing behind her. No one else kept vampire hours, so she was able to stuff the cards box by box into the computer without waiting in a line. Yes, computers used to have lines, because they cost more than houses and were nearly as large, so many people at the same institution had to share. Yet even today, there are still lines and applications for use time on supercomputers like the one at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

  As her numbers crunched themselves, she sat in the empty Berkeley building, chastising herself for careless errors that negated some of the computer runs, requiring her to repunch the cards and then rerun them. But while some of this arrangement was for the benefit of her career, some, she had to be honest, was just about avoiding Bruce. Tarter “was getting more intoxicated about prospects of being a professional scientist and on [her] own.”

  “The wife thing was in my plans,” she says, “but it didn’t take star billing.” She no longer felt that her and Bruce’s bond was with each other, but primarily with their daughter, Shana, who held them together like the middle of a Venn diagram.

  Bruce says their lives just became more and more separate, starting at that American Astronomical Society meeting in Puerto Rico, where she had had too much fun and cut herself on coral. Tarter had never had full adult freedom; she was a student when she had met and then married him. Bruce had experienced the world before their marriage; he had a real job. He acted distant; he was distant.

  As Tarter grew up, Bruce says, they grew apart. “She had gone through undergrad early, almost without experiencing the things people normally do—parties, ups and downs, having a social world,” he says. “She had never really done that.”

  Now, at Berkeley and in that wild “social revolution” Bruce referred to—which seems to have involved its fair share of swinging—Tarter was finally getting the chance. “We went to parties at Berkeley that I kept thinking would jeopardize my security clearance,” says Bruce.

  They lived on the same planet, and sometimes went the same places, but they inhabited different worlds. And the two began to separate those worlds even more. In the mornings, Tarter packed up her luggage cart, went home from the lab, and softly shook Shana awake. They ate breakfast together and then stood outside waiting for the school bus. Tarter zombie-walked back inside and went to sleep, the house hers alone, just li
ke the computer. She woke up in time to meet the school bus upon its return. She felt as if no time had passed, like the two bus moments were stitched right next to each other, without a gaping loop of fabric between them, a wormhole through space-time.

  After Shana settled in for the night and Bruce returned to watch over her, Tarter rolled the luggage cart back to Campbell Hall. She became a kind of wild animal that lived mostly to fulfill its basic needs, where “basic needs” were “write a 300-page scientific document and avoid my husband.”

  In the small moments she had free, she sorted through her shell collection—the one from her childhood visits to Manasota Key in Florida. The shells bore the marks of a different life from the one she had now. A life free and close to the ocean, full of big questions about the universe and her place in it and on this planet. She began building a table and placed each seashell carefully beneath a glass top. This table, she began to think, would look very nice in a place of her own.

  Despite marital tension, Tarter and Bruce hosted their annual gathering. The first Saturday of every May—even the Mays like this one, when their house felt more like a stage for performance than a home, to both of them—Tarter and Bruce held a Kentucky Derby party. It was part of Bruce’s Southern-gentleman heritage.

  As Tarter muddled the mint for juleps, she thought of Mika Salpeter. Her impeccable hosting. Her equal and companionable marriage with Ed. Tarter channeled Mika as she decorated the apartment with derby hats, rose wreaths, and horseshoes. She had gotten up at 5 A.M. to put the roast beef in the oven at the exact bacteria-killing temperature. By mealtime, the meat would equilibrate with the oven air and emerge perfectly rare. She cooked grits and wrapped 40 plastic glasses in aluminum foil, faux sterling cups.

  As the guests arrived, Tarter smiled over their heads at Welch, put Joe Silk’s perfectly rare roast beef in the broiler when he said it wasn’t done enough for him, and mingled with all her guests. Welch smiled back.

  When December came around, Tarter and Bruce were still living in the same house. They sat in a room once a week with a marriage counselor. It felt clear, to Tarter, that this was the end. Tarter told Bruce she would not go to Christmas with his family but would stay and work. This abandonment was the first Shana knew of the impending divorce, her first experience of the split it would make in her family, and her first positioning as the only thing in the middle of the mother-father Venn diagram. She was not happy with that lot.

  Not long after, Tarter began paging through the classifieds and walking past for-rent signs, imagining what life would be like with Shana in each apartment. She finally found a place on Virginia Street in Berkeley, a small two-bedroom flat that opened onto the backyard of the house.

  “What I remember is that she just sort of delivered a fait accompli at some day, some time,” says Bruce. “She said she had rented an apartment on Virginia Street.”

  And that was that. Their talk shifted to joint custody, separation. The terms felt like a foreign language, but one they were learning well, through immersion.

  Days after their move, Shana set up an Army-surplus tent at Tarter’s to match the playhouse that sat in the backyard of Bruce’s house. Tarter rented an upright piano so Shana could continue her lessons. Tarter stacked unpainted particle board furniture, pre-Ikea, into desks and cubes and shelves—a whole identity to be arranged and rearranged against the walls. The glass-top shell table, finished, held a place of honor in the kitchen.

  “I’ve always regarded it as an amiable divorce,” says Bruce, “if unexpected from my coordinate system.”

  After all, he adds, she kept his name, and his subsequent ex-wives have not.

  After Tarter and Bruce split, Tarter began pursuing Welch. As Tarter speaks of this today, she pauses in the retelling and looks out at San Francisco Bay, where the fog is coming in and covering everything outside the house. Welch sits at the dining room table—an Italian contraption that expands such that no matter how many piles of paper sit on top, they can always undo a latch to make room for dinner. During one recent meal, the green beans came out overdone because Tarter and Welch had to finish a debate about single-dish radio telescopes. When dinners are over, they often dance to samba music in the living room of whatever house they are in, regardless of who else is present. They discuss the merits of the bossa nova artists that come up on Pandora and argue about whether they once saw this or that musician at this or that Berkeley club that closed in either the 80s or the 90s. They seem covalently bonded.

  Welch, in the early days of their courtship, began to come over to Tarter’s new room of her own in the evenings. One night, Tarter forgot to lock her bedroom door, and Shana walked into her mother’s room to find only Welch, lounging on the floor mattress like a college student.

  Tarter, hearing the shock, ran to the room.

  “What’s Jack doing here?” Shana asked.

  But Jack was already not there, having launched himself out the window.

  “Jack is going to be in our lives a lot more often now,” Tarter explained to Shana, which was as uncomplicated as she could make it.

  Life was shaping up—an apartment, a daughter, Jack. Soon, maybe soon a career instead of school. But how soon? Silk, her doctoral advisor, continued to pull projects out of his sleeve like carnival scarves. One morning, despairing to think of living in this liminal state forever, she leaned against the wall of Campbell Hall and just cried. Ivan King, who had made the unfortunate comment about women on Tarter’s first day of classes, saw her before she saw him.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  She wiped the tears away and stood up straight. “My time’s almost up,” she said, “and Joe keeps saying, ‘Won’t you write something else?’”

  He wasn’t requesting more and more maliciously—there were just so many questions to which he wanted answers, and here was this person whose job it could be to go investigate them! “I was one of his first grad students,” says Tarter. ”He had not yet internalized any obligation to guide the path of his students into their future careers. He never thought about the fact that I needed to move on.”

  King’s expression loosened. He had had a friend during his own graduate school days who couldn’t complete his thesis and move on to the real world, and felt like he would be trapped in limbo forever. Seeing no other way out, he killed himself. That’s not an uncommon feeling, although it’s a less common action. A 2006 study conducted by the University of California found that 60 percent of graduate students felt “overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time.” And 10 percent had thought about committing suicide in the past year. Tarter seemed so shattered that King feared she might be getting to that point.

  “Come with me,” he said. Holding her elbow, he marched them into Silk’s office. He looked from Silk to Tarter and from Tarter to Silk. He pointed at the thin line on Tarter’s paper where Silk’s signature meant the difference, to Tarter, between this life and a different one.

  “Sign,” he commanded Silk.

  He did.

  Now able to take a giant leap into the next phase of her life, Tarter and her friend Susan Lea, who also had an Ames postdoc, carpooled down I-880, across the 1.6-mile Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay, down the 101, and finally into Mountain View. They waved to the guard as they passed through NASA’s security gates. They breezed into their offices and deconstructed the universe.

  “We were hot shit,” Tarter says. “We were handling full-time research careers, complicated family lives, and other avocations. The world should just come to expect this from women.” Affirmative action, she thought back then, was totally unnecessary. Women were finally making it through the pipeline—in a funneled fashion, sure, but that would change. When the world saw how good they were, that world would say, “Oh, there’s no problem! Women are fine. Bring ’em on.”

  But she had forgotten the political context of her own upstream swim. When she was in high school, she leaned against her locker
listening to Sputnik beep beep beep Soviet dominance over the loudspeaker. The 1958 National Defense Education Act gave more than $1 billion to this teaching overhaul. And so Sputnik gave American scientists a chance they’d longed for: to rejigger curricula, shifting them toward basic research and adding innovations like hands-on labs (both the boon and bane of every high-schooler’s existence, still today). The United States was so far behind that if catching up meant some scientists had to be women, so be it.

  That attitude had withered by the time Tarter was a postdoc and the United States had climbed back toward the top. And while women of Tarter’s day were perhaps more supported in their secondary-school years, the bolstering didn’t yet apply (and still doesn’t) to later-year complications. During Tarter’s postdoc, the American Association of University Women was trying to remedy part of that problem. They invited her to come to Washington, DC, to attend a forum about a new policy. Congress was considering legislation to fund training for women who had left the scientific workforce to raise children but wanted to return. Tarter believed the cause was good, and she agreed to attend. But when a form arrived asking her who she would like to share her hotel room with, Tarter wrote back, “When somebody invites my husband to a meeting, they don’t ask him to share a room.”

  When she arrived in DC, she walked into a room of 80 women. Eighty female scientists. Seventy-nine other people who were also hot shit. She had never been in a room with that many women, period, let alone that many with PhDs. Like a convention of people who’d spent time in solitary confinement, the women bonded over their shared isolation: living in a world that didn’t quite know what to do with them—the geologists, she thought, had it the worst, as they were routinely denied fieldwork because the professors said their wives were jealous.