by Scott Kelly
We board the bus—the prime crew, our flight surgeons, the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center managers, and a few suit technicians. We sit on the side facing all the lights and clamoring people. I catch sight of my family one last time and give them a wave. The bus slowly pulls away, and they are gone.
Soon, we are moving, the motion lulling us into a contemplative trance. After a while, the bus slows, then comes to a stop well before the launchpad. We nod at one another, step off, and take up our positions. We’ve all undone the rubber-band seals that had been so carefully and publicly leak-checked just an hour before. I center myself in front of the right rear tire and reach into my Sokol suit. I don’t really have to pee, but it’s a tradition: When Yuri Gagarin was on his way to the launchpad for his historic first spaceflight, he asked to pull over—right about here—and peed on the right rear tire of the bus. Then he went to space and came back alive. So now we all must do the same. The tradition is so well respected that women space travelers bring a bottle of urine or water to splash on the tire rather than getting entirely out of their suits.
This ritual satisfactorily observed, we get back into the bus and resume the last leg of our journey. A few minutes later, the bus makes another stop to let the train pass that has just fueled our rocket. The bus door opens and an unexpected face appears: my brother.
This is a breach of quarantine: my brother, having been on a series of germ-infested planes from the United States to Moscow to Baikonur just yesterday, could be carrying all manner of terrible illnesses. Dr. No has been saying “Nyet” all week, and now, suddenly, he sees my brother and says “Da.” The Russians enforce the quarantine with an iron fist, then let my brother break it for sentimental reasons; they make a ritual of sealing up our suits, then let us open them to pee on a tire. At times, their inconsistencies drive me nuts, but this gesture, letting me see my brother again when I least expect to, means the world to me. Mark and I don’t exchange many words as we ride together for the few minutes out to the launchpad. Here we are, two boys from blue-collar New Jersey who somehow made it such a long way from home.
2
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE of the warm summer nights when my mother tried to settle Mark and me to sleep in our house on Mitchell Street in West Orange, New Jersey. It would still be light outside, and with the windows open the smell of honeysuckle drifted in along with the sounds of the neighborhood—older kids yelling, the thumps of basketballs against driveways, the rustling of breezes high in the trees, the faraway sound of traffic. I remember the feeling of drifting weightless between summer and sleep.
My brother and I were born in 1964. Members of our extended family on my father’s side lived all up and down our block, aunts and uncles and cousins. The town was separated by a hill. The more well-off lived “up the hill,” and we lived “down the hill,” though we wouldn’t know until later what that meant in socioeconomic terms. I remember waking early in the morning with my brother when we were small, maybe two years old. My parents were sleeping, so we were on our own. We got bored, figured out how to open the back door, and left the house to explore, two toddlers wandering the neighborhood. We made our way to a gas station, where we played in the grease until the owner found us. He knew where we belonged and stuck us back in the house without waking my parents. When my mother finally got up and came downstairs, she was perplexed by the grease all over us. Later, the owner came over and told her what had happened.
One afternoon when we were kindergarten students, my mother bent down to tell us she had an important responsibility for us. She held a white envelope in front of her as if it were a special prize. She said that we were to put the letter in a mailbox directly across the street from our house. She explained that because it wasn’t safe to cross in the middle of the street—we could be hit by a car—we were to walk up to the corner, cross the street there, walk back in this direction on the other side of the street, mail the letter, then retrace our steps all the way back home. We assured her we understood. We walked up to the corner, looked both ways, and crossed. We walked back toward our house on the mailbox side of the street, Mark boosted me up to pull down the heavy blue handle, and I proudly deposited the letter in the slot. Then we pondered our return trip.
“I’m not walking all the way back to the corner,” Mark announced. “I’m just going to cross the street right here.”
“Mom said we should cross at the corner,” I reminded him. “You’re going to get hit by a car.”
But Mark had made up his mind.
I set off back toward the corner myself, satisfied that I would be praised for having followed directions. (It occurs to me now that following directions that seemed arbitrary was good early training for being an astronaut.) I got to the corner, crossed, and turned back toward the house. The next thing I heard was car brakes squealing and the thump of a collision, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something the size and shape of a kid flying up into the air. The next moment, Mark sat, dazed, in the middle of the street, while the frantic driver fussed over him. Someone ran for our mother, an ambulance came and took them to the hospital, and I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with my uncle Joe, pondering the different choices Mark and I had made and the different results.
As our childhoods went on, we continued to take crazy risks. We both got hurt. We both got stitches so often we sometimes would have the stitches from the previous injury removed during the same visit new stitches were put in, but only Mark was ever admitted as an inpatient. I was always jealous of the attention he got when he was hospitalized. Mark got hit by the car, Mark broke his arm sliding down a handrail, Mark had appendicitis, Mark stepped on a broken glass bottle of worms and got blood poisoning, Mark was taken into the city for a series of tests to see whether he had bone cancer (he didn’t). We both played with BB guns recklessly, but only Mark got shot in the foot and then damaged by a botched surgery.
When we were about five, my parents bought a little vacation bungalow on the Jersey Shore, and some of my best memories from childhood are from that time. It wasn’t much more than a shack, with no heat, but we loved going there. My parents would get us up in the middle of the night, when my father got off work, and load us into the back of the family station wagon in our pajamas with our blankets, where we’d go back to sleep. I remember the feeling of being rocked by the car’s movement, looking at the telephone wires out the windows and the stars beyond them.
At the shore, in the mornings, Mark and I would ride our bikes to a place called Whitey’s, a boatyard where we bought bait for crabbing. We’d spend all day on the dock behind our bungalow, waiting to feel a crab nibble on the bait. We built rafts out of spare fence planks, on which we set sail from the lagoon house on the approach to Barnegat Bay. We had a kind of freedom my own children never had. I remember falling off the dock before I knew how to swim and sinking into the dark and murky water of the lagoon. I didn’t know what to do about it. I simply watched the bubbles of the last of my air rising. Then my father, who had seen my blond hair drifting just above the water, grabbed a handful and pulled me out.
—
MY FATHER WAS an alcoholic, and sometimes he would take off drinking for long periods of time. I remember one weekend at the Jersey Shore when he disappeared, leaving the three of us with no food and no money. My mother explained to us that he had taken our only car to a bar; somehow we got a ride over there to find him. It was a ramshackle place, set off in the marshes that lined Barnegat Bay, built of brown pressure-treated wood that had been bleached by the salt air. He refused to give us any money or to leave with us. I remember my mother’s face as she led us out of there. She was upset, but her face showed determination: she would get us through this. We didn’t eat that weekend, and I’ll never forget how that felt; it affects me to this day when I hear of people who don’t have enough to eat. The physical feeling of hunger is horrible, but much worse is the bottomlessness of not knowing when it will end.
When Mark and I
were in second grade, our parents sold the place on the Jersey Shore so they could buy a house “up the hill.” They wanted us to be able to go to a better public school. We moved onto a street lined with giant green oak trees, aptly named Greenwood Avenue. I remember the smell of springtime on that street, trees with new leaves and azalea bushes of pinks and purples. It’s odd that once we moved, we hardly ever saw our family on Mitchell Street again. My father was often not on speaking terms with various friends and family members, so it’s possible he had burned through all those relationships by the time we moved.
We may have lived up the hill now, but in socioeconomic terms we still belonged down the hill, sort of like the Beverly Hillbillies we saw on television. We stuck out among the wealthier Jewish families who lived nearby. Mark and I used to get into scrapes with neighbor kids—snowball fights, rock fights, apple fights with the crabapples that fell off the trees. We threw them at adult neighbors too, and we discovered that the grown man next door had a pretty good arm when he threw them back. We were like juvenile delinquents who never got arrested, probably because we were the children of a cop.
In the summertime, my father and his cop buddies would have cookouts in a nearby park, and those days were always fun—at least, at first—as we ate hot dogs and played softball. But as the day went on and the empty bottles and cans piled up, you’d have twenty drunk cops getting into arguments, things turning nasty. My father would finally load us into the car, blind drunk. As he went careening down Pleasant Valley Way, swerving into the opposite lane, we’d be screaming at him not to crash the car.
Sometimes my father’s cop friends would come over to our house for parties, and when they got drunk they would pull their guns out. Once, my father wanted to show off his new gun to his partner, so they decided to use a wooden sculpture I had just made in school as a target. I had brought it home and showed it proudly to my parents, and I was heartbroken that my dad would blast holes in my artwork.
My brother and I used to spend one night a week with our paternal grandparents, whom I loved, so my parents could go out drinking. My grandmother, Helen, was a heavy woman who was always impeccably dressed and always wore a wig. She was so pleased to see us every weekend, consistently kind and loving. She let us watch all the TV we wanted and sang us to sleep. My grandfather had served in the Navy in World War II on a destroyer in the Pacific, and it seemed odd to me that after having that kind of extraordinary experience he came home and worked in a mattress factory for the rest of his life. But he was content, had a great sense of humor, and he made a good life for himself and his family despite having only a sixth-grade education. In the mornings our grandparents always took us to the same diner for breakfast. After that we would spend hours visiting the flower gardens surrounding the historic mansions in northern New Jersey. That’s how I started to gain an appreciation for flowers, which would come back to me during my year in space, when I was tasked with bringing a crop of zinnias back from the brink of death. As much as I loved the breakfast and the flowers, I loved the routine, the way we did the same things in the same order, the stability of life with my grandparents.
When my brother and I were maybe nine or ten, my parents thought we didn’t need to be taken care of anymore when they went out drinking. They’d come home in the middle of the night, drunk and fighting. Kids sleep pretty hard, so the sound would first sneak into my dreams—the shouting and banging starting off low, maybe imaginary. But then it would gradually get louder, and Mark and I would eventually be lying awake, blinking in the dark, hearts pounding, listening to the yelling and screaming and things shattering against the walls.
Sometimes my mother would get scared enough of my father to leave the house with Mark and me. We’d run to my grandparents’ house several miles away. We’d bang on the door and wake them in the middle of the night, ask them to take us in. We always wound up going back to our house the next day. I remember coming home on those mornings, feeling like maybe it had all been a dream, but then seeing the things that had been broken scattered on the floor. Sometimes my brother and I would dedicate ourselves to fixing things—plates, furniture, knickknacks—in the hopes that fixing the damage would somehow put an end to the problem. It never did.
By the time I was a teenager, I had started trying to intervene in the violence between my parents. I never actually saw my father hit my mother, but I knew he did from the bruises I sometimes saw. I remember coming out to the living room one night in the middle of one of those fights and seeing my father, drunk, with his gun in his mouth, saying he was going to kill himself. My brother came out, too, and the two of us talked him into putting the gun down. It’s a wonder he survived those years.
Sometimes I think if my father hadn’t been a police officer, he would have been a criminal. He used to tell a story about when he was a young cop, answering a false alarm at a tire store in the middle of the night. His more experienced partner opened the trunk of the police car, took out a spare tire, and flung it through the window of the store. Then they loaded all the new tires they could fit into the police car, drove to his house, dumped the tires on the lawn, and went back to the store for another load. They called all the other police officers on duty to come over and get in on the looting. Eventually, they called the owner and told him, “Your tire store was robbed.”
In spite of my father’s behavior, I respected him, even idolized him in some ways when I was young. As bad as your parents may be at their worst, they are the only parents you’ll ever have. My dad was good-looking and charming when he was sober, and to me he seemed just like a TV detective, a larger-than-life figure hunting down bad guys and meting out justice. At the time, I didn’t realize he was probably just another blue-collar guy, getting through the week to get to the weekend, getting through the years to get to retirement. Some people seem to need conflict, thrive on it, and create conflict everywhere they go. I’ve heard it said that the children of conflict seekers are raised to have the emotional control their parents lack and then some—that fighters raise peacemakers.
My parents bought a series of boats, always in deplorable condition. We would take them out into the Atlantic Ocean, well past the horizon. We’d go out in any kind of weather, sometimes straight into a blinding fog. We had no navigation equipment other than a compass and no working radio. We’d fish all day, and when we felt it was time to come back in, we would try to follow the charter fishing boats back into the inlet. When we lost them, because those boats were invariably faster than ours, we’d head west until we saw land, then head up or down the coast until we saw something we recognized. Often, our crappy engine would break down and we would drift until we could flag down another boat, one with a radio, to call the Coast Guard to tow us in. Sometimes we would even be taking on water, in danger of sinking. Each time, we’d get home, congratulate ourselves for surviving, and head right back out again as soon as we could. It never occurred to us that we should stop taking these risks, because we always survived by our wits, always seemed to learn something from it.
—
WHEN I WAS about eleven, my mother decided to become a cop. She’d done catering or babysitting occasionally to make extra money throughout my childhood, and then she’d become a secretary, which was unrewarding and didn’t pay well. Now she wanted a career. The local police department had opened up the entrance exam to women, as many departments did in the 1970s. A lot of male police officers would have felt threatened by the thought of their wives trying to become officers as well. But not my father. To his credit, he encouraged her.
My mother studied for the civil service exam, which took time and effort. After she passed that, she had to take a physical fitness exam. She would have to meet all the same benchmarks as the men, and for a small woman, this was an enormous challenge. My father helped her set up an obstacle course in our backyard where she could practice every day. She ran around a set of cones carrying a toolbox filled with weights. She practiced dragging me a hundred feet across the b
ackyard (in place of the dummy she would have to drag in the real test).
The toughest part was the wall she would have to scale, seven feet four inches. Knowing that, my father built a practice wall a bit higher than the real one. At first, she couldn’t touch the top. It took her a long time before she was able to jump up and grab the top of the wall. Eventually she was able to pull herself up and get a leg over, and by honing this technique in practice sessions every day, she got to where she could scale that wall on the first try every time. The day of the test, she actually scaled the wall better than most of the men. She became one of very few women to pass the test, and that made a big impression on Mark and me: she had decided on a goal that seemed like it might not be possible, and she had achieved it through sheer force of determination and the support of people around her. I still hadn’t found a goal for myself that would give me that same kind of drive, but I had at least seen what that would look like.
My memories of school are largely of being trapped in a classroom, bored out of my mind and always wondering what was going on outside. For my entire K–12 education, I pretty much ignored my teachers and daydreamed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, just that it would be exceptional, and I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with history, grammar, or algebra. I couldn’t concentrate on any of it anyway. I was reading way behind grade level when I was seven, so my parents asked my maternal grandmother, who was a special education teacher, to evaluate me and try to help. After working with me for a few days, she gave up and declared me hopeless.