Margaret Dean: Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

THE SUNY MARITIME CAMPUS was surprisingly beautiful, on a spit of land between the Long Island Sound and the East River, under the Throgs Neck Bridge. Sprawling and well kept, the campus centered on the stately structure of the old fort, with newer buildings around the perimeter. On move-in day, I had only a footlocker full of clothes, a boom box, and cassette tapes of Journey, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead, and Supertramp. I found my room, a beige cube crammed with two single beds, two desks, and two dressers. My roommate was already there, unpacking. He introduced himself as Bob Kelman (the college did everything alphabetically, so Kelly and Kelman would room together and line up together for everything). Bob was—and still is—a friendly and outgoing person with a wry smile and a cutting sense of humor. We talked a bit as we unpacked, getting to know each other.

“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bob asked.

“I’m going to be an astronaut,” I said without a trace of a smile, looking him dead in the eye. I was trying to get used to taking the idea seriously myself. Bob narrowed his eyes and looked me up and down.

“Oh, yeah?” Bob asked.

“Yep,” I responded, deadpan.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I’m going to be an Indian chief.”

He laughed pretty hard at his own joke. At the time I thought he was being sort of a jerk, but once we became good friends this story of his reaction always made us laugh, especially once I actually became an astronaut.

As we unpacked our things, Bob and I talked about the indoctrination period about to begin and what exactly that would be like. I made a joke about getting our heads shaved.

“What?” Bob froze, a pile of books in his hand. “They’re not going to shave our heads. You’re joking, right?”

I told him I was pretty sure it was true. “It’s like a military indoctrination. Don’t they always shave your head in the military?”

Bob thought about it for a moment, then dismissed it. “Nah,” he said. “They would have told us. I mean, we would have had to sign something.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Bob and I were awakened at five in the morning by upperclassmen beating on pots and pans and garbage can lids and screaming in our faces. We had five minutes to go from a dead sleep to dressed in our PT gear, beds made, standing in the hall at attention. That morning, and every morning to follow, started with an hour of running and calisthenics. It was already hot and sticky even before dawn, and once the sun came up the heat was brutal.

Those first days, we memorized quotations and phrases connected to the school’s history. The first one we learned was the Sallyport Saying, which was inscribed over an archway in the old fort: “But men and officers must obey, no matter at what cost to their feelings, for obedience to orders, instant and unhesitating, is not only the life-blood of armies but the security of states; and the doctrine, that under any conditions whatever deliberate disobedience can be justified is treason to the commonwealth—Stonewall Jackson.” (Basically, “Obey orders.” If Jackson had been more succinct, my indoctrination would have been a lot easier.) I preferred a shorter, more compelling quotation: “The sea is selective, slow at recognition of effort and aptitude, but fast at sinking the unfit.” I still remember those quotations to this day.

That first morning, we were marched to another building, where we were taken into a small room one by one. Because we did everything in alphabetical order, I got to watch Bob’s reaction while I sat in the chair and had my head shaved. I didn’t mind about my hair, but I can still remember the look on Bob’s face, an expression of abject horror. I laughed so much that the guy with the clippers had to yell at me to hold still. A few minutes later, Bob’s black curls were on the floor along with mine.

The military discipline came pretty easily for me. I think I had been craving that kind of structure, and it was almost a relief to be told what to do and how to do it. Many of my classmates questioned the logic and fairness of every aspect of our training, tried to cut corners, and whined and complained. But I had started to figure out that I needed a clear challenge in order to apply myself. Schoolwork was still hard for me, but following directions gave me stability. I embraced it.

At the end of the indoctrination period, we had a ceremony to mark the achievement. My parents came, dressed in their Sunday best, as did my paternal grandparents. As we marched by in formation, I saw all of them in the stands looking proudly at me. I was surprised by how much it meant to me to have them there, to have given them something to be proud of. But I was also aware of how far I still had to go.

When the school year started in earnest, I was taking six classes. I was nearly starting over as a freshman because the curriculum for the program here was so different from the random handful of arts and sciences classes I’d taken in Maryland. I was taking calculus, physics, electrical engineering, seamanship, and military history. The curriculum was challenging even for my classmates who had excelled in high school, and I felt good about the fact that I was keeping my head above water.

When Labor Day weekend approached, I got a call from one of my high school buddies inviting me to a party at their frat house at Rutgers. I said I’d be there.

I called my brother. “Let’s go down to Rutgers and hang out with Pete Mathern at Sigma Pi,” I said.

“I can’t,” Mark said right away. “I have a test coming up.”

I spent a few minutes trying to talk him into it before he interrupted.

“Don’t you have some sort of test coming up, too? You’ve been in classes for a few weeks now.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “My first calculus exam is at the end of next week. But I’ll study for it after I get back. I’ll have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…” In my mind, I was already on the side of the Cross Bronx Expressway with my duffel slung over my shoulder, thumb stuck out.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Mark asked. “You’re in school. You need to absolutely ace this exam, and everything else, if you want to get caught up. You need to spend this entire weekend at your desk, doing every problem in every chapter this exam is going to cover.”

“Seriously?” I asked. “The entire long weekend?” This sounded insane to me.

“All weekend,” he said. “ And the whole coming week, too.”

There was a weird silence while I took this in. I didn’t appreciate being yelled at by my twin brother. It was tempting to tell myself he was just being a jerk and that I should ignore him. I came so close to deciding not to listen; the memory still unsettles me, like a memory of teetering on the edge of a cliff. As much as I wanted to go to the party, I knew somewhere in my mind that he was right and that he was offering me something important by being as blunt as he was. Mark had also started out as a distracted, indifferent high school student. But he had decided to pull himself together long before I did and had succeeded. I’d never asked him how he’d done it, but now he was trying to offer me the lesson of his experience. I reluctantly decided to listen.

I stayed in all weekend—hard as it was for me—and worked every problem in every chapter, just as he had suggested, until I could do them all. When I took the exam that Friday, I felt for the first time in my life as though I understood every question and thought I had answered them more or less correctly. It was a strange feeling. When we got our exams back the next week, there was a circled red 100 at the top of mine. I stared at it for the longest time, trying to reinforce to myself the sequence of events that had played out. I had earned a perfect score on a test for the first time in my life, and a math test to boot. This was how people got good grades. It was like a door had opened.