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HONORABLE MENTION - ENTRY FEE DIVISION - 2009 FFW ANNUAL ESSAY CONTEST
The Lady Vanishes … Into Big Science
Writing about major discoveries and events for big men on campus
By Cindy Howell
You don’t know me, but chances are good you’ve gotten a message from me,
read something I wrote or heard someone else using my words. NASA’s return
to flight after the Challenger accident? Voyager’s close encounter with
Neptune? Missions to Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun? Fixing the
Hubble Space Telescope? The ozone hole and global warming? Discovering
dark matter? I was there, taking notes, sending out updates.
For fifteen years, I wrote NASA speeches, congressional testimony, White
House briefings, commencement addresses, video scripts, museum displays,
press releases, photo captions, government websites, newsletter blurbs,
and yes, even public service announcements printed on milk cartons. At
turns, my words were lofty, compelling, persuasive, empowering, evocative,
factual, terse, informative, chatty, and homespun. And they were almost
entirely invisible to the naked eye.
My writing traveled as undetectable radiation emitted from an unseen
source -- one whose presence can only be inferred from its gravitational
effects on more visible stars. No byline. No publication record, abstract
or citation.
I wrote for and to many famous ‘big men’: Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau,
Freeman Dyson, Presidents and Vice-Presidents, members of Congress, chief
scientists, Nobel laureates and runners-up, nightly news anchors, leading
lights among our nation’s science elite, and many, many distinguished
guests. Visible luminaries, they accounted for the upper one percent of
matter in the observable universe – the bright and glowing equivalent of
writers to top the New York Times bestseller list. I was certainly never
a star in their presence. No, like so many other writers, I was part of
the universe’s 99% of remaining mass – dark matter. It was liberating.
While the public charted the stars’ moves, reported on their positions,
marked their ascents and descents, I was free to move about the cabin. I
circulated in and through a world of big ideas, global truths, important
discoveries, breaking news – to capture moments, play with words, and
craft simple messages headed for audiences outside that rarified
atmosphere. It was heady stuff.
My writing career kept me out of the limelight, but occasionally my
insignificant motion could be detected in the lights from the stage.
My favorite memory is lunch with Freeman Dyson. NASA’s elite hosted a
meal to honor the towering figure in modern science and philosophy --
the headliner in their Distinguished Lecturer Series. The equivalent of
a shabby English governess in a private men’s club, I found myself
seated at Dyson’s right for the exclusive gathering held in a hot,
stuffy Chinese restaurant. My fellow diners had toiled 30 years and
more at their stratospheric endeavors, racking up impressive publication
records to earn a place at lunch. A minor curiosity to the others, I’d
earned a seat through my own much more subtle gravitational pull, having
had the temerity to actually think of inviting the giant most believed
unapproachable. Once Dyson inscribed my old copy of Disturbing the
Universe with his idiosyncratic signature, I happily receded into the
shadows. Slurping my hot and sour soup noiselessly, I sat in the
darkened restaurant and contentedly watched seven grown men carry on
like teenage girls at a Jonas Brothers concert, wishing they’d brought
their own autograph books.
I was satisfied to float like interstellar flotsam between gas giants,
attending public conferences, science symposia, and social functions.
Without any pride of authorship or fear of literary criticism, my
writing was an unfettered expression of ideas, a series of messages
tapped out for audiences both known and unknown. I loved putting words
into the actors’ mouths from my prompter’s box off stage. When my
writing was at its best, everyone looked at the puppet and no one
noticed the strings.
Like Hitchcock’s title character, the unremarkable Miss Floy in The
Lady Vanishes, I hid my words in plain sight, encoding them into songs
performed and delivered by other voices. And as the story goes, despite
the occasional roadblock those messages managed to reach their final
destination. In the last scene you can still distinctly make out the
melody.
Any writer disappears in a world traveling 186,000,000 miles per
second, expanding at an even faster rate. And even the most notable
authors are eclipsed by the glow of epic human achievements. But once
your writing is out there, if your message is true it may travel
through time and space indefinitely.
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