Small Moves
Photos/Sam Lackey.
By Sam Lackey
At first, in March, I contacted only those I normally contact: my family back in South Carolina, my closest friends, my current students, and colleagues. Then, as solitude filled the spring and spilled over into the summer, I cast a wider net: an old college roommate, a cousin in Massachusetts, a graduate school buddy now teaching in Macau. There can be little doubt that the modern age offers a dizzying array of methods for staying in touch with virtually every key player in our lives, but the sum total of all this communicative technology is still not enough, is it? Even in more quotidian, non-pandemic times, humans are inherently lonely and constantly yearning for contact of all kinds: benign or destructive, verbal or physical, here on earth, or somewhere out in the cosmos. Now, as the dread days of 2020 march on, that yearning for contact has become intensified and almost unbearable for many of us, but perhaps we would do well to reflect on some of the myriad meanings and uses of an especially versatile and beguiling word.
In July 1997, the film Contact debuted in theaters. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster and an impossibly young-looking Matthew McConaughey, the film is an adaptation of scientist Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name, and it tells the story of Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, an astronomer who spends her days at an observatory listening to radio emissions from space that could indicate the existence of extraterrestrial life. Initially, Ellie’s hopes for contact with aliens result in little but scorn from her boss and a lack of funding for her team, but eventually she hears the evidence she’s been waiting for: a signal consisting of a clear, deliberately-made sequence of prime numbers sent from the star system Vega. Many plot developments later, Ellie makes contact with the civilization that sent the message. After a celestial event for which she claims to have no words—“they should have sent a poet,” she says, awestruck—an alien being in the form of her long-dead father approaches her on a beautiful dreamscape beach drawn from her childhood imagination. Near the end of their conversation, the alien observes that humans are “an interesting species...an interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost—so cut off, so alone. Only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
Then he tells her that she must go home, that this was merely the first step for humankind: “In time, you’ll make others.” When she protests, the alien sets her at ease with the old saying her father employed back when she was a kid trying to contact faraway people on a HAM radio: “Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.” Then he kisses her on the cheek and forehead, and she takes one last look at the beauty around her before crashing back to earth.
I recall watching Contact for the first time on a VHS from Blockbuster at my sister’s apartment in Charleston, South Carolina during the winter of 1998. She had just given birth to her first child, and I held the baby girl on my lap while growing increasingly bored with the leisurely-paced film. It’s gotten better as I’ve aged, but as an adolescent I would have preferred something along the lines of Independence Day. The baby I held then is a grown-up woman now with a life of her own and a newborn child, her first.
To the scientists and engineers observing on earth, it appears that Ellie’s mission is a failure: her space vessel simply drops from its launching pad into the water beneath it and very little time elapses. But that is only because she is sucked through a wormhole and no longer bound by earth time; to her, the whole experience is lengthy and absorbing. Sometimes, when the solitude drives me to reflect on the past, I feel like those clueless guys in the control room: it all seems to be over in a second, and I’ve missed the bigger picture. The words from Ellie’s dad have stuck with me, though.
One of the most obvious conclusions one can draw from even the briefest survey of human history is that we do not always share the aliens’ belief in unity. For the majority of the Americas’ original inhabitants, first contact with Europeans led to mass extermination. In fact, when Europeans first entered into sustained contact with nearly any other civilization—in Africa, in Asia, in the South Pacific—they almost immediately set about devising schemes for exploitation and oppression. Indeed, the history of western societies is so replete with carnage and injustice that it is tempting to run from it all. It hurts to think about, and it might even make us angry or ashamed to contemplate our own potential complicities and connections. In Contact, the alien civilization from Vega embeds a video in their transmission: a television broadcast of Adolf Hitler introducing the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. This choice of video upsets the earthlings, many of whom take it as an indictment of the human race. The White House Chief of Staff is incredulous that Hitler of all people could become our “ambassador” to space, while the bellicose National Security Advisor is ready to encourage war on the aliens for their impertinence. But the scientists explain that these beings are likely unaware of the footage’s significance and merely selected it because the ‘36 Olympics was the first televised event with a broadcast signal strong enough to reach outer space.
As Ellie’s arrogant boss puts it, speaking over her before she can offer the explanation herself, this civilization capturing the broadcast and sending it back is a way of saying “Hello. We heard you.” As the viewer, I also hear “You are not alone.” Of course, the use of Hitler or some other historical villain would be much more deliberate and symbolic if the video was sent by an oppressed group of humans rather than a detached, curious alien race. Still, it seems to me that reckoning with or even just being reminded of the many bleak moments and bad figures in our national and global histories can be, among all the other things that it must be in our present moment, a method of reaching out, or maybe even a way of responding to a signal.
Contact, Nevada is an old mining boom town in the northeastern corner of the state near the Idaho border. Its origins date back to the 1880s, but an organized settlement did not emerge until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. By the town’s zenith around 1930, it could boast of two hotels, a jail, a schoolhouse, multiple saloons, and a post office. But by the ‘40s the boom times were over, and a fire then destroyed most of what was left of the town’s buildings and infrastructure. Through it all, some residents hung on and stayed put. Many of them were employed by the Nevada Highway Department, as the evocatively-named Contact Maintenance Station has long been located in the town.
Contact is slung along Highway 93 about an hour and a half north of Elko and an hour south of Twin Falls, Idaho. Just past the road sign announcing the place name and elevation, there is a turnout with a historical marker nearby detailing the history of the settlement. From this marker, a large and handsomely-made plaque sitting atop a neat, squarish platform of stones, I learned of great promise and eventual disappointment. Gold was discovered here, as was lead, silver, and zinc. But it was copper that made the place. Nearly six million pounds of it were extracted from the area’s mines, and the town’s name comes from the unique copper deposits formed from contact between granodiorite stock and carboniferous sedimentary rocks roughly 150 million years ago. Geological contact. In 1926, the Oregon Short Line was built, allowing the town’s many local mines to send their ore shipments to Salt Lake City by rail. This development seemed to promise a continuation of the town’s salad days, but the copper market soon grew depressed along with the rest of the country, and Contact went bust.
I saw no signs of its past glory, nor any sort of business district or anything that could be considered a town center—just a few clusters of homes, sheep, and the Highway Department outpost, which is partially hidden from view behind a couple of houses and a small grove of trees. Across the highway is the aforementioned turnout near the historical marker, with a bank of mailboxes fronting it. The turnout has the look of a place that was once destined for more: along the back there is a row of bricks, no longer fully intact, with other bits of random masonry laying about, as if further building was considered but later forgotten. At the end of the brick row are two steps rising up from the dusty ground that perhaps once led somewhere, but there is no trail or habitation beyond those steps now. I saw only scrub brush, a tree or two, and the mountains looming in the distance. Further up Highway 93 is a white boarded-up building with a collapsing aluminum awning in front and “Mineral Hot Springs” scrawled above it in fading blue letters. It has clearly not been in use for years and is at least several miles away from any other man-made structure, but stuck to the front door is a sign for a real estate company listing a number to call.
According to that historical plaque I read, Contact was once home to “miners, bootleggers, cowboys, and railroaders.” To my eyes they are all gone now, yet life goes on. Contact continues. Though obviously diminished in comparison to what it once was, the place did not register to me as a complete ghost town. When I approached the gate in front of the Contact Maintenance Station, I was greeted by two barking dogs and a less-than-pleased older gentleman in jeans and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. I saw official state vehicles parked at the facility, and as I continued to travel up 93, I saw scattered houses and trailers and multiple RVs and fences and a couple of large private ranches. I heard sheep bleating. A couple of miles south of town I saw Salmon Falls Creek—a shallow, stony affair—and spotted an empty beer bottle and what appeared to be abandoned socks on the sandy bank, detritus left behind by what I imagined to be recent swimmers. Indeed, people still live around here, and visiting did not make me sad for times gone by or old hopes dashed. After all, this is a place named for contact between prehistoric rocks and home to a Highway Department station said to “maintain” contact. There is a local history for anyone who cares to read it, and a turnout where travellers can park their cars, take a break, and walk up those steps to nowhere. Or to anywhere at all.
Be this as it may, I still wake up most mornings alone in the apartment I share with my tortoiseshell cat, wondering when my own meaningful contact will come (the valued and seemingly eternal companionship provided by Olivia, 15-years-old and still going strong, notwithstanding). Humans are understandably impatient when it comes to our own happiness, and it’s easy to despair—whether you’re sitting alone with Netflix, listening at night for radio transmissions from outer space, or driving through a town that initially appears to be dead and gone. But contact is persistent. People, animals, and apparently even rocks crave it, seek it out, and, in their own idiosyncratic fashions, generate it through sheer force of will and optimism. It will never truly stop. All we can do is find it in whatever shape and through whatever means we can. It might take a long time, and it might not be what we thought, but it’s out there. As an alien dad once said to Jodie Foster, “Small moves, Ellie. Small moves.”
Sam Lackey is an English Instructor at the Winnemucca campus of Great Basin College, where he teaches courses in composition and literature. Originally from the coast of South Carolina, Dr. Lackey specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 2018.
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