How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (25 page)

After
cat
, Lilah next learned
flower
. Flowers (scrunch up nose as if sniffing) were everywhere, first only outside on plants, but soon she generalized to flowers on her clothes or her shoes, or in pictures in books and magazines. I wanted to hook up wires and do experiments and comparisons and studies to understand it all.

“You want to do what?” Diane would say.

But, really, who wouldn’t? In our own house the most extraordinary thing in the universe was taking place, and it was passing by unexamined, unstudied.

“There will be no Lilah experiments,” Diane declared.

I know, I know. I wouldn’t
really
do it. I didn’t
really
want to hook up those wires. Mostly I just wanted to hold Lilah tight as she made signs to the world around her, and I wanted to tell her: You are the most extraordinary thing in the universe.

We had recently bought a new house. For the first few years of our marriage and the first six months of Lilah’s life, we had lived in a diminutive Spanish-style bungalow in a typically densely packed part of suburban Pasadena that I had bought years earlier. I loved my little bungalow. It was the house where I first cooked dinner for Diane. When Diane had moved in, I had warned her: I love this place and never want to move.

But the house had almost no sky.

I biked home at night through lit streets, car headlights glaring everywhere. I thought back to the days of living in the cabin and walking the trail by the light of the moon or stars; I thought back even earlier to the days of living on a tiny sailboat in the San Francisco Bay and staring up at the whole sky before finally closing the hatch for the night. From my bungalow, I could sit in the hot tub in the backyard and look up and see slivers of sky.
Sometimes I could see the Big Dipper, sometimes Cassiopeia. But in my tiny night-sky universe, I never once saw a planet.

When Diane suggested that we probably needed to move to a bigger house to fit our now-expanded family, I reluctantly agreed. Maybe it was time. I grudgingly went to look at a few places with her. Nothing felt as perfect as our happy little bungalow. Then one day, with no expectations, we stumbled onto a house perched on top of a massive one-hundred-thousand-year-old landslide. Almost nobody knew it was a landslide, but I had made my geology students write about it nearly a year earlier. How could I not have fallen in love with the house? We bought it three days later and moved in the following month.

Living on a landslide has its advantages. We have a steep canyon in our backyard, because canyons are easily formed in rubble. We have landscaping boulders of every conceivable size and composition, and if we ever have the need for more, we just dig a foot underground to see what else the landslide brought down. The landslide makes a minor wildlife corridor, so we have an abundance of birds, an occasional bobcat, and even once a black bear.

For me, though, the best benefit of perching on the tip of the tongue of a landslide with the mountains rising to the north of you is that you have an uninterrupted view to the south. And if you go outside at night and look to the south, you get to see the spectacular constellations. You get to see Orion and Taurus and Scorpius. You get to see the blue of Sirius, the red of Betelgeuse. And best of all, you get to see the planets.

Lilah and I have spent the years since we’ve moved to our new house tracking Jupiter and Saturn across the sky, watching Venus set into the Pacific Ocean, seeing how red Mars looks in comparison to the pale stars. But more than anything else, we’ve watched the moon.

When we first moved into the new house, Lilah was still learning new word signs. One of her favorite combinations translated something like this: There is a light; turn it on (hand held overhead, first balled momentarily, fingers suddenly flying open to show you what to do). If you complied, she would even say “thank you” (finger tapping heart).

One spring night, the nine-month-old Lilah and I sat outside wrapped in blankets staring up at the moon, which was nearing full. A rollicking storm had been through for the past few days, revealing to us all of the places where our new house flooded. But the rain had stopped, and between the thick black clouds covering about half the sky we could see the brightest stars and the bright full moon, which had found itself in a large hole in the clouds and was shining down on the still wet and now sparkling nighttime landscape. I told Lilah about night and the moon and the rain. We heard coyotes across the canyon, and I told her about them, too (and about why the kitties were now going to be solely indoor kitties).

And then the moon ducked behind one of the thick clouds, and everything got dark.

Lilah looked around, looked up to where the moon used to be, and looked at me. Then she held her fist up in the air and flung her fingers open. She looked at me expectantly.

The cloud passed. The moon came back out and once again brightened the landscape.

Lilah smiled at me and tapped her heart.

•   •   •

I have an extremely vivid memory of the day that summer, a few weeks before her first birthday, when Lilah really learned to walk. She had previously taken a few halting steps before tumbling, or she had scooted along while holding a wall, but one day
she instantly went from easily manageable (she would not have gone too far if I had looked away for sixty seconds) to fast, unpredictable, and apt to disappear in seconds. A day earlier, while trying to throw a friend in the swimming pool, I had broken my ankle, and I was now in a cast and on crutches. The fact that I had to take a few steps from the kitchen counter to the refrigerator was something I now mourned. But the worst thing was that Lilah was suddenly up and running just as I was slow on my crutches. The only way I could keep up was to crawl. So, that day, Lilah and I traded. She now walked. I now crawled. I had many theories about the precise symbolism of that transition, and all of the theories were ominous.

Lilah made up a sign-language symbol for me walking on crutches (two hands held in front of her, pointer fingers moving up and down), which I count as the moment when she first learned to mock me. I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, enamored of the mocking.

Six days later, still on crutches, I headed to Italy to give a talk at an international conference on the Kuiper belt. We talked about the formation of the Kuiper belt, the surfaces and atmospheres of the objects there, and what they might be made of, but the question of what to call them never came up. But at night, when we went to little cafés (the closest of which was precisely 1,032 crutch-steps away, which felt to me like the distance from Earth to Sedna) to drink prosecco and watch the World Cup soccer games, everyone wanted to speculate about Pluto and Xena and planets. I tried out my arguments about ten planets and about continents. The scientists balked. They didn’t like the idea that the definition of
planet
would include no science.

“So you think everything round should be a planet? You think that there should be two hundred planets?” I asked, assuming that that was going to be the obvious response.

“Of course not!” they responded. Wasn’t it obvious that there were only eight planets?

I thought the other astronomers were being naïve. It’s easy to sit inside the scientific bubble and make pronouncements, but they were forgetting how much of an impact this decision was going to have on the outside world. No one was going to let Pluto be killed, were they? But still, it was interesting. Within the field of people who studied the Kuiper belt for a living—people who had devoted their careers to the outer solar system and its many, many denizens—it was almost not worth having the conversation. Of
course
Xena was not a planet. And Pluto likewise. Hadn’t we settled that question 150 years ago when the asteroids became asteroids?

Naïve, I thought. I remembered back to the days when I used to think the exact same thing. Wouldn’t it be nice to just think about science and not worry about its impact on culture? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just say the thing that makes the most sense?

A week after I got home, my phone rang, and out of the blue I was told by a member of a previously unknown IAU committee (the third planet committee? The fifth committee? I couldn’t keep track) that Xena was to be a planet.

He couldn’t reveal the details of the decision on the definition of the word
planet
, but he wanted to prepare me for the onslaught of publicity that would surely follow. As I was the only living discoverer of a planet, he thought it best that I stay humble.

Humble? I thought, and chuckled to myself. My one-year-old daughter had recently learned to mock me in a sign language she had made up herself.

While he had not meant to reveal details to me, he already had. The “only living discoverer” could mean only one thing. If
the IAU was going to pick the two-hundred-planet definition, there would have been perhaps a dozen living planet discoverers. If there was only one, it was clear that the IAU had decided on the ten-planet definition that I had come to terms with myself. Xena was to top off an elite list.

“Do you think the rest of the astronomers will go along with this?” I asked.

I was quickly assured that they would. “I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past few days. This is going to sail through the vote process.”

•   •   •

I went home that night and told Diane. We opened a bottle of champagne and drank to the amazing fact that I had discovered a planet.
A planet. I had discovered a planet!
After all of this time, Xena was officially going to be a planet, and I was officially going to be the only person alive who had found a planet.

Just then, Lilah walked around the corner from where she had been playing, saw the crutches under my arms, and immediately stuck out her hands and waggled her pointer fingers.

Okay, so I was slow, and I still had to crawl to be as fast as my one-year-old daughter. But I had found a planet. No one could take that away from me.

Living on the outskirts of Los Angeles with a clean sweep of the sky to the south of us, we have a very nice view of the standard flight path for arrivals and departures at LAX. Those things moving through the daytime sky that turned into lights brighter even than the stars at night held a special fascination for Lilah. Her sign-language symbol for airplane (arm held aloft with hand parallel to the ground) got much use. First it was just for those little moving dots in the sky, then it was for pictures of airplanes in books, and then, one very exciting day when Lilah was thirteen months old, it was for an airplane that she actually got to fly in. I spent the whole morning trying to prepare her for the mental transition:

“Look! Airplanes in the sky!” I said, as we got close to LAX.

“Look! The airplanes are driving around on the ground!” as we were moving through the airport.

“Look! That is the tunnel people take to get
on
to the airplane!” as we were at the gate.

“Look! We’re now inside!” as we sat down.

For what I had assumed would be a difficult cognitive leap, Lilah took it all in stride. Of course we’re inside the airplane and now flying in the sky, Daddy. What else would we be doing?

We were taking our first family vacation, two weeks on Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands, northwest of Seattle. Diane had lived on Orcas Island for her high school years, and her mother still lived there. It was the first place Diane and I had ever gone together on an official vacation (Hawaii together? That was just work). And now we were bringing our daughter there. Diane has an affinity for the annual Library Fair, where used books get sold on a Saturday morning in August at the otherwise sleepy farmers’ market. For reasons that I, as a non–native islander, can never fully understand, the Library Fair is an unspoken homecoming day; previous island inhabitants show up, as if by accident, to stroll around on Saturday morning, peruse the used books, and snack on barbecued oysters.

I love the Library Fair and—out of sheer exuberance—always buy used books that I would not otherwise even glance at. And then I sit on Diane’s mother’s porch on a midsummer twilight lasting until well past ten o’clock and read.

But during this very first family vacation with Lilah, I had no opportunity to relax and read on the porch. My vacation coincided with the once-every-three-years meeting of the International Astronomical Union, this year in Prague. And at this meeting, for the first time in history, they were finally going to vote on the definition of the word
planet
.

Why wasn’t I there? Why was I vacationing half a world away from where the astronomical action was?

It’s a good question.

There are four answers to that question. First, I love the Library
Fair. Second, it was our first family vacation. Third, no one—not even the astronomers who found themselves in Prague—had been warned that the vote about planets was imminent. I admit, had I known ahead of time that this vote was going to take place, I might have felt obligated to be there rather than to abscond to a small island in the Pacific Northwest. Luckily, I didn’t know. Fourth, and probably most important, I am not a member of the International Astronomical Union. I would have been ineligible to vote. I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t get myself to fill out the paperwork to join. It’s all because of Question 12 on the form. After the form asks for your academic qualifications and awards, both of which I can handle, it then quizzes you about your miscellaneous special distinctions. And then I stop. Well, I think, I’m no William Herschel (the discoverer of Uranus, which is indisputably a planet). I’m no Adams or Leverrier or even Johann Galle. (Adams and Leverrier predicted the existence of Neptune, and Galle confirmed it.) Really, I wonder, do I have
any
special distinctions? And each time I get to that spot in the application, I have to stop and put down my pen. There was no reason to bother going to the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague because I would not have been let in the doors.