Orbits, Collisions, and Ricochets by Amethyst Loscocco

My father and I gazed at the comet searing the night horizon. As he sometimes did after dinner, he had pulled out a small army-green telescope bought at a yard sale and placed it on top of our blue station wagon, where it stood at an easy height for his lanky six-and-a-half feet. At nine years old, I had to stand on an overturned five-gallon bucket to reach it.

Usually, he would quietly look through the eyepiece, making small adjustments with an occasional sigh. Then he would give me a chance to look, pointing out any planets that happened to be visible that night.

“See Venus right above the horizon? It’s much brighter than a star.” Or, “That over there would be Saturn. You can just barely make out the rings. Can you see them?”

In the spring of 1997, the telescope often stood neglected, because a comet blazed like a slow-moving firework across the sky, visible to the naked eye. High above us, dirty ice fractured and splintered, streaming behind the comet as it sped 100,000 miles per hour toward the sun.

Billions of eyes turned skyward to marvel at comet Hale-Bopp, later dubbed the Great Comet of 1997. The comet was visible for eighteen months between 1996 and 1997. A comet is frozen solid when it is far from the sun. But as it approaches, the crust heats and cracks, emitting dust and ice plumes to form a halo-like corona around the frozen nucleus. The larger the nucleus, the more luminous the comet. Hale-Bopp’s brilliance could be seen at dusk, even from cities with light pollution. It birthed a new generation of astronomers, and, as with previous great comets, it inspired awe and fear and longing.

My father wasn’t an astronomer. He was a potter. He gleaned facts about cosmic phenomena from the dusty National Geographic magazines piled up in the back of his pottery shop and the NPR reports he listened to while up to his elbows in clay.

“See how it has two tails?” my father pointed. “One of dust and one of gas.”

He explained that the slightly arced, pale-yellow tail on the bottom was made of billions and billions of tiny dust particles made visible by the sun. The straighter, blue-tinted tail was made of gas molecules ionized by solar radiation. The tails pointed away from the sun, blown back by the solar wind in a spectacular display.

If you saw Hale-Bopp, the image is probably singed in your memory, like the glow behind your eyelids after looking at the sun. Maybe you were four years old, balanced on your mother’s hip as she pointed to the horizon. Maybe you saw it through an airplane window on a flight to a place you’d never been, or you looked up at it when you snuck out into the backyard at night to smoke weed as a teenager. Maybe you were a long-haul trucker, and you pulled over in the middle of the country where everything was flat and there were no lights. You paused. The comet burned so bright, you felt as if you could reach out and touch it.

We were all sky watchers then. Separated from the comet by 120 million miles, we were connected by awe, by inevitability, by the inescapable pull of gravity.

As the comet faded, so did my father’s presence in my life.

Comets are like time capsules from the violent dawn of our solar system. About 4.6 billion years ago, a stellar explosion in a nebula—a ginormous cloud of gas and dust—caused part of the cloud to collapse into a condensed spinning disc. Intense heat and gravity at the center of the disc smashed together hydrogen atoms, turning them into helium and igniting in nuclear fusion. The sun was born.

In a period of epic tumult, hot gases churned and dust flash-heated into molten rock, crashing, clumping, and coalescing into the first asteroids, planetoids, and then planets. The rocky planets formed closer to the sun’s warmth, and the gaseous planets like Jupiter formed farther out. At the same time, mighty Jupiter flung chunks of rock and ice out to the edges of the solar system, where they remain today as a reservoir of thousands of icy comets. Tugged by gravity, many of these comets periodically orbit back toward the sun.

My father grew up on the West Coast, and my mother on the East. Each, in their own way, yearned to break free from their upbringing, looking for freedom, spirit, and connection. They met in New Mexico, often nicknamed the land of enchantment, a place where art and alternative lifestyles thrived, and the land and sky were palpable entities. But when I asked each of my parents how they met, neither version of their story was enchanting.

My father said they met at a party he wasn’t planning on going to. He had to kill his chickens because they wouldn’t survive the winter snow. After slitting a few of their throats, the knife slipped, and he cut his finger. “Really cut the shit out of it,” he said. At the time he was making jewelry and selling it at craft fairs, and an injury meant he wouldn’t be able to make enough for the big fair coming up soon. He was so angry about it that he stuffed all the chickens, both live and dead, into a burlap sack and left them in the forest for the coyotes. Then he went to the party where he met my mother. “We hit it off,” was all he said about that.

My mother said sometime later her car broke down. When she didn’t have enough money to pay the mechanic, he told her she could pay in “other ways.” Incensed, she walked away. My father was one of the few people she knew in the tiny mountain village of Vallecitos, so she asked him if she could borrow money to pay the “sleaze bag” mechanic. He lent her the money, and they got together shortly after. 

At three years old, their second child, my older brother, was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. When my parents realized they would need to settle down to care for him, they decided they also wanted to adopt. Over the course of the next few years, they adopted five children: one newborn, and four biological siblings aged two, three, five, and eight. They had each experienced trauma in their birth family and the foster care system that, for some of them, had a lasting impact on their mental health that my parents weren’t equipped to deal with alone. 

I’m the youngest of my parents’ three biological children, the third youngest in the group of us eight. I have no memory of a time when I didn’t have seven siblings, many close to my age. There was always someone to play elaborate make-believe games with, someone crying, someone to get in trouble with, and someone in trouble.

When I was four, my parents bought a sixteen-acre farm in the desert, outside of the small town of Truth or Consequences. They wanted fields for their eight kids to run in, cottonwood trees to climb, and food planted by their own hands. My father built a house and planted apple, pear, cherry, and apricot trees. He plowed the fields and sowed corn, squash, and beans. As kids, we swung from rope swings hung from a giant elm tree and got sick from eating unripe fruit from the orchard. We built forts from leftover construction materials and played restaurant with tin cans and mud. When my father asked us to weed the garden, we grumbled because the garden was an entire field. We wanted to explore the trails left by animals on the hillsides, walk the slippery-rocked creek and catch minnows, see if the old outhouse was haunted or if a raccoon had fallen in. 

The two-story adobe house my father built had red brick floors and high ceilings of knotted pine. There was a two-story glass atrium with banana trees and cacti. Enormous floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the orchard and fields. The house had ten doors to the outside, one of which led to nowhere—a drop from the second floor. Maybe even as he built it, he was thinking of exits, of escape. That house could not hold onto everyone. The unstable mix of elements, personalities, and needs never found equilibrium. Some of my siblings stayed; some left in explosive outbursts of yelling and trails of broken things. That farm was like Jupiter, with immense gravity pulling ten people together and spinning them with such speed and ferocity, they collided and ricocheted far out and out and out, to California, to Colorado, to Louisiana.

To escape, I often slipped into other worlds and onto other planets by reading books, as many as I could get my hands on. Mostly I read fantasy that featured magic and adventure, and always had a child—The Chosen One—who escaped a harsh home life and ultimately saved the world from the forces of darkness. The year of the comet, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer after reading a biography about Maria Mitchell, a professional astronomer and professor in a time when few women existed in the field. In 1847, she discovered a comet, later named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” in her honor. 

I longed to discover my own comet. Sometimes, after washing the dinner dishes, I would lie on the dirt driveway and stare up at the sequined night sky. Far out in the countryside, there were no interfering city lights, just me, the enduring ribbon of the Milky Way, and the galactic tides of my dreams. I was sure somewhere out there, far, far away, there was a great destiny for me, as well as a comet speeding through space with my name on it.

A comet is named after the person or observatory that discovered it first. Sometimes the credit is shared, as was the case with Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp who independently discovered Hale-Bopp as it passed between Saturn and Jupiter on July 23, 1995. A comet’s name also includes a code with the year of discovery, and either a letter “C” designating a non-periodic orbit around the sun, or a “P” for a periodic orbit, meaning we can count on it to appear again within the next century. Halley’s comet, perhaps the most well-known periodic comet, makes an appearance every 76 years. Hale-Bopp C/1995 can’t be relied upon to return for thousands of years, if it returns at all. Comets with long, unpredictable orbits can easily veer off into interstellar space, leaving us wondering where they went.

On April 1, 1997, Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to the sun, known as its perihelion, then sped around the sun with such speed that it was flung back out, deep into space. It wobbled as it passed the mighty mass of Jupiter but sprang free. Then it faded into the distance, with no plans to return until the year 4385.

The day my father left, I watched him load his dresser—each drawer pulled out and still full of his clothes—into the back of his white truck. I was ten years old and didn’t know why he was suddenly choosing to leave. I didn’t know he was unhappy with the life he’d built, or that he insisted he’d never wanted to adopt so many kids. I didn’t know he was testing other futures with other women, although I soon caught on. All I knew was that he would live in a different house, thirty minutes away, and we would visit him one weekend a month. 

Perhaps my father said something reassuring before he drove away. Then again, he was never one to get sentimental, so it’s more likely he just said, “See ya later.” 

Later that day, I sat alone in my parents’ bedroom staring at the dust on the floor where the dresser had sat for years. The intense desert sun had faded the pale lavender wall, and the dresser’s absence exposed a darker rectangle. I was captivated by the newly empty space and didn’t yet understand the weight of absence. In my experience, solely informed by fantasy books, losing a parent meant a quest was ahead, a hero’s journey. Something exciting was finally happening. At the very least, I thought it would be fun to live in two houses. 

By this time, most of my older siblings had moved out, and several others were in group home facilities where they could get more care than my mother alone could provide. All that remained were three pre-teen girls and my sick brother who lay in a hospital bed in our living room, unable to walk, talk, or feed himself. We all knew he was dying.

My mother explained to each of us what it meant for parents to get divorced. She read us children’s books written to help cope with a changing family and navigate all the contradictory feelings. Things might get difficult, she said, but parents will still be parents and try to do the right thing. 

I was wrong that living in two households would be an exciting adventure. She was wrong that parents will always try to do the right thing. 

While my mother was caring for my dying brother, taking kids to mental healthcare appointments two hours away, and managing her business and the farm, my father tried to take the house, tried to take us, tried to avoid paying child support. When that failed, he resorted to taking tools, farming equipment, and a hot tub he never used again because that wasn’t the point. He didn’t just want to leave my mother; he wanted to leave her with nothing.

He often came by unannounced to take things that “belonged to him.” On one of these visits, he got back into the driver’s seat of his loaded van, clutching a large roll of thick industrial rope he planned to take. My mother pleaded with him to stop. She grasped the rope, trying to take it back. I watched, wanting to stop it but unable to move. He started to drive away while my mother still held the rope.

I didn’t understand how someone who loved me would act this way. I didn’t understand how I loved someone who would act this way.

Another day, he returned for a stack of corrugated metal that had sat beside the barn for years. My mother said the metal panels didn’t belong to him because they were the doors to the barn, and this was not his land anymore. He came anyway, along with three men and a large flatbed truck. 

Without consulting my mother, my two sisters and I climbed on top of the four-foot-high stack of metal panels.

“Get off,” he told us. “This has nothing to do with you guys.” 

“It does too,” we said. “These aren’t yours to take.”

“I don’t have time for your mother’s bullshit,” he said. “Move. Now.”

We didn’t say anything, just sat there cross-legged, holding hands, hearts pounding. We’d recently watched documentaries about the civil rights movement and the power of nonviolent protest. We were primed to stand up against injustice in the world and this seemed like a good time to start.

“Move!” he repeated.

The men were silent, hands in their pockets, staring at their boots. With them standing there, he couldn’t yell or drag us off. His eyes were steely gray, fuming. Eventually he had no choice but to leave. I feared he would blame our mother for our behavior, as he frequently did, but I knew we had to stop this constant violation. I didn’t understand that such a public humiliation by a few girls could only fuel the fire. I hoped he would see us, see what we needed, but he only saw that we stood together.

My mother eventually got a restraining order. For the first time, we locked the ten doors, the sheds, and the gates.

On the last farm down a long, dirt road, lived my mother and her last three daughters, trying to maintain a sixteen-acre farm. The good ol’ boys watched us from their dust-covered pick-up trucks, spitting tobacco, and speculating on how we would cope. Some offered to take the farm off my mother’s hands for a pittance. She refused.

Without my father, my sisters and I—all scrawny pre-teen and barely teen girls—learned how to irrigate the alfalfa fields. We mowed the 100-tree fruit orchard with a single small lawn mower because he had taken the tractor. We learned how to stucco the cracks woodpeckers had made in the house, exposing pale adobe. We fixed broken faucets and repaired fallen fences. When the Southwest monsoons came, the arroyos flooded, cutting rocky gullies across the dirt roads. We dug trenches to redirect the muddy torrents of water. Our hands blistered, then calloused. Our knees were always bruised. 

I rarely had time to look up at the stars, more distant than ever, and less real than the demands of the land. My only dream was to leave, to escape this giant house that felt haunted by reneged promises. We all agreed we wanted to move away. But those ten doors that so effectively let everyone else out somehow locked the last of us in. It took six years to sell that farm, that oasis in the desert.

When I stood beside my father and marveled at the streaming tails and steady progress of Hale-Bopp, I thought him a stable force in my life. But stability is no more a prerequisite for parenthood than it is for the formation of planets. For my stability, at fourteen years old, I cut contact with my father. We didn’t talk for five years.

Hale-Bopp traveled an immense distance, pulled from the solar system’s outer reaches, from the Oort cloud where thousands of comets live. The Oort cloud is a spherical shell of rock debris and ice chunks surrounding the solar system. It lies at the edge of the sun’s gravitational pull, a desperately cold and utterly silent place where the sun is just another far-off star. The distance is so great that miles are meaningless, and scientists use Astronomical Units (AU) instead. One AU (93 million miles) equals the distance between the earth and the sun. The Oort cloud’s inner edge is around 2,000 AU from the sun, and the outer edge—where the sun’s gravity is no greater than that of the next closest star—is approximately 100,000 AU. Or, if you use time for scale, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, won’t reach the outer edge of the Oort cloud for another 30,000 years.

For years I felt betrayed by the loss of a future with two parents for support, a future with a father. Sometimes I would walk the empty dirt roads, out into the chaparral-scented desert. I would cry. I would scream where no one could hear but the rattlesnakes and the coyotes. Sometimes I wrote heartsick poetry, trying to explain what happened, why I made the choice to sever our bond. The words I wrote got progressively angrier and darker. Nothing erased the loss. I felt pulled apart. Pieces of myself and my possible futures shattered off, trailing behind me.

Once, when no one was home, I got some matches and a picture of my father. He still had his long hair, but with a mustache instead of the full beard I grew up with. His smile was more of a grimace, like he was putting up with whoever took the picture, maybe me, maybe one of my sisters, probably on one of those cheap disposable cameras we treasured long before we had phones.

I lit a match and held it to a corner of the photograph. It ignited, curling at the edges. The glossy veneer bubbled, bleeding brown and green chemicals. I set the picture on a blue ceramic plate that my father had made. The flames engulfed it. 

At a yard sale, we sold my father’s old green telescope. A woman who lived in a trailer park by a gas station bought it for five dollars. That night, an unoccupied pickup truck rolled into a large propane tank at the gas station, triggering a massive explosion that sent flames a hundred feet into the air and broke windows for miles around. The trailer park burned, along with the telescope.

The last time Hale-Bopp passed by Earth, 4,200 years ago, the Egyptian pyramids were brand new. The Greek and then Roman Empires were yet to rise and conquer. People described these sky anomalies as sky snakes, stars with hair, or flaming swords. The word comet wouldn’t exist until much later, derived from the Greek komētēs, which literally means long hair.

Cultures worldwide associated their sudden appearance as divine omens that foretold something momentous, often a cataclysm, a catastrophe, or some end—maybe the end. People have associated comets with plagues, natural disasters, and the deaths of leaders like Julius Caesar. But occasionally, comets are paired with victories. In 1066, William the Conqueror believed Halley’s comet heralded his success in the Norman conquest of England. But, perhaps the defeated king of England saw it as an ill omen. There is always an event to connect and attach undue significance.

My father and I reconnected so slowly, so tentatively, that I barely remember how it happened. One Christmas, he bought my two sisters and me a subscription to National Geographic, misspelling my sister’s name. We were not impressed. My oldest brother, who hadn’t experienced the traumatic events surrounding the divorce, still talked to my father. My brother insisted we should talk to him, that he asked about us all the time, that he was still our father no matter what had happened. My father started calling once a year, then twice, sometimes on birthdays or holidays. We passed the phone from hand to hand with trepidation and the occasional eye roll.

I was ambivalent about the value of bringing this now stranger back into my life, as if nothing had happened. How do you speak after years of silence? Talking about the present was easier than talking about childhood, or about the moments he had missed—the birthdays, the graduations, the boyfriends, the depression, the surgeries, the struggles of our single mother to make ends meet, the tiny two-bedroom apartment four of us squished into once we moved to California after a white-knuckled drive in a U-Haul one rainy Christmas. What can a daughter say to a father she doesn’t know? 

Almost two decades have passed now, and my father calls me every month.

“I’m thinking of retiring,” he says one day. He’s been saying this for years, and I don’t believe him. His fingernails will always have clay or soil underneath them. He will always have a garden that can feed a family of ten but is now only for two. He is a maker who built two houses, planted trees, created pottery glazes the colors of a stellar nebula, built my family and then scrapped it like a cup that had slumped sideways on the potter’s wheel.

He talks about coming to San Francisco to visit soon. My brother and youngest sister live here, too. I tell him we’re thinking of taking a road trip to New Mexico to visit him sometime. But this is also something I’ve been saying for years, and maybe he doesn’t believe me.

“It only takes a day to get to Palm Springs from here,” he says. That’s where he grew up. “But it takes two days to get to San Francisco. The damn Grand Canyon is in the way.”

And he is right. The Grand Canyon separates us, but sometimes it may as well be the entire Milky Way. We don’t talk about the things that we hold close, our fragile dreams, our fears, our regrets. We don’t talk about the past. We talk about the fires ravaging both California and New Mexico, or our respective travel plans, or the abundance of his garden’s pea and broccoli crop this year.

We still sometimes compare notes on cosmic phenomena, like the recent eclipse and northern lights. In fall of this year, comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS C/2023 will appear. Since its discovery in 2023, astronomers have compared it to Hale-Bopp, speculating that Tsuchinshan-ATLAS might be a great comet, maybe the greatest comet of this century, though there have been conflicting observations as it moves closer. Predicting whether a comet will be great is notoriously difficult. Comets are unpredictable. From far off, they can promise to blaze brightly, to awe us. But there’s always a chance they’ll burn out before fulfilling that promise. 

Halley’s comet appeared the year before I was born. Hale-Bopp preceded the end of my parent’s marriage. I know scientifically these things are not cosmically significant or connected. Comets are indifferent to events on Earth. They are commanded only by gravity, by the inescapable tug of the sun. But part of me, the part that used to spend hours lying in the dirt awed by the complex grandeur of the universe, searching for my destiny in the stars, wonders what this next comet will bring.