HFA Creativity Contest: Prose
This spring, UCSB’s Humanities and Fine Arts Division hosted a creativity contest to highlight creative student voices across the UCSB campus. The following essay won 2nd place in the prose category.
2nd place winner
Race to the Surface of the Earth
By David Gjerde
David Gjerde’s research-based narrative essay “Race to the Surface of the Earth” won second place in the prose catagory for this year’s HFA Creativity Contest.
For the first time in their lives, the crew on a Blue Origin flight saw the curve of the Earth. As they looked out of the windows in space, their legs floated behind them. On their faces, beading eyes expressed pure childlike awe, and perhaps, fear. “In that moment, [it] was blackness and death,” said retired Star Trek actor William Shatner when the crew landed. “[But Earth] is life and nurturing.”
From 80 kilometers above, the Earth looks like a crested egg. There, ancient valleys roll into continents and water waves into unmarked countries. Mountains, the grain of the Earth, shoulder clouds, which look like cream. The windows peered into the immense blue and black that is our world in a vast, vast space. Up here the crew was weightless, and they could ponder the existence of man, and the existence we could have. In a way, countries are weightless up here too. No man-made lines pin them down, nor do any conflicts. In their weightlessness, those who are fortunate to venture into earth’s low orbit are usually struck with inspiration and purpose. The view has the power to turn unsuspecting astronauts into environmentalist U.S senators, and 90-year-olds into humbled advocates. “It's so fragile,” Shatner said in a later interview.
The crew on the Blue Origin Flight consisted of four civilians, and the mission proved to be another success for the space startup created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in September of 2000. A passion project designed to commercialize space flights, Blue Origin aims to make space travel not only cheaper, but widely accessible. An invitation-only mission such as William Shatner's voyage is the tip of the iceberg of Origin’s and Bezos’ vision.
—
Eighty Kilometers down, just outside Birmingham, humans were close enough to see each other, and Jennifer Bates looked down at her hands. In her life, Jennifer’s hands had picked Okra, cooked and served charbroiled burgers, and worked, worked, worked in her sweet home of Alabama ever since she was 13. She liked working, loved God, and was interested in making $15 an hour, more than double the minimum wage in Alabama. Now, on her third day at the local Amazon warehouse, Bates felt pain in her hands and legs. “I was hurting, and I looked around and realized it wasn’t just me,” Bates recalled. In May of 2020, she had begun working in the newly constructed Amazon fulfillment center, a structure so large one might be mistaken for thinking you could see it from space. The 855,000 square-foot block, built from 15,000 tons of steel, was designed to ship more than 100,000 items a day. “It’s a beautiful thing to see,” the regional director said on opening day. “It’s kind of awe-inspiring.”
The new plant was constructed as Amazon deals with increasing scrutiny of its employment and labor practices. The company’s obsessive culture of productivity is largely attributed to Jeff Bezos himself, who, above all else, is reported to fear stagnation in his company. Amazon knowingly prevents building a long-term workforce, which Bezos has warned is the “march to mediocrity.” As a result, Amazon has an average annual turnover rate among employees of 150%, burning through an entire workforce in less than a calendar year.
Such productivity and drive accompany Bezos through all his endeavors. Just as he dreamed of widespread internet commerce in 1997, he for most of his life has envisioned human beings reaching the stars. As a little boy, Bezos crafted mini paper rockets and control panels in school, inspired by the Star Trek franchise. Some decades later, through Bezos’ undeniable entrepreneurial vigor, Blue Origin manufactured New Shepard, a gleaming white rocket standing 59 feet tall. William Shatner, who as Captain Kirk told audiences, “Genius doesn’t work on an assembly line basis,” took part in New Shepard’s 18th successive mission.
New Shepard embodies Bezos' bid to compete in growth and human potential. Bezos, along with eccentric CEOs Richard Branson and Elon Musk, are part of a new class of billionaires competing for the stars through privatized space companies. By market capitalization, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic places last with a value of $8 billion. Musk, on the other hand, has been the clear leader of the space race with his startup Space X, accredited for securing highly contested contracts with NASA and developing a company valued at over $161 billion. When it comes to innovative thinking and the influence over modern technology, Musk, who could mint billionaires with a single tweet, is an unrivaled phenomenon. Jeff Bezos, who threatened lawsuits against NASA for its contract preferences, is surfacing as a more legitimate opponent to Musk with missions such as New Shepard’s. Bezos’ Blue Origin is attempting to overthrow Space X by building its own lunar lander, aptly named Blue Moon, in hopes of one day venturing to the moon before Elon Musk’s team.
The criticism of the entrepreneurs has been severe. The new age of technology and globalization has deepened the gulf between the rich and the poor to an extent unwitnessed for well over 100 years. The increasing awareness of climate change has likewise turned public opinion against these space voyages and has challenged space missions as not only representative of inequality, but environmental damage. The crew boarded and settled into the New Shepard rocket last October, they were strapped atop nearly 165,000 lbs. of steel and fuel, a weight requiring tremendous energy to leverage. Similar 11-minute voyages have been found to release 75 tons of carbon emissions, an amount more than the average person emits in their entire life.
Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard flight took off from Launch Site One, also known as Corn Ranch, a 165,000-acre piece of land situated in West Texas.
But nothing about this mission was average, and surely no one was thinking of stagnation. Slowly, as the rocket started to rumble, the crew looked up and prayed. In a Blue Origin control room, an operator counted down from 15 seconds. William Shatner understood the risks of an awesome failure, one that would make him the oldest man to die in a freak rocket accident. Ten seconds. The roar of the engine consumed the launchpad and the valley of Van Horn in West Texas. It sounded like man-made thunder. Five seconds. The rocket levitated slowly and elegantly. William Shatner might have fainted. Many people do. Many people worked on this. Many people hoped for this. Many people would criticize this. Many people would not get the chance to do this. Despite the many, the rocket went up.
And up and up, up, up....
But who could disagree with the Pacific Ocean? Or the abundance of our world, the wealth of our home? Anyone would shudder at the cold blackness, the absolute scarcity blanketing us. Anyone would look down and marvel at our planet, the body that bore life, intelligent beings, and the limited liability corporation. Up here, you could not see hands, but the heavens. And you would think of the ideas that brought us here. Ideas brought us here, and great men fulfill their great ideas. Seeing the Earth, however, was not an idea. The feeling was visceral, like a shock of reality. The crew had just been plunged in cold water, shaken like rag dolls, and invited to swim up to the surface and see their creators.
—
Real? How could anyone feel real when their feet weren't planted on the ground? It made no sense to any worker, especially Jennifer Bates. To her, staying on the ground was the difference between getting fired and making it through the day. People were plucked out of line in front of her and terminated on the spot beside her. So, she stood steady, and she stood sharp. Elevators marked “Material Only” mocked her as she climbed four flights of stairs. On her breaks, Jennifer would join in with her coworkers, complaining about their hurting bodies. Weeks went by, and Jennifer and her coworkers noticed the constant churning of employees: new faces, new hands, and new legs. Still, the group she was talking to remained. “I can’t [quit] because who’s going to pay the bills?” Bates recalled a coworker saying to her. As if she were caught in a machine, like loose cloth, Bates was stuck between hurting and being unable to find a new job. She recalled when she worked in a ministry as a worship leader, and how she taught the people around her to put their hands up to God instead of down to conveyor belts.
When Jennifer was placed as learning ambassador for the facility, she took advantage of her teaching position and started to talk about a new idea in the Bessemer center: the idea of unionizing. She knew the constant rotation of people was not normal, and she knew above all else she and her coworkers were hurting. However, Jennifer Bates was unaware of the political forces moving against her grand idea to become the first Amazon facility to unionize in the U.S. Amazon is highly coordinated in its union-busting, mandating classes to new associates that proclaim the self-reliant mantra of the Amazon spirit. While Amazon fulfilled its legal duties to give employees information and protocols to unionize, Jeff Bezos’s judgment could be heard throughout the warehouse. Even in bathroom stalls, company posters reminded workers of their benefits. Higher-ups said in the south, unions are impossible. They said in Amazon, benefits are enough. Although wage raises are capped after three years in the facility, the company said the workers have all they need to lead healthy and productive lives. For Bezos, a man who believes not only that everything can be optimized but that it must be optimized for the sake of human ingenuity and growth, enough is hardly ever enough. “It was his ego that kind of woke us up,” Bates said, referring to the leader of the Amazon empire.
On the eve of the election to unionize, Jennifer was hopeful and proud. She felt she stood for something real, and she helped spread an idea which harnessed the political power of her coworkers.
In March of 2021, the vote to unionize failed two-to-one.
—
New Shepard landed in the valley after 11 minutes in the heavens. Jeff Bezos circled the ship and peered into the large windows, giving the crew a thumbs-up and a wide smile. As the space travelers exited the ship, Bezos laughed like thunder and hugged his team. Shatner stood silently, processing his voyage. As springs of champagne brought the first showers to the desert in years, Bezos put his hand on Shatner’s shoulder. Shatner said to him, “Everyone needs to experience this.”
Perhaps many people will experience this. Bezos’ long-term vision includes mass commercial space flights and constellations of satellites to improve global network connectivity. If his hawk-like business philosophies are carried through, maybe our children will get the chance to see our home. Maybe they would see how fragile it is, or how fragile we all are. As of 2022, however, a ticket on a Blue Origin flight is reported to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the environmental footprint poses enormous challenges for a larger project. Still, we should marvel at the idea of it.
Ideas spread, and by and by people’s lives improve. We have prided ourselves on our ability to choose which among the sea of ideas will float to the top. Competition, the driving force behind human potential, has given us medicine, machines, and Amazon Prime. As we think of our home from space, we may start imagining what is possible. What is possible, indeed, when we look beyond the weight of an idea.
David Gjerde wrote this research-based narrative essay in his Writing Program course Creative Nonfiction. It draws upon 11 works of secondary research.