The flava:
Kelly Holley-Bockelmann had always oriented herself by looking up at the sky, but now it was tilted and unfamiliar. The Milky Way sank toward the horizon line, and darkness never arrived quite the way it had in Tennessee, fast and enveloping. Instead, there was hazy dusk and then stubborn twilight before the sun rose again over her extended-stay hotel thousands of miles from home.
She took a tram, then a train, then a bus until she arrived at a glass-walled building in the Netherlands. There was a Dutch flag near the entryway and a replica of a spaceship in the lobby. She rode the elevator to her new office, a small room with whitewashed walls, empty drawers and a handwritten note taped to the desk. “We are thrilled to welcome one of America’s great scientists,” it read.
A new colleague stopped at the doorway to check in on her. “I know it might not look all that impressive,” he said, gesturing around the office.
“It’s perfect,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “After these last few years, I’m just so grateful to be here.”
She had never expected to be starting over halfway across the world at age 55, just as she reached the pinnacle of a career that was often celebrated as uniquely American. She’d grown up in Montana, lying in the grass beneath the night sky and trying to feel the Earth spin. She dreamed of becoming an astronomer before she knew the word for it. Nobody in her house growing up had finished college. She’d never met a scientist. But she made herself into a theoretical astrophysicist, a leading expert on gravitational waves, a top adviser to NASA, and a chaired professor at Vanderbilt. She helped begin a new graduate program for astronomers and raised millions in federal money to recruit American scientists with backgrounds as unlikely as her own, only to watch that pipeline be dismantled piece by piece. . . .
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