by Kurt Caswell
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book’s heart is rooted in the imagination of one of its editors at Trinity University Press, the poet Barbara Ras. I am deeply grateful for Barbara, for her life and her life’s work, for her belief in me as a writer, for calling me out of the void to take a ride on this star. She has made my life better, and I will remain in gratitude until the end.
My gratitude to everyone too at Trinity for championing my work, especially director Tom Payton and my editor Steffanie Mortis, whose talent and job it is to make books better—she certainly made this book better. Also at Trinity, thanks to Burgin Streetman, Sarah Nawrocki, Lee Ann Sparks, and Bridget McGregor.
Chris Dubbs, Natalia V. Maximova (Natasha), and R. Gilbert Moore (Gil) each offered their time and resources beyond the measure of ordinary generosity. Chris is one of the original champions and scholars of the space dogs of Soviet Russia, and his help and guidance have been invaluable. To aid in my research, Natasha translated a key resource from Russian and offered me a deep and critical reading of the early manuscript. When I traveled to Moscow, she arranged visits at museums and sites important to Soviet and Russian space history, as well as other sites near Moscow that I was interested in. She took me into the countryside to visit friends at their dacha, where I hunted mushrooms in the forest and experienced the noble tradition of the Russian banya. I could not have traveled in Russia with such ease and confidence without her help. Gil’s technical mastery, enthusiasm, and careful feedback helped steer my revision process. I was delighted to discover in our discussions that many of the people I was writing about were Gil’s friends and colleagues, and many of the events in this book are central to his life. Thanks too to Gil and his wife, Phyllis, for welcoming me into their home for good conversation and good cheer.
I am grateful to a good number of people for their time and expertise: Tom Macarrone in the Physics Department at Texas Tech University; Hwihyun Kim and Judit Gyorgyey Ries at the University of Texas; Sergei Khrushchev; Adil Ravgatovna Kotovskaya; Amy Nelson; veterinarian John Smith and the staff at ARK Hospital in Lubbock; Jeff Thomas at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center; Erin Collopy and Anthony Qualin in the Texas Tech Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures; Asif Siddiqi at Fordham University, who helped answer one of the central questions of this book; John McGlone, Alexandra Protopopova, and Glenna Pirner in the Texas Tech Department of Animal and Food Sciences; former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Norm Augustine, a man of depth and vision; Patricia Alvarez, Patricia McCarroll
, John Karas, David Welch, and Andrea Greenan at Lockheed Martin; Jim Mayberry and Sue Taylor at the New Mexico Museum of Space History; Fred Wyman, Sarah Knoll, and everyone at United Launch Alliance; Catherine Tsairides at Wyle; the man whose team designed, built, and installed the wiring harness on Atlas 5 OA-6 and with whom I shared a bus seat to the launch site at Cape Canaveral; my uncle Dick and aunt Janet Cantwell in Ocala, Florida, who took me in and talked my ears off; Brandi Dean and astronaut Donald Pettit at NASA; Cathleen Lewis at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; James Schombert at the University of Oregon; Art Dula, Elena Perepelkina, and Evgeny Albats, who contributed vital information that helped sharpen this story’s clarity and focus; Richard Porter at the Texas Tech International Cultural Center; the Texas Tech Office of Research for a generous grant that helped me with my journey to Russia; Steve Fritz; P. Michael Conn at the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center and Alice Young at Texas Tech for their help in understanding the place of animals in scientific research; John Lane; Michael San Francisco and Aliza Wong in the Texas Tech Honors College, where I teach, who opened doors, bent spoons with their minds, and carved out space, time, and money for me in support of this book; Kathryn Miles, a writer of grace and sensitivity who knows a hawk from a handsaw, a situation from a story; my parents, who gave me a room with a woodstove to work through the winter; Karen Clark, a talented editor and gracious soul, for her support, counsel, and love, from beginning to end; Scott Dewing, my brother along the Way—dokkodo—for traveling with me to Russia and then down the slope of Eastern Europe; and Kona, the German shepherd who watched over me as I wrote this book in the many places I wrote it—Texas, Florida, Saskatchewan, Idaho, Oregon, and dozens of little camps between here and there where I set up in my Alaskan camper and made words into sentences into paragraphs into pages, and into this book. Thank you.
Photo by Rachel Veale
Kurt Caswell is a writer and professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches intensive field courses in writing and leadership in the mountains and on rivers in the West. His books include Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents and In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation (both published by Trinity University Press), and An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. He is the co-editor of To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature. His essays have appeared in ISLE, Isotope, Matter, Ninth Letter, Orion, River Teeth, McSweeney’s, Terrain, and the American Literary Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas.
