Memories of Sky

I did not learn of Sky's death until, nearly a week after it happened, I was on my way back from the field and checked my email for the first time in almost two weeks. I was, needless to say, stunned, shocked, and deeply saddened.

Sky was a wonderful, good-hearted person, beloved by all of us in the small community of Caltech geobiologists. I didn't get to know Sky as well as I would have liked outside the context of the lab and the field -- how could anyone, when we were all expecting decades in which to do that and were given only a few years? Yet Sky was still a beloved and trusted friend.

I first met Sky just as he was starting at Caltech, at a meeting discussing the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere deep in Earth's past. Over the following three years, he revealed himself to be not just a brilliant and hard-working scientist, more capable than almost anyone else in our program of binding together the "geo" and "bio" of geobiology, but also one of the pivotal members of our community. One of the last extended periods of time I spent was Sky was in New Mexico and Texas last November; I have a vivid memory from the magical setting of White Sands in flood of Crystal, Sky, and I sneaking aside to prod at colorful streamers of bacteria.

I last saw Sky in May, shortly before I left Caltech. By the time I returned to Pasadena in June for graduation, he was already off exploring Australian geobiology. I imagined that we would have many decades together as colleagues and as friends; it never would have occurred to me that he would leave us all, and that I would never see him again.

While I was away, the GPS Division held Zilchbrau, its annual party. The last email I have from Sky reads, "They're making me play you in Zilchbrau -- any advice?" I wish I could have been there to see it.

Sky had weathered a lot of hardships in his life, but he rarely showed it. He was one of the warmest and most generous people I know. Life, for all of us, is transient. But we approach immortality through the people we touch and the products of our action. Sky is gone, but he has touched so many people, and through us all he will yet live a long life.