If you think about it, science is one big act of searching. There's always something to look for, whether it's the answer to a hypothesis or the next Goldilocks planet. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers find themselves looking high and low.
Part 1: Comedian Sam Lyons is determined to not get involved with his partner’s feral cats, until one goes missing.
Sam Lyons is a comedian, musician, actor, and Gilmore girls enthusiast - and not always in that order! He joined our Story Collider staff with an aversion to science, but the practice of sharing his own stories and helping other tellers with them as opened his eyes to how science is all around us, ready to embrace without strangling. You can likely catch Sam and his partner Emma feeding feral cats in an alley near you.
Feral Cat Outreach of St. Louis
Part 2: In an act of desperation, Bhaskar Sompalli goes on a hunt to find free lab equipment to make his graduate school experiment work.
Bhaskar Sompalli is an engineer and storyteller living in the bay area. After graduate studies in Tulsa and Chicago, he's worked on several technologies over the years; from fuel cells and batteries to semiconductors, and founded a battery startup. An optimist who is passionate about clean tech, he now works full-time on using hydrogen fuel cells and batteries to tackle climate change. He has narrated several of his personal essays on San Francisco's KQED NPR station. He is a writer whose first fiction novella Utopia Revisited 2050 is now out on Amazon as a paperback, and is currently working on his second novel.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
You probably can't tell this by observing me, but growing up, I was always an avid reader. I know, I know. I seem more like a five star quarterback, point guard, goalie situation but, no. Books worked for me.
In high school, I really got into the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I just really loved all the different stories you could find there, a lot of stories about love and heartache and family perseverance and finding friends when you need them. But the stories that always hit a little too hard for me, I couldn't really get down with were the pet stories.
There would always be these sections full of like Chicken Soup for the Pet Lovers and it's always about like this kid and his puppy overcoming 15 years of adversity and then the puppy dies of cancer. Or a pet parakeet goes missing. Flies off for three years and never see it again. I was just reading these books, like this is terrible. Why would you want a pet, a creature, another creature you have to love and like expand emotion for but you can't even talk with it? Why would you set yourself up for more heartbreak?
So I told myself I'm not going to be a pet person. I'm just going to stay near and clear of it and I'll never be hurt.
Sam Lyons shares his story at St. Louis Public Radio Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MO in February, 2023. Photo by Joe Martinez.
Then I fell in love with a certified cat lady. Emma is verified beginning to end loves cats. Grew up in a family with them. And when we met and when we started dating, she immediately took a companionship for the feral cats living in my alley. She would come over and hang out and she'd always take out a little bit of food and stick out for them in the driveway.
I'd say, “All right, if you want to feed these cats like when you're here, that's fine. As long as you know like these aren't my cats. Like I'm not… they can hang out in the yard and that's cool but they're not coming in the house.”
And she's like, “Okay. Sure.”
Fast forward two years. We're living together and we now have two cats. So I clearly really stood my ground in that battle. We've got two cats inside, Stu and Huby, and we've still got this coven of outdoor cats that we also feed.
You know, I love Stu and Huby. They're my homeboys. We hang out and I'm like, “I love these cats. These are great cats. And if we want to keep taking care of the other cats, that's fine, but like two is the limit. We don't have space for more cats.”
And she said, “Okay. Sure.”
And we go out and we would feed the cats across the alley. There's this old, abandoned house. They used to take shelter in this dilapidated garage. The owners of the house had the garage cleared away. The older couple that took care of the house for them came out shaking their fists and said, “You can't feed these cats in our driveway.”
So we moved them across to our driveway and we start feeding them there. And I said, “They can come to the driveway but they're not coming in.”
December of 2021, I'm sitting at my desk working and I get texts from Emma. She's at work. The text is very casual. It says, “Hey, have you seen LaShonda today?”
LaShonda's not a neighbor. She's one of the cats. Just a real name we've given this cat.
She says, “I don't think LaShonda was at dinner last night or at breakfast this morning. Have you seen her?”
I texted back. I said, “No, I haven't seen her,” but I'm also not like checking for these cats. They don't clock in with me. They do their own thing, I do my own thing, never the two shall meet.
And I say, “You know, I'm sure she's down the alley flopping around. She'll show up today or tomorrow.”
And Emma says, “No, this is serious. This is not like LaShonda like LaShonda is always there for a meal.”
In my head, I say, “This is a feral cat. You don't know her schedule or her prior commitments.” That's what I said in my head. What I said over text is, “I know it's concerning. If you want, tonight, we can walk up and down the alley. We'll look for her. I'm sure she'll pop up.”
Emma was like, “All right. Cool.”
So we go out that night. We put the food out for the cats that know how to be where they're supposed to be. We could see the cats and they're eating.
We're in the backyard and we're yelling out, “Lashonda. LaShonda.” She's nowhere to be found.
And we're walking up and down the alley. Some of the cats are like peering at us, following us, meowing with us. We can't find LaShonda anywhere.
I can see Emma getting more and more nervous and I'm like mildly curious. Not to the fact that I think anything's wrong with LaShonda but I'm just like, “Oh, I wonder where she's been hanging out at. I wonder what kind of stories she'll have when she comes back to us.”
And I tell Emma again. I'm like, “I'm sure she'll be back soon enough. We just got to stay cozy. She's a cat. She's an outdoor cat. This is why she has the freedom, so she can go back and forth.”
And every day we go out. We feed the cats for breakfast. We feed them for dinner. And every time we go out there, we're putting out cans of food. We're yelling out, “LaShonda. LaShonda.” Every time she doesn't show up, I can see it start to weigh on Emma a little more. She's getting really worried about this cat and I'm starting to feel a little worried too for her, because I can see how much this cat being gone is affecting her. Not me at all.
And I just keep on that bright smile. “You know, I'm sure she's gonna show up. She'll pop up and it'll just be like she was never gone. It'll be like, ‘You, silly girl. Where you been?’”
And she just doesn't show up. A week goes by and we haven't seen her. And in that week's time, we have brought in another one of the outdoor cats, Lily, because LaShonda and Lily were a one day one comrades. For some reason, the day LaShonda stopped coming around, Lily got very comfortable in our basement. So now we've got three cats but we still don't have LaShonda.
Sam Lyons shares his story at St. Louis Public Radio Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MO in February, 2023. Photo by Joe Martinez.
We're sitting. We're sitting in the basement with Lily and he's cuddling up between us. We're looking at these videos, these pictures and videos we've got of the cats throughout the months and years that we've known them.
I'm watching this video from a few weeks prior of LaShonda chasing me around the backyard. I've got my shoes untied, because that's my business. And she enjoys this thing where I would drag my foot around and she would shake her little butt. You know how they do. And come chasing after my shoelace.
And we're sitting there watching this video and Emma starts to cry because she loves this cat. Then I start to cry because Emma is crying, I think. I said to myself, “Damn, I'm really like I'm really feeling the emotion that other people are feeling. I'm just such an empath. I had no idea.”
And as we're watching this video and these tears keep coming, I start to realize I don't think these tears are for Emma. I think these tears are for me.
And now I'm sitting there thinking to myself, “Son of a bitch. I love this cat and I miss this cat.”
That wasn't supposed to happen. They were the outdoor cats. They were supposed to get the scraps and I go about my day. But, now, I'm sitting here in this basement just crying, “LaShonda. LaShonda.”
And Emma's like I've got my head on Emma’s shoulder. I'm snotting all over her shirt. I'm like, “You're the one that's supposed to be upset. I'm supposed to be comforting.”
I'm realizing that all this time I spent being like afraid of ending up in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book, I know that I'm now like I'm living a Chicken Soup story. Like this is that moment. If I was reading this story right now, I'd have tears dropping all over the page. The library is probably going to fine me for damaging the book.
But in the moment I'm not upset that I've broken my rule. I'm not upset that I care about this cat. I'm just upset because my cat is gone. That's the moment in my head where I'm like I need my cat back and I just have to deal with it.
So the next day, I'm sitting at my desk again working and I get a call from Emma, which is weird because she's not at work today. She's at home so I don't know why she doesn't just come to the room.
I answer the phone. She says, “You gotta come outside right now. I swear, I can hear LaShonda meowing. You gotta come out right now. We can find her.”
And in my head I'm thinking, “There are 30 cats in this alley. It could be literally any one of them but LaShonda.”
What I say aloud is, “Okay, I'll be right there.”
I go running outside and she's standing in the alley right outside the yard. She's got her ear straight and I'm like, “What do you hear? What do you hear?”
“I just heard her crying. You don't hear that?”
And we get real quiet and we're just standing there. Then I hear her. I hear a meow, meow, meow. I looked down and it's LaShonda’s sister Pip. Don't ask me where these names came from. It's none of our business.
And Pip doesn't like interacting with anyone. She does not communicate. She comes, she eats, she runs away. But she is very intent on getting our attention. She just keeps meowing at us, meowing at us.
We're staring at her and then she starts turning around and looking at the abandoned house that they used to hang out near. And she keeps meowing, looking at us, looking at this house.
So we go across the street and we think, “Okay, maybe she's like hiding in a bush somewhere. We'll find her.” And so we started walking around the perimeter of the house.
“LaShonda. LaShonda.”
And as we're crossing the front of the house, I hear a, “Mmow.” It's different. It's not Pip. It's not the same meow.
We stop in front of the house. “ LaShonda. LaShonda.”
“Mmow, mmow.”
And then we realize the meow is coming from inside the house.
We run up these rickety old steps to the front door. It's got one of these old school mail slots. We push open the mail slot. We peek in and we yell, “LaShonda.”
Then we hear that little pitter patter of feet running across this dilapidated hardwood floor. And we hear the nails like skitter as she slides into the door, stands up on her back legs, sticks her little stupid nose through the mail slot, “Mmow, mmow, mmow, mmow, mmow.”
“LaShonda! We found you.”
We're freaking out. We're yanking on the door. It's locked. We're trying to lift up windows. They're all boarded shut. We have no idea what to do. We can see her staring at us through this mail slot.
Emma runs home, grabs some dry food. We start scattering it through the slit. It's just all over the floor now. We don’t know how long she's been in there. It's been days and we know she needs food.
So we're sitting there with her. We're just whispering sweet nothings through the mail slot. We're calling the police. We're calling animal control, stray rescue, PETA, freaking Elon Musk.
We're like, “We need help rescuing this animal stuck in a house.” And everybody just keeps telling us, “Oh, I'm sorry. That's a private domicile. We can't enter without the owner's explicit permission.”
And I was like, “I’ll give you explicit permission.”
They keep telling us that we've got to just find the owner's number and call them. So we find the number listed to this house and we leave like four messages, “Our cat's stuck in your house. Please, you have to help us. Dear God.”
Emma runs, goes back across the alley because she's got to log in for a virtual meeting for work and I'm just sitting there hoping to God that these owners are going to call me back.
Sam Lyons shares his story at St. Louis Public Radio Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MO in February, 2023. Photo by Joe Martinez.
I just keep whispering, “It's okay, LaShonda. We're right here.” And she's saying, “Mmow, mmow, mmow.”
The day keeps dragging on. I start to realize like we might not get her out of this house today. If they don't call back, we can't just like burn the sucker down. We're going to have to wait.
But like we've got the number. We've left messages. We know where she is. Like she's fine. She'll be okay if we just wait a couple days.
So I'm trying to steel my reserve so I can call Emma and tell her that we're going to have to sit tight. I just don't know how to do it. I just turn around, I look through the mail slot one more time and I said, “LaShonda, you doing okay?”
And she stands up on the little back legs again and this time she sticks her paw through and latches onto my finger and starts purring.
I said, “Screw this,” and I jump up and I run back across the alley into the house. I get my toolkit out. I get my screwdriver and I go around to the back door of the house. Emma's with me. We get the plywood boards off of this door and the screen door has no glass on. It's just completely open.
We can see LaShonda running around in the front of the house. I reached my hand through and I unlocked the screen door and we open it up. And the loudest, most obnoxious security alarm it goes off in this abandoned house, let me remind you.
LaShonda says, “Mmow, mmow,” runs up the stairs to the second floor.
Emma says, “No,” runs into the house after her, chases her up the stairs. Scoops her up in her arms, runs back down the stairs, runs out the front door of this house that we don't own.
And there's neighbors all across the street sticking their heads out trying to see where this alarm is coming from. Emma just takes off running down the block with the cat. I go out the back door, get the screwdriver, board the house back up.
We get home. We throw LaShonda into the basement. We don't throw her. We gently, gently place her in the basement with her brother Lily. Everybody's fine now. You're good. You live here now. Close the basement.
I go back to my desk, get back to work. 20 minutes goes by and then I hear a bang, bang, bang, knock on the door. What could it possibly be now?
I get up. I go to the front door and it's the elderly gentleman from across the alley that takes care of this house, the one that we've called, left six voicemails for saying we've got a cat stuck in their house.
I open the door and I say, “Hey, how's it going? How are you?”
“So, yeah, we got some voicemails I think were from y'all. Y'all had a cat missing or something.”
I was like, “Yeah, yeah. She was missing for a while but she, lo and behold, she popped back up.”
He said, “Hah. Well, the voicemail said that y'all thought she might be stuck in the house and it's weird because then we got a call from the security company saying the alarm had gone off.”
I just gasped. I said, “Wait a minute. Somebody broke into your house? The alarm went off? This is not how I remember this neighborhood coming up, man. Did they take anything?”
“Well, we were just hoping the cat got out.”
“Yeah, the cat got out. I don't know what she was doing in there. Maybe she set the alarm off on her way out. I'll be sure to talk to her about that, man. I'm really sorry. Have a great day,” and then closed the door and went back to work.
So, now, I have four cats in my house. And now if I'm screaming out, “LaShonda. LaShonda,” it's never because she's missing and always because she just decided to devour a roll of toilet paper fresh after we set it up.
So the moral of the story here is never tell the world you're not a cat person because they'll entice you into performing a home invasion to prove you're wrong.
Thank you.
Part 2
I was terrified of the dark when I was a small boy. I remember when I was growing up, there was a huge mango tree two, three stories tall right outside my bedroom window. Now, during the day, I'd play on its branches with my friends, jumping around on the tree like a monkey. But as soon as the sun went down, I'd run right back in. Why? Because to my young mind, that tree at night held all kinds of evil spirits and ghosts.
I struggled to fall asleep, sweat pouring down my face, my heart beating so fast because I did not want to go to sleep, worried that those ghosts will come get me. So my poor father, he tried his best. He tried to calm me down and he said, “You know, there's really nothing out there. You don't have to be afraid of the dark.”
But it took a while. As I grew up, I got better. I thought I had gotten rid of this irrational fear of the dark.
Fast forward a few years later. I am here in the US wrapping up my masters in mechanical engineering in a university in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then I had this crazy idea. You know what? I need to switch and I'll switch to chemical engineering. I want to work on clean tech, developing fuel cells. I want to research it, build something with my hands, make something that's tangible.
Bhaskar Sompalli shares his story at at Jewelbox Theater in Seattle, WA in March 2023. Photo by Elizar Mercado.
So I applied and I got accepted at a university in Chicago for another graduate program but no funding. I was a poor graduate student, maybe a thousand dollars in savings. There was no way I was going to put myself through years of graduate studies with that little money. I needed a tuition scholarship, maybe a research fellowship, so I figured, “Well, it's in fall and summer is still here. I'm gonna go to Chicago and I'll figure it out.”
So, summer of ’96 I found myself in Chicago with barely any money, no place to stay and really no prospects that I knew of.
Back where I'm from in India, there's a little saying that goes like this. “If you don't know swimming and you're drowning, does it really matter if the water is a foot above your head or an inch above your head. What really matters is how you deal with it.”
So with this in my heart, as soon as I stepped out of the plane I went straight to the university. I started talking to professors and I got a lead. There was a professor in the chemical engineering department who was working on a research grant proposal for the US Army.
Now, the Army, when the soldiers are out in the battlefield, they needed power sources for all their communications equipment. Now, these power sources need to be portable. They should be silent enough, not have any emissions or any sound, any heat signatures, so the enemy would not detect them. And fuel cells, especially methanol fuel cells were fantastic for it. They had solved all the categories and the fuel could be carried in a canister in their backpacks. Perfect solution.
So the professor decided to give me a shot. He said, “Read all the papers you want. Just find your way around the lab. Just don't burn the lab down.”
I said, “Okay. Good.”
So that's an opportunity, an unpaid internship for the summer with a shot to getting paid maybe a little tuition grant by fall. I figured if I was successful, I'd be able to fund my education for the next couple of years. If I was not, I'd have about a month to find a job or leave the country.
Now, I did not have the time to dwell on this doom and gloom scenarios. I had to find a place to stay for the summer. So through friends of mine, I called a few people and I heard of a graduate student, an Indian graduate student on campus who had a spare couch for the summer. His name is Raj, an interesting guy.
He was about a little short, thin guy, very stern but a wicked sense of humor. I like to think of him as an Indian version of a Charles Dickens character like headmaster with the heart of gold, maybe.
So he heard me out and then he said, “Fine. You can crash on my couch on two conditions. One, you have to cook dinner three to four times a week. And, two, you have to split the groceries bill.” And I'd owe him the rent money until I got paid.
It was a fantastic deal. I loved it. It solved all my problems, except there was one problem. I just didn't know how to cook. I didn't tell him that, of course.
So that very first night, as soon as I moved in, I tried my hand at cooking and I almost sent him to the ER. But I thought, “This is it. He's gonna throw me out,” that night, that very night. No, he didn't do that. He gave me another shot at it. But this time, he gave me a few pointers on how to cook.
Now, granted it was an act of self preservation, it worked. I actually got better at cooking.
Then I started to work, like I got really busy. I'd get up at 4:00 AM in the morning. I'd go rush out to the lab, read all the research papers I wanted to discuss with all the postdoctoral fellows in the lab, and I started to work on this experimental setup, which is the coolest thing I ever did.
What it was was taking an infrared spectrometer and build a fuel cell and build an elaborate system to study the fuel cell reaction. So think of it as a camera system I was building to study the little molecules running around my fuel cell generating the electricity. It was a fantastic opportunity
And to do that I needed a lot of stainless steel tubing and valves and pumps and compressors and so on. If I had to buy it, it would have cost me about $30,000. Remember, we were trying to get funding. We didn't have funding. We had about a budget of $5,000, so I figured we will beg, borrow, steal whatever it is and try to build it.
Progress was extremely slow. I wasn't paid.
Now, fall is right around the corner. I'm running out of savings. My credit cards are maxing out. To save money, I stopped calling my parents and my sister. I miss them terribly. This was the one lifeline I relied on for the entire week, that 20 minute phone call. Gone.
Bhaskar Sompalli shares his story at at Jewelbox Theater in Seattle, WA in March 2023. Photo by Elizar Mercado.
So fall is almost upon us. I'm pretty depressed. I'm questioning myself. “Is this really worth it? I'm inconveniencing so many people. Is it really worth it?”
With all this running in my head, I'm outside the department smoking. Of course I had money for cigarettes. So I'm outside smoking and all these running in my head and Floyd walks up.
Now, Floyd is an interesting guy. Very high strung, full of energy. He had a story for any situation you threw at him. A very good friend of mine. He's a technician in the lab and we started talking.
And I told him, “Listen, I don't think it's working out. I'm gonna have to quit. I'm gonna have to go back to do something else.”
He heard me out a few seconds and then he said, “Hey, have you thought about the tunnels? Maybe there's something in there you can use.”
That's the first time I heard about tunnels and Chicago in the same sentence.
So I asked him, “Tunnels? What tunnels? Tell me more.”
That's when he told me that deep underneath this department, the very building we're standing outside of, under State Street all the way from 31st to 33rd Street are a network of tunnels built back in the 1950s. Nobody knows why. It's empty now. It's abandoned. The only reason it's there is so departments could store all their old equipment in that space.
Nobody knew how to get in there. It's just there. Only the old timers knew about all this stuff. He's one of them. He knew about this. He told me.
That very night, I figured this is it. This is one shot. Music to my ears. I'm going to go find this place. Except I just didn't know where it was, where the entrance was. It's a 100 year old building, stuff is piled up all over the basement. I'm running all over the place, I can't find this thing.
And then a janitor told me, “Here it is.”
I must have run past that same spot 20 times. I just couldn't— I didn't know it was a door. It looked like a broom closet to me. Hiding in plain sight.
So I figured, fantastic. Here it is. I'm eager with anticipation. I opened the door. I wanted to step right in and then I stopped. What I saw, the old fear of darkness came right back. My heart is pounding. I could hear it in my ears. My hands are sweating. It's four steps leading down into a narrow corridor, one light bulb flickering. It had all the elements of a horror movie.
So I figured why do I need to go down this? But stakes are high. I had to do it.
So one step at a time, let's just go down this step and see what's out there. I'm talking to myself now.
So I go down these steps, down to the corridor, that one first entrance to the tunnel. I look out there, my skin started to crawl. There's maybe a few light bulbs flickering, dust covered. There were cobwebs, thick cobwebs going from bulb to bulb like Halloween decorations. The ground is shaking because we're right underneath the green line. Every time the train goes, the dust is raining down.
And there's barely any light. I could barely see something ahead. I'm walking slowly through that narrow space and then I see something run over my feet. Rats. Huge rats.
And in the light I can see cockroaches running right on the walls. The air is musty and damp. It's a little warm, which is the only nice thing about this place.
So I'm walking down this floor. I'm thinking, I think to myself, “What happens if the lights go out? I can't find my way back. I'd die of hunger. The rats would eat me.” There's all these crazy thoughts running in my head.
So I'm still going down there because, to me, at some point it became— this is how I distracted myself. I'm a character in a Jules Verne book. But, still, 30 minutes are going by. I'm losing hope. And then, right there, I turn the counter and there all the stuff is. Everything that I was promised, a treasure trove of old equipment.
Mass spectrometers, gas chromatographs, with beautiful stainless steel tubing, valves, compressors. Probably, you've never seen anyone so excited about valves but here I am telling you about this.
And it's right there covered with dust. I could see like gold gleaming through dust. I figured this is it. I got it.
Bhaskar Sompalli shares his story at at Jewelbox Theater in Seattle, WA in March 2023. Photo by Elizar Mercado.
It took me three days. I went back multiple times, no more fear of any darkness anymore. I opened all this little equipment, took out whatever I needed, hauled them back up to the lab and then I got to work on my experimental setup. It took me two weeks and then data started rolling out.
After that, it was a whirlwind of events. Data was so beautiful. We were able to post our presentation. We got an award. And then quickly it led to the Army research grant. And then soon after that, what I coveted the most, tuition scholarship and a research assistantship. Sustenance.
So when I got that paycheck right after that, it was the most beautiful piece of paper I've ever seen in my life. Then we went out to the pub to celebrate. I gave the money, rent money to my friend Raj for all his patience.
And that little setup that I glued together generated such wonderful data, I got two research publications in peer reviewed journals.
Here I am, nearly three decades later. I'm still working on hydrogen fuel cells. Now, this time, it's to fight climate change. So, to me, this wonderful opportunity is because of the kindness of strangers and friends, my dad's advice to face the darkness and that little adventure I had deep below the streets of Chicago.
Thank you.