SILVER LAKE: ILLINOIS NATURE

A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

What’s the story here, boys? Alan, Jim, and I looked up in surprise. Three large men were standing above us. We were unloading our small boat, a string of carp visible on the bottom. I felt as if I had been punched in the gut. Wha.. what do you mean? We stammered? We are from out of town, the men said. We haven’t been here before. Do you need a city license to use this lake? We looked at each other in relief as we explained the local regulations to the men.

This was 1966, the summer before my senior year of high school. My friends were a year older. The three of us frequently hunted and fished together, usually with limited success and sometimes trouble.

The previous winter, we had gone rabbit hunting on a property owned by a friend of Alan’s family. She was just leaving, going into town for the afternoon, she said. Sure, you can go hunting but don’t go on the neighbor’s property. He is not friendly.

It was a rare day off school in the middle of winter; I do not recall the occasion. Alan claimed to know something about this neighbor. He works in town. He won’t be home today. The rabbit habitat was vastly better on the neighbor’s property, so it did not take us long to cross the fence. We had success. Soon we had two or three rabbits each. Unfortunately, the owner was home. He was aroused by our shotgun blasts. We heard, then saw, an old truck barreling up the field road. A man was screaming at us out of the open window. He had a pistol and fired off a couple of rounds.

Beat ass! Yelled Alan, and we did. We ran for our vehicle on the other side of the fence. Jim and I were not tall, but we were able to hop easily enough over the barbed wire—not Alan, who was short and stocky. I can still see him approaching the fence, shotgun in one hand, a freshly killed rabbit in the other. He sized it up as he briefly ran alongside and then he leaped prone and rolled over it, landing on his side, rabbit guts and shotgun shells flying. We helped him up and ran to the car. We threw in the guns and our hunting vests, spilling blood and rabbit parts everywhere, but the man had driven around and blocked our road with his truck. He leaped out, swearing at us. He flaunted the pistol as he screamed at us for trespassing. Jim, in a very meek voice said, uh, do you want these rabbits? That sent the man into another tirade. Finally, he ran out of air and told us to leave saying he would shoot us if he ever saw us again.

That incident had come quickly to my mind when the men at the lake asked, what’s the story here boys? You see, the fish in the bottom of our boat were stolen. We had put baited lines around the lake to catch carp. Ours were empty, but as we checked them, we found other lines, put out after ours, were full of fish. Somehow, collectively, we decided the individuals who had put out lines after us must have stolen our fish, so we took theirs. We should not have taken those fish. We really did not want the carp anyway, but at least we avoided trouble over it.

This happened at my hometown’s reservoir, Silver Lake. The name belies the muddy creek for which it was named. The water in the lake is never clear. Still, in an area mostly covered by corn and soybeans, if not subdivisions, Silver Lake with its shoreline is THE natural area in my hometown.

The lack of natural areas is demonstrated by my memory of pleading with my parents, please, can we go to Grackle City? Often, they assented. It would be a Sunday morning after church when we frequently went for a ride in the country. This meant piling into our old Plymouth Cranbrook to drive the farm roads around my hometown of HIghland, Illinois. On one of those rides, we had come across what I called Grackle City.

A large colony of Common Grackles nested in a line of small trees. Grackles, then as now, were considered “trash” birds. Although I liked seeing the crowd of birds and listening to the dissonance of sound, what thrilled me most was that we had to drive a mile or two on an unpaved road. I was about ten years old and had never been anywhere except the thirty miles to St Louis. An unpaved road was wild and exotic.

Often those rides in the country occurred on summer evenings, and we would sometimes walk by our town’s old reservoir, known as the “City Lake.” Interestingly, this still-existing original reservoir was built by a local brewery and a condensed milk company because local voters rejected taxation to pay for it.

This “old” city lake was adequate until there was a great drought in 1954. The small lake nearly dried up, resulting in the plan to build a much larger reservoir. I wonder if the project could be built today. It flooded nearly six hundred acres of virgin hardwood forest. There are no large areas of such forest remaining in that part of Illinois. It would be an amazing resource.

When we walked at the old lake on summer evenings, there was a harmonious serenade of what seemed like dozens of whip-poor-wills—now very much (70-90%) declining—a population loss no doubt hastened by projects such as Silver Lake. An unforgettable moment was when I saw what appeared to be a length of brown hose sticking out of some reeds. I reached down and hoisted a muskrat—a shock to both species as I shrieked, and it scooted away.

After Silver Lake filled in 1961, my parents bought a small boat. It had an unusual, air-cooled engine, like a lawn mower. Although unreliable and barely faster than paddling, I loved taking it out. Once I saw a flash of bright red in the top of a shoreline tree—my first Scarlet Tanager. And it was evening on this lake where I first heard the loud, rhythmic bleating whoops, coos, and gulping kuk-kuk-kuk notes of Pied-billed Grebes. Sometimes I would chase them. They would dive and I would have to guess where they would resurface.

Once, I took the boat several miles to the village of Grantfork. This upper end of the lake was difficult to navigate because it was necessary to find the old creek channel. I slowly bumped along, sometimes killing the motor to row. Finally, I passed under a highway bridge and entered the dark, shadowy creek. An enormous turtle had its head above the water and slowly submerged. It was so large. It was an Alligator Snapping Turtle, the largest freshwater species in North America. I had never heard of one in our tame part of Illinois.

The lake also provided hunting access. I would bring my rifle in the boat and stop along the shoreline to hunt squirrels, but I was hunting a remnant. That old bottomland had been prime hunting territory. A sad story of my hometown was of a young father who had been shot by another hunter before the dam was built. The shooter panicked. The wounded man, found hours later, was blinded by the incident. I recall him walking the sidewalks of Highland, tapping a cane in front.

I gave no thought in those days to how much nature was lost as farm after farm was either consolidated, subdivided, or submerged. For example, my dad and I went hunting for Ring-necked Pheasants at a nearby conservation reserve. That area is now under Carlyle reservoir.

But while I enjoyed the experience of hunting, I did not really enjoy the aftermath. Cleaning the game was messy and smelly. My mom was a willing cook, but most times we would bite into a piece of shot—no thought in those days about the toxicity of lead; it probably being a good thing most of our hunts were futile.

One successful hunt followed a day when I worked on a farm and noted a spare clump of trees in the middle of a field. I had seen a squirrel from the hay wagon. Thinking correctly that no one ever hunted such a small patch, I secured permission, went out in the evening, and bagged that squirrel. It was an old buck, hard to clean, and harder to eat. Mom tried frying it, but it was too tough. Then she took those leftovers and cooked them in a stew, thinking longer cooking would soften the meat. It did not work. Chewing it was like grinding on rubber. I felt bad for killing that old squirrel who had found a safe patch of woods and had lived long and peacefully until I noticed him. I remember my sister, three or four years old at the time, running out one morning after I had been hunting and calling Did you catch any? I felt like a murderer. I only hunted a few more times thereafter.

Instead of hunting, I always wished someone could have mentored me with birds. I would wistfully read of free bird walks in St Louis’s Forest Park, but they were always early Sunday morning, unavailable to me because of weekly mass. Once, mom heard of a local woman who fed birds and had books about them. Mom called her and borrowed some books. When I returned the books, I was unable to talk to the lady. The couple were elderly. The woman’s husband, seeing a teenager on the porch, was gruff What is it you want? I meekly handed him the books never meeting his wife.

Maybe she would have taken me birding at Silver Lake—something I always do when I return for a visit. I always anticipate reuniting with two beautiful Illinois birds: Red headed woodpeckers and Eastern Bluebirds. Here is where I saw and heard my first Eastern Warbling Vireo. Another day I saw a Great Crested Flycatcher. Fall migration can be especially good. I have identified many migrant warblers and vireos. Lately, kayaking on the lake has become popular and I have enjoyed going with my brother.

Hence, the lake and I have a lot of history. An interesting bit begins with my mom’s penchant for shopping at The Salvage Store. Again, I am one of the few old enough to remember it. This store purchased items salvaged from train and truck wrecks or from warehouses damaged by weather or fire. Items would be laid on tables for shoppers to pick through. I do not recall mom buying much, but it was important to her to ensure after each week’s delivery that she did not miss an amazing bargain.

When I was a late pre-teen, I became interested in music. This was just before everyone had a transistor radio. I asked about buying records. Too expensive, mom said, but then she came home with a succession of albums from The Salvage Store. She could buy these for ten or twenty-five cents. I was supposed to be happy because I now had music. When I complained about it, she was unsympathetic. But these records being all that I had, I listened to them anyway. That is how I came to know songs that had been popular in the previous twenty to thirty years such as Jumping Jive, Buttons and Bows, and The Song from Moulin Rouge. I especially liked the melody of the latter and used to whistle it to a girlfriend when we walked at the lake. I never thought about the melancholy words: whenever we kiss, I worry and wonder. I also realize now that my whistling was off-key. Well, girls did not have unlimited choices in that small town.

My favorite lake memory, however, involves my sister. I am nearly 16 years her senior. When I was back from college, I often loaded her car seat and took her for rides and sang to her. My favorite song to sing, perhaps for no other reason than that I knew it, was Tiny Bubbles. Silver Lake, being the closest thing to a natural area, was always our destination. I liked pointing out all the squirrels. My singing to Jeannie and driving around the lake paid off handsomely. Once when I returned for Christmas, I took her for a ride to the lake and then we went to our dad’s store. My sister, being three or four, was asked by one of the clerks, who’s coming Jeannie? Referring, of course, to Santa Claus. She got a quizzical look and said, Nobody’s coming, Nic’s already here.

READING

PART 1

HENRY, EDGAR, AND RABBIE

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought but to serious reading…and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate around the world…How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

The inscription reads: To Nic—Merry Christmas and much happiness always. Love, Mother and Dad (1969). This is my only sample of my mother’s handwriting. It adorns the inside cover of a 60-page Hallmark booklet: Reflections at Walden: Selected Writings of Henry David Thoreau. I was twenty years old, in the middle of my junior year at the University of Illinois. Mom and I had a tumultuous and hands-off relationship. But here was something she had given me as a keepsake. If she ever tried to give me a personal remembrance, other than a wedding gift eighteen months later, I have no recollection. Despite her having added Dad to the salutation, I knew he neither knew nor cared who Thoreau was. I was pleased.

I was surprised mom had any idea of my relationship with Thoreau. She always carefully inspected my clothing and belongings and must have noted my accumulation of books. By the time I completed college I owned, besides Walden, other works by Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods.

My interest in Thoreau began during my first year in high school. An English teacher, a young nun, introduced us to the usual classics. Unlike most of my classmates, I read Walden in its entirety.

I was already a reader. To me, a reader is someone with sufficient curiosity to read anything. Science Fiction and mysteries can be part of the pile, but so are histories, economics, psychology, biographies and whatever else.

I became that type of reader, in part, because of the fear of displeasing our small town’s librarian, the stern Miss Patton. My mother, noting my interest in books when I was ten years old, asked Miss Patton to select my reading material. My parents taught me to respect authority. I had to read what she gave me. Thanks to Miss Patton, when I entered high school, I had already read Hawthorne, Cervantes, Melville, Sir Walter Scott, even Shakespeare. I had also learned to persevere through books I otherwise would have put aside. For example, Miss Patton gave me Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, the origin of my 100-page rule: unless I have read at least one hundred pages, I must keep reading. After one hundred pages, I can decide whether to continue. Consequently, it is rare I start a book and do not finish.

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch was historical fiction, a genre I still seldom select. The setting was Revolutionary War era Salem, Massachusetts. The book describes Nat Bowditch, a member of a poor, once sea-faring family. I was not interested in seafaring in the early 1800s. I forced myself to continue. By about page one hundred, I had developed an investment in the characters and from then on, could not put the book down.

Without that experience, I might not have persisted with Walden. Chapter 1 bored me. I did not care about the construction of his cabin and the planting of beans and turnips and what assorted items had cost. With the reading discipline I had learned, I persevered.

I remember that first time. The famous quotes astounded me, such as the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and only that day dawns to which we are awake. The accuracy of these observations: that most people were missing real life was apparent to me, but I had never known anyone to say it.

I had already realized there was unhealthy competition for material goods and saw the truth in And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.

As with most adolescents, I felt different, and was encouraged when I read, if a man…hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears…. And I was inspired by …if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

At the same time, I was steeped in Christian instruction attending daily mass and having daily religion classes. I did not question my faith then, but Thoreau’s quoting of Hinduism and Buddhism lodged in my memory and fostered my eventual interest. As this was also a time of racial unrest, I also identified with Thoreau’s sentiments toward slavery.

I reread Walden as an adult, and more frequently consulted my mother’s gift. When I felt pressure to earn more money and to advance my career, Thoreau consoled me…my greatest skill has been to want but little. I was always more interested in buying time with my earnings. I worked more than I wanted because of job insecurity and always said I would trade money for a more secure job. No doubt Thoreau would abhor how much I have accumulated, but his words helped align my career with my personal desires.

Most of all, I treasured Thoreau’s relationship to nature. I grew up in a stoic German community where anything other than neat lawns and straight rows was derided. Hunting and fishing were the nature activities I knew of, and harvesting, as in did you get your limit? That is, did I shoot five squirrels in a day? was the goal.

Accordingly, I mostly hid my interest in birdwatching as weird if not disgraceful. I found an outlet in Thoreau: …. going through a field this evening, I was unexpectedly struck with the beauty of an apple tree. The perception of beauty is a moral test. For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully. And, of course, I identified with Thoreau’s in wildness is the preservation of the world which led me to a lifetime of reading classics of nature: Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and the works of writers such as Joseph Wood Krutch, Alexander F. Skutch, Annie Dillard, and others.

Besides Walden, I appreciated other classics during high school. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles portrayed how the fortune one is born to has so much to do with life’s outcome. Tolstoy’s War and Peace kindled my anti-war sentiment. I enjoyed the classroom-assigned Great Expectations so much, that I soon read more of Dickens’ works.

We also read poetry. In my practical German community, enjoying poetry felt wasteful, or as Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden: Poetry was a symptom of weakness, of degeneracy and decay. Nonetheless, two poets captivated me.

The first was Edgar Allen Poe. I had read his short stories and his poem The Raven before high school. His stories are known for being macabre, but it was his gift for language, for instilling a mood by the sounds of words that impressed me.

I felt the rhythm of The Bells and the foreboding of The Raven, but Ulalume, my favorite, went further. No review explains the poem word-by-word, but all of them state that Poe wrote it while depressed and deranged. I remember reading Ulalume aloud to myself in our kitchen when I was thirteen. I perceived Poe’s unsettled mind. That someone else had felt so despondent seemed to mollify my teenage angst. The poem’s meaning was opaque, but I recognized the melancholy in the early stanzas, followed by dread and finally tragedy.

Still today, when I hike in the mountains and observe a shallow, swampy pool, red with iron stain and stagnant with decaying vegetation, I am apt to say, ah, there is ‘the dank tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted woodland of Wier.’ The gloom and enigma of those words persist.

I was also enchanted by Robert Burns or Rabbie Burns to the Scottish. Thoreau and Burns are extreme, Thoreau an ascetic, and Burns, dissolute, a rounder…my Yin and Yang. It is easier for me to emulate Thoreau, but I wanted to be Burns.

When I was in second grade, we played Afton Water on our tonettes. I recall reading the words: Flow gently sweet Afton, among thy green braes. I could see the soft water in a green glen. I wanted to be there. My 8-year-old self did not understand that Mary being asleep was a euphemism for death; that the poem was an elegy. I thought of the beautiful Mary taking a nap while the gentle brook wafted alongside. Burn’s words My Mary spoke to me of fondness, one person for another.

When I learned in high school that Burns had written Afton Water, I was immediately interested in the rest of his poetry. I enjoyed reading the Scottish dialect. I instinctively recognized someone unconventional who judged people on their character rather than their possessions as in Address to the Unco Guid. I also identified with Burn’s contempt for class and pomp and circumstance as eloquently stated in To a Louse.

I was immersed in a religion that had taught me everything that happened was one’s own fault. Burns knew different and expressed it so well in To a Mouse: The best laid schemes o” Mice an’ Men … lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Also intrinsic to my senses was that life could be difficult and cruel, as Burns expressed well in To a Mountain Daisy. He begins with a paean to natural beauty but ends with a lament for the life of a poor farmer: Ev’n thou who mourns’t the Daisy’s fate, That fate is thine…Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight, shall be thy doom.

Burns also attracted my 15-year-old self because of the hint of sex. Mention was made of children born out of wedlock, but in my Catholic High School, we did not read Ode to Love Begotten Daughter. I read that one later. Burns was unabashed by his poor reputation, saying to his newborn, Thou’s welcome ween. But was he just acknowledging she was worth the fun he had? Was he simply irresponsible? Life was difficult for illegitimate children. Does the poem only justify himself?

And yet, among Burns’ writing, I found …the great end of human life is to become wiser and better… Wonderful words to live by which could have been written by Thoreau who said: These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men.

I recognized that those ideas have been expressed as long as there has been spoken word around campfires. I understood that the words that persist through the ages have not been the words of commerce or the words of oppression and conquest, but words that acknowledge our time on the planet is finite, that there is not enough time to do it all, see it all and feel it all. As J. W Krutch put it, The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

PART 2

EXPERTS

Us got to do the best us can with what us is like! Alice Walker, The Color Purple

It was a few days before my First Holy Communion in my local parish. Before partaking, confession was required. We had been given missals, books that contained the prayers and instructions needed to become full-fledged, participating Catholics. We were directed to the section on Confession where there were lists of sins we might have committed. No other instruction was proffered. We were to review the lists so we would remember which we had committed and confess them to the priest. I was six years old.

I was more impressionable and sensitive than my classmates. It is clear to me now, that my tendency to weigh every alternative and worry about each choice was inborn. I pondered the missal’s pages. What did it mean that I must not have ‘impure thoughts.’ What were impure thoughts, anyway? How do I stop them? No one had told me that having undesirable thoughts was normal. And, again, which of these thoughts were impure?

A scene came to my mind. The previous weekend, I was playing with our neighbor’s nephew. Delmar, the uncle, had bent over to pick something up and behind his back, I pretended to kick him in the rear. Jim, the nephew, covered his face with his hand, laughing but making no sound. Neither of us said anything. I was not so far out of toilet training that connecting someone’s rear end with secret laughter felt shameful. I was mortified by this memory, and dutifully confessed the act to the priest. He made no comment other than to assign Hail Marys and Our Fathers for absolution.

Although I outgrew the frightened misunderstanding of a child, early shame leaves a mark. I have struggled my entire life trying too hard to do the right thing.

I found answers, intellectually if not always emotionally, in my reading. A series of books, based on physical evidence including brain scans, by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio were helpful.

• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.

• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.

• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Putnam.

Damasio recognized that being stuck on unwanted thoughts can be the result of youthful training. What a relief it was to read: We can control, in part, whether a would-be inducer image should be allowed to remain as a target of our thoughts. (If you were raised Catholic you know precisely what I mean…) There it was, explained by a neuroscientist. The church I had tried so hard to satisfy was a source of my most difficult problems as an adult.

Another source was my mother. To her embarrassment, I was an emotional and loud child. I recollect remonstrations from her about how I had humiliated her with my public tantrums. My earliest memories contain her constant admonitions. Self-control! self-control! She would demand.

I no longer blame her. She meant well. Unfortunately, these conflicts trained me to suppress, deny, and despise emotions. Again, it was a relief to read Damasio: a spontaneous smile that comes from genuine delight or the spontaneous sobbing that is caused by grief are executed by brain structures located deep in the brain stem under the control of the cingulate region. We have no means of exercising direct voluntary control over the neural processes in those regions. We are about as effective at stopping an emotion as we are at preventing a sneeze.

I wish I had been taught that one’s mind constantly entertains unwanted thoughts and that, as Buddhists say, such thoughts are like clouds that will float away if allowed to do so. I also wish my expressions of emotion had been acknowledged and guided instead of shamed. I should have been taught that each of us is different regarding how and to what extent we respond emotionally. I hope my children and grandchildren have benefited from my experience—and my reading.

Another book vital to my world view is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. If I were an autocrat who could force everyone to read one book, it might be this one. Pinker asserts that most public and educational policy as well as most social mores and child-raising advice are based on the idea that individuals are tabula rasa, that is, they can make themselves into whatever they want or can be trained to do anything.

It is amazing how the idea has endured. I am fond of basketball analogies. I played at 5’10”. I was a guard. No amount of effort could have made me effective at the center position. Our tallest player at 6’3” was the center. How could it have been different? We also accept that IQs are different, as are hair and eye color. Why has it been so difficult to accept that a child’s ability to learn or respond emotionally would not be equally variable?

Pinker posits two broad types of genetically driven personalities and uses both modern biology and classical philosophy to illustrate his points. Using terms from philosophy, Pinker describes the optimistic view: impoverished and homeless people have had bad luck and would be perfectible with appropriate assistance. Diverse cultures are inherently valuable and there is something useful to learn from them. The second personality type has a tragic view: the poor and downtrodden mostly deserve their circumstances. Tax money spent on welfare goes to cheats. Someone from a different culture is ignorant or, at a minimum, wrong.

Pinker presented studies from scientific literature showing how people with these tendencies fall neatly into right-wing or left-wing political categories. Through this book I softened my view toward my political opponents, realizing that at least not all of them are selfish, or ignorant.

Indeed, I have developed a great love of books by experts: E.O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Greene, Vaclav Smil, Eric Kandell, and others. I look to experts to guide my life and focus my thinking even or, especially, if they are not in agreement. Reading opposing views from two authorities, such as Gould versus Wilson regarding the absolute role of genetics in human behavior, provides the ideal setting for forming my opinion.

From such writers, I grasped how cultural change is vastly slower than technological evolution. Homo sapiens, the only species of the Homo genus that is not extinct, began walking the African continent around 300,000 years ago–approximately three thousand generations. How much did human work and transportation change between then and two hundred years ago? Not much! Two hundred years ago, just six or seven generations, horses and oxen performed any work not performed by human hands. Compare those times to the past one hundred years. Consider as well, the advances in communication. Most humans are genetically wired culturally in the Stone Age, being suspicious if not hostile to change and to anyone who looks different.

Admittedly, this reading has been sobering when I consider the world’s future. The societal gap between technological evolution and cultural evolution grows greater by the year. There are so many in the world who have insufficient access to the necessary education. How can they keep up? Increasing political and social polarization seem inevitable. The distrust of vaccinations is a recent example. Inaccurate information can flow around the world in a matter of days or hours. The truth, being more complicated, and often requiring study, takes much longer.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s historical novel, The War of the End of the World, illustrates what can happen. Brazil gained its independence from Portugal. Peasants in the hinterland never understood geopolitics in the first place. Now a republic was replacing the monarchy inciting rumors that the king and the pope had been replaced by Satan. Consequently, the first census takers arriving in rural areas were murdered as representatives of the devil. This led to resending them with armed guards which caused fiercer conflicts eventually ending with a Great War, fueled merely by ignorance and rumor. After reading that book, I asked myself, has anything changed?

And experts clash as well. I was shocked by the intensity of conflict over social biology between Stephen J. Gould and E.O. Wilson as described in Defenders of the Truth by Ullica Segerstrale. The book re-enforced my belief that Gould let his ideology blind him to the science—a very disturbing thought to me. Here was a leading liberal, considered a Marxist by some, exhibiting behaviors symptomatic of my chief complaint about the political right.

To me, Wilson’s concept of social biology was obvious. I excitedly read Wilson’s views: What if we taught elementary school children that an initial revulsion/fear to a person who has a different appearance was rooted in their genes and explained why: innate tribalism/the need to protect and stay with your own group.

Genetically-programmed reactions could be compared to our dog who ineffectually scratches the ground with her back legs after her backyard deposits—a vestige of the need to bury scats in her distant past. In other words. Children could learn that inherent racism is a vestige that is now maladaptive because of social evolution. Children could be taught such feelings are natural (you cannot help it), but ineffectual and counter-productive both for them and society.

Gould saw these kinds of explanations as justifications for racism. I see them as a means for putting racism aside. Of course, Steven Pinker would say I believe too much in the perfectibility of humans. Is there no hope for humans, I ask myself?

Nonetheless, reading these books has made me less dismissive and critical of views that oppose mine. My empathetic understanding has made me more certain that education could resolve the differences. Unfortunately, there are those who would call it indoctrination, humanism, or socialism. And, even if implemented, would require a multi-generational commitment to accomplish. Again, I turn to Pinker’s more recent books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. Here, Pinker presents his belief that the cultural evolution I wish to see is happening, but I wonder, can it reach enough people in time?

PART 3

LOVE OF MEMOIR

I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of details of how people lived at a particular time and place: how they spoke, what they said, what they ate, how they behaved.

Paul Theroux The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

I have always loved memoirs, travel memoirs most of all. What interests me are the windows into the past and learning what was a person’s raison d’etre. Further, a leading cause of our society’s ills is that we suffer generational amnesia; that as the generations pass, humanity forgets the world as it once was. This forgetfulness is devastating for nature as later generations continue to accept more degradation; death by a thousand cuts.

Thoreau saw this clearly when he remarked: When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here – the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country. I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places.

I have read so many memoirs, it is useless to catalog them. Hence, I will only mention a few. I enjoyed Paul Theroux’s books because he did not travel to encounter the typical inhabitant, rather he emphasized encounters with the below-average. After his books, I felt I knew where and how the people lived. Although Theroux found much to love and celebrate, my lack of desire to visit Asia and Africa was abetted by his books. I found those cultures unappealing. His travels in Latin America, however, were culturally attractive, even though his titles were not always appealing such as his recent book through Mexico entitled On the Plain of Snakes.

Theroux’s longevity as a writer has also been instructive. He lived long enough to return to locales he had visited decades previously. Africa was a sad return. Most locations had failed to progress, and whatever innocence had once been evident had degraded to squalor. This left me something to ponder, as good reading does. Was the present-day portrait of Africa accurate or had Theroux become a pessimistic curmudgeon, something I wonder about myself?

Peter Matthiessen is another favorite. He wrote brilliant fiction such as At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga, and The Watson Trilogy (Shadowland), but is probably best known for The Snow Leopard which won the National Book Award. The Snow Leopard is more than a travel memoir. It is a powerful, and often Buddhist, exploration of death–his wife had recently died—suffering and healing. I have read it more than once. Each time I can sometimes read but a page before I need to rest my mind from the intensity.

A lesser-known Matthiessen work is the inadequately titled, The Wind Birds: The Shorebirds of North America. Published in 1967, the book is an elegy for nature and lost ways of life. Matthiessen interviewed elderly hunters and fishermen who described the great spectacle that was—of shorebird migration. Poignant was the description of the now extinct Eskimo Curlew, some so fat that when shot, they would split open from contact with the ground. To me, the Eskimo Curlew has always been extinct. To read that during my lifetime, people yet lived who had seen thousands—that was a lesson.

The greatest writer no one has heard of might be Moritz Thomsen; best known for his chronicle of Peace Corps experiences in coastal Ecuador: Living Poor. He described it thusly: Living poor is like being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all of your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination. True poverty is a state of perpetual crisis, and one wave just a little bigger or coming from an unexpected direction can and usually does wreck things. …Never having paddled on a calm sea, he his is unable to imagine one. I thought of my mother-in-law who looked at Mexican border shanties and said, Hmph, you think they could look over here, that is, at the US, and see how to live.

Thomsen relates a specific example of a man needing help to repair his home. The culture required procurement of food and alcohol such that the labor would also be a fiesta. It was such a fine fiesta that the drunken men destroyed the house. Thomsen was aghast, but not the owner. It had been such a fine party, he declared he was jodido pero feliz (screwed but happy).

I have visited Ecuador on three occasions and once, drove along the coast, south of where Thomsen lived. I observed the inhabitants during the holiday celebrated for the Independence of Cuenca. Hordes of vendors packed the coastal highway selling everything from water bottles to grilled chicken. How could anyone make any money with so much competition? The non-venders were buying and lounging. Venders were probably buying from each other and trading different foods. As twilight approached, the road seemed lined with signal fires as we passed scores of flaming grills. Sadly, they had nowhere to party. Their housing was hovels. Where could they congregate but along the highway as trucks and cars passed?

I was introduced to Thomsen when I picked up a sale copy of The Saddest Pleasure, a memoir of his travels through Brazil after being kicked off the Ecuadorian farm where he had worked so hard. He had stayed on after his Peace Corps stint and worked for ten years.

He accepted his need to leave the farm, although he is unsure whether to describe it as a failure or a natural progression. He wonders if he did any good. His friend, whom he helped to a better economic life, was now a pariah among his neighbors for daring to rise above them. For Thomsen, it was another milestone in his own difficult life. His upbringing, as well described in My Two Wars, was abusive; the first war was with his father, the second recounted gruesome World War II experiences.

Now, he is on a trip through Brazil. Like Theroux’s returns to Africa and Asia, Thomsen decries the changes noting: It is the howling of jets that now defines the beginnings of journeys and announces with a sneer the mediocritazation of the world’s cities to which one must now travel with diminishing anticipations.

These books sound depressing, but Thomsen had the ability to observe and describe life objectively, and how so much depends on the chance of birth and that despite bad luck, life is worth living: …having lost God myself, I am up that same creek when it comes to finding meaning. Still, if I’m not an especially happy person, I am no unhappier than most and feel in my depths that what meaning there may be involves the obligation to celebrate life—that the meaning of life is being alive enough to live it…an apt summary of Thomsen’s writing: profound honesty and yet enough curiosity to make life worthwhile.

I have also enjoyed memoirs written by scientists. While in graduate school, I read The Double Helix by James Watson. The book resonated with me not as much for the brilliance of the discovery but because of its depiction of the vicious competition among scientists. In my career, I saw that around me every day.

A more recent book, without the chicanery, is The Code Breaker, the story of Jennifer Doudna who shared the Nobel prize in Chemistry for her work on gene editing. Doubtless, she and a co-worker deserved the prize, but other researchers could have shared it; the commercialization of the work has included an expensive battle over the patents. Consequently, it is an eye rolling moment for me when I hear conservative commentators suggest there are conspiracies among scientists regarding global warning or vaccinations or any other scientific pronouncement. Scientists are intensely competitive, and often justifiably arrogant. The idea of a large, scientific conspiracy is ludicrous.

Scientists also tell kind and inspiring stories such as: Life on Other Planets by Aomawa Shields, In Search of the Canary Tree by Lauren Oakes, and The Plant Hunter by Cassandra Leah Quave. All three describe how the authors obtained their PhDs against various odds.

Shields, a woman of color, became a Professor of Physics and Astronomy but sidetracked her scientific career for ten years in the Arts. Oakes’ book described her dedication to research and the attending costs to her private life. She persisted because the cause of global warming is so crucial. Quave passed on a lucrative medical/surgical career to study Ethnobotany. I love how her passions and interests drive her life. She overcame a physical disability as well as the selection of a difficult field of study for raising money, all while having children and caring for an aging family member.

I wondered about these scientists; did they ever sleep? Each emphasized the need for self-care; something the stoic German background I mentioned previously tried to deny me. I loved these books for another reason. I could have had a PhD. I was almost finished. Colleagues told me it was being served on a silver platter. I have felt regret over not completing it. Doubtless, earning a PhD is an achievement I could have had, but I recognize I did not share these authors’ passion for knowledge, nor did I share their brilliance. I was an excellent learner and connector, not a theoretician. In my own heart, I felt a PhD should require the effort and drive of people like Shields, Oakes and Quave. Knowing the world has scientists of their character gives me hope.