Boldly go, p.3
Boldly Go, page 3
Some of you reading this may wonder why I continue to refer to Elizabeth as “my wife” when a cursory glance at Wikipedia or any number of websites will tell you that we are divorced. We are, in fact, divorced, but only on paper. Some may call it modern; others may call it strange; it was certainly a delicate concept to handle when we first went down this road, but we decided that to avoid any sort of conflicts whatsoever about my estate when I’m gone, we could separate our financial interests, leaving my three kids to inherit equally, while Elizabeth would be taken care of through the terms of the divorce. For us, it works, and I think that is all that really matters in the end.
Despite challenges over the years, my family unit is intact. I feel that I’ve done something right, hopefully for them as well as for myself; I have a clear vision of how I want my family to function, and of its importance to me. If you’ve ever seen a blade being forged, you’ll know that it begins as a piece of steel. It is heated, beaten into shape, reheated, and left to cool slowly. The steel is heated and beaten again, and then again, quenched in liquid, sanded and sharpened, and then that perfect piece of steel can exist for a lifetime. That is the way I want my family to be. Even as I know perfection is an unattainable goal, I want us to be perfect in our construction. Perhaps striving for that is the best way of ensuring prosperity and contentment. I have long since passed the point where I have to work for myself, so everything I do, materially, is for my family, even as I continue to derive pleasure from the work itself.
I think about those video calls with my children and grandchildren. Modernity, in a strange contradiction, effectively tears us from our personal attachments, then comes right back to aid us through other applications. There I was, every week, talking to my family on Zoom while the pandemic kept us physically apart. Families all over the world can take advantage of technology to bridge the physical gap that exists between them as they move to different corners of the globe. When I was young, if you wanted to keep in touch with someone, you had to write them a letter; on rare occasions, if you had the money, you could manage a short phone call. Now? Communication has never been easier.
Sometimes, communication is so easy that we get ourselves in trouble. Jeffrey Toobin is CNN’s chief legal analyst. When it comes to explaining constitutional law, he’s got few peers and is well known for his sharp analyses. Unfortunately, in late 2020, Toobin became better known for an incident on a video call as part of his work for The New Yorker. He said he wasn’t aware that his camera was still turned on when he inadvertently exposed himself to his colleagues. He was fired from The New Yorker and CNN, but later was welcomed back to the latter. We take video calls for granted now, but the exponential growth of technology has in some ways been driven by—wait for it—pornography. It sounds perhaps unlikely, but in an effort to fulfill our most basic needs for sexual satisfaction, we as a society have long enriched the coffers of companies that could deliver that content. I find this utterly fascinating. Here we have the synchronicity of a man being caught trying to gratify his most basic biological urges while using the very same innovation that likely fulfilled those urges.
For the record, I find it distasteful that we judge people by the worst moments in their lives. Certainly, the timing of Toobin’s actions was unprofessional, but are we going to pretend that we do not have urges? My goodness, they are essential to our continued existence as a species. We are driven by a need to reproduce. Are we so prudish that we will publicly demand puritanism whereby sex can exist only in the context of procreation, while we flock in record numbers to view and consume pornography? I hope not. That seems to me an inherent denial of our basic humanity. It can only reinforce the loneliness that affects us all at various points in our lives.
In our early years, the essential aloneness into which we are all born is abated by the family unit. After that, how does one achieve that abatement? Our society says you get married. You have children. You surround yourself with more of your tribe, of your clan. You try to live a long life. When you die, your children continue the theme. Lather, rinse, repeat. Treated properly and nurtured along the way, that family unit can be the source of truly profound happiness; it is a tangible daily reminder of our connection to each other. A friend once remarked to me that if you could measure despair and joy on a scale of zero to ten, then without children in our lives, we would likely fluctuate between a two and an eight. Once children are factored in, that expands to the full zero-to-ten range. The highs are higher, the lows, lower. Being a father, I can say without question that this role has been the greatest, most fulfilling of my life. From that highest high to the lowest low, their joy is my joy, and their despair is mine as well.
I feel fortunate to be the father of girls at a time when the place of women in our society is inching closer to where it ought to be. I want my daughters and granddaughters to have the opportunity to fulfill themselves as human beings—something we menfolk have taken for granted since time immemorial. Progress is being made every day, even though, in my opinion, it is neither substantial nor swift enough. I dream that one day—it may unfortunately be a long time after I am gone—every one of you on this blue marble of ours will have the opportunity to achieve your maximum potential as a human being. It seems like such a simple proposition, and yet it has never been realized. Star Trek showed that in our imaginations, this idealism could one day become commonplace and accepted wisdom, to the point that it need not even have attention called to it. Gene Roddenberry once opined that “Star Trek was an attempt to say humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life-forms.” A more eloquent expression of the oneness of humanity, I have not found. We have the potential to find true unity of purpose and nature, but it requires that we all pay attention, especially those who sit atop the power structures.
While it is easier to maintain the status quo and not challenge our long-held beliefs, true progress and change require us to listen, to put aside our egos, to break deeply ingrained habits, and to see things from perspectives other than our own. It is not easy work. Certain elements are baked in and require significant effort to dislodge. I try to get it right, and I know I fail constantly. I recently caught myself using the term authoress. I used it as an identifier, certainly not with any derogatory intent, but I am reminded of the power of language, because language gives form to our thoughts, and to our attitudes. Those thoughts and attitudes are carried into our everyday lives, and they become the prevailing thoughts and attitudes of some of those around us as we seek to maintain our participation in societal units—friendships, family bonds, working relationships with colleagues. We can do better; we must do better. It is a challenge worthy of our highest efforts and attention.
I think often about “bonds” as we try to find connection. We now know that they exist on a far more elemental level than previously believed. Ecologist Suzanne Simard has spent her life unearthing fascinating facts about, for want of a better term, the secret lives of trees. We have long understood the vital role that trees play in our daily lives—taking in carbon dioxide, generating oxygen, and so forth. We have harnessed them for lumber, often in a manner that causes deforestation and damages the delicate balance of our planet. But through her tireless work, Simard has discovered, as documented in her absorbing book Finding the Mother Tree, the intricate networks through which trees communicate with each other. In their natural state, trees behave in very much the same way humans do. There is a central tree—the matriarch of the family, if you will—and around that central “mother tree,” deep beneath the surface of the ground, are roots spreading out in myriad directions, connecting to all the other trees. Even when seeds are dropped in various places and scattered by the winds and displaced by birds and other animals, their eventual roots find their way back to the original connection: their mother tree. That mother tree, in essence, continues to try to take care of its offspring in a variety of ways, spreading nutrients and reinforcing the bonds through its ancient and time-strengthened roots, nurturing it to its potential. What is the tree’s potential? To grow. To fulfill its purpose, to feel the warm, life-giving energy of the sun. A passage from Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts reminds me of this ever-upward thrust of trees and their desire to reach the potential imbued by their mother. At the end of the play, the character Oswald Alving begs his mother to euthanize him, so terrified is he to experience the effects of the disease syphilis, which is coursing through his body on the way to bringing him to a painful end. “Mother, give me the sun,” Oswald entreats. She doesn’t understand his request. “The sun. The sun,” he repeats. To me, it feels like that most elemental need. The sun. Warmth. The need for love, and to be made to feel safe and comforted.
As a child, Suzanne Simard lived in British Columbia, Canada, where a tradition of clear-cutting the region’s forests had been in place since the British first marched into the area and discovered there were woods. For decades, the loggers would simply cut down the trees and turn them into pulp and mulch. Over time, the people of the region came to understand, at least theoretically, that this would have an effect on the ecosystem. A government report cited the likelihood that the destruction of these swaths of trees could lead to permanent damage and erosion of the surrounding areas, which could create landslides and similar phenomena. A new policy was put in place: for every tree that was pulled down, another must be planted in its place. Hundreds of thousands were cut down, and hundreds of thousands planted to replace them. After graduating from university, Simard was hired to examine the plantings and to see how well the ecosystem was holding up.
Not well, she discovered. The replanted trees were struggling. Their roots were dying; Simard was determined to find out why. She experimented with different techniques, including digging up saplings and seedlings and examining their root structures. What she discovered was that, unlike the old trees that had been pulled down, the newly planted ones were not tightly connected to an existing root system. They didn’t have their mother. Their family. It was taking longer for them to grow and they weren’t connected to the rest of the trees the way they needed to be in order to thrive. If that isn’t a metaphor for our own existence, I don’t know what is. It just makes my spine tingle. Learning more about these connections we have to the fabric of trees, the fabric of Earth—I swear, it’s why I wake up as early as I do and spring out of bed. That thirst for understanding powers me; in the vast universe of knowledge, I know nothing. I know a fraction of nothing. I need to learn more. In every discovery I make of the natural world, I find a connection to our own story—the story of our shared human condition.
We’re told that time heals all wounds, that blood is thicker than water. Our bonds can break, but they can be healed. I have seen my own relationships bend and fracture, but also mend. A relationship can be saved by words and deeds, by working to create circumstances in which it can flourish. In the mirror image, when given the right conditions, the right nurturing, nature can regenerate. Bonds can heal. Fractures can mend. In the early twentieth century, it was governmental policy to exterminate many predators from Yellowstone National Park, which had been founded in 1872. By 1926, the Yellowstone wolf packs had all been wiped out. With the wolves removed from the landscape, the ecosystem began to change. Lacking a natural predator, the elk population skyrocketed. In the four decades that followed, almost seventy thousand elk were removed from Yellowstone (most, sadly, were killed, while some were introduced to other areas in which they’d previously been eliminated). In the late 1960s, the park reversed its policy and stopped killing and removing elk, leading their numbers to jump again. In harsh winters, many simply starved to death, and all the while, the ecosystem they depended on was gradually eroding, being stripped bare of all its natural sustenance by an elk population too big to spread the wealth effectively.
In the times before the predatory wolves were removed, the elk were often on the move, their numbers reduced by that predation. They didn’t have time to browse the willows for long before having to move on. What this meant was that the willows had time to recover, particularly during winter months, and were available as a source of food for beavers. When the beavers were well fed, they built dams, which affected stream hydrology, providing a sustainable home for fish to thrive in, which in turn provided food for swooping birds and other creatures. The predatory wolves also effectively distributed food to other animals, leaving carcasses along the way to be picked at by birds, bears, and coyotes.
Without that delicate balance, those natural bonds started to break; the intricate network began to fray. In 1995, ecologists reintroduced the gray wolf to Yellowstone. Where before there was one beaver colony, today there are nine. The flow-on effect of the wolves’ return has begun to rebalance the fragile Yellowstone ecosystem, to return it to its natural strength and continuity. It is a return to harmony and a physical reminder of the connection we share to the Earth and its inhabitants. As the ultimate apex predator, humankind has the most power to disrupt nature. I hope we can all learn a lesson in the futility of doing so and dedicate ourselves to repairing the damage we have wrought, generation after generation.
Mycologist Paul Stamets has been lauded for his pioneering work in the field of bioremediation—in essence, using mushrooms to help repair damage to the natural environment. These fungi produce enzymes that can break down pollutants and even, in some cases, plastic. Through his life’s work in this fascinating field, Stamets has discovered yet another facet of how nature forges bonds and connections through what has been termed the “mycelial network.” Fans of Star Trek: Discovery may remember the concept (and, of course, the tributary character Lieutenant Paul Stamets, played brilliantly by Anthony Rapp), which was used in a theoretical fashion to allow interstellar travel in an instant, without the pesky long commute times associated with warp drive. Of course, the ability to travel through outer space along the mycelial network is pure fantasy (at present!), but the Paul Stamets of our century has shown how the mycelia of subterranean fungi connect plants and trees together, transporting nutrients, and effectively “talking” to those plants and trees, while providing a conduit for them to communicate with each other. He termed this connection “Earth’s natural internet.”
Plants and trees, fungi, and even some bacteria are said to communicate through low-level electrical impulses driven by their own chemical neurotransmitters. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we have neurotransmitters in our brains. Our brains use neurons. They transmit. Simple, right? Except what on earth does that mean? Electricity generally is something we can harness, but there is still much to discover about how and why it exists in the first place. Similarly, our brains exist and we can harness them. They are built upon billions of electrical connections. It’s easy to get lost in the technical jargon and theoretical nature of many of these discoveries and hypotheses, but what it all suggests to me is that we are part of this grand network, which we are only beginning to understand on a physical level. Our relationships, the bonds we forge and share with each other, are a microcosm for the inner workings of the universe itself.
Yet all of this somehow fails to capture the magnificence of that concept. It’s so easy to say “we’re all related.” We try, failingly most times, to grasp at the implications of the concept, and yet it also seems somehow ingrained in all of us, if we can just look around and admire the grandeur of it.
I’m reminded of a trip I took to Ireland with my wife Elizabeth. We were in Dublin and were introduced to a reporter who wanted to show us some terrific spots around his country. So, we found ourselves in a small Irish village inn and met a gillie, a local fishing and hunting guide. I have hunted for sport in the past; it is one of my biggest regrets. I remain ashamed of myself for choosing to kill innocent creatures for no other reason than the challenge of proving my superiority. I try to adhere to a more plant-based diet these days, with occasional exceptions, and if I am to fish, it must only be for food. Never for sport.
The gillie asked if we had ever been fly-fishing. I had, many times: as a child with my father and later in Alaska with some of the world’s premier fly fishermen. We agreed to go, having already decided that anything we caught would be our lunch. The gillie took us to a trout stream: “The best, most beautiful stream in the village,” he said. He lent us fishing rods and took us through a little trail that ran alongside the stream. Every so often we would see a fly fisherman standing in the water, waders on, stalking the fish, waiting for his moment. There were maybe a dozen paths that led to spots where you could cast, and at each of them, a fly fisherman practiced his or her ritual.
Finally, we came to an empty area. We waded into the water with our equipment and began casting. After a couple of hours, we’d had no luck. No bites, no nibbles. Barely a ripple in the water. We couldn’t catch so much as a cold out there. I asked if perhaps we should move on and seek better luck in another part of the stream. “Oh,” the gillie replied, “I’m sorry if I’ve misled you. There are no fish in this stream.”
Was this a joke? Were cameramen about to appear from behind the brush and expose me on an Irish trout-themed prank show?
“You see,” the gillie elucidated, “I’m an alcoholic. All the people fishing here are alcoholics. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place, and we come here to ease our minds by going into the fishing stream and casting about for fish that don’t exist.”
