Luckily, tonight the wind dies. “It takes years to get observing time at these world-class telescopes,” Tim explains. “Sometimes we go halfway around the world to observe, then some little thing like the wind shuts us down and we go home having accomplished nothing.”
“What star are we on?” Roger asks. “SJ 9523,” Tim replies. “Do we have the Halley coordinates?” “Yes.” “Then let ’er rip,” Roger says, and a curved door in the ceiling of the dome opens slowly onto the universe.
The core of a comet is made of remnant materials from very early times. Its coma (tail) is a spherical cloud of ice and dust—debris left over from the time of planet building. To see into this sphere is to have a window into the beginnings of time. On the computer screen, Comet Halley appears as a white dot, that’s all. During the night there are long periods when nothing seems to happen. Tim reads Dante, Roger falls asleep and jerks awake. Then he turns to me and says: “It must seem strange to you to find out that I spend my life studying dust. If only I could get a handful of it … Maybe then I would know something.”
Sometime after midnight a “bump” appears in the spectra. It is explained to me as dark material—probably carbon—not seen before. Roger calls Tom Gerballe, an astronomer in one of the other observatories on the mountain. “Did you see it?” Roger asks. “Yes. And they saw it other places too.” Roger and I drive to Tom’s building. Inside, the atmosphere is markedly different: bright lights, rock music blaring, Tom on his hands and knees in a continuous sea of paper running out of the printer. “Look, it’s here and here and here,” he yells excitedly, and I see bumps in the masses of wavy lines but fail to understand what the finding means in terms of the comet.
“Is it gas?” “It can’t be gas.” “Which gas?” “Is it hotter? This doesn’t look like any other spectra I’ve ever seen.” “Maybe we’ll learn something about comets tonight.… Ah, the sky is full of mystery.…”
Finally, Tom sits in a chair with an armful of uncut computer printouts. He has slate-blue eyes and wild corkscrew black hair and wears sandals despite deep snow outside. “I just came up here to test an instrument. It’s usually so boring—no romance in all this, you know—but now we’ve made a discovery, even if we don’t know what it is we’ve discovered,” he says, laughing. He watches more paper undulate across the floor. “The first night I went to observe as a student, I left home in the fog, drove up the mountain in the fog, unloaded the equipment in the fog, sat all night in the fog. In the morning, I went home in the fog and never knew where I was, which direction I was facing. That’s kind of how astronomy is, even on nights like this.”
Back at the NASA observatory, Roger, Tim, and I gather the data. “Now the fun begins,” Roger says sleepily. “We go home and try to figure this stuff out.” Down the treacherous road to Hale Pohaku, I talk nonstop to keep Roger awake at the wheel. Light comes into the sky, and far below, a thick bank of fog carpets the entire island.
“I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there,” Richard Feynman, the physicist, said. Today I was taken to see a tree. It’s April 15, and I’m in north Florida. What Floridians call a “scrub,” Wyomingites would call a forest. My guide leads me through pines, palms, and cypress trees. Against a red sky, palmettos hold up their fringed fans, wild vines cling tightly to tree trunks, and the coarse fibers of an uprooted palm are like hair. The trail through a dense thicket stops, and there is an opening. In the distance, a lake spreads before me, gold in morning light.
Florida is a flat limestone shelf that sticks out into the sea. It is all water, runneled through soft rock, breaking open here and there, and whole lakes have been known to drain overnight. But this one shimmers, almost overfull. The slap of alligator tails announces our arrival. Egrets and herons poke around in mud flats, and tall palms at the edge of the water sway as though fanning away the heat to come.
The guide takes me deeper into the woods. Spiderwebs span trees, wrap around my wrists and neck, and ticks fall into my shirt. The spongy ground takes my tracks and lays them onto those of a deer.
In many early cultures, trees, like mountains, were thought to be the axial center of the universe, soaring as they do above human entanglements. It wasn’t the tree I saw first but the clearing beneath it: dappled with sunlight, it seemed altarlike, as if we were meant to kneel there. The tree is a live oak soaring straight like a mast but thick as ten masts lashed together. Far up, branches hold moss from their arms as if weighing stories for truths, balancing every disparity in their elegant, judicial spread. Cheek against bark, I look past leaves into the becalmed eye of a Florida morning: “Quercus.” Oak. That’s the tree’s Latin name. It sounds like a question.
Later. Dreamed I held a comet’s tail like a tree trunk and carried it to my astronomer friend to look at and explain to me. “Have you ever touched time?” he asked. “No,” I said. Then Roger took my hand and put it on a place where pieces of ice and bits of stars bubbled out from a vent in emptiness like the ones at the bottom of the ocean where warm, juvenile water gurgles into being.
Now I’m on water for an afternoon, on the warm gulf stream, which has been known to carry the seeds of tropical plants as far north as Ireland. Days when sky and sea are the same color, I understand how water currents are stirred by air currents and air currents heated or cooled by water, both functioning as one organism, how it is not correspondence but coherence that matters, that if we do not start with wholeness and unity, we will not end there either.
I read about galactic plasma and marine plasma and the chemical architecture of the human brain. Are the icy contents of a comet’s tail—its plasma—red, crystallized blood? The microscopic bits of life floating in a primeval ocean three hundred thousand million years ago marched from hydrosphere to lithosphere, took purchase on rock, plumbed itself, rose up, bearing seed, flower, and fruit, high into the air.
A tree represents the zenith of botanical evolution, it is an aerial garden, far from its oceanic beginnings. A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree. It is a thumb held up or a leg striding, the kind of obstacle that causes human and botanical consciousness to occur.
Even the words used to describe the human brain are botanical: limbus—referring to the limbic system, where all emotion occurs—is a word whose ancient meaning was “limb of a tree.” Cortex, that deep part of the brain where language and abstract thought happen, means “bark.”
I am told of the delicate nature of the tree’s parts: of cambium, the inner layer of cells between phloem and xylem, and how remarkably sensitive it is to any strain on the tree. And the way bark acts as a waterproof covering to the thin layer of living tissue within. A tree’s breathing is slow and slight. The respiratory pores in the bark, called lenticels, must have ample space. As the tree ages, the central heart-wood thickens and the girth of the trunk widens to accommodate decay.
Gary Lynch, a neurobiologist, has put together the physiology of memory, the way we know what we know. Thoughts arise as electrical impulses; bits of thought and sensation are neural plasma shuttling from cell to cell, spreading like a net. There’s a rhythmical pattern of firing activity, and wild chemical reactions occur: calcium is released and in turn activates an enzyme called calpain, which scrubs connective tissue between neurons—the rootlike dendrites—cutting into the cytoskeleton and, in this way, exposing receptors. Through these, information is absorbed; memory is etched in, and the dendritic brainscape, a place that looks like the cracks in ice on my lake, changes its shape forever.
To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.
Wyoming. I wait for light, and when it comes the lake is mine again. It is a black shield, a silver mirror, a black cloth wound around glinting mountains. Ducks waddle on a free-floating piece of ice that bumps into the island. Golden eagles colonize the
sky. One area of open water in the lake is shaped like a violin. Wind plays water pizzicato, à la Bartok, plucking strings. At the shallow end, gray mud flats are marked with holes where snipes have thrust their sensitive bills for food. By the end of the week, sun has shrunken lake ice to the size of a dime.
On the evening news. Carl Sagan talks about the photographs from the Voyager. He sounds distraught: “There doesn’t seem to be any life out there,” he reports, “which underscores the rarity and preciousness of life here.” One photograph has moved him. It looks back at the earth from the edge of the galaxy. “We look like a blue dot. A blue dot … that’s all we are.”
At dusk I gaze across the lake. My little island, Alcatraz, is a floating hyacinth in rising water, dragging willow branches like oars. Purple swallows dive down for mosquitoes, and the iridescent heads of mallards flash back and forth. Inside a nest hung by pink straps made from willow bark, I see a blue dot—a universe within a universe: the blue egg of a robin.
April 20. White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Here I am at ground zero, my fingers stuck through the chain-link fence that surrounds Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945. This place stands for what could be the end of all life, yet spring is in full bloom and I’m here with the botanist and writer Gary Nabhan, looking for an uncommon cactus, Toumeya papyracantha, which survives by giving up its best defense: sharp spines. Also called grama grass cactus or papery spine cactus, it has soft and elongated spines, a camouflage to make it look like the grama grass in whose midst it grows. Redtailed B-17s fly hot missions over us, low and fast, dropping bombs near Stallion’s Gate to the north as we crawl over radioactive ground.
“It took a year to get permission to come onto this land,” Gary yells over the roar of bombers. At the main gate we were fingerprinted, photographed, given badges, and sent off with an Army biologist named Kim.
“Don’t touch any ordnance,” she warns as we search fairy rings of grama grass for the cactus. We are in the supersecret zone where laser explosives are set off to duplicate nuclear detonations and Patriot missiles are fired. Everywhere, pieces and parts of bombs, shells, nose cones, and airplanes stick out of the sand. “Some things might still be hot,” Kim says. “You know, unexploded.” I keep expecting to find grotesquely enlarged plant specimens, but everything looks quite normal. At my elbow, a phosphorescent beetle with a turquoise back crawls over an unexploded shell, then makes tracks away from me in the sand.
Semis go by with full-grown pine trees, held upright in giant Christmas tree stands. The Army is the greatest producer of theater. “What are they doing?” we ask. “They’re making a simulated forest to practice night bombing raids,” we are told. A turkey vulture circles us, and an oryx—imported from Africa for fat-cat officers to hunt—looks on as we begin to find and flag toumeya. Looking down into a clump of grama grass, we find it almost impossible to see the cactus, whose papery spines flow out like blond hair. Conformity and camouflage are two ways plants and humans can get along in the world; they can also be a way to hide the means of war. To live in conflict and harmony …
In the morning we are barred entry to the missile range. During the night they bombed the “forest,” and now they are shooting off missiles that land where, yesterday, we found cactus, so we retreat to nonmilitary lands. A skiff of new snow shines on Sierra Blanca Peak to the north, and to the south, a blimplike object is suspended in the sky, which I’m told is the border patrol’s “look-down radar” for drug detection. As we set up ten-by-ten-foot transects where toumeya is particularly thick, a mockingbird mimics the sound of a phone ringing, then a bomber zooming overhead.
We stop to look at a king-sized yucca tree. One species of moth lays its eggs inside the ovary of the yucca flower, showering pollen onto the stigma as it does so, inadvertently pollinating the plant. When the eggs develop, the larvae feed on yucca seeds, leaving enough for the plant to reseed itself … a classic example of botanical love: the plant unable to live without the animal, and vice versa.
On another road we examine a buffalo gourd, so precisely adapted to the desert’s short rainy season that it can emerge from dormancy to flower in just twenty days. The plant is pollinated by an unusual bee whose body is shaped perfectly to fit inside the male flower. The bee goes there to sleep at night and backs out at dawn, carrying pollen grains on its back as it visits the female flower.
Two by two, F-15s make their morning assaults on my ears as I crawl on hands and knees through stands of cactus endangered by its defenselessness and think how cooperation and competition can be the same thing, two sides of the same coin. At midmorning I find a robust, two-headed toumeya, the biggest one so far. Head propped on my hand, I memorize the cactus’s form and shape and listen to the mockingbird sing obsessively—one song after another—and wonder what makes any song one’s own. Then it occurs to me that this cactus’s best defense is a peaceful one: not meting out pain but merely blending in.
Conclusions end in new questions. Why would a cactus live in the middle of grasses that are routinely grazed? Have I missed the obvious? Perhaps the point is to be eaten, so the ingested seeds can be distributed through the manure of the grazing animal. The lesson here is implicit: some things die in order to survive: individual sacrifice for the greater, common good. But isn’t that what they tell young soldiers going to war?
More F-15s streak by, and another mock forest has been created and destroyed. Here, on the missile range, death is thought to have the power to end things. But that truth is incomplete. There is also this: the origin of life is always found in death; death is life’s constant companion.
Home again. It’s almost May, and I climb the dry bed of Cedar Creek, looking for meltwater. Scrambling up boulders, down steep sides, over fallen trees, I finally come to a grotto. Pine wind drives into it, scouring its walls as though readying it for spring. Bird song reports against red walls in sharp echoes. Looking upcanyon, I see towering peaks trimmed in snow—our storehouse of water.
At the mouth of the grotto I touch my toe to a pool covered with ice—delicate as eggshell, it splinters. I dreamed last night of three waterfalls whose flow had been transfixed as crystal bowls that wouldn’t stop breaking; then, falling, they became whole again. A long icicle at the front of the cave drips—the tick of a heart.
The word “grotto” comes in a roundabout way from crypta, meaning “hidden” or “to hide,” and is related to an old Norse word that means “pile of stones.” Two huge, whalelike boulders lean out from the gorge, cantilevered over my head, and where they split apart is wedged a single, egg-shaped rock, glazed over with ice—a transparent cocoon inside of which stirs an unborn being: a bug, a whale, a bird.
We turn our cattle out onto the range. Thousands of acres are split into temporary hundred-acre pastures by the use of electric fences, and we move the cattle, sheep, and one guard donkey through these quickly—depending on the growth rate of the grass, it’s about every three days—in order to avoid overgrazing and damage to the whole ecosystem. Short-duration, high-intensity grazing duplicates the movement of buffalo pursued by predators (human and animal) over these lands. For protection they bunched up, trampled ground, grazed, then quickly moved on. In this way, few, if any, grass plants were bitten off more than once.
Now I’m on my hands and knees again, regarding a blade of grass, not only to see myself in it, as Whitman did, but to understand what a grass plant needs to flourish. It should be grazed once, and the root systems left to restore themselves; it needs to be fertilized by the animals who use it and watered by rains.
In Japan I visited the Taoist farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, who said, “In order to restore the balance of the natural world, we have to change our attitudes. We have to learn to do less. People plant with their heads. They think they have to do many things, but they are wrong. It’s the kamisama who do the growing; we just help out a little bit: We must stop thinking we know anything. Better to take our clothes off and roll aro
und on the ground like babies. We have to give up everything before we can begin.”
As we walked to his hillside farm, bird song erupted and a wild tangle of vegetation took over from neatly pruned farms below. Cucumber vines climbed persimmon trees; peaches dropped into winter gardens of scallions, cabbage, daikon. Narcissus bloomed around mandarin orange trees whose unpicked fruit was split open and eaten by birds. “If they like it, it must be good,” Fukuoka exclaimed happily. He grows rice as it’s meant to be grown—like any wild grain, started from seed, sprouting in soil, not water. “Why do people think they have to plant rice any other way? They must be crazy! So much work. The kamisama laugh at us. Really, things are very simple.”
I try to cultivate my thinking and manage the land for biodiversity. Let one good thing happen, and there are many results. Stop overgrazing, and more plants—grasses, wild-flowers, shrubs, trees—cover the ground and more species occur. As a result there are more bugs, more birds, more small and large animals, a better energy and mineral cycle. Intermittent streams begin to flow year round. In a few years’ time there is more of everything, and these open spaces begin to fill with life.
May. High water. One stream comes down, then another, until meltwater pours from every direction onto the ranch. There are creeks where none existed before, and the front yard is a wide pool buzzing with mosquitoes. Bird song rolls over tumbling cataracts, falling into the catcher’s mitt of the human ear. Snow is gone. If snow represents renunciation, then I renounce renunciation. By afternoon a snake dance of red silt stains running water, and drinking it, I feel red threads pull through me, the red threads of desire.
Mornings and evenings I irrigate a hundred acres, setting dams in ditches to stop the flow of the creek and divert it onto fields of native hay. Standing knee-deep in water, I recklessly declare this to be the end of the drought. Fields that have been dry for three years are inundated, water working its way around hard stems like an embrace. How good it must feel to drink with the whole body. At the end of the day a bird, hidden from sight, sings a song I’ve never heard before.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 13