by Oliver Sacks
“The limo driver who has picked me up at the Colorado Springs airport is taking me to the Broadmoor—I know nothing about it, but he pronounces the name with a sort of reverence or awe—says, ‘‘You’ve stayed there before?”
No, I say, the last time I was in Colorado Springs was in 1960, and then I was zigzagging around the country on my motorbike, with a bedroll on the back. He digests this. “Real swank place, the Broadmoor,” he says at length.
It is indeed—all three thousand acres of it—a sort of Hearst Castle, with a lake, three golf courses, fake four-posters in the bedrooms, and flunkies, charming men and women trained to anticipate your every wish and action, pulling out chairs, opening doors, offering suggestions for dinner. How far, I wondered, would this overservice go? Would one of these pleasant, uniformed helpers thrust a tissue under my nose if they saw me about to sneeze? I am uncomfortable being so waited upon, and would prefer to go about my business quietly, open my own doors, pull out my own chairs, blow my own nose.
Later, I am sitting outside on the terrace of one of the Broadmoor’s many restaurants, an informal one that just serves, I am told, “simple” bar food. As I sit, gazing at snowcapped Cheyenne Mountain and the beautiful, clear mountain skies, eating a chicken sandwich the size of my head, a plane climbs almost vertically in front of me, leaving shining twin contrails in its wake. I wonder if it is from the U.S. Air Force Academy nearby—no civilian plane, surely, could climb like that—and my mind goes back to 1960–61, when I was biking around the country and paid a special visit to the academy’s new chapel, which, with its dramatic, triangular outline, looked as though it were shooting up into the sky.
I was twenty-seven. I had arrived in North America a few months before and started out by hitchhiking across Canada, then down to California, which I had been in love with since I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in postwar London. California stood for John Muir, Muir Woods, Death Valley, Yosemite, the soaring landscapes of Ansel Adams, the lyrical paintings of Albert Bierstadt. It meant marine biology, Monterey, and “Doc,” the romantic marine biologist figure in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
It was not just physical spaciousness that America stood for in my mind then but moral openness and spaciousness, too. In England, one was classified—working class, middle class, upper class—as soon as one opened one’s mouth; one did not mix, one was not at ease, with people of a different class. The system, though implicit, was nonetheless as rigid, as uncrossable, as the caste system in India. America, I imagined, was a classless society, a place where everyone, irrespective of birth, color, religion, education, or profession, could meet each other as fellow humans, brother animals, a place where a professor could talk to a truck driver without the categories coming between them.
I had had a taste, a glimpse, of such a democracy, an equality, when I roved about England on my motorcycle in the 1950s. Even in stiff England, motorcycles seemed to bypass the barriers, to open a sort of social ease and good nature in everyone. “That’s a nice bike,” someone would say, and the conversation would go from there. I had seen this as a boy when my father had a motorbike (with a sidecar, in which he would take me along), and I encountered it again when I got my own bike. Motorcyclists were a friendly group; we waved to one another when we passed on the road, made conversation easily if we met at a café. We formed a sort of romantic, classless society within society at large.
* * *
—
I ARRIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO in 1960 with only a temporary visa and owning almost nothing except the clothes I wore. I had eight months to wait before I could get a green card and start my internship in a San Francisco hospital, and in that time I wanted to see the whole country—in the most vivid, unshielded, direct way possible—and the way to do that, to my mind, was by motorbike. I borrowed some money, bought an old BMW, and set out with nothing but a bedroll and half a dozen blank notebooks, to encounter the vastness of America. Setting out on Route 66, I biked through California, Arizona, Colorado…and this was how I found myself, early in 1961, outside the Air Force Academy.
The academy itself was full of young, idealistic cadets, heroes all, to my impressionable eyes. I had volunteered, a few months before, for the Royal Canadian Air Force—but the RCAF wanted me as a research physiologist, and I wanted to fly. Flying was still invested for me with a sort of glamour. Airmen, to my mind, were the motorbikers of the air, with goggles and leather helmets and thick leather flying jackets, enjoying ecstasies, facing dangers, like Saint-Exupéry (and perhaps fated, like him, to die young).
So I identified with the young cadets—their youth, their aspirations, their optimism, their idealism. It was part and parcel of my pristine vision of America, that first enchanted encounter with it, when I was still in love with an America I had dreamed about: an America of vast spaces and mountains and canyons—young, innocent, ingenuous, strong, open, as Europe had long ceased to be—and, by happy coincidence, with a great young president at its helm.
I was soon to be disenchanted, disillusioned on many fronts. The death of Kennedy added an almost personal pain. But that day in the spring of 1961, when I was twenty-seven and full of vigor and hope and optimism myself—that day, that vision of Colorado Springs and the Air Force Academy, made my heart exalt, beat strongly with joy and pride.
This comes back to me with a sense of the ludicrous now (but one must not condescend to one’s younger self), as I sit here in this plush, false Eden, forty-three years later. I stir slightly in my chair, and the waiter, telepathic, brings me another beer.
Botanists on Park
There is no end to the odd things that New Yorkers do on Saturday mornings. This, at least, is what drivers must have thought recently when they had to slow down to avoid a line of a dozen people flattened against the enormous embankment of the Park Avenue railroad trestle, peering with magnifying glasses and monoculars into tiny crevices in the stone. Passersby stared, asked questions, and even took photographs. Police officers stopped their patrol car and watched with suspicion or with bewilderment—until they caught sight of the T-shirts many of us were wearing, which bore slogans such as “American Fern Society” or “Ferns Are Ferntastic.” We were assembled for a meeting of the American Fern Society, which had joined with the Torrey Botanical Society for a Saturday morning Fern Foray. These forays, which have been going on for more than a century, are usually in somewhat more bucolic sites, but this time we had no goal beyond the Park Avenue viaduct, which, with its crevices and crumbling mortar, is a perfect place to see chink-finding, xerophytic ferns—ferns that, unlike most, can stand long periods of drying out and come to life again after a good rain.
The AFS is a society of amateurs that was founded in Victorian times, an age of amateurs and naturalists. Darwin is our icon. We include a poet, two schoolteachers, a garage mechanic, a neurologist, a urologist, and assorted others. We are about equally divided by gender, and our ages vary from twenty to eighty. Besides us pteridophiles that morning, there was a young couple, two bryophiles, from the Torrey Botanical Society—a group of botanists and amateurs founded in the 1860s, just a few years before the AFS. They were “slumming” amongst the fern people: their interests lie more in mosses, liverworts, and lichens. Ferns are a bit too modern, too evolutionarily advanced, for them, just as flowering plants are for the rest of us.
One tends to think of ferns as delicate and moisture-loving, and many of them are. But others are among the toughest plants on the planet. Ferns will invariably be the first things to sprout, say, on a new lava flow. The planet’s atmosphere is full of fern spores. Woodsia obtusa, the basic fern on the Park Avenue embankment, has sixty-four spores within each sporangium, and thousands of sporangia on the underside of the fronds of every plant, so each plant is good for a million spores, perhaps more. Let one of these land on a suitable place, and you see why ferns are the great opportunists of the plant world. Indeed, in the fossil record, there is something
called the “fern spike,” which shows how, after most of the world’s plants and land animals were killed in the great extinction of the late Cretaceous period, life came bursting back in the form of ferns.
The leaders that morning were Michael Sundue, a young botanist and fern expert from the New York Botanical Garden, and Elisabeth Griggs, a botanical illustrator. We started on the west side of the trestle—it is shaded in the morning—and trekked up Park Avenue, facing the traffic. “Botanize at your own risk,” the Fern Foray invitation had said.
“An ideal habitat for gametophytes,” Sundue said. “Tiny rivulets of water creep down after a rain, dissolving the mortar, making an ideal medium for the lime-tolerant Woodsia obtusa.” He discovered a tiny heart-shaped gametophyte in a bed of moss. It had no fronds and looked nothing like a fern. It much more resembled, the bryological couple was happy to see, a liverwort—but it is a crucial intermediate stage in the fern’s reproductive cycle. It has male and female organs on its surface, and when it is fertilized two tiny fronds, the new fern, will sprout from it. On an adult Woodsia, Sundue pointed out the tiny black umbrella-shaped structures, the indusia, that shelter the sporangia. When time comes for the sporangia to scatter their spores, they activate an ingenious catapult mechanism that flings the spores into the breeze. The spores will float, perhaps, for miles. And if they land somewhere moist and suitable, they will grow into gametophytes, and the cycle will continue.
High above his head, Sundue spotted a gigantic Woodsia specimen, almost six feet across, clinging to the rock. “That one’s a good age,” he said. “Decades old—some species can be very long-lived.” When he was asked if ferns show signs of age, he hesitated; the answer is not clear. A fern tends to keep growing until it outruns its food supply, is ousted by competitors, or (as will happen sooner or later with the Woodsia) becomes so heavy that it falls to the ground. In some botanical gardens, there are massive ferns more than a hundred years old. Death is not built in to these plants as it is for us more specialized life-forms, with the ticking clocks of our telomeres, our liability to mutations, our running-down metabolisms. But youth is apparent, even in ferns. The young Woodsia are charming: a bright spring green; tiny, like babies’ toes; and very soft and vulnerable.
There was nothing but Woodsia between 93rd and 104th Streets, but moving to the next block we spotted a Thelypteris palustris, the marsh fern, here in a very unmarshy environment. It was perched in the wall about eight feet above the ground. Sundue, acrobatic, leapt up and pulled down a frond. We passed it around, peering at it through high-powered lenses and using Swiss Army knives to dissect its vascular bundles.
One of the group, an angiosperm lady from the Torrey Society, spotted a flowering plant near the Thelypteris. It was oozing with sticky white resin. Lactuca, she said, allied to lettuce. The word made me think back to my marine biology days, and stimulated a sudden memory of Ulva lactuca, the edible seaweed that is often called sea lettuce. I thought, too, of the old word lactucarium (which the OED defines as “inspissated juice of various kinds of lettuce, used as a drug”).
All these names are irresistible, and the next one seemed positively neurological: ebony spleenwort, Asplenium platyneuron, densely covered the trestle between 104th and 105th Streets. It used to be much rarer in this area, Sundue said, but now its range is spreading north and east. Sometimes plants migrate because a favorable habitat has been created. Rocks in New York tend to be acidic, hostile to these alkaline-loving ferns, although artificial structures made with mortar can provide a haven for lime-loving plants. But the great Park Avenue trestle goes back to the nineteenth century, long before the Asplenium is believed to have started spreading. Perhaps there is some local source of warmth (cities are full of unexpected heat islands), or perhaps it is yet another sign of global warming—perhaps both.
Between 105th and 106th Streets we found Onoclea sensibilis, the “sensitive fern.” It looked very dry. It was not doing too well; solicitously, I gave it a drink from my water bottle. If I watered all the Onocleas here regularly, Sundue said, they would become the dominant fern species, and completely alter the ecology of the trestle.
Next came another splendidly named fern, Pellaea atropurpurea. Some of the plants, those in the densest shade, were a deep blue, almost indigo, verging on purple. None of us were certain why this should be so. Is the blue just a waxy cuticle, or is it a diffraction color like the metallic blue one can see on some butterflies’ or birds’ wings? Some ferns turn an iridescent blue, in a strategy evolved for absorbing more light. Would this Pellaea revert to green in bright light? We gathered some to take home and experiment with in different illuminations.
The block between 109th and 110th Streets was the richest so far. Here—and nowhere else—Griggs’s favorite, Cystopteris tenuis, grows, along with the remarkable “walking fern,” Asplenium rhizophyllum, which seems to shoot out new limbs like a brachiating gibbon, putting down suckers at intervals, thus striding across great expanses of stone.
And then, suddenly, strangely, at 110th Street the ferns stopped. From that point north, there was a startling, lifeless desolation, as if someone had decided to eradicate all signs of cryptogamic life. No one knew for sure why this was so, but we quickly crossed over to the sunny side of the trestle and began to work our way south again.
Greetings from the Island of Stability
Early in 2004, the discovery of two new elements—113 and 115—was announced by a team of Russian and American scientists. There is something about such announcements that raises the spirits, thrills one, evokes thoughts of new lands being sighted, of new areas of nature revealed.
It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the modern idea of an ‘‘element’’ was clearly defined, as a substance that could not be decomposed by any chemical means. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Humphry Davy, the chemical equivalent of a big-game hunter, thrilled scientists and the public alike by bagging potassium, sodium, calcium, strontium, barium, and a few other elements. Discoveries rolled on throughout the next hundred years, often exciting the public imagination, and when, in the 1890s, five new elements were discovered in the atmosphere, these quickly found their way into H. G. Wells’s novels—argon was used by the Martians in The War of the Worlds, and helium to make the antigravity material that transported Wells’s heroes in The First Men in the Moon.
The last naturally occurring element, rhenium, was discovered in 1925. But then, in 1937, there came something no less thrilling: the announcement that a new element had been created—an element that seemingly did not exist in nature. The element, number 43, was named ‘‘technetium,’’ to emphasize that it was a product of human technology.
It had been thought that there were just ninety-two elements, ending with uranium, whose massive atomic nucleus contained no less than ninety-two protons, along with a considerably larger number of neutral particles (neutrons). But why should this be the end of the line? Could one create elements beyond uranium, even if they did not exist in nature? When, in 1940, Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California were able to make a new element with ninety-four protons in its huge nucleus, they could not imagine that anything more massive would ever be obtained, and so they called their new element ‘‘ultimium’’ (later it would be renamed plutonium).
If such elements with enormous atomic nuclei did not exist in nature, this was, presumably, because they were too unstable: with more and more protons in the nucleus repelling each other, the nucleus would tend towards spontaneous fission. Indeed, as Seaborg and his colleagues strove to make heavier and heavier elements (they created nine new ones over the next twenty years, and element 106 is now named seaborgium in his honor), they found that these were increasingly unstable, some of them breaking up within microseconds of being made. There seemed good grounds for supposing that one might never get beyond element 108—that this would be the a
bsolute ‘‘ultimium.’’
* * *
—
THEN, IN THE LATE 1960S, a radical new concept of the nucleus emerged—the notion that its protons and neutrons were arranged in ‘‘shells’’ (like the ‘‘shells’’ of electrons that whirled around the nucleus). The stability of the nucleus of an atom, it was theorized, depended on whether these nuclear shells were filled, just as the chemical stability of atoms depended on the filling of their electron shells. It was calculated that the ideal (or ‘‘magic’’) number of protons required to fill such a nuclear shell would be 114, and the ideal number of neutrons would be 184. A nucleus with both these numbers, a ‘‘doubly magic’’ nucleus, might be, despite its enormous size, remarkably stable.
This idea was startling, paradoxical—as strange and exciting as that of black holes or dark energy. It moved even sober scientists like Seaborg to allegorical language. He thus spoke of a sea of instability—the increasingly and sometimes fantastically unstable elements from 101 to 111—that one would somehow have to leap over if one was ever to reach what he called the island of stability (an elongated island stretching from elements 112 to 118 but having in its center the ‘‘doubly magic’’ isotope of 114). The term ‘‘magic’’ was continually used—Seaborg and others spoke of a magic ridge, a magic mountain, a magic island of elements.
This vision came to haunt the imagination of physicists the world over. Whether or not it was scientifically important, it became psychologically imperative to reach, or at least to sight, this magic territory. There were undertones of other allegories as well—the island of stability could be seen as a topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland realm where bizarre and gigantic atoms lived their strange lives. Or, more wistfully, the island of stability could be imagined as a sort of Ithaca, where the atomic wanderer, after decades of struggle in the sea of instability, might reach a final haven.