by David Suzuki
As we soared into the air and over the water, I was confident in my ability to hold onto the netting, but I learned later that cameraman Neville Ottey was terrified on that ride. I am impressed with his courage, because in spite of his fear, he did the job. I realized how dangerous the whole operation was when we were being dropped onto the barge. It was rising and falling many feet at a time; at one moment we would be way above the deck and then suddenly, splat, right on it. It turned out to be a spectacular stand-up, with the barge surging up and down with glimpses of the oil rig behind me.
Preparing to dive for an underwater shoot near Halifax with unidentified scientist
from Dalhousie University
I have had many uncomfortable stand-ups, usually involving squeezing into spaces such as an astronaut's suit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration center in Houston, Texas, or a hard-hat diving outfit for deepwater exploits. But two are particularly memorable for their unpleasantness.
For Science Magazine, producer John Bassett was doing a report on hypothermia and decided the best way for me to do a stand-up was in the ocean. But it was December, and although we shot it in Vancouver, which has a relatively mild climate, it was snowing that day. I was wearing street clothing, but underneath that I had a wet suit of vest and short pants. Since the mid 1960s I had been an avid scuba diver, and in British Columbia the best time is in winter, when the cold water is clear and visibility is excellent. So I knew what it felt like when a wet suit first filled with water.
But on this shoot, I had minimal protection for my torso and no hood, gloves, or booties. I was not prepared for the shock when I jumped in. The water sloshed onto my skin and literally took my breath away. I could barely gasp out the lines as I had memorized them, my teeth chattering and my breaths coming in spasms. I can't remember how many times I had to do the stand-up, but when I crawled out of the water, it took me hours to warm up.
By far the most disagreeable shoot was for The Sacred Balance, filmed in a gold mine just outside Johannesburg in South Africa. It was bad enough going two miles underground: I had worried for days about developing claustrophobia, because in a huge, packed crowd, I get panicky at being swept along. What would happen when I was so far below ground in dark, narrow tunnels? I think the fear of being regarded as a wimp was the major factor that got me through those two days of shooting. But the biggest discomfort was not the noise, confinement, or darkness, it was the heat. The rock was 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air was almost as warm. We were advised to drink at least a quart of water an hour, which I did without having to pee—the water simply poured out of our skin.
We were there for a fascinating story. Until very recently, it had been believed there was no life below a few hundred feet underground. Oil drills had kept clogging up with microbial contaminants, but over the years those were dismissed as having originated above ground. However, the persistence of such findings finally induced scientists to determine whether there was life at a deeper level than was then known.
We followed the scientist Tullis Onstott of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, who had discovered life embedded in rocks deep underground. Now bacteria are found up to five miles deep and probably farther. (Writer/researcher and my sometime coauthor Holly Dressel's response when I told her about this was, “I always knew rocks are alive.”) What Tullis has discovered are bacteria that belong to entirely new groups of organisms, which may have been isolated hundreds of millions of years ago. They metabolize so slowly they may divide once every thousand years.
We were going to film a sequence in which I would assist Tullis as he took samples of water flowing out of the rocks. He would explain to me what he was doing and what he had found. As we hunkered in front of the camera, the heat was overwhelming; it was so hot that the camera had been taken down the day before to allow the fogged lenses to clear as the camera heated up. We shot for a few minutes, then all of us retreated about one hundred feet down the tunnel to where one of the ventilation ducts blew cooler air into the shaft. We cooled down, then rushed back to film for another couple of minutes, then fled back to the vent.
After we had done this for about an hour, I was beat and was relieved to be told my part was finished, so I could stay by that vent. But Tullis was the star of the piece and had to be there to the end. He was beginning to stumble over his lines, and I warned the producer to watch him because I was worried. Sure enough, Tullis passed out from overheating and had to be dragged to the vent of cool air. The collapse of a worker is a nightmare, because at least two others are required to pull him to cooler air, and the rescuers are at risk of overheating and collapsing themselves. Pretty dicey, but our dogged scientist survived to talk another day.
Sometimes I have to juggle several stand-ups in a shoot. I had remarried in 1972; my wife, Tara, was pregnant with our second child when, in 1983, filming started for A Planet for the Taking, the biggest television series I had ever been involved with. We had slotted in a three-week interval around the time the baby was due when I could be in Vancouver. The anticipated date for the baby's arrival came and went, and day after day the amount of time I would have available to stay home shrank.
A publicity shot with illusionist David Bens for a film on Martin Gardner called
“Mathemagician” for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki
We had three camera crews out filming at the same time, one in India, the other two in Europe, and I was absolutely needed to do the stand-ups because they would hold the entire series together. If I couldn't be there when filming was going on, I would have to be sent out with a crew later just to shoot stand-ups, and that would be terribly expensive. I kept getting messages from India asking when and where I was arriving there so I could be picked up. Finally, the day I was supposed to leave for India came and still no baby. Sarika arrived three days after that, so I stayed around for another two days and then flew to India, five days late.
I did my stand-ups in India over several days, then moved on to Europe, Egypt, and Israel before flying to Kenya, where producer Nancy Archibald was filming a sequence on baboons. At this point, I had not seen Tara or Sarika for over three weeks. Tara had received clearance from doctors to fly with Sarika (and three-year-old Severn) to meet me in England, where I would be shooting a segment on the mathematician Isaac Newton, so I had to leave Nairobi on a certain date. As you might imagine, I was very antsy to leave for England.
Three days before the day I was to meet my family in England, I met up with the crew in Kenya. We filmed a number of stand-ups, and the day before my departure, we were scheduled to film a series of stand-ups with the baboons in the background. Shirley Strumm, the baboon expert who was advising us for the filming, had assured us that once the baboons were awake, they would move and forage for food for two or three hours, then settle down in midmorning for a couple of hours, and that's when we could film our stand-ups. If all went well, I could be out of there by noon.
We had followed the troop of baboons until they bedded down for the night, so we knew where they were. The next morning, we woke very early when it was still pitch-dark and set out so we could follow the animals once they started to move; they would tolerate us in close proximity as long as we were unobtrusive and didn't look them in the eye. I had four long stand-ups to deliver, which meant a lot of material to memorize. As soon as we were on the trail, I began to go over and over my lines, feeling the pressure both because there were wild, unpredictable animals involved and because I just wanted to get the hell out of there and onto the plane.
As Shirley had predicted, the animals woke up in the dawn light and began to move in a leisurely way. Lugging all our gear, we followed them for a couple of hours, until they finally seemed to be settling down to rest and digest their food. Nancy whispered, “Okay, David, stand-up number 1.”
Rudi pushed me around so that the baboons were nicely arranged behind me as I concentrated on stand-up number 1 over and over again. Just as Rudi was ready to s
hoot, the animals would get up and shift around. We'd scramble to find another spot where they had settled. “Okay, number 4 this time,” Nancy instructed, and Rudi and I repeated the process.
We followed the monkeys for the entire day and didn't complete a single stand-up. “I'm so amazed,” Shirley insisted. “They always settle down for a rest.” My brain had slowly turned to mush as the day dragged on and I was cranked up to shoot stand-up 1, then 4, then 3, then 2. All I knew was that I was going to miss my plane, and I did. The next day, the animals performed perfectly, and I was out of there.
One shoot I did had an absolutely amazing effect. Actually, it was a shoot for a still photo, not for a program. In the 1970s, when a program of The Nature of Things failed to get more than a million and a half viewers, we would worry. But with cable and dozens of competing channels, our numbers fell steadily until our average, while still robust for a CBC program, sank below a million. I kept saying, half jokingly, that we could get dynamite numbers if we did a program on the penis, a perfectly good subject for a science show. When Michael Allder became the executive producer, I mentioned the idea and he immediately expressed interest. So he commissioned the program to be done and it focussed on the male obsession with size and some of the techniques used to enlarge the organ. The show was called “Phallacies.”
Michael had wanted a series of new style photos of me for publicity and arranged for a shoot at his cottage in Georgian Bay. As we were leaving the CBC for the shoot, Helicia Glucksman, our publicist handed me a couple of fig leafs and said “If you have time, please have a photo wearing this for ‘Phallacies'.” It was all said lightheartedly and I didn't know whether she was serious or not.
To get the best light, we shot very early the next morning with the rising sun. The photographer was very efficient and we soon had all the pictures Michael wanted, so as a lark, I taped the fig leaf to my crotch and we set up a bench to stand on and pose. Now it was quite cold out so I had to drape a blanket over my shoulders between shots so I wasn't covered in goosebumps. It was a very large fig leaf, so I felt it was pretty modest, but I can tell you, if it had fallen off, it wouldn't have made much difference. As I told you, it was cold. Of course, my Haida friends who saw the picture teased me for needing such a “small leaf.”
Helicia arranged for the photo to be on the cover of the Toronto Star TV Guide and I was astonished to see the reaction when it came out. It was picked up by dozens of newspapers across the country and written up as if it was incredible for me to pose that way. I did receive a couple of letters and one nasty phone call (all from women) expressing disgust at my “obscene photo.” Overwhelmingly, the response seemed to be surprise that even a 64 year old man could still be in reasonable shape. There was even a suggestion that my head had been superimposed on someone else's body. Well, I'll tell you, if we were going to do that, I would have selected a much better body.
I am not a bodybuilder and at my age, testosterone levels are too low to allow me to build up muscle mass, but I had been exercising regularly for decades, ever since I had married a much younger person. Once when my daughter admired a photo of someone's “abs” by saying “Wow, look at this six-pack,” I had interjected, “What about mine?” Sarika retorted, “Dad, you've got a ONE-pack!” I have been gratified that even in my sixties, my body has responded to exercise and after Sarika's jibe, I had developed a series of exercises for my belly and it worked.
We got the best rating for “Phallacies” than we had had for many years but it was bittersweet for me. Staff at my foundation worked hard for years for every story we got into the media on environmental issues. Then I take off my clothes for one shot and we get gangbuster exposure. It wasn't fair.
chapter FIVE
FAMILY MATTERS
I WAS BECOMING MORE involved in television when Joane and I separated in 1964. By that time, we had two children and a third was on the way; we didn't divorce until two years later.
Troy had been born in January 1962, and his name came from the father of my roommate in college. In 1956, at the end of my second year at Amherst, my roommate, Howie Bonnett, from Evanston, Illinois, invited me to spend the summer with him with the promise that I could get a job that would pay much more than I made working for Suzuki Brothers Construction back in London. So I went and stayed with his family. Howie's father's name was Troy. I had never known anyone by that name, and I loved the antiquity and masculinity of it. I vowed that if I ever had a son, I'd call him Troy. The high-paying job in Evanston never came through, but I didn't forget that name.
As with so many second-borns, Troy may have suffered from seeming to repeat what his father had already experienced with a first-born. Tami continued to enthrall me with every new behavior and activity. Troy was of a different gender, which was fascinating, but my attention kept turning to Tamiko and the new things she did every year. As he grew older, Troy certainly suffered from the expectations teachers inadvertently laid on him. “Oh, are you going to be a scientist like your father?” they would ask innocently. Or, because Tamiko was a good student, they might say, “Oh, you're Tami's brother,” implying they expected him to do as well. Troy reacted by not trying at all to compete academically.
Troy grew up in a household of a mother and two sisters but, I believe, suffered from the absence of a male figure. My father had played a huge part in his life and tried to be a role model for him, but Troy needed me to be there to help pick him up when he hurt himself, to revel in his successes, to lay down the line when he needed the discipline, and I simply wasn't around enough to fully fill that role. I'm so grateful Troy and I have become closer as the years have gone by, but I have no doubt he bore a heavy burden through my absence.
Laura was conceived before Joane and I had agreed to separate. She was born prematurely, on July 4, 1964, at the very same time I went into the hospital for a month in isolation after contracting hepatitis b from eating contaminated oysters. She developed jaundice, which apparently is quite common among preemies, and the treatment was incubation with light of a certain wavelength. I don't know whether that was the cause, but she developed problems with a “wandering” or “lazy” eye; that may have been a result of her prematurity, but it was never fully corrected by surgery. She was a beautiful child, always quite self-sufficient and happy playing by herself.
When I left hospital, I moved into an apartment near the family so I could still see the kids every day. But when Michael Lerner, an eminent population geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, invited me to teach a course there, I eagerly accepted. It was an exciting time, and I was thrilled to be living in Berkeley when “flower power” and Haight-Ashbury were blossoming. During my stay, the battle over
Television host of Suzuki on Science (late '60s)
People's Park broke out, and I took part in the demonstrations that ended in tear gassing, buckshot, and death at the hands of the California National Guard, called in by Governor Ronald Reagan. I was appalled at the violent attempt to put down American youth and realized then that my decision to return to Canada in 1962 was still the right one.
I had gone to Berkeley looking like a square, and I came back decked out in granny glasses, a moth-eaten mustache and beard, and bell-bottoms. I had been transformed, much to the discomfort of my fellow faculty at UBC, especially because of what became my trademark—long, nearly shoulder-length hair held in place with a headband.
But the University of British Columbia, like Berkeley, was swept up in revolutionary fervor and the sexual revolution. Physical appearance didn't seem to matter anymore, and I no longer felt such intense self-loathing because of my small eyes and my Asian appearance. In the pre-aids period before the 1980s, there was rampant experimentation with drugs and sex, and although I was too unhip and insecure to ever try the drug LSD, it was widely believed I was “into” psychedelics and I heard rumors (totally false) that “acid” was being synthesized in my lab.
I was a child of the 1950s, still imbued with the
notion of stable relationships and marriage. After Joane and I split up, I had two very serious relationships, one lasting three years and the other close to four years. Both broke up as much as anything because of my own insecurities about whether I was good enough and expectations I had as a spoiled male. I was not ready to commit again to a long-term relationship, and I was still driven by desire to make a name as a scientist.
On December 10, 1971, I was scheduled to give a talk at Carleton University in Ottawa. I entered the lecture room at the top of Carleton Towers to find it packed with several hundred students filling every seat, the aisles, and the floor in front of the podium. As I began to speak, I noticed a sensationally beautiful woman sitting near the front. With long, blonde hair, a full mouth, and high cheekbones, she looked like the American film star Rita Hayworth.
After I gave my speech and answered questions and people began filing out of the room, a handful came down to the front to carry on with a dialogue. The beautiful woman was one of them. I had never acquired the self-confidence to “pick up” someone or even start a conversation in that direction. Instead, as I was leaving, I announced in a loud voice, “I hope you're all coming to the party tonight,” and I left.
I had to sit on a panel early that evening and did not see the beautiful woman in the audience there, so I figured I had failed. Afterward I was driven to the party, which was packed with students, a number of whom immediately surrounded me to engage in serious conversation. About half an hour later, the woman arrived, and I spotted her. I ducked out of the ring of people, popped up in front of her and asked her if she wanted to dance. As I moved away toward the dancing, she looked inquisitively at the woman next to her, who said, “I think he meant you.” So she followed me to the dance floor, and the rest, as they say, is history.