Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (7 page)

“I have so many things I want to tell you,” my father had said on the phone earlier that year, “about the origins of life and the universe and what it all means.”

Although my interactions with my father during the preceding twenty years had been limited to two dozen or so strained phone calls and half as many month-long summertime visits to his home four hours away, some parental guidance sounded great. I was thirty at the time, and he was sixty-six. Perhaps it was my own growing maturity, or maybe it was the fact that I was in the process of a divorce, living by myself for the first time in my life, and generally struggling through a tough period—for whatever reason, I felt the need to get to know my father. Adult to adult, on equal terms.

Call it curiosity.

What a shame it would be if I never got to know him, to absorb his wisdom. I would have been happy with menial advice on how to get rid of the mouse in my kitchen, but a summation of existential reflection from a learned biology professor, a man of whom I knew so much
about
and yet so little
of
? It was a
Tuesdays with Morrie
proclamation, this universe-and-what-it-all-means offer—a gesture that promised insight as well as a very late back payment toward a longstanding parental debt.

Of course, no one has the answers to grand questions about the meaning of life, the why-are-we-here contemplations that hypnotize us as we gaze into a star-filled night sky, but I was curious to hear what my father had to say. Taking a trip would give us the occasion to talk, leisurely and in depth.

“Let's go to Mexico,” he said, “like we used to when I was married to your mother. Do you remember?”

 

Sixteen

 

How could I forget the way my mother's brown hair whipped against her neck as my parents' VW camper van roared down the Baja coast? The first couple nights we'd camp on the beach and fall asleep to the ping-ping-ping of the tent's unzipped flap as it bounced against the aluminum poles, silver in the moonlight, leaning into the salt wind. Then back on the road, the highway veered inland. We raced toward distant pools of water across the road that, as we neared, morphed into waves of heat that billowed into the yellow sky. Each time my father pulled off the road he'd mop his neck with a handkerchief before stooping in the gravel with his index cards and empty glass jars.

As a child, I hadn't realized the value of my father's studying scorpions, other than the immediate benefit they served as general samples to show his students. In fact, I never gave the why-would-anyone-study-scorpions question much thought until after my thievery of his favorite specimen, the one he captured in 1971 in Las Estacas, Mexico. Since that theft, which triggered a scientific, Google-by-night-public-library-by-day curiosity, I've come to recognize the biological significance and medicinal potential of scorpions, including the recent development of venom-based pharmaceuticals that fight cancer, treat stroke patients, and prevent malaria. In deeply examining scorpions, we have extended that knowledge and applied it to ourselves. While most of us loathe wild scorpions—shriek and jump back when we find one under a rock or in the backyard—I sure was thankful for my bottles of venom-based anti-malaria pills when I went to Africa and Ecuador. (And I was just visiting, unlike the millions of people who live with the threat of this disease every day.)

But it wasn't scientific curiosity that prompted me to steal the scorpion—no, the all-night Google pursuit did not motivate my little robbery. I snagged the scorpion because I was driven by a curiosity neither scholarly nor literary, but rather personal and visceral: who is this man, my father? Perhaps I took his scorpion in an attempt to recapture the sense of adventure and security that I felt when we traveled through the desert as a family those many years ago—the bottled scorpion a talisman of an almost forgotten father-daughter connection that diminishes with each passing year, like a dream dissipating in morning's light until only an undefined emotion remains.

And I think it was a similar kind of curiosity that made the proposed road trip to Mexico so attractive. The thought of exploring the Baja Desert, of retracing the roads and the hikes we'd taken during my childhood—it all seemed so irresistible as I sat alone in my under-furnished one-bedroom apartment with the receiver pressed against my ear and the spiral phone cord wrapped around my index finger. What a gift. I could get to know my father, the parent I'd never known, not
really
. What's he like? How will it be, just him and me, alone in nature? Perhaps this trip would make up for lost time, like a cram session before a final exam proctored by Professor Grim Reaper. I was incredibly curious. What parental guidance, what father-figure wisdom, had I missed out on?

The idea of getting to know him, to relate as autonomous adults, appealed to me. Although I wasn't with him in the mid-seventies when he rolled the camper van off the Baja highway embankment (spewing hundreds of loose pages of his in-progress Stanford dissertation all over the dry roadside), I've heard the story so many times it seems like my own memory. I can see him zooming southbound from Rosarito toward San Quintín, game for anything new—music, food, language, social conventions, women, or a hit of acid while lying alone on his open-air cot, miles from the nearest rancher's house, his limbs splayed beneath the Milky Way.

His being the outsider seems to excite rather than inhibit the character I've created in my mind: a cross between a nerdy professor and an overage hippie, with shoulder-length red hair, worn leather boots tied at the ankle, and a large peace sign pendant bouncing against his sternum. As I've said, he was never what you'd call a traditional, involved father. But he was sort of a cool guy in other ways, up for any adventure, anywhere. And when the van veered full throttle off the highway in 1973 and rolled four times down the steep embankment, he miraculously crawled out the open window of the upturned vehicle and chased his papers on hand and knee, frantically slapping his palms against loose-leaf pages filled with field notes and diagrams of arachnid anatomies.

His fearlessness, his uninhibited desert explorations, and even his lead-foot approach to life—while these character traits pushed against the boundaries of others' expectations, to the point that they might qualify as personality flaws, to me they seemed proof of his invincibility. And that's what appealed to me, to the grown daughter with the receiver pressed against her ear.

On the other hand, I was motivated by something more than a nostalgic longing to recapture an idealized father-daughter bond that may never have existed in the first place. Yes, a shade of curiosity, but also fear—the fear of death, not my own but his. I couldn't have articulated it the day I sat in my apartment with the swamp cooler blowing and the receiver slipping against my sweaty cheek, but I was preparing myself for his eventual exit from this planet. His sixty-six years seemed incredibly old to me at the time. I wondered: How would I feel if he died today and I hadn't forgiven him for what I perceived as his parental shortcomings? If I didn't make peace with him while he was still alive, how would I feel when he was gone? Would I have regrets? On some level I realized I was still trapped by my inability to forgive his parental absenteeism; I was ready to begin the purging of a lifelong grudge that must precede my getting to know him as an adult. The real him, though—not the polarized still-frame images of either heroic perfection or demonic culpability (depending on the filter of my recall). And this forgiveness-in-order-to-know was not of the What-Would-Jesus-or-Buddha-or-Mohammed-Do variety; no, it sprang from neither a moralistic nor sympathetic state of mind, but rather, it emerged totally self-serving on my part. I was pretreating my anticipated pain of his eventual death, however far off that might be, like taking two aspirin and gulping down a big glass of water before stumbling to bed after a night of heavy drinking. I sought to prevent my own existential hangover.

My father repeated his question over the phone. “How about it? Mexico, just you and me?”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Where will we go, exactly?”

“Let's play it by ear.”

 

Seventeen

 

Question: If I'd known ahead of time that snakes might lay hidden beneath the sand, would I have gotten out of the car in the first place? Would I still go on the hike?

Answer: Probably not.

Answer amendment: Looking back, I see that what I was looking for, what I sought, wasn't the cave paintings, per se, but adventure. So maybe I would have gone anyway. That's what the whole Mexico road trip was about. Adventure. Everybody knows that driving around Mexico is risky to begin with. Then add a snake-addled hike to the mix. Now we're talking danger. Going on an adventure—saying to yourself, “I don't know exactly what I'm getting into or what will happen, but I trust myself to navigate through the unknown”—allows you to find out what it is you don't know about yourself. Unless you push yourself into unknown territory, unless you give yourself the opportunity to assess a new situation, ask yourself a series of impromptu questions—follow my father through the snake-infested sand or head back to the car?—well, what better way to learn a little something about yourself, surprise yourself?

This principle underlies not just human psychology, but scientific inquiry as well.

Case in point: Recently, in a climate-controlled room at the University of Northern Colorado, stacks of clear-sided drawers and cluttered countertops surrounded a middle-aged, bearded man in a button-down shirt. Professor Steve Mackessy carefully lowered a long, J-shaped hook into a thick glass box containing a sprawled but very alert rattlesnake. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as he gently slid the hook underneath the snake and lifted it from the pen, then grasped the creature barehanded, keeping his fingers behind the animal's head. In reflex, the snake opened its mouth, revealing two fangs, each capable of delivering lethal amounts of venom. Mackessy guided the fangs over a small, widemouth plastic measuring cup, where drops of yellow poison fell.

Since 1994, Mackessy's research on the biology of venomous snakes and the biochemistry of those venoms has centered on the hopes of developing an anti-cancer drug. Not unlike our discoveries of the medicinal uses for scorpion venom, snake venom has a lot of potential. Toxins promise life. “The difference between drugs and poison is a matter of dosage,” the inquisitive Mackessy said in a recent interview.

After extraction, the venom is frozen and stored for research. Crude venoms—venoms taken directly from the snakes—are introduced to cultured breast cancer cells to answer general questions in early-stage experiments: which types of venom kill or inhibit the growth of cancer cells? Later, more complicated tests involve breaking venoms down into smaller components in an attempt to learn what, exactly, inside each venom is useful, and how those compounds might be developed into lifesaving drugs. While Mackessy's team is far from producing any drugs yet, he thinks within the year he will have enough data to begin the next stage of in-depth research.

My point here is that scientifically motivated curiosity like Mackessy's and my father's illustrates another shade of curiosity and exemplifies our need to exceed the most basic knowledge (
Will the snake bite?
). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. While biologists have inventoried over two thousand species of venomous snakes, we know relatively little about most of them, and unless we keep asking questions, we can't know what it is we don't know. We're still too clueless to realize we haven't a clue.

“The work is just starting,” Mackessy said gleefully of the research ahead, “enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life.”

And that's how it is for me, too—trying to figure out my father, myself, my present position on the spectrum of reconciliation. The work is just starting, enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life. As my parents age, as my duties as an adult daughter shift, relative both to their decline and to the state and logistics of our respective relationships (Will my father continue to live in Mexico or will he return to Visalia? Will my mother move back into my spare bedroom, or will I take on an additional job to pay for a nice assisted-living facility?), I constantly navigate unknown terrain. Each phone call is a sinuous lump in the sand. Is my father calling to say he's moving back? Is the caretaker calling to say my mother's needs are too high for assisted living? For most of my adult life, I've considered my parents' well-being separate from my own: my parents are kinda crazy, I'd say, but we stay out of each other's way. Now our paths have merged. My father's and my mother's trails have veered into mine.

Question: Hypothetically speaking, had the notion of scientific or medicinal potential occurred to me out there in the boulder fields of Cataviña where I scanned the sand for suspicious-looking mounds, would I have conceded some similar potential benefits to the likes of rattlesnakes, too?

Answer: Maybe.

Answer amendment: Even so, such thoughts would not have comforted me in the moment, would not have eliminated the fight or-flight tingle in my palms as I balanced on one foot, listening for the
tststststststs
of sidewinders. I'm okay with the stolen formaldehyde-soaked scorpion floating in its jar inside my desk drawer (though I admit to a ting of the heebie-jeebies when I jiggle the jar back and forth to feel its forty-plus-year-old body shift limply from side to side). I'm okay with thousands of scorpions in thousands of jars, as a matter of fact, and throw in a few hundred pickled spiders as well. But snakes: no can do. Not dead, not alive, and certainly not loose and unaccounted for, poking stick or not. I fancy myself the Indiana Jones type—allow me an adventure, an impromptu hike in the desert, but please, no snakes.

Intellectually, I get it: curiosity + scientific inquiry = knowledge.