Nadyne and the Theory of Everything

I

When Galileo Galilei’s affirmation of Copernican heliocentrism was initially censured by the Catholic Church, it was deemed “formally heretical” because it was “contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” It was not until 1992 that the Catholic Church conceded the movement of the earth around the sun. Even now there are those who reject heliocentrism, groups that seek to prove our solar system a geocentric one, using the work of Newton and Einstein in order to affirm the scriptures. The nature of God and the nature of gravity have long been at odds.

I have been thinking about gravity and what it means to defy it. Gravity, like God, demands reverence, that thing that keeps us fixed upon the earth, controls the changing of tides, holds together the constituents of our universe.

Gravity, being:

the force that attracts a body toward the center of the earth, or toward any other physical body having mass,

or, heaviness; weight,

or, extreme or alarming importance; seriousness.¹

We defy gravity out of fear, airplanes and space shuttles desperate affirmations of our own progress, our significance in the universe. We defy God out of disbelief, out of an unwillingness to be controlled, to be tethered, out of doubt.

Doubt, being:

a feeling of uncertainty or lack of conviction,

or, [archaic] fear; be afraid of.

At some point in our language, to doubt God and to fear Him were one and the same.

Ii

Nadyne and I sit on the roof of the ranch house overlooking a small apple orchard, planted years ago in a meadow in California’s Sierra Nevada. We have climbed through her second-story bedroom window, and we sit there, smoking cigarettes, with her window open as Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home comes through on her record player. I sit as high up on the slant of the roof as I can, my back flat against the wood siding, far away from the ledge, the drop from which can’t be more than six feet, and that into a lush bed of overgrown grass. But I have long been uncomfortable with heights, and so against the wall I sit.

Nadyne and I are naturalists, instructors of outdoor education at what, during the fall and spring months, functions as a science camp for kids. We teach children about the Sierra, its geology, its botany, the history of its indigenous people. We teach animal tracking and wilderness survival. We teach them how not to die in the mountains. Of course there is fun, too. A week of learning, a week of paddle boats on the lake, archery, ziplines, a ropes course. There is a rock-climbing wall with six guided routes that vary by difficulty. I am trained to belay children safely, to set up and take down the ropes by climbing the fire-escape-like metal ladder running thirty feet up the backside of the wall, through the trap door, and onto the platform behind the climbing routes where I hang ropes on their respective pulleys. I do not like to do this; my palms sweat as I climb the ladder, and I dread them slipping off the metal rungs. I’m not sure what it is I fear most, the physical dangers it poses to my body or the fall itself.

Fall, being:

move downward, typically rapidly and freely without control, from a higher to a lower level,

or, pass into a specified state,

or, be drawn accidentally into,

or, to commit sin; yield to temptation, from the Old Norse fall, meaning “downfall, sin,” as in a state of godlessness, as in a fall from grace, as in the Fall of Man, as in the rejection of divine authority, as in a step back from control, a plunge into chaos.

The property sits on the edge of Nelder Grove, an old-growth grove of giant sequoia, which, by volume, is the largest species of tree in the world. The largest, the General Sherman, stands 275 feet tall in Sequoia National Park. There are many sequoia trees on...