Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World

4. A School a Minute

39 A School a Minute My mother never really adapted fully to life in Pittsburgh or felt completely at home with American customs. She always pined for Quebec and for French-speaking friends. Although she spoke English as well as any native speaker, all her life she would emphasize her origins by occasionally using an outrageously fake French accent or interspersing her conversation with “How do you say it in English?” accompanied by a Gallic shrug. She painted avidly and encouraged me to draw and paint. I enjoyed it without being inhibited by the least sense of angst. I knew I didn’t have the talent to contemplate becoming a professional artist. My father took enthusiastically to living in Pittsburgh and thoroughly enjoyed being in the United States, which he found amazingly open and free of onerous restrictions. He told me how liberating it felt to live in a country where everything was permitted unless specifically forbidden, as opposed to the authoritarian system he had grown up in which everything was forbidden unless explicitly permitted. Having come to America as an adult, he did find some of the cultural idioms puzzling, however, and never lost his strong Austrian accent. In the Pittsburgh years it took a long while for the family to settle down in any one neighborhood. I don’t know why. Don’t you think I might have asked? But children take the vagaries of life pretty much for granted. My father worked for the same chemical and plastics company, Koppers, the whole time my parents were in Pittsburgh, yet they kept packing everything up and moving. Over about a three-year period we moved twice a year, and I each time had to switch schools, usually during the school year. I suspect that the frequent moves were motivated by four 40 Becoming a Naturalist my mother’s discontent with the neighborhoods we lived in. The results of these moves on my schooling can’t have been good. They certainly meant that I had to frequently make new friends, and that took time. Then we’d be off again. From my point of view, one of the best itinerant neighborhoods was only a few blocks from an enormous abandoned quarry featuring a dangerous high cliff and the occasional crashing cascade of rock. The place had an easily subverted fence, and I’d sneak off alone or sometimes with friends to adventures among the heaps of truck bed–sized slabs of tan sandstone–an obviously dangerous place to play in and thus ever enticing. This new neighborhood was to lead to my first and only tour of duty as a member of the Cub Scouts. This scruffy but lively troop had no uniforms beyond the little yellow and blue Cub Scoutneckerchief,butwedidn’tmind.Ourdenleaderlivedafewhouses down the street from us, and our troop of half a dozen met in his house after dinner. He was an astronomy enthusiast who taught us some basic science, such as the speed of light. I was downright amazed to hear that light even had a speed. We spent most of our scout meetings doing experiments using oranges and golf balls revolving around a light bulb. We all played the roles of planets around that light bulb to understand rotation and revolution, and why we could only ever see one side of the Moon. We stood outside on the lawn looking at the full Moon and discussed how the craters had formed: Were they meteor impacts or giant extinct volcanoes? We Cub Scouts had heated if not particularly well-informed arguments over which kind of lunar violence we liked best. Planetary scientists favored the idea of volcanoes in those days, and the craters of the Moon spoke of volcanoes of unimaginable size. Now, as a result of the revolutionary studiesofpioneeringplanetaryscientistEugeneShoemakerinthe1960s, lunar craters are known to be the result of asteroid impacts. The Moon is now seen to be a palimpsest of overlapping craters marking the great asteroid bombardment of the inner solar system that took place from about 4 to 3.8 billion years ago. The Earth had its share of those ancient impacts, but erosion and the relentless geologic forces of a living planet erasedtheoldscarslongago.GeologicallymorerecentimpactsonEarth have left a record of large craters. One massive impact 65 million years A School a Minute 41 ago, at what is called the K-T boundary, significantly influenced the history of life by bumping off...