Like a Frosty Beer, But Completely Different

I must have been in, perhaps, sixth grade, and I was bringing a monstrous creation to life in the woods behind the Harvest Gold split-level on Willow Road. I had ached for a tree house my entire short life, only to move into a suburban, verdant neighborhood, with my own private Sherwood Forest. A perfect triad of hemlock trees waited in the back yard, beyond sight of the house, hidden by spirea and thimble-berries. Being an indifferent, under-achieving sixth grader, I had ample time for this project. The only obstacle to beginning construction was matériel.

Like a shed-roofed addition for growing family's house, Halley Plat was squeezed into a parcel of woods between the moneyed vistas of Edgemoor and Chuckanut Drive (well before it worms south and becomes the Most Scenic Highway in the world). Like the aforementioned domestic expansion, the craftsmanship of the modest homes being built there was slightly frantic.  Contractors steadily swarmed over foundations, erected studs, sheathed it all inside and out, and - Lo – a house popped into being, mushroom-like.

I made twilight visits to homes-in-progress, tromping across damp plywood floors, scaling the treadless stair risers, taking in details of framing, nostrils awash in the tang of sawdust, the musk of curing concrete. Pallets of plywood and two by fours slumbered under the dark sky, tools lie where they landed at five o'clock. Building my tree house could have been trivially easy. A trusty accomplice, some midnight skulking, and all the wood that we could chuck into the trees could be ours.

Fortunately, as regards my character, my compass pointed north to scrounging, not the southern bearing of theft. Unfortunately, as regards the quality of my tree house, I found it necessary to patch together scraps and odd remnants in my arboreal endeavor. The timbers running between the trees I sourced easily enough, but the plywood decking bridging these joists came from discard bins at construction sites. Luckily, I happened upon a piece large enough to cover half the triangular floor. The balance of the empty space I bridged with a tilting stair-step arrangement of smaller and smaller bits of exterior plywood, riveted together with the abundant sixteen-penny nails that littered the mud surrounding the concrete footing for the new houses. I had become a necessary combination of Doctor Frankenstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Artful Dodger.

I relate all this prepubescent acquisition, lurking, and attendant hammering because the production of a tree fort necessitates the employment of a certain simple machine. Swinging a hammer at found fasteners, into salvaged lumber was all well and fine, but the mechanics of climbing ten feet with hands full of supplies and tools required a pulley. The origin of this pulley is lost in the mists of my recollection, but I can state with confidence that when it fell into my possession, I immediately knew it would serve one day as the supply line between Terra Firma and my future, fantastic lofty fort.

If you give any thought to the problem of hoisting something, anything, aloft, in the process of building in the trees, you'll see the fallacy of using a pulley. A rope, by itself, is sufficient for the task: secure your load, clamber up, hoist as you may. A pulley, however, allows you to stand on the ground below, and, courtesy of the noble wheel and axle, converts your downward pull on the rope into an upward vector for the work you exert upon the mass of the burden you are lifting. A completely superfluous, yet delicious, exercise in mechanics.

This tableau of Oregon Grape and Salal is where I may have received my radioactive spider bite. I'm not entirely certain from where my peculiar power came, but I recall a certain event, in a surging ocean of well-recalled, crystal-clear life experiences, that may be the genesis of my particular gift. I still bear grudges against kindergarten classmates, and I assure you that my memory is excellent. Based on what I know about cognition and the nature of intelligence, I can conjure only one possible etiology and I remember the events vividly, like a landscape frozen in the strobe of a lightning bolt.

I was fixing to nail an irregularly-shaped fragment of half-inch ply onto the previously-secured random chunks of laminated wood that constituted the crazy planes of my burgeoning elevated garrison. I had tossed the lumber up and onto the existing surface, but decided to utilize the pulley to freight the hammer upwards, an antique owned by my late grandfather, Amos – a blacksmith. I have since learnt the value of a handful of useful knots, but at the time, my ignorance called for improvisation. The turns of frayed cordage, like a lashing of writhing snake, tightened and clutched at the hickory shaft, the coils slipping like the stranglehold of a python on the proverbial greased pig.

I replay this tiny drama in my head, and I'm amazed that I possessed not the sense to stand beyond the probable trajectory of a one-pound chunk of steel set to fly by gravity and a shitty knot. When the rope was fully hauled, I bent to belay the line to a makeshift cleat comprised of a pair of nails driven into the bark of one of the hemlocks. The twining and looping of the rope around the nails must have tickled the snake's hold on the hammer's handle and potential energy proved kinetic.

I remember a wave of nausea hitting me like a crashing breaker, slapping me down against the hard sand of a littoral abruptness. I may have blacked out for a time; I was alone and don't know for sure. I clutched at my senses, reeling between the roots of the second-growth adolescent trees, who were audibly laughing at me in their quiet manner. I fought down the rising gorge in my throat and abandoned any thoughts of swinging a hammer, much less climbing trees, that afternoon. The hammer had fallen a minimum of seven feet only to land squarely on my crown. I never told anyone about the undeniable concussion I had suffered that day. My interest in the tree fort, my ugly platform in the woods, waned rapidly after I summoned the fortitude to finish the final bit of half-assed carpentry that defined the realization of my secret desires.

Long before I picked up a hammer (millions of years actually), lemur-like ur-primates, our forebears, were engaged in an evolutionary arms race in the wake of a some very bad luck at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Actually, the situation might be better described as a biological game of RISK. Eighty-five per cent of Earth's species were snuffed out, like so many birthday candles, after a well-understood cometary or asteroidal impact (the account of paleosleuthing by Luis and Walter Alvarez reads like fine detective mystery) in the Yucatan region of what we modern humans have decided to call Mexico. The species that survived this archetypal nuclear winter woke up to a world in which only fifteen per cent of the available environmental niches were occupied. If you allow that there may have been a selection for species with similar habitat needs (mouse-like burrowers, for instance), the Tertiary sun may have risen over an even emptier planet. But I digress.

So profound is the devastation in the strata laid down on day one of the Paleocene, that the absence of late Cretaceous fossils (dinosaurs, ammonites - the list is long) define the boundary. In college, I had the dubiously envious job of Paleontology Research Assistant, and I have seen the sediments from the Brazos River section in Texas with my own eyes. Indeed, it was my job to pick through carefully-collected zip-lock bags of mud, looking for macro fossils, and seining the remaining grit for the minuscule survivors called Foriminifera,  amoeba-ish creatures with elaborate and distinctive tiny shells. The post-grad financial certainty of performing similar paleontological analyses for oil companies discouraged me so that I abandoned paleontology as a major, and floundered in both direction and scholarship for the next couple years.

Such a suddenly-empty planet is great laboratory for the biological forces that blossom as diversity through the processes of evolution. Some browsing creatures opted for immensity, as plains of newly-invented grass went to seed and needed mowing. Others, like the ground sloth, existed largely on the fruit of revolutionary flowering trees we have labeled “Avocado”or “Ficus”. Terrible predators, all scimitar teeth and raking claws, pounced on the meaty herbivores when their backs were turned. Elephants (well, their great x 10² grandparents) experimented with various dental configurations and an elongated, useful proboscis. Our ancestors, however, in a desperate board meeting, decided that the problems of their continuing propagation hinged not so much on hardware, as software.

The notes of that conference, if the secretary had yet been invented, are lost in the annals of hominid history, but the marketing strategy and production schedule have manifested in the latest version of Homo, as testified to by the extent to which we have colonized our hostile planet, and embarked on polluting it with our garbage and exhalations. The secret sauce in this global domination scheme was not a better set of armament or sheer bulk (but props to venomous insects and whales), or any other specialization. What makes Humans the dominate species on Earth (as measured by effect, not biomass) is that we generalize. And we do this with a tremendously flexible information-processing organ behind our binocular eyes, between our stereo ears. “I'm cold”, “I bet that Mastodont is tasty”, “I want to fly to the Moon” - these are problems that the brain can solve where sharp claws or a penchant for Bamboo would definitely, ultimately fail.

The brain is so astoundingly complex that it boggles the mind. Grok that – As smart as we are, we are only beginning to understand the basics of how we understand. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a way to isolate and render images of the cogs in the brain:

“In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies. ... In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.” 

The most complicated information-processing structure on Planet Earth is the result of cosmic chance and the combined efforts of millions of monkeys. And there are almost seven billion of them in production. To be sure, it is easily the absolutely best problem-solving technology available, and it can be assembled by unskilled labor.

As you recall, objects accelerate in Earth's gravitational field at approximately 9.8 m/s/s. To clarify, for each second spent falling, an object's velocity increases by roughly 10 meters per second (disregarding Earthly effects like the friction of air on the object). In round numbers, at one second, the object, starting from rest, is plummeting groundward at ten m/s, another second later, and it's falling at twenty m/s. Three seconds: thirty m/s. The speed is increasing, even though the rate of speed change (acceleration) is constant.

Suppose that we suspend an object (say, a sixteen-ounce [0.5 Kg] hammer) about seven feet (2.13 m) above another object (say, a human cranium containing a 3-pound [1.5 Kg] brain). Suppose also that the hammer object is secured by an inept lashing of parachute cord, such that it releases its tenuous hold on the handle of the hammer just as it reaches an altitude of a previously-mentioned 2.13 meters above the previously-mentioned brain. The word “Oh...” is all that is muttered before the hammer impacts the frontal bone, superior to the upwards-tilted forehead of the muttering fool, who gapes upward, at the falling hammer.

In the interval of time between the hammer slithering from the clutches of ill-tied cordage and cranial impact, the brain of the target subject had to recognize that the hammer was both falling, and falling in a predictable path that intersected the subject's head. That the eyes could, in this brief moment, transmit this information to the brain, that the brain could pluck an appropriate response from its banks of synapses, that the mouth and tongue could begin to form a verbal oath, is testament to the flexibility and power of the human brain. Arms were, undoubtedly, moving to fend the missile, but inertia and a complicated neural connection prevented the intended blockade. An observer would marvel at the situation, probably doubling over with laughter, as the truncated, but implied “...SHIT!” was appended by the synapses of his own brain.

I leave the specific mathematics as an exercise for the motivated reader, but suffice it to say that more altitude (thus more acceleration) might have rendered the author a drooling idiot, provided he even survived the impact. A lesser impact would have hurt, well, less. The miracle is that the hammer fell precisely as hammers do, precisely as fast as necessary to have exacted the mechanical alteration of brain tissue that I'm convinced happened on that afternoon.

As we know, the brain is fabulously intricate, like a mantel clock fabricated from cement trucks, driven by penguins, in a landscape of fried rice, awash in a sticky fruit cocktail. Or not. I don't believe that the electrochemistry of my injured brain was altered, which would demand a fundamental alteration to neurological functioning – and where would these new chemical compounds come from, anyway? A new organ might need to spring into existence, secreting the Pixie Dust that powers the cognitive energy of my altered gray matter. Even an alteration to an existing structure is so unlikely as to be statistically impossible, like an aerial giraffe. But if this supposed, newly created apparatus did exist, it would need a snappy name. Perhaps the Canal of Schlem - but alas, that's taken. 

I think that, perhaps, the hammer bruised an area of my forebrain, a humble region responsible for cross-checking imagery and verbiage against some synaptic check sheet of understood comparisons. For a healthy brain to function, it must necessarily catalog every experience and idea into the context of previously-sorted information. A myriad of neural connections are made, and, after a long life of meaningful and orderly thought, if your mind should unravel slightly in your autumn years, surprising expressive and perceptual glitches might manifest. It's possible that the disruption in my cerebral cortex reworked certain critical housekeeping routines, such as help govern the protocols of human communication.

Wielding even a minor super power is an awesome responsibility. I must flex my mental muscles carefully, lest I unintentionally launch someone through the plaster and lathe of the cognitive reality in which they reside. The nature of my ability is such that I cannot simply discard a frayed overcoat of normalcy and assume the über-persona, turning back time, for instance, by dragging the Earth backwards, in a cape and tights. It's much more subtle than that.

I must live in a portable Fortress of Solitude, where I filter my inner thoughts through a complicated colander of social algorithms that prevent my friends and associates from reacting to me as if I were a rabid badger. True, it's partly for their protection, but my own safety calls for discretion. My associative gift might easily be misconstrued as a flavor of mental illness or a “cry for help”. At times, it's a lonely existence, a social wilderness, but the occasional metaphorical connection is worth it. I heft my similes and gauge their power like dangerous automatic weapons.

I bring adventure like a brakeless lorry descending a serpentine mountainous highway paved in cinders and broken glass. I am the Blue Screen of Death.  I live in the shadows of polite conversation and well-intentioned homily.  I swing my mace of reckoning through slap-dash windmills of superficiality. 

I am... ANALOGYMAN!

(Happy Birthday, MC)