Chapter 10. National Geographic

Dad may have been anchored in Memphis by his call to serve the blue collar people of his home town, but he had a restless fascination with the whole world. Maps from National Geographic covered the wall of his ham radio room (his “shack” in ham jargon). Sabbath dinner conversations included reports about his regular conversations with Adventist missionaries. We heard about emergencies in which Dad put Catholic and Lutheran missionaries in touch with their headquarters back here in the States and about phone patches (radio to telephone hookups) that allowed lonely scientists at the South Pole or McMurdo Sound talk with girlfriends and wives back home.

We never threw away a National Geographic Magazine and during my teen years, I devoured every issue, both current and those stored in boxes in Dad’s shack. Through fifth, sixth and seventh grades, articles about Africa fueled my dreams of going to Africa as a doctor. Pictures of dirty villages, of dark women in outlandish jewelry that stretched their necks or earlobes, of people squatting in the dirt to cook, make weapons or groom each other. If anyone needed the benefit of enlightened Western civilization and medical care these folk did.

But somewhere along the way, the magazine became subversive. I wasn’t swayed by the reports of the Leakeys about their findings of ancient hominids in Kenya and Ethiopia. They were obviously benighted evolutionists hopelessly committed to an erroneous understanding of earth history. But the description of their outdoor life and their place in the local society undermined the neat separation between America as the land of plenty and Africa as a world of need.

Africa was not just a place of service. It could also be a place of wonderful, sweet adventure. Their son, Richard, grew up camping with his parents on their digs, thoroughly immersed in the natural and native environments where his parents worked. I still vividly remember a photo of Richard in a muddy lake. Just his head was out of the water draped with moss and algae. The caption explained he had learned from Africans the trick of camouflaging himself as a floating stump to sneak up on ducks. It required great patience, but he could walk slowly, neck-deep, across a pond until he was close enough to grab a duck by its feet.

The lakes of northern Mississippi where we swam and skied were muddy, but the lake Richard was pictured in was more like an algae-covered, late summer pond. I could never bring myself to drape my head with gooey, slimy algae. And grabbing a duck by its feet required a boldness and force of will I didn’t have. But I imagined it. And longed for the unconstrained adventure of a life in the wild.

I read with skeptical fascination the Leakey’s reports of their discoveries of bones and tools and dreamed of doing my own field work to find irrefutable evidence to disprove their theories of ancient evolution and establish the reliability of the Bible. I began to imagine a life that combined high religious purpose with outdoor adventure.

As I moved into my high school years, the magazine continued its subversion. It did not alter my explicit beliefs about earth history or God. Instead I was seduced by the back story of the writers and photographers. They told of exotic customs and strange foods. They reported on elements of culture, climate and biology different from anything I had ever seen. But these reports could be ordered into pre-existing categories in my head. The most subversive thing about these writers was what they revealed of themselves.

When they were in Fiji, National Geographic writers dined with the local king not the villagers. On the Mongolian steppes they were guests of the chief. It was not too difficult to imagine stepping into their culture–not the culture of the people in the pictures, but the culture of the people taking the pictures–urbane, educated, sophisticated, cool. They were a secret aristocracy with privileged access anywhere in the world, the very opposite of the effete dullness I associated with the fat, rich people of upper class Memphis. And certainly very different from the ordered, boring world of conventional Adventist church life.

While I was immune to the science in articles about evolution, I was enchanted by the reports on balloon flights to explore the troposphere, expeditions to the poles and the work of Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall. The science reporting that most fascinated me concerned Edward Link’s work on extended periods of living in undersea environments, the story of a midwinter traverse of the Arctic Ocean by the nuclear submarine, Nautilus, and the work of Alvin, a deep-sea submersible used to explore seven miles down in the Marianna’s trench.

In all these expeditions there were doctors. Not missionary doctors, but still doctors. I found my place in the stories in the references to the medical challenges of sustaining human life in a submarine environment.

At school, I was an outsider. I wasn’t picked on. I was just different. I was different at home, too. I was different everywhere. This was unmistakably clear to me by third grade. At recess, I wasn’t the worst ball player, but usually I was no better than the top of the bottom twenty percent. Not infrequently I spent recess inside with Kenny Brooks doing late homework. My parents and teachers talked to me constantly about what I could do if I would just apply myself. I tried sporadically, but the tedium of homework always defeated me. By sixth grade I was aware the cutest girls would never be interested in me. I just didn’t have whatever it was that got their attention. In addition to being clumsy, socially inept, and hopelessly defeated by homework, I was separated from most of my classmates by my intense (fanatical) piety. While the kids were not mean, it was clear I could never fit in with the school crowd.

The world of science was different. It was an exotic, enchanting culture in which the price of admission was intellect not social coolness. Scientists were like missionaries in their ability to flout social conventions and in their intense, life-forming commitments to their tasks. They were an elite I could imagine being part of. At least that’s what I learned reading National Geographic.