Clearing the...air? head? body?

    There is much to be joyous about, and much to (self) create worry about. But as I began to read yet another book about our miraculous bodies and how we have so much we've yet to understand about how life itself functions, I was reminded of the words of Norman Cousins who said: Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.  I had just finished the touching piece almost morbidly titled, How I Helped My Dad Die, the story of a daughter who understood what her father wanted; said Bloomberg author Esmé E. Deprez:: ...I found myself in the disturbing position of contemplating other ways to help him end his life.  Perhaps my husband and I could carry him and his gun down the hill behind his house and leave him?  Or take his rowboat out into the ocean and push him overboard?  Smother him with a pillow as he slept?  Her father, who "could wire a house, tile a floor, bag a duck, skin a deer, ride a motorcycle, and helm a boat," had ALS, and like death itself, there was no getting out of it.

   Sue Black considers this her favorite definition of us, that is, of us humans: Humans belong to the group of conscious beings that are carbon-based, solar-system dependent, limited in knowledge, prone to error and mortal.  She goes on to add: It is strangely comforting to be granted tacit permission to make mistakes just because we are human.  As we possess neither the capability to get everything right the first time nor an unlimited lifespan at our disposal to practice and hone each task to perfection, we should accept that our lives will be a bit of a mixture.  She's an anthropologist, anatomist, Dame of the British Empire, and author (among other things) but is perhaps better known as a forensic scientist (her newest book is Written in Bone).  It probably didn't help that I had just finished Working Stiff by medical examiner, Dr. Judy Melinek and her husband, T.J. Mitchell.  After all of that pondering, I could only emerge with the continued thought that the human body-- and what keeps us going-- was even more of a puzzle...I needed to get away.

    In many ways my wife and I were lucky.  Our animals, both wild and domesticated, would be cared for and our friends were gracious enough to offer us a place to stay during our "escape."  In addition our rental car would get us there in comfort so we would feel as if we had splurged and had bought a new car (our 11-year old cars are doing just fine, sort of like us, but driving something new sort of gets that urge out of us for another year).  And what better than a long drive to just let your mind wander and yet take it all in...we were headed back down to Sedona.  

    As we walked though the juniper and pine forests, again seeing the ancient rocks as unmoved as the last time we visited (bah humbug, they seemed to say...humans), I could only reflect on the words of Zane Grey who wrote in one of his books (about Sedona), "I never understood anything of the meaning of nature until I lived under these looming stone walls and whispering pines."  Indeed, this "refresher course" of walking among the ancients, be they the now-dried walls of prehistoric oceans or the towering pines that spiked through crackled junipers, this was exactly what I needed.  There is something about the silence and the heat and the overly-large stone cliffs that help to remind me of the wonder that is everywhere, almost forcing me to reflect on what it is to just BE here...or to be anywhere.

    As author Sue Black noted, we don't get to choose our birth any more than we get to choose our death, so why not focus on the moments we have in between?  Here's is her take on how humans --YOU-- form: Every human is created when two separate cells fuse and then begin to multiply -- an incredibly humble beginning from an unimpressive little sack of proteins.  After forty weeks in utero, those two cells will have gone through the most miraculous transformation, becoming a highly organized mass of over 26 billion.  The huge increase in the size of the fetus and in the specialization of its individual components requires a tremendous amount of precise planning if everything is to go as it should, and, thankfully, much of the time it does.  By the time that baby becomes an adult, the cell mass will have expanded to over 50 trillion, grouped into some 250 different cell types forming long basic tissues --epithelial, connective, muscular and neurons-- and a variety of sub-tissues.  These in turn will combine to construct approximately seventy-eight different organs, divided into thirteen major organs systems and seven regional groupings.  remarkably, only five five organs are considered vital to sustained life: the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys and liver.  Every single minute [emphasis is mine] about 300 million of our cells will die, many of which are simply replaced...Somewhat ironically, those with the shortest shelf life are the ones that start it all off: sperm survive for only three to five days after formation.  Skin cells live for a mere two to three weeks and red blood cells only three or four months...The liver takes a full year to replace all its cells and the skeleton almost fifteen years.  She would later note that there are only four types of cells in our bodies that never change from the day we are born...but I'll leave those up for you to figure out, immersing you in a great Sherlock Holmes mystery.

    So here we were, being towered over and "ready" for our next lesson from these walls of rusted sandstone, walls that seemed to be waiting to teach us.  The forests below, despite the drought and the dead wood, gave us examples of the cycle of life.  Beauty, even if twisted and snarled, was everywhere blending into the dry environment.  It was life...and somehow I needed reminding that I didn't understand it all.  These rocks had witnessed so much over the millions of years; and they would undoubtedly see more.  The oceans would come and go, as would the homes that were now passing the $700,000 mark.  We humans with our mountain bikes and hiking shoes would also come and go...as would the cliffs themselves.  The lesson seemed to be not what you were seeing, but what you were NOT seeing.

    There was a piece in the New York Review of Books that wrote this: Inevitably, birds inhabit a world of sights, sounds, and smells unlike ours.  Bird vision exceeds ours in several respects: its power at a distance, its speed in resolving detail, its lateral breadth (in most cases), and its perception of a broader spectrum of colors.  Notably, birds can see ultraviolet light.  Some birds that look plain to us probably shine and sparkle to other birds.  Birds can also detect the earth’s magnetic field, a sense that humans lack entirely.  In a rare flight of fancy, Sibley (David Allen Sibley) imagines what a migrating black-and-white warbler “might see in the sky: a blue band of polarized light, and a reddish band oriented with the magnetic field with a stronger dot showing the slope of the magnetic field.”  Birds can hear a wider range of sounds than humans, and hearing plays an outsized part in their lives.  Although it may be a stretch to claim analogies to human language...birds communicate actively by calls and songs.  The two are not the same.  Calls are short signals used year-round that can transmit socially important information: not merely the approach of a dangerous predator, for example, but what kind of predator it is -- snake, hawk, cat, human...Memory is another competence in which some birds surpass humans.  The champions here are Jay's and other members of the crow family that store food for later use. Clark's nutcracker, a member of the crow family native to the mountains of the western United States, can hide over 30,000 seeds and recall their precise locations many months later.  These birds not only can locate their food caches but also conceal them from rivals, and they know to retrieve first those likely to spoil.  

    Whales are not much different, their intelligence virtually ignored despite (as noted in Discover): Baleen whales emerged as the earliest whale group about 41 million years ago... though the oldest whale species still around today have only been around for roughly 10 million years, and most species are only a few million years old.  The major difference between baleen and toothed whales is their feeding strategy.  The toothed whales hunt down prey and eat it, often using echolocation.  Baleen whales are still carnivorous, but they specialize in grazing on tiny creatures like krill in vast numbers, filtering them through their grill-like baleen as they swim.  Added Hakai: Early industrial whaling was incredibly inefficient.  Harpoons were prone to breakage or loss.  Whales would fight back, and use their tails to flood the whalers’ small pursuit boats.  Other whales would swim around rocks when harpooned, eventually prising the weapon out, “and all the labour would be lost, which hath often happened,” lamented Frederic Marten, a 17th century British whaler.  Some wounded whales would drag the whalers’ small boats away from the main ship, or run the line in a way that risked them capsizing, leaving the whalers with no choice but to cut the whales free.  

     500 million migrating birds are estimated to still fall victim to nets and traps each year, prized for their thumb-sized ounce of meat; whales faced similar declines in past centuries...so both changed their migration patterns; sperm whales began swimming downwind from passing ships (The Guardian), and migrating birds are now nesting on entirely different islands to avoid hunters (Flights of Passage).  As the ice melts in Greenland, scientists are discovering ancient leaves that lay buried under a mile of ice, making scientists wonder what other landscapes might be buried (The Conversation).  Added Hakai: In 2019, researchers declared large baleen whales to be the “carbon capture titans of the animal world.”  A single large baleen whale absorbs an average of 30 tonnes of CO2 throughout its lifetime...Whales increase phytoplankton productivity, and phytoplankton plays an enormous role in atmospheric conditions.  Phytoplankton produces two-thirds of the planet’s oxygen.  It captures 40 percent of all CO2 produced.  According to researchers, the ocean’s phytoplankton captures as much CO2 as 1.7 trillion* trees.  That’s four Amazon rainforests’ worth.

    As I savored my slowed pace among the red sandstone and other exposed rock, I felt embarrassed to not know these rocks' history, to not know what they had "seen" over their millions of years, and how I could have ignored them for so many years.  I didn't even know the names we humans had geologically placed on them.  To me the best I could do was consider them rocks, surrounded by trees and plants and cacti and lichen that I had also clumped together as tidily as a three-year old.  I wasn't a geologist or a botanist; but like a child I could marvel at what stood before me.  But I did know that I was open to learning...learning to respect that much of this was here long before me and that those birds and whales would continue to adapt no matter the obstacles we were putting in front of them.  After all, I only had to look up at these towering stories of stone and realize that this entire area was not only once filled with water, but that the very TOPS of the buttes and precipices were merely the BOTTOM of what once was an ocean...it was all beyond my comprehension.  And I was loving it.