A Song in the Night (4 page)

L
anguage is one of the greatest human mysteries. We often forget this, because our days and our minds are so flooded with talk. Yet the search to find the right word for our experiences is constant. Anyone who has witnessed the struggle of a foreign visitor, or a small child, or a person overcome by brain damage, to find just the right word knows how hard it is to do and how rewarding to succeed.

Speech also creates telepathy. Think about it for a moment: the eyes record an object or the ears register a sound, and these are translated instantly into meaning that is not only understandable to the self but can be communicated to others. Not all sights and sounds fit into language, but when we see something and assign it a word, or when we hear a word and assign it an image, we are creating meaning—often unconsciously—in a way that shapes our emotions, our decisions, and our future. This mystery also has a darker side. If something does
not
have a name, if we, as humans, lack a way of talking about it, then the person or the object or the idea becomes largely invisible.

As children we swim in an ocean of received wisdom. We use the words we are given; we think about things in the way we are taught. The liberation of the human mind comes with the expansion of sight and sound into new and unexplored areas. By transforming sight into sound—and back again—and by introducing the raw power of our imaginations, it becomes possible to see what never was, and to imagine what has never been.

In my first years, I was primarily the recipient of experiences—of love and of pain, of joy and of suffering—for which I had little understanding and no words. As I grew I started to look past the horizon in more ways than one. My imagination steadily took hold and allowed me to connect with people and ideas that far exceeded my own limited experience.

This capacity increased through such simple experiences as a walk in the forest. Every summer my family returned to a marvelous piece of land in Maine purchased by my maternal grandparents in the early 1940s. Situated on the tip of the island of Sunshine, near Deer Isle, it became our refuge from the world, the forest hideaway where we lived in harmony with the daily rhythms of tide and wind, rain and sun. Our tiny log cabin was near a beach, where all the local children, including my newest sister, Elizabeth, went to swim in the bone-chilling seawater.

Part of the joy of this place was that everyone could hike back and forth, through the woods and along the beach, to explore the nature around them. Everyone, that is, but me. To make up for my difficulties, my parents and friends sometimes
tried to organize a special expedition to the point at the very end of the property, from which one could see all the islands in the area at once.

These rare expeditions were fraught with the danger of falling, of twisting an ankle or striking a joint on stone. The trail ran down a lengthy forest path lined with pine needles, then along an ancient moss-padded logging road, before emerging abruptly onto the hot white sand of a small beach. From there we would edge along the lapping water toward the east, up and over ledges, across patches of sand and shells and dried-out rockweed, and sometimes right through the salt flats decorated with pale green and lavender sea heather.

My father would load me into a wheelbarrow for the first stage of the expedition. He steered me carefully around the exposed roots so as not to risk tossing me out. When we reached the beach, he carried me. I remember the reassuringly familiar discomfort of his prickly wool sweater, the strength of his arms and shoulders (holding me firmly, with power to spare), and the smell of his tanned neck and unshaven cheek as he guided his feet, step by step, to the firmest spot.

When we came close to the point, he would let me try to walk, though my two full-length leg braces made this difficult. The braces had been painstakingly constructed by a specialist, who had molded and shaped the intricate steel and aluminum and leather parts to fit each leg so that I could move upright, though only slowly and with difficulty. Every morning I strapped them on, tightening the straps and buckles over my shins and thighs and knees, tying the laces of the brown
oxford shoes into which the ends of the braces were bolted, straightening the knee joints out, and sliding the ingenious square locking devices down and over the joints so my legs would not buckle. I then pulled up the pants that had been carefully widened and adapted by my mother.

If I stood still, the machinery of my locomotion remained hidden; only when I started to move was the secret revealed. I would swing each limb forward, one after the other, tracing a slight sideways arc to the left, then to the right, then to the left again. In the summer I sometimes felt comfortable enough with my friends and family to wear shorts, thus fully exposing my atrophied and mechanical legs. For most people it was too shocking, and I did not want others to be uncomfortable—or to reject me.

I struggled to walk over rocks and sand and seaweed. My sisters and friends, fleet-footed and full of words of encouragement, would hop ahead of me, cheering each small advance. With canes, walking sticks, and the sturdy hands of both parents, I finally made it, and then I took in the sights and smells, the glittering waters and cleansing wind.

Behind me were the lichen-encrusted pines, firs, and spruces and the sun-splashed clearings of long grass and wildflowers. Below me lay an array of huge boulders, remnants of a molten primeval stew now cooled into granite dappled black and gray, white and pink. These immense boulders had been cracked and buffed by a thousand centuries of glaciers and storms and tides. The sea continued its work even in our presence. The water would strike sharply in slaps and pops and
then withdraw with a scouring hiss through the crevices of each protruding stone.

When I finally reached my destination, on a strip of sand and stone that advanced far into the channel, I could see everything. To my right rose the dark and brooding peak of Isle au Haut surrounded by the restless waters of Penobscot Bay. Rank upon rank of waves and swells, tufted with white, swept by swiftly and rhythmically. To my left stretched the blue-black expanse of Jericho Bay, speckled with the spray-painted hues of thousands of lobster buoys. At the water’s distant edge rose the majestic hills and mountains of midcoast Maine—Blue Hill, Mount Desert, and all of their lesser attendants.

Straight ahead I could see the two mysterious landmasses of Marshall and Swan’s Islands. I could hear the tall red bell buoy anchored miles ahead of me ringing like a Zen sea chime. On some days the islands were hidden by fog, and on others they were so clearly spotlighted by sunlight that I could almost count the trees lining the shore.

Between the two islands, I could just make out the steady line separating pale blue sky from the gray-green of the water. It was this horizon that attracted my eyes and excited my dreams about the future. I pictured myself in a sharp wooden sailboat, slicing through the waves, streaking past the islands until I reached the ultimate freedom of open ocean and all the unknowable beauty that lay beyond. That moment might seem impossible from where I was standing, but I willfully and joyfully pictured it anyway. What I could see with my eyes blurred with what I could see in my mind.

In a sense, I was being introduced to the elementary building block of faith and hope, the belief that what I hoped for but could not see would come to pass. I may be here, I told myself, temporarily confined by my braces and by the present, but someday I will be there, moving with grace through a whole new future.

There were other horizons I hoped to cross, including the horizon of time. I grew up in the generation after World War II when Americans instinctively believed that every problem would eventually yield to technology. To a child bound to crutches, leg braces, and wheelchairs, science offered the thrilling hope of eventual release. I was unfamiliar with the troubling moral complexities of technologies such as the atomic bomb; for me the domain of science was idealistic and optimistic to its core. If machines could do the work of a thousand men, if new chemicals and drugs could alter nature and combat disease, then surely it was only a matter of time before someone announced a cure for hemophilia.

My interest in science was not only driven by my personal hopes; I was also delighted to be growing up in a nation whose strength, brilliance, and virtue were changing the course of history. The United States had defeated the demonic Nazis just eleven years before I was born. I was taught that we were holding the line against other people who intended to overrun the world if we weren’t standing in their way. And we were destined for new forms of greatness through our national life.
This conviction—that a nation could live up to its ideals and be a force for good—was thrilling.

I was very young when John Kennedy became president—only four years old—but I could tell that a change had taken place in the whole country. The new president was energetic and funny and looked a bit like my father. I could tell that my father admired him. And this new president told us what I was already fully prepared to hear: that the country was going to do exciting, virtuous things, like sending astronauts to the moon.

Fifty years later, now that we have stopped launching space shuttles and seem to be abandoning the space age, it is hard to recapture how exciting rocket launches were for everyone. People paused at work to listen to the radio. Schools held special assemblies when the entire student body was marched into the auditorium to watch the launch on a single television. People would stare transfixed as the flight clock lost seconds and then would shout out the final countdown. Even on our small black-and-white televisions, the thundering climb into space made our hearts thump with excitement.

The space program got off to a fast start. Just a few months after Kennedy’s inauguration, Alan Shepard became the first American to ride a flaming missile in a huge arc from Cape Canaveral to an ocean splashdown 116 miles away. When I was five and a half years old, John Glenn blasted off on February 20, 1962, and became the first American to orbit the earth.

More Mercury rockets took off, each containing one astronaut, until we moved to the Gemini program, in which two astronauts traveled together into space. The great objective,
still years away, was the Apollo program, designed to send three astronauts a quarter million miles to the moon. John F. Kennedy’s consistent message—that difficulties should intensify rather than weaken our commitment to boldness—became a window through which I began to see not only my own challenges but those of the nation and the world. The president made this clear in his initial announcement and in his subsequent comments about the space program. As the president said in Texas, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade … not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Drawn by such daring visions, bubbling with curiosity, I yearned to know as much about the workings of the world as I could. My mother brought home stacks of brilliantly illustrated volumes from the Time-Life Science series that revealed some of the hidden mysteries and glories of our planet. I pored over volumes on the cell, the body, and the mind; on energy, matter, sound, and flight; on weather, planets, and space. Each photograph and diagram and paragraph reinforced what has become a fundamental part of my view of life: that we live in a magnificent universe with innumerable and beautiful secrets; that many of these secrets can be unlocked through the steady application of the human mind; and yet at the same time there will always remain an awe-inspiring complexity, vastness, and unknowable glory to creation. Those books, and the other materials that my parents carried home to feed my ravenous
curiosity, helped me to peer past the edge of my wheelchair and bed, beyond the boundaries of our home and backyard, and into the mysteries that ruled everything from the tiniest cell in my body to the rhythm of galaxies in space.