Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

Carol Maier, entomologist and owner, Victoria Bug Zoo, Victoria, Canada:

  “They light up as a form of communication for the purpose of mating. Both sexes light up. Usually the female is on the ground, or on foliage, and the males are flying around. The males start a specific code of lightning flashes, and the females recognize that code and flash in response. Once they’ve agreed that they are the same species and they want to mate, the males and the females will cue in to each other through this code. The males have really large eyes for finding these female flashes. Unlike most other insects, fireflies use visual cues instead of chemical.

  “The flash itself is a complex chemical reaction. It is almost one hundred percent efficient—it creates very, very little heat, it’s almost ninety-eight percent light. The chemical that lights up is luciferin, which requires an enzyme called luciferase. All species of fireflies have this chemical, some to a greater degree than others. There is a phenomenon we call the ‘Firefly Femme Fatale.’ This lightning bug will be lying on the ground, watching and responding to males of a different species for the sole purpose of attracting a male to her so she can eat him. So she gets a meal and she gets to accumulate his luciferin.

  “The best lightning bug display that I ever saw was in a really remote location up the Sekonyer River in Borneo, in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. They were flying way up in the nipa palms. There were billions of them. It was like a fireworks display the entire night, like one big flashing Christmas tree explosion after another. It was really extraordinary.”

  10.

  A Train to Sue

  Dean had reawakened my interest in dinosaurs, and was teaching me about them. But now I discovered one of the great benefits of being a father and having a boy who wasn’t quite so little anymore: if I could get him interested in the same things I was interested in, then I had a partner for whatever I wanted to do. He was a great excuse. I’m not big on sports, but the football-or baseball-crazed father knows this angle well: get your son into football or baseball and you’ve got it in the bag.

  Suddenly, you are a boy again.

  Dean’s godfather had given him a paperback picture book called A Dinosaur Named Sue about a T-rex fossil at the Field Museum in Chicago. We read it at bedtime after we finished with Bakker, and became curious. Dean asked: “Why does that T-rex have a name like a little girl?” I knew why the boy in the Johnny Cash song had the same name—his father wanted to make him tough, a cruel joke—but didn’t have any idea about this T-rex, one of the biggest and most complete such fossils ever found.

  Rather than go online, or simply turn to the page that actually explained the mystery, I decided this was a great opportunity to find the answer by taking a trip. We would go to Chicago, just the two of us, just like my dad and I used to travel to Rochester, and we would find out for ourselves why this fierce carnivore had such a little-girl name.

  And to get there, we’d take the train.

  I have always loved train journeys, both those that I have experienced and those that have been described to me. Scenes from each stuck permanently in my memory, the images illuminated by the platform lights at strange hours of the day or night, the wheels shiny and greasy, the brakes hissing steam. My father remembers taking the Sunset Limited with his parents when he was ten, and standing beside a giant black locomotive in El Paso, Texas, just before sunrise. I remember, also in the predawn coolness, waiting to get aboard an Amtrak train on the way home from visiting my cousins in North Carolina at Christmastime when I was about the same age.

  In high school, I did a loop around Europe with a bunch of friends, Eurorail tickets in our back pockets, taking as many overnight trips as we could to save on hotels. When Helene and I got married, our honeymoon included a night train trip, in this case the Paris-Amsterdam Express. I thought it would be very romantic, having sex on a train between two great European capitals, but that idea was banished from our heads when we discovered that our compartment wasn’t private, and that we were sharing it with a Belgian businessman in silk paisley pajamas. He detrained in Brussels, but by then the moment had passed.

  Two years later, we took the overnight express from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in Thailand, chasing cockroaches out of the compartment before switching off the lights and watching in the darkness as the brightly lit triangular roofs of temples, appearing magically levitated, glided by in the distance like low-flying airplanes. Then, a year before Dean was born, for a travel story, we set out on a three-day rail transit of Canada, with a layover in the Canadian Rockies two days in. Although Helene was a good sport, she was clearly weary of the rails by the time we reached Vancouver.

  But now I had Dean.

  Traveling with a child is a delicate art. They are not really designed to be good travelers, their attention spans and energy levels are not calibrated for long journeys, no matter how much they may be fascinated by the cars, planes or trains that carry them to their destinations. You can only look out the window of a plane or a car for so long. As a parent, your biggest worry is that your child’s screeching and misbehaving will get on other travelers’ nerves, just as screeching and misbehaving children got on your nerves when you were childless and traveling to Chiang Mai or across Canada and wondering, Why would anyone ever have one of those?

  I’m not quite certain why I thought taking a five-year-old on an eighteen-hour train journey was a good idea; I figured we could range around the whole train if he got antsy, run up and down the corridors, go to the lounge. I would be giving us both the gift of a memory. I booked a compartment on the Lake Shore Limited for late June, with a return trip a day later after one night in a hotel.

  The tickets were $800. As I read my credit card number to the Amtrak reservation agent, I realized that the gift of a memory was not cheap.

  Dean was excited: the promise of a train journey to a faraway city, with meals at a rocking table and sleep in an upper bunk, the rails clicking rhythmically below, was pretty exotic. As the departure date drew near, he asked me repeatedly about what to expect: Would our compartment be bigger than the elevator in our building? Would there be a television? How many cars would the train have? What would we have to eat? What was the first thing, the absolutely first thing, we would do when we got to Chicago?

  We had lunch with Helene in the neighborhood on the big day—Brenda was watching Paulina—and then took the subway into the city, my bag filled with our clothes, Dean’s backpack heavy with games and puzzles and books, his growing hand in mine. Since we had booked a sleeper, we got to use Amtrak’s lounge in Penn Station, which included complimentary beverages. Dean loved this concept, and we spent most of our lounge time at the soda machine. Then the Lake Shore Limited was announced. We went down to the platform and then all the way to the end, to sleeperland.

  The compartment was smaller than the elevator in our building: just two seats facing each other next to a big window and a small shelf to the side that flipped up to reveal a toilet (each compartment had one). Everything was stainless steel and had a very solid feel. The compartment had a small television screen above one of the seats, but our porter, Jay, said it didn’t work; he wasn’t sure if it ever had.

  We unpacked the games and a CD player (for which I’d burned a disk of Dean’s favorite songs), then stowed our bags and took our seats facing each other. The train started to move in that smooth, unannounced, almost imperceptible way trains do, and soon we were out of the darkness and shooting up the Hudson. We passed stone walls scarred with graffiti, and shore-front parks where couples posed for wedding photographs, and the spans of bridges with names like Tappan Zee, Mid-Hudson, Kingston-Rhinecliff and Rip Van Winkle.

  I tried to teach Dean chess but we both grew quickly frustrated. He looked through a picture book and got his famous paper cut. He listened to his CD for three minutes. I was about two pages into the book I was reading about the Battle of Leyte Gulf when he took off the headphones and said he wanted to tour the train.

  We headed through the two sleeper cars, pa
lms against the sides of the corridors to keep steady, until we got to the lounge car. Jay had told us it would be closed until Albany, but I figured we could go through and see what was on the other side. Dean pushed the square button that opened the door with a hiss, and we walked in. The attendant was behind the counter, his back to us, counting inventory.

  “You can’t come in here,” he said, not turning around. “We’re closed.”

  “We just want to go through.”

  “I said we’re closed. You can’t go through.” Now he turned.

  “But…”

  “I said we’re closed.”

  I felt myself getting very angry. I’d paid $800 for this trip, and I’d be goddamned if I was going to be spoken to that way in front of my son.

  Here’s a memory from my childhood:

  I went through a lengthy samurai movie phase beginning when I was twelve. My dad and I went to a double feature of Japanese films, The Loyal 47 Ronin, parts one and two. But we got there late—only single seats remained. Two were in the front row, with a man sitting between them. Slouched down and balding, he was staring straight ahead with his hands in a triangle in front of him, fingertips to fingertips, thumb tip to thumb tip. I walked up to him and politely—and I’ve been told I was an unusually polite kid—asked if he would mind moving over one seat so my dad and I could sit next to each other.

  He looked at me, and at my father, and back to the white screen and said, “Yes, I would mind. I’d mind twice. Once for you, and once for him.”

  I was surprised but didn’t really care; my dad and I would just sit one seat apart.

  But my father radiated rage.

  He stepped forward and said, “Stand back, Wen, while I kick this man’s face in.”

  It was a hugely uncharacteristic threat of violence from my dad, and although the man in the seat between two empty seats didn’t even look up, I was horrified by the thought of a fight and pulled on my father’s sleeve until he backed down. We sat on steps in the aisle for both films, neither of which I remember, except that they were very long and that the climactic sword fight took place off-screen. But I can still recall the feeling of abject terror in my stomach, my pulse racing, at the thought of my dad rolling in the aisles, kicking and punching some artsy arthouse movie guy from 1978 who wouldn’t move over one seat.

  Now I was standing in the café car of a Chicago-bound train, my legs still unused to the rocking sensation, and Dean was looking at me just like I must have looked at my father nearly thirty years before. I didn’t want him to feel that same feeling of terror, and I could see from his eyes that it was coming on. Nor did I want his chief memory of this trip being that of me, his father, cursing and spitting as I hurled myself over the snack counter to wrestle with the lounge attendant.

  He tugged on my sleeve. I gave Mr. We’re Closed the dirtiest dirty look I could muster and we went back out through the hissing door.

  By dinnertime, the Hudson was smaller. We ate in the dining car with an older woman and her granddaughter, who was six, a year older than Dean. The woman lived outside Schenectady and was taking the little girl for the weekend so her son and his wife could have a break. They’d been late getting to the station in Albany, where they boarded, but luckily her son knew someone who worked in the control room, and the train had been held.

  I asked her what was news in her part of the world, and she became very animated and went into some detail about a virulent strain of algae that had clogged all the rivers and streams near her house. Dean followed along, energized by her enthusiasm.

  “Is it, like, really disgusting?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’ve never touched it,” she said.

  Then she added: “How much fun it must be for you, taking an overnight train with your dad.”

  When we got back to our compartment it was made up for sleeping; Dean was unconscious after less than two minutes of back scratching. I got comfortable in my bunk, sipping a little flask of bourbon I’d brought along, reading about Leyte Gulf. This didn’t last long; soon I was asleep, too, waking only when the train made a station stop. I’d roll over and brush the curtain aside to see where we were and some yellowy light would filter in. Once, I saw our dinner companions walking to a waiting car, its blinkers on; later I saw the 1:00 a.m. skyline of Rochester, and I thought sleepily of the trip my dad and I had taken here when I was about Dean’s age.

  When Dean and I woke up, Lake Erie was out the corridor window, framed like a moving diorama. It was a bright sunny day. “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean: you can’t see the other side,” he said as we went to breakfast.

  We ate with a British couple who had traveled from Swindon in the south of England to London, via train, then flown to New York, and were now training it to Chicago and then Milwaukee to see Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.

  Dean was impressed. “You took a train and a plane and a train again to hear music?”

  “We sure did, mate.”

  “Do a lot of people do that?”

  “Don’t know, really.”

  The four of us hit it off. They were surprised that I knew that the band XTC came from Swindon; I was surprised that the woman had been involved in an ill-fated Web venture with Dave Gregory, XTC’s guitarist. Swindon must be a small town, I thought. (Actually, according to 2002 statistics, the population is 153,700.)

  Dean and I went back to our compartment after breakfast to pack up for Chicago. But trouble rode the rails. I had noticed during the night and during breakfast that the train stopped a lot for no apparent reason. When we were still outside Gary, Indiana, the flaming tops of its oil refinery smokestacks off in the distance, I realized we were going to be late; we’d already been aboard for eighteen hours. I silently cursed our algae-obsessed dinner companion for making the train wait in Albany. I worried about the Swindon rockers’ Milwaukee connection.

  And I worried about Dean.

  He had been busy and interested throughout the trip, but he reverted to the five-year-old he undeniably was when we pulled onto a siding yet again to let a freight train rush by. I pointed out the flaming smokestacks. I suggested he count the cars of the passing train. Neither interested him. He began to sob.

  “Why does this train always stop?” He pounded his fist on the table. “Why doesn’t the television work?”

  Now the compartment seemed much, much smaller than the elevator in our building.

  We got into Chicago at noon, four tear-filled hours later.

  But then we saw her.

  The Field Museum’s main dinosaur exhibit was closed for restoration, but a traveling show of fossils from China had just opened; it included specimens Mark Norell had brought back to the United States. As we went through it, I was reminded yet again about how much dinosaurs had changed since I was a child: these new varieties were more outlandish and unpronounceable than any we’d previously encountered: Mamenchisaurus, Caudipteryx, Toujiangosaurus, Monolophosaurus.

  That’s a bloody mouthful, as our breakfast companions might have said.

  Dean could pronounce every one, putting to rest my final worries about his speech. But these Chinese beasts, as impressive as they were, were only a warm-up. The T-rex named Sue stood by herself on the first floor, visible in the distance over the heads of those lining up for tickets.

  Standing in the museum’s soaring main hall, Sue was different from any fossilized skeleton we’d seen before. She did not appear to be static, standing upright and lording it over those around her, but was instead crouched over, her haunches up, like she was in the midst of a final sprint to catch her quarry. The T-rex at the American Museum of Natural History is crouching, too, but Sue’s movements had an almost liquid-like fluidity to them; you could practically see the flexing muscles in her massive thighs, and those little two-fingered forearms quivering excitedly as her teeth plunged into some foolish duckbill’s back, and that whipping, surprisingly elegant tail in motion.

  I knew that Sue was nearly an entire skeleton; the
one in New York was a mixture of two. A painting of Sue in happier times—that is to say, when she had flesh and muscle and a functioning brain—hung beneath the hall’s ceiling, above a frieze supported by Ionic columns, showing her hunting beneath a purply late-Cretaceous sunset.

  Dean’s eyes went wider than usual as he nodded his head in silent acknowledgment of the beast. Then he bent forward, double talons out, and started working on his own impersonation of this exciting new stance.

  I read to him about Sue. She was discovered in South Dakota in 1990. This made me smile: she was still buried when I became obsessed with dinosaurs in first grade and would be for fifteen more years, until the year I started dating Helene, who would eventually give birth to the little boy standing—or bending and roaring, all three feet, ten inches of him—next to me.

  She was the sightseeing high point of our trip. Everything that followed, including German U-boat 505 at the Museum of Science and Industry, which we checked out the next day before getting on the train for New York, was somehow diminished by her malevolent greatness.

  But she was not the most important discovery of the trip for me. Back in my little lower bunk, Dean asleep above me, my flask nearly empty and the Japanese at Leyte Gulf nearly vanquished, I thought about the last three days. More specifically, I thought about Dean and realized that my pride in my son had welled up in a way it never had before as we sat with our companions at dinner and breakfast.

  He talked so easily and inquisitively. I had seen it begin with Ron Charles—“Daddy—remember that time. The bumper?”—and Mark Norell—“Is that early Cretaceous?” But now he was a full member of the conversation—“Is it, like, really disgusting?” “You took a train and a plane and a train again to hear music?”

  When he asked the last one, I felt like cheering. The little girl with whom we’d had dinner, cute as she was, hadn’t said a word.

  Once Dean had been a baby, and then a toddler, cute and funny, but now more than ever he was a real person. My feelings toward him, toward the person he had become, were evolving. He asked me questions, I answered or I looked for answers—but sometimes now I asked, too. His discovery of dinosaurs had been a revelation to me: he had let me see the world through the eyes of a child, and reminded me of mysteries and wonders I’d forgotten. Somehow, being on a trip, traveling, just one on one, father and son, made these changes dramatically clear to me. This was what I learned.