Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  I put down my book and switched off the reading lamp. The compartment was dark except for the occasional light flying by, its reflection flashing across the stainless steel. The tracks clicked fast beneath us; the Lake Shore Limited was making good time.

  “Why does that T-rex have a name like a little girl?”

  —DEAN

  William F. Simpson, collections manager of fossil vertebrae, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago:

  “It’s named after the woman who discovered it, and her name was Sue Hendrickson. She was part of a commercial paleontology company that was searching for and digging up dinosaurs in western South Dakota. The head of this company named the dinosaur after her because it was such a stunning discovery—the largest, most complete T-rex ever found. But even though we call it Sue, we really have no idea what gender this particular Tyrannosaurus was—it might be a boy named Sue. As sort of an aside, when I was growing up, dinosaurs didn’t have names like this. They had their scientific names and that was it. Sue was one of the first, and started a trend of the big rock stars of the dinosaur world getting their own names. I even named my own dinosaur here at the Field Museum. It is a juvenile Tyrannosaur, and it was found by our first curator of vertebrae paleontology, Elmer Riggs. So in the new tradition of always naming a dinosaur after the discoverer, the specimen is now known informally as Elmer.”

  “Is there such a thing as a nice dinosaur?”

  —MINA PAZ-LE DRAOULEC, age three,

  Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

  Again, William F. Simpson, collections manager of fossil vertebrae, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago:

  “It depends on what nice means. There were dinosaurs that ate other animals, and I think that they would probably not be viewed as nice, since they were predators. But there were hundreds and hundreds of plant-eating dinosaurs, and unless you were a plant, I think you could view them as nicer. Some of them were gigantic, so you’d have to be careful if you were alive and around them; even if they didn’t want to eat you, they could still hurt you by accident. But another way of answering that is that there is no nice or not nice in nature: that is a human construct. I don’t think that we know of any animals that kill for fun, other than human beings. Certainly human beings alone in nature understand the ramification of killing something, which makes it meaner of us to kill than it would be otherwise.”

  “Why does this train always stop?”

  —DEAN, just outside Gary, Indiana, when he should have been arriving in Chicago

  Bill Crosbie, Senior Vice President of Operations, Amtrak:

  “There are three primary reasons. First, what we call ‘freight-train interference’—other trains on the line. We travel at a higher speed than they do—typically seventy-nine miles per hour, and they typically travel at fifty to sixty miles per hour—so we would overtake them. It really comes down to congestion. Then, in the interest of safety, there are various wayside detectors for dangers like hot wheels and hot bearings. It’s a voice warning that tells the engineer to stop the train immediately. Usually, the conductor or the assistant conductor will go out and do an inspection on the train. The next reason, the last reason, would be the owner of the railroad, the company that owns the right-of-way. We rely on the freight railway network outside of the Northeast Corridor; when you take a trip like on the Lake Shore, you are traveling as a guest on that railway, and we have an operating agreement with them. Railways try to keep their right-of-way—their tracks, the bridges, their signals—in a state of good repair. And they do that in the daylight hours. In the interest of safety, workers put a block on the section of track where they are working, and they have to clear that before allowing the train to go through. Sometimes the tracks, the rails, are removed, and you’d have to wait on that until they get them back in place.”

  “Why doesn’t the television work?”

  —DEAN, trying to kill time outside Gary, Indiana

  Again, Bill Crosbie, Senior Vice President of Operations, Amtrak:

  “We’ve made the decision here to discontinue the televisions in the sleeper cars. It was unbelievably expensive to maintain them, and that’s due to the working environment. It is a standard television built for your living room—it is not built for being shaken around on a train trip. It was very frustrating for our customers. We debated internally on both sides whether to replace them. There were arguments on both sides whether to keep them or take them out; because of the maintenance, we decided to take them out. They are all disconnected, but I guess some screens still haven’t been removed.”

  “Is it, like, really disgusting?”

  —DEAN, asking about a bloom of ravenous algae in upstate New York

  Rob Moore, Executive Director of Environmental Advocates of New York:

  “There are several types of different algae; some can form slimy or disgusting mats of green stuff and some do not. Some can even pose a health risk, like blue-green algae, which can secrete a poisonous substance. Algae are something that are always present in freshwater bodies and are actually the base of the food chain, serving as food for small fish that are in turn eaten by bigger fish. So algae are actually a very important part of a water body’s ecology. When you start getting too many nutrients that algae feed upon—like nitrogen and phosphorus—you throw the water body’s balance out of whack, and the result are large blooms of algae that can form thick mats of slimy stuff that looks like vegetation. It depends on what type of algae you have. If you were dealing with filamentous algae, for example, you may have this mat floating on the water, and it’s oozy and slimy, gross; it kind of sticks to things, it gets on the side of your boat. Other types of algae may just form little clumps that make the water appear very cloudy.”

  “Do a lot of people do that?”

  —DEAN, learning that an English couple had traveled from Swindon, England, to London to Chicago to Milwaukee to see Tom Petty

  Miriam Plastow, high school attendance secretary living just north of Toronto, Canada, and a devoted Tom Petty fan:

  “Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fans who live outside of the United States have no option but to travel a long way if they want to see their favorite band live in concert. The band no longer tours outside of the country. The last time they performed in Toronto was in 1999. This year I will be driving to Saratoga, New York, to see a show, then I’ll be flying to Philadelphia the following week to see another one in Camden, New Jersey. The farthest I’ve gone so far to see this band was several years ago, when I flew out to California from Toronto to catch two shows. I’ve also seen the band in Chicago and New York. I know of one fan who has flown several times from England to the United States for this, and this year one of the fans is flying all the way from Australia to Arizona to see a show. Tom Petty is always saying how lucky he is to have such a lot of loyal fans. Well, we’re either loyal or have more money than sense. By the way, I have been extremely fortunate enough to meet Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers backstage before a show in New York at Madison Square Garden on December 13, 2002. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.”

  “Can you get struck by lightning on Metro-North?”

  —NICK MANSKE, age seven, Brooklyn, New York, after reminding his mother that trains, unlike cars, do not have rubber tires

  Robert Walker, former head of the power department, Metro-North Railroad:

  “If you are sitting on a train, then, no, you cannot get hit by lightning. You are shielded by the body of the car, which is made of metal and is grounded by the metal wheels riding along the steel rails. A Metro-North car, or a Long Island Rail Road car, or any other passenger train car is basically a metallic shield that is protecting you from the lightning above. Could one of the cars get hit by lightning? Yes—there would be a large bang, people inside could hear it, but nothing would happen to the people; the charge would just travel through the metal and go down to the earth. We have had lightning hits on the railroad, particularly on the New Haven Line, where we hav
e overhead catenary lines. But as long as you are inside the car, with all the metal around you, it is much safer in a lightning storm than being on a golf course or being under a tree. That’s the glory of it. Now, if you were on a Metro-North platform, the odds go up that you could get hit. But I don’t remember ever hearing of anybody getting hit on a platform.”

  “Why does the plane swing out over the ocean?”

  —SAM ROSEN, age eight, Montclair, New Jersey

  Captain Arnold Reiner, Delta Airlines pilot (retired), and former director of flight safety, Pan Am:

  “Planes normally take off and land into the wind, because they get better performance that way. So if you are coming into Los Angeles from New York and the winds are from the east, you will swing out over the Pacific Ocean in order to get lined up to land toward the east. But not every time: if the winds are out of the west, you will come in straight from the continent. When you leave from New York, because the airports are in the vicinity of water, you will frequently go out over the water; very often air traffic controllers will try to do that to minimize the noise over populated areas. When you take off from John F. Kennedy Airport on Runway 31 Left, which is the preferred runway for international departures because it’s the longest, you’ll turn to the left as quickly as you can to avoid overflying the city, and end up heading south over the ocean. It’s a less noisy route to city residents and the flight track avoids the city’s tall buildings. And it’s a safer route. If an engine failed early in the departure, there would be less thrust to climb and you would want to ascend in a less obstructed area, which would be over the water.”

  “In Antarctica, are people upside down?”

  —JORDAN MAINZER, age eight, Highland Park, Illinois

  Liesl Schernthanner, winter manager, South Pole Station, Antarctica:

  “When standing here at the bottom of the Earth, I don’t feel upside down. My feet are on the ground and the sky is above me, so I’m perfectly right-side up. An astronaut in outer space may look at me and notice that my head is pointing in the opposite direction as someone standing at the North Pole; from the same view, someone in New York may look somewhat sideways. Thanks to gravity, we’re all grounded on the Earth with our heads towards the clouds, and we’re all right-side up relative to our location. Life is all about perspectives.”

  “Why did the Egyptians build pyramids? Why not giant rectangles or some other shape?”

  —ALEKS SIEMASZKO, age eleven, Montclair, New Jersey

  Dieter Arnold, curator of the Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:

  “Egyptologists assume that they represent primeval hills, the hills that on the day of creation rose out of the flood. This idea certainly comes from the natural state of Egypt in former times. Egypt was flooded by the Nile, and when the flood retreated, islands appeared and they are considered to be symbols of re-creation, of the day of creation. So a pyramid could represent such a hill. But one could ask: Why was it not just a rounded hill, why did it have edges leading to a top? Another idea has to do with the rays of the sun, because sometimes one can see the rays of the sun in Egypt falling in a pyramid shape on the desert surface. So a pyramid could also be a place where a king climbs up to his heaven. But these are all speculations. Do you want a third theory? In the Egyptian city of Heliopolis—this was the center of the sun cult in Egypt—there was a monument called a benben stone. This was apparently a kind of sacred stone. It’s gone now. It could be that this benben stone had the shape of a pyramid, and that the people who built the pyramids were trying to re-create that, because the top piece of a pyramid is called a benben.”

  “Why don’t they make mummies anymore?”

  —JAY RUSSELL, age five, Brooklyn, New York

  Dr. Gunther von Hagens, Heidelberg, Germany, anatomist and inventor of Plastination, a method for preserving dead bodies:

  “Every culture of old preserved bodies by natural methods to avoid decomposition. The most developed method of preservation was mummification practiced by the Egyptians; eventually it became very elaborate. First, the brain was removed through the nose with the aid of a hook. This idea was both disgusting and fascinating to me when I was young. I imagined it was maybe like noodles. The body was then slit open and everything except the heart was removed, washed in palm oil and preserved in a jar in alcohol. The body was washed and filled with powdered myrrh, resins and perfumes and the slit was sewn back together, and then placed in a preservative solution for seventy days. Then it was washed, rubbed with oils or resins and wrapped in many layers of linen bandages. Despite all this work, only the skin and bones were permanently preserved.

  “Mummies are no longer made for religious reasons, but technology, science and a human desire to become immortal has opened the door for new preservation methods. Human nature is still drawn to mummification as a means of ensuring immortality. A modern method of mummification is Plastination, a process that I invented in 1977 at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, in which all bodily fluids and soluble fats are removed from the body and replaced with polymers like silicone. Plastination preserves so well that it reveals the beauty beneath our skin frozen in time between death and decay. It is available to anyone who is interested in having his or her human remains preserved for health education of future generations. A poll of Germans showed that ten percent would consider Plastination as an alternative to conventional burial. After thousands of years, modern mummification is regaining interest in modern society.”

  Epilogue

  The Dinosaur Heresies was only the first of many dinosaur books I read. But I never told Dean everything I learned about that dinosaur called Sue.

  I didn’t tell him how Sue Hendrickson found the T-rex embedded in a cliff in South Dakota while on a dig with Peter Larson, a private fossil collector who had been her boyfriend, or that in the months and years following the find the discovery turned into an international controversy. The federal government seized Sue the dinosaur, saying it was the property of the rancher on whose land it was discovered, even though he had accepted a check from Larson for $5,000. Prosecutors eventually charged Larson with currency violations and illegally digging for fossils on private and federal lands.

  I didn’t tell Dean how Hendrickson had to testify against Larson at his trial, after being barred from speaking to him for three years, and that Larson spent nearly two years in prison after being convicted of felony currency violations and two other misdemeanors. Or that Sue the dinosaur, after languishing in a storage facility for years while the legal dramas played themselves out, was eventually auctioned to the Field Museum with financial backing from McDonald’s and Disney.

  She sold for $7.6 million.

  Why tell Dean all this? Why spoil the mystery and romance of that graceful crouching skeleton waiting at the end of our overnight train journey with the details of lawsuits, and arcane federal land regulations, and hostile witnesses, and newspaper headlines, and jail time, and big corporate dollars?

  Sometimes, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

  And when I think about Sue and what Dean doesn’t know about her, I wonder, really, what do we know about anything?

  We know that volcanic ash shuts down jet engines and policemen eat doughnuts because they are easy to replace and that getting stabbed feels like getting punched. We know that tickling is an attack and elephants don’t cry and that there is a reason they put the rope on the left side of your neck when they hang you. We know there are 25,393,690 lights in New York City and that the Beatles grew up and that fire doesn’t travel from brownstone to brownstone. We know that doctors write illegibly because they are impatient and sea horses dance because they’ve been reunited and pigs sometimes need help to have sex because they are fat, and we know that cats and raccoons have been known to dine together. We know that John Dean was always very solicitous of his wife, Maureen. And we know that billions of lightning bugs swarm like exploding Christmas trees in the nipa palms above the S
ekonyer River in Borneo.

  But there’s a lot we don’t know.

  We’re not entirely certain why the dollar sign has an S in it—maybe it was the pesos, maybe not. We don’t know if those dancing sea horses are monogamous their entire lives, but we are trying to find out. We don’t know who first said “spoon.” We don’t know what would happen if a jetliner hit the Empire State Building or why the Egyptians made the pyramids in the shape of pyramids, but we have theories, tons of theories, and people whose job it is to speculate about such things and make very educated guesses. And we don’t know if that Apatosaurus in the American Museum of Natural History, rearing up on her hind legs to protect her young from an Allosaurus, really did that, though we’d like to think so, and the biomechanics experts think it was very possible.

  I hope the day never comes when someone proves she couldn’t, whether because her legs were too weak, or her neck too long, or her torso too heavy. Whatever the reason, it would be a disappointment.

  Facts can intrude on your imagination, can rob you of the wonderment that comes with being a child.

  I really appreciate Geoffrey Patterson, Oscar-nominated sound mixer, explaining why the highway is so noisy, putting to rest in a minute of explanation a lifetime of confusion. It is actually quite interesting that some municipalities and states use old tires in their asphalt to bring down the noise. Or that reducing noise by ten decibels is actually perceived by the human ear as reducing it by half. That’s something I never would have guessed had he not told me—I doubt the question would even have occurred to me.