Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem

by Bill Nye

  I am pretty sure the only reason the other guys didn’t get their counselor victims to the dock was because they knew they didn’t have to. Everyone there could swim. Everyone there had spent some time in the water learning the inverted scissor. Everyone was nominally strong enough to do the right thing and get a kid or a big grown-up to shore in a real, serious situation. After each Scout had shown his skills to the counselor in the water, even if he didn’t get his “victim” to shore, the counselor said, “Okay, fine, you passed. Let’s get to the dock.” But I was driven by a bigger goal. I wanted to do it for really real. I wanted to put the theory to a hard test—I did, and it turned out that it worked. Well, it worked for me. The other guys were all standing on the dock, arms akimbo, unimpressed. Their attitude toward me was, roughly, “Are you quite done? The rest of us passed without all the extra splashing.”

  I’ve often thought about that morning in the many years since. I took everything I knew and, in a fit of nerdy ambition, tried to do something slightly more ambitious than what I thought was possible. We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another. It happens when you first learn to ride a bicycle, or master a gymnastics move, or find yourself running to second base after hitting a double, or perform a piece of music flawlessly for the first time. It’s also the feeling of the scientist running experiment after experiment until the data begin to fall into place and a deeper awareness emerges. You can surprise yourself, I realized, if you focus, follow the procedure, and stick with it, stick with it, stick with it.

  Not that I was spinning any such highfalutin notions at the time. All I knew was that I had studied all the rules of lifesaving and lifeguarding, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to see them through, Big John or no Big John. My motivation and belief were what convinced me that this task, even though it looked nearly impossible, could be accomplished if I trusted myself.

  It was what I believe we call a “life lesson.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Me Against the Rock

  Nothing sharpens your appreciation for science and engineering like a nice, rousing life-or-death situation. But hold on—I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and take you on a return trip to my childhood in the 1960s.

  As you have probably realized by now, I love being in the water. I also love spending time on the water, navigating under my own power. I trace that second love to age 11 when, along with some other tenderfoot Scouts, I got in a canoe for the first time. My scoutmaster, “Uncle Bob” Hansen, was a stockbroker, a gentleman farmer, and a consummate outdoorsman. Significantly, he also had a close friend named John Berry, a champion canoeist who built his own fiberglass boats at home. Listening to our scoutmaster talk, you’d think this guy practically invented the decked canoe. A decked canoe looks like a kayak but with subtle differences. A canoe has more bottom; its hull is rounder than that of a kayak, and its bow and stern curve up toward the sky a bit more than a kayak’s hull does. If swimming taught me respect for the physics of water, my encounters with the canoe made me appreciate that science alone is not enough. When you are in a dangerous spot on a river, engineering is awfully important, as well.

  Both the kayak and the canoe have a long engineering history behind them; they are products of different cultures working out different solutions on different continents. Kayaks were invented by the Inuit, Yup’ik, and Aleut peoples of North America. The earliest known canoes were built in northern Europe, though the same basic design appeared (independently, apparently) in Australia and the Americas. The similarities are no coincidence. Everywhere, people were trying to solve the shared problems of getting food by navigating across the water. On first glance, a canoe looks like a kayak, and a kayak looks like a canoe. Inspect them for a few more moments, though, and you can see that river people and ice-fishing people made distinct choices to optimize their various vessels’ performance. For carrying loads like animal pelts or sacks of rice, a flatter-bottomed canoe has more room and is more stable. For chasing and hooking fish, a kayak is more maneuverable, especially perhaps around small floes of ice.

  Each type of boat requires its own paddle and its own technique. A kayaker wields a long paddle with two blades, one on each end. By tradition, and by two or three dozen millennia of trial and error, a canoeist goes forth with a shorter single-bladed paddle. In a kayak, you’re sitting down. Your legs react and support the force of each paddle stroke, but sitting down restricts how much leg you can put into each pull of your arms. In a canoe, I quickly learned that you’ve got to kneel, not sit, and you’d better keep paddling or the river will do whatever it wants with you. Your hips and thighs can provide a good bit more force to drive and steer the boat, so much more that it’s hard to muster enough force with your arms to compensate for all that, unless you put both hands in the service of a single paddle blade.

  The 10 or so canoes issued to us Scouts that summer in 1967 were open boats, sturdy, time-tested, and made of hard-to-damage aluminum. My fellow Scouts and I found that we could run them over the river rocks pretty recklessly. Afterward, the boats would show scars, but they’d still be quite river-worthy. Our teachers had shown us how to angle the keel and use the river current to ferry right or left, how to figure which rocks were deep enough to slide over and which would stop one end of the boat and spin you around. They had shown us nominally how to shoot white-water rapids. Nevertheless, we—I’m pretty sure it was all of us, not just me—were often terrified. We were not yet fully in control of our nerd powers, and we knew it.

  There are a couple of tricks with a single-bladed paddle that enable you to push a lot of water around in a hurry. You’re probably familiar with Newton’s third law of motion, whether or not you call it by that name: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s the scientific principle that sends rockets into space, with the exhaust throwing the mass of the fuel down while the mass of the rocket soars up. In the same way, when you push on the water, the water pushes back and moves the boat in the other direction. When you pull on the water, you pull the boat toward your paddle. When you really get smooth with it, moving the boat feels like magic. But as I am so fond of pointing out, it’s not magic; it’s science. It is perfectly, beautifully predictable—if you know what you’re doing.

  When you are in a canoe, you don’t need to study physics to understand action and reaction. Action and reaction, viscous drag, wind resistance, turbulent flow, force equals mass times acceleration . . . you don’t have to know the theory behind these things to master a kayak, but you sure do need to know how they all work. You learn it somatically—in virtually every fiber of your body—when you put paddle to water. That’s what the early Inuit, Aboriginal Australian, and other water-faring cultures did, and that’s what I was doing all over again on Pennsylvania’s run of the Youghiogheny River in the summer of 1967. I was mastering a fundamental piece of technology and learning how nature works, just as other eager kids had done for thousands of years before me. If you’ve ever gone paddling, you know exactly what I mean. And if you haven’t, well, I highly recommend it.

  A lot of this is intuitive, but some important ideas are not.

  For the hard-core kayaker or C-1 decked-canoe paddler, a major rite of passage is the “Eskimo roll.” Here, the physics is predictable if you know what you are doing. It is utterly unforgiving if you do not. Skilled kayakers from any culture can roll their boats completely over, under, around, and back upright again, all in a single fluid (pun intended) motion. Their head and torso go completely underwater, but only for a few moments. This is where more engineering comes into play. Whether you are rolling for fun or desperately trying to recover from capsizing, when you attempt an Eskimo roll, it’s all too possible to get stuck head-down with no source of air. That’s bad. Then you have to either abandon your boat by wrestling free and swimming straight down—no easy task in a close-fitting kayak or decked canoe—or stroke with just the right motion, with the paddle pulled hard from behind your head toward your thig
hbone, to twist yourself back upright. In other words, you can easily drown beneath your own, nominally very maneuverable boat.

  This buddy of my scoutmaster, our stalwart Mr. Berry, was accomplished on the water, almost ridiculously so. He smoked a pipe while he plied the white water; that’s how cool and calm he was. One chilly morning in a calm part of the river, while showing off his canoe-paddling techniques, he performed an Eskimo roll and spun down and back up so swiftly that his pipe didn’t go out. He puffed it right back to glowing orange life. I realize now that this may have been an illusion. Maybe the tiny fire in his pipe did go out, and what I recall witnessing was just steam rising from the hot tobacco leaves. Whatever actually happened, though, I’ve never forgotten the feeling that the sight inspired in my young brain. Mr. Berry had such command over his boat and its position on the river. He was not the slightest bit concerned about oncoming rapids or rocks, let alone going upside down in a river eddy. He understood the exact engineering capabilities of his canoe, and he had his somatic knowledge of physics down pat. I hoped to be that good someday: not to worry about what might go wrong, and be ready to recover in case something did. It’s a confidence that gets justified only after you prove to yourself that you can consistently paddle and roll with the river, no matter what challenge might come along.

  Steering a canoe is a matter of combining well-timed quick flicks by the guy in the stern with a few real hard paddle strokes by the guy up front. Quickness is key. With the occasional missed opportunity in bow pulling and stern pushing, now and then one of the boats would capsize. It’s a little bit like accidentally driving your car into a tree. I don’t recommend it. Although the consequences of a canoe capsizing were generally not as serious as a car crash, if you did capsize, you were cold and embarrassed. More than once, I saw my fellow Scouts have to crawl to shore or to a high and dry big rock, turn the canoe upside down to get the water out, and then recover their now-wet camping gear.

  Along with providing much of the power, the bowman is also the first guy at the scene of a crash, if you catch my drift. As a young Scout, I was put in the bow, and I often paddled for all I was worth, exhausting myself by day’s end. As much fun as I was having, I was also constantly aware of the consequences of any small error in judgment. I knew what it was to tip over, to capsize, to get everything you have with you for the weekend instantly soaking wet and cold.

  Then one time it happened to me: We hit a rock, and over we went. There were the standard two of us in our canoe. I claim to this day that it wasn’t my fault. I was up front, pulling and pushing. The guy in the back was supposed to do the steering (right?). In any case, when things go wrong in white water, they go wrong very quickly. This is true of any high-speed activity that depends crucially on human reaction time—including skiing and, more commonly, highway driving. We smashed the boat on a rock. With the bow dead stopped, the stern caught the current, and the whole boat spun around. Water came over the gunwales (sides), and all our gear went flying. My knees, shins, and feet were soaked. We easily could have found ourselves in a part of the river from which there was no simple exit, but we managed to maneuver the boat near enough to a big rock that we could crawl out onto it.

  By that point, our canoe had taken on so much water that it was behaving more like a full bucket than a boat. Once we were secure on the rock, we tipped the canoe up, rolling it on its side so it could drain. It wasn’t the life-or-death kind of event I referred to at the beginning of the chapter, but it was humiliating. When we finally got back to camp, it seemed like most of the Scout troop was waiting for me. Along with the embarrassment, I had a desire. I wanted to do better—eventually. In the moment, I was so frustrated that I never wanted to do anything like that again. Then, after a few hours and days of reflection, I really wanted to do it, to get good at it, to get confident. This is a common process. It’s part of being a nerd. It goes with the old saying, “No one cares about you when you’re down. It’s how you get back up that they’ll notice.” I wanted to get back up from this little wreck and become a great, or at least good, paddler.

  Years and canoeing seasons went by. Four of them, to be precise. Although Uncle Bob and the other grown-ups moved our Scout group around on a few different eastern rivers, this day we were back on the Youghiogheny in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains. Now I was 15 and had graduated to the stern of the canoe, and I had a young guy named Ken in the bowman position up front. Things were going well. The water was rough but not too rough, the day was clear, and there was no wind to speak of. Just a few minutes earlier that morning, Ken and I had witnessed another boat run aground, get spun sideways, and capsize. He was spooked by it. I knew that feeling and shared it that day, although for different reasons: Ken didn’t yet feel the science and engineering of the canoe in his bones, and that kind of uncertainty breeds fear. He hadn’t had the chance to be confident.

  At first, things were smooth, and then very quickly they weren’t, in the sudden way that can happen on a river. The current had picked up, and I realized, a moment later than I should have, that we were headed for a medium-size rock. This was not one of those monolith-of-death-looking rocks, which are out there. No, this rock was big, but smaller than our canoe. Still, we had some speed up, and I knew that if we hit it—well, we’d be in the middle of the cold, swift current with no easy means to recover. At that moment, I saw Ken recoil and freeze. The rock was, from his point of view, going to kill us. Four years earlier, I might have frozen, too. Even now, I clearly remember my thinking the moment when I saw Ken’s mounting panic and could visualize our impending doom: “Wait, I’m the senior guy here. I can handle this.” All that nerdy knowledge in my head had transformed from information to action. My reaction was intuitive, automatic.

  Without thinking—absolutely without thinking about it—I shouted, “Brace!” Ken knew the command and automatically braced his paddle across the gunwales of the boat so the paddle was no longer controlling our direction. Meanwhile, I forcefully steered us around the rock, just barely missing it. I was in real danger there on the Youghiogheny River, and I really avoided it. I took control. In that moment, I had 4 years of canoeing under my belt. I instantly assessed the problem of the oncoming rock, the design of the canoe, the limited abilities of my guy in the bow, the dynamics of the water, and Newton’s third law. My bowman was a guy just like me, only a few years younger. He probably had all the physics he needed, too, but what mattered was confidence bred by repetition. He didn’t know how to put his knowledge into action.

  There were going to be unknowns, but I knew how to roll—or flow—with them. It wasn’t just a way of thinking about paddling; it was a way of thinking about the world. It was a way of living. There are always going to be unknowns, and there are always going to be moments when I (or you) look into a crisis and then . . . either panic and freeze or realize “I know how to handle this.” In the few seconds before we hit the rock, I understood with crystal clarity what I could accomplish by scanning the full database in my brain and putting to use what I knew. By paying attention to everything all at once, I was able to execute a solution to the problem of the rock.

  It may sound like I’m making a big deal out of a small rock in a beautiful river replete with rocks, but it was a seminal experience. I was coming of age and realizing that I could handle situations, dangerous ones, if I paid attention and kept my head in the game. That moment changed me for the better. If we had hit that rock, I’ll readily admit, we wouldn’t have died and likely wouldn’t have been injured in any lasting way. We would’ve gotten dunked, and possibly stranded. The adults may have been faced with the sorry task of paddling hard upstream against the current to recover our gear. Maybe one or both of us would have gotten banged up a bit on the rocks. We would have been cold and miserable for the rest of the day. Perhaps more important, the other Scouts would have made big fun of us. We would have been uncomfortable had we capsized, but that was the path not taken. Instead, we dodged the rock and carried on.


  That day with the rock made me want to use good judgment about . . . everything, really. Is such a thing possible? Is it even desirable? After all, going wild now and then might not be all bad. But preparation for anything always pays off. What’s wonderful about nerd knowledge is that it is there if and when you need it. So when I think about the changes I want to see in society, I think about avoiding the rock in the river by being prepared and in control. I think about the filtered knowledge, applied just the right way. I feel that the canoe, the rock, energy policy, and climate change are connected. No kidding.

  I know many people who would move past such an experience and forget about it. I know others who would go the other way and interpret it as a spiritual message. For me, it was unforgettable, but it was not evidence of a higher power looking out for me. What saved Ken and me was nothing more or less than the steady training by the older Scouts and the patient guidance of Mr. Berry and Uncle Bob, the scoutmaster, along with his assistants. They had taught me about the river and about the design of the boat and paddles. They had drilled the necessary information into me. They had trained me in a way that didn’t lead just to theoretical knowledge but also to muscle memory and preparation that were completely related to the real-world experience of many different possible scenarios. When I was actually faced with one of those situations, as the saying goes, “the training kicked in.”