To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  On any given day in our country, tens of thousands of people might read a magazine cover-to-cover. Hundreds of thousands may tune into a particular radio show. But on that same day, as evening sets in and the toil of the day is eased by a soft couch and a remote, people by the millions will turn on their television. That, I thought, was my audience, and Hollywood was my source. I would audition for the host of a TV show.

  The sledgehammer came down hard, splintering the cinder block into large chunks that rolled off my stomach and onto the floor.

  “Francis.” The producer is British, so my name came out sounding like Frawn-cis. He was earnest, excited. “Now turn to the camera and tell me just how much that hurt.”

  That was a confusing request. It didn’t hurt at all; I thought that would be the lesson of this segment. Physics was my armor against any pain. The nails on the bed were sharp, but there were hundreds of them, densely packed, and my body weight was spread out across them. As a result, my body didn’t push down on any one nail with much weight at all.

  The cinder block made it look dangerous. But, again, physics was on my side. The impact of the sledgehammer was displaced throughout the massive block, with most of the energy going into fissuring it into smaller pieces, like a crumple zone in a car that allows a driver to walk away from the crushing impact of a head-on collision.

  That, I thought, was the whole point of the show. Dangerman would perform seemingly harmful feats, reproduce jaw-dropping movie stunts, yet always come out unscathed. Then he would explain the trick behind it and the audience would marvel at the wonders of science.

  “But you must have felt something. You had nails penetrating into your back,” the producer encouraged.

  I appreciated his enthusiasm. I was also getting words of encouragement from the sidekick holding the sledgehammer. Still, there was little I could think to say.

  “Mmmmm.” The producer was miffed. Why wasn’t I seizing the moment, he wondered, rushing toward the camera and bloviating about the pain with my hands held up like claws mimicking the sharp piercing nails? That’s what makes good television.

  What the producer said next probably wasn’t meant to be serious, it couldn’t have been. He suggested that maybe we need to build things up from here. The show could open with the stunt I had just done, and then over the course of the half hour, the tempo could increase, growing more and more intense with each stunt. He had a vision for the climax. “How about we drive a car over you while you’re lying on the bed of nails?”

  I had imagined months ago, when the producer put out a call for scientists to audition, that I could somehow take advantage of the possibility of hosting the show as a means to channel my growing passion for addressing global challenges; perhaps, I thought, the show would give me an opportunity to present those challenges to a big audience.

  A colleague first alerted me to the search for Dangerman:

  CASTING 25 TO 35 YEAR OLD MALE HOST FOR SCIENCE ADVENTURE SHOW

  Objective Productions (UK) and The Discovery Channel are in search of a 25 to 35 year old male host for a new adrenaline fueled and action filled show. Our host will take on seemingly impossible challenges with crazed enthusiasm.

  DANGERMAN is a documentary style reality series that replicates the extraordinary stunts performed by daredevils, stuntmen and showmen and explains the scientific principles that make the most amazing feats possible.

  There were some problems with my auditioning for this. First of all, I wasn’t twenty-five. Or even thirty-five. I was forty-five, ten years too old to even be considered. Another problem was this: while adrenaline is one of my preferred fuels, “crazed enthusiasm” doesn’t describe me. For example, I wouldn’t jump into a tank of hungry sharks for two reasons: 1) it was risky; 2) it was stupid. I had my limits; I wasn’t sure if Dangerman did.

  I decided that those were details I could sort out later, on the off chance that they selected me. As they requested, I sent them a photo and bio. To balance out the fact that I was ten years over their limit, I sent those items in a box along with a bottle of Tough Guy Hot Sauce. That might show them that despite my age I still had the stomach for it.

  I made it into Round Two.

  The second round of cuts required the submission of a short thirty-second video of the potential host talking through an actual stunt. I phoned a friend of mine who had access to a studio and explained to him what was going on. He gave me his honest assessment. “They’re going to make a jackass out of you.”

  “Not going to happen.” I was sure about that. “I have my limits.” Besides, it’s not as though they would plan anything ridiculous, like driving a car over me.

  I went to my friend’s studio, stood in front of a green screen, arms outstretched, and mimicked the opening scene from the movie Mission: Impossible II. Later, sitting at his computer that night, he added in a mountain backdrop and music. Done.

  I made it into Round Three.

  Round Three required a longer video submission of three minutes. They wanted the potential host to carry out an actual stunt, and they wanted it within two days. This time my friend wasn’t available to give me an assist so I considered dropping out.

  “Don’t drop it. It’s getting interesting now,” Gina said.

  “They want a three-minute stunt video by tomorrow and I don’t have access to a studio. There’s no way to pull that off.” I figured it was over.

  Gina had an idea. “How about I use my camera? I can videostream it. Just make something up. Riff for three minutes.”

  And so I riffed. My stunts, as I remember, were sweeping the floor and changing a lightbulb, two chores on my list that Sunday. The video still exists out there, somewhere, on YouTube.

  For reasons I’ll never know, I made it into Round Four. The producer flew me to Hollywood to audition in their studio, along with the two other finalists. Thinking back, I should have realized from the moment I dropped my bags in that Hollywood hotel room that I was out of my element.

  The hotel had a theme, like an amusement park. I was supposed to feel like I was on a farm. The room was outfitted with a country-style rag rug and a thick-slatted high-back rocking chair. Paintings of barnyard animals hung on the walls, along with a coatrack in the shape of a rooster. Hinting that there might be an opportunity for a sinful tryst in the hayloft, the hotel offered an accommodation for the more daring: the No Tell Room.

  “What do you think, Frawncis?” the Dangerman producer asked. “Can we drive a car over you?”

  I realized at that moment that I had a fundamental misunderstanding of television. I thought that any concept for a new show would be carefully developed. Before committing to the project, I assumed a producer would test the idea with a sample audience in some typical towns in America, places where the values are solid and the names convey warmth and conviction like Old Satchel or Beavers Tooth.

  I was wrong about that. What I discovered was that the development of a show, or this one at least, was all trial and error. Ideas were being shaped and sampled on the spot. My Sidekick, for instance, had been working as a magician around town and thought he’d finally achieved a breakthrough when the producer had contacted him; it turns out the only reason he had received the call was because he owned a bed of nails that he could bring to the set.

  The Dangerman producer was behaving like an inventor in a garage, a Thomas Edison attaching slivers of carbonized bamboo to some electrodes to see if they would glow. I was his sliver of bamboo.

  “So, can we drive a car over you? Frawncis?”

  I can’t remember what I said at that moment. I think I discussed safety issues with him, suggesting that the weight of the car would mash my body deathly deep into the bed of nails. In any case, whatever was said, my mind was made up at that point. This was not for me.

  An e-mail a week later made it clear that the producer didn’t want me either: I wasn’t selected; no one was. The show, evidently, was canceled before the first episode was ever taped.

&
nbsp; Dangerman wasn’t a path for me to address global challenges, but another path was. It was always there in front of me, I just hadn’t recognized it before.

  Every glacier that I have ever punched my crampons into is shrinking. Every one of them.

  The glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro has been shrinking steadily since I climbed it. On Mount Everest, more than six hundred feet of the Khumbu Glacier has melted away since I was there. Scientists are rushing to Puncak Jaya, in Indonesia, to collect samples before this last glacier in all of the tropical Pacific vanishes. The same rapid melt is occurring on the Kahiltna Glacier that flows off Alaska’s Denali and the glaciers in Argentina around Cerro Aconcagua and in Europe at Mount Elbrus.

  The globe is warming, and these melting glaciers aren’t the only evidence. Ocean levels are increasing, Arctic sea ice is decreasing, and global temperature is rising. All this has been accompanied by a rise in carbon dioxide emissions.

  While numerous factors impact climate, carbon dioxide emissions happen to be one of the few factors that we can influence. Cloud cover, the sun’s radiation, ocean currents, none of these things directly respond to any dial that we control. CO2 emissions, on the other hand, come from things like our car’s tailpipe and the smokestack of our power plants. Those are things we do control. We have a carbon footprint that scientists can track and measure.

  Admittedly, chasing down the source of every molecule of CO2 we emit can get out of hand. For example, reincarnation, it seems, has a carbon footprint:

  New ‘green’ pyre to cool planet while burning India’s dead

  Tripti Lahiri (AFP)

  June 21, 2007

  New Delhi, India—The average Indian may go through his entire life without contributing a huge amount to the world’s production of greenhouse gases, but in death his carbon footprint jumps.

  “Our faith tells us we must do our last rites in this way,” said Vinod Kumar Agarwal, 60, a mechanical engineer who has developed a raised pyre that cuts the amount of wood required and ensuing carbon dioxide emissions by more than 60%.

  Hindus believe that burning the body entirely helps to release the soul in a cycle of reincarnation that ends only with salvation. But “all the ashes go into the rivers and carbon dioxide is creating global warming,” said Agarwal. UN figures show close to 10 million people die a year in India, where 85% of the billion-plus population are Hindus who practise cremation.

  That leads to the felling of an estimated 50 million trees, leaves behind half-a-million tonnes of ash and produces eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, according to research by Agarwal’s Mokshda environmental group. But Agarwal believes it will take at least a generation to entirely convert Hindus to the new funeral pyres that he hopes will lead to salvation—though not solely of a spiritual sort.

  “My main mission is to save humanity,” said Agarwal. “To save trees for mankind, for the coming generations.”

  When I first read that story in the Hindustan Times, while Gina and I were flying back home from Sri Lanka, I laughed at the craziness of it. I tore the article out of the paper and shoved it into my pocket, saving it to show colleagues back in the States.

  That article still amuses me, but now, rereading it, I find one thing about it that’s revealing. There is a lesson in it about science and culture.

  Agarwal the Engineer could have taken a different approach. If he had an exclusively scientific point of view, he could have tried to reduce the carbon footprint to zero by telling people that reincarnation is a fiction and they should just bury the bodies instead. But if he had done that, he would have accomplished absolutely nothing. No one would have listened to him.

  Instead, Agarwal the Engineer merged his technical expertise with the religious experience, the narrative of his people. He diligently estimated the carbon footprint of reincarnation down to the last twig and then invented a reduction method that the culture could embrace. Fewer trees are burned now, perhaps not many, but fewer, and people are better off for it.

  A purely scientific method would have produced nothing; it was adding a touch of humanity that got Agarwal the Engineer his results. That would become my approach as well.

  It was a crisp morning, the clouds a touch gray, as I walked up to the MacArthur statue at West Point. I had come here under the suggestion of a major, who now points his finger at the words chiseled into the granite of the statue. “I suggest you read that, sir.”

  I had come to West Point at the invitation of a brigadier general who wanted cadets and faculty to hear my point of view on global challenges. I had given talks on the subject at a dozen campuses by that time, but this one would be different, more challenging.

  Several of my colleagues couldn’t understand why I was taking my “science should address global challenges” message to West Point. To me, it was obvious.

  Armies, rebels, and militias had been a constant presence in my journey over the last decade. I stood toe to toe with the Free Papua Movement and the Indonesian army. There were the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army, the Maoist United People’s Front in Nepal, the Khawarij militia in Morocco, and Chechen rebels in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia.

  I didn’t always see the insurgents in those places, but I was always reminded that they were there. I was asked at a hotel I was staying at in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, if I wanted to hire armed guards to accompany me when I went into town to get supplies for a climbing expedition. I thought about it long enough to realize that those guards wouldn’t behave like Secret Service agents guarding the president, ready to take a bullet in the event an enemy shot was fired. No, if a firefight broke out, these guards would have no particular loyalty to me; they would scatter before they would willingly take a bullet. I declined the offer; I was probably safer without them walking beside me, guns in hand, drawing the attention of al-Qaeda to my every step.

  Gina later joined me at Base Camp on that particular expedition. Shrouded in a head cover, she had been driven through the nearly impassable Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan. On that drive she saw a bus, toppled over on its side. She could see bullet holes punched through the metal, bloodstains on the shattered windows. She told me that her driver offered her this assurance: “No worry, that didn’t happen today.”

  So I have witnessed how soldiers can shape a country, how they can ease or amplify its burdens. But my personal experience wasn’t the only reason I wanted to go to West Point. At one time, decades ago, West Point rightfully boasted that it graduated nation builders. Science and engineering in the service of the country was a core value at the institution. That was a tradition to be proud of, a tradition worth preserving.

  I started my talk by drawing a map of the world. Then I took the audience on my ten-year-long journey, circling places I’d traveled to, describing our interdependence and the challenges we face together: disease, lack of clean water, and the melting glaciers. The chalkboard—so different from what it looked like ten years ago when I used to duplicate the ancient problems Galileo had solved—now looked like this:

  After a half hour, the map was filled with circles; hardly any untouched region remained. Then I delivered the message that had brought me here. I turned and faced the audience of soldiers.

  Science was a powerful means to combat these challenges, I said. The natural world operated according to well-defined physical principles that mathematics could delineate and science could address. Science can, and must, be used to confront pressing global challenges.

  “However, science isn’t enough,” I insist.

  These challenges weren’t for science alone to solve. Science could only get us so far. There were other issues, competing factors, which also needed to be addressed in order to make progress. Just as Agarwal the Engineer had realized, solutions require recognizing the cultural context in which they will be deployed.

  A key context was security. “These challenges—delivering clean water, managing pandemics, and moderating global warming—they are all national
security issues,” I explain.

  Without describing any of my personal run-ins, I identified some of the guerrilla insurgencies and how those conflicts were complicating the situation, making the global challenges even harder to solve.

  I closed with a mention of the military strategists’ theories regarding ungoverned spaces—that they are breeding grounds for social problems. In those areas, health risks run higher, poverty runs deeper, lawlessness reigns, and terrorists find safe, even welcome, havens. Climate change, disease spread, water shortages would all amplify the problems where ungoverned spaces already existed. They might even create ungoverned spaces where none had existed before. Consequently, I repeated, addressing these global challenges is in the national security interests of our country.

  Some soldiers nodded in strong support, others rolled their eyes. I never thought that everyone in the room would agree with me, but I didn’t expect what happened next.

  After the talk a major, who had just completed a tour in Iraq, walked up to a group that had formed around me. He patiently waited until all the others had their questions answered before speaking.

  “You have a short break listed on your schedule, sir. Would you like to take a tour of West Point? I think there is something you should see.” On our walk across the campus, he briefly, yet respectfully, said he disagreed with me. Those global challenges I had discussed were, as he put it, “not our business.”

  And so I’m standing in front of the statue of General Douglas MacArthur, reading excerpts of his final public speech of May 12, 1962, chiseled into the granite. The words are stirring, soaring, filled with passion and an overwhelming sense of duty and honor, the very sense of duty and honor that I would like to see channeled toward addressing global human problems.

  Near the end of the speech I find the words that explain why the major brought me here:

  You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres and missiles marked the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind—the chapter of the space age. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a greater, a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; of purifying sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.