by John McPhee
“What—if any—are your main handicaps as a bird-watcher, Mr. Bingham?”
“I can’t remember the names or the salient characteristics of the birds. I once had the difference between the least sandpiper and the semipalmated sandpiper down pat. The last least I saw I called a sanderling. The titmouse, which crawls downward on my tree eating suet, is a bird whose name I can never remember. ‘What’s the name of that upside-down bird?’ I will ask my wife, who is not a bird-watcher. ‘Nuthatch, dummy,’ is her reply.”
ALONG THE WAY we stopped at Geysir, where a great hole in the ground is the world’s eponymous geyser. The old geyser is no longer forthcoming. It is full of water but not of action. It had literally been roped off. Close at hand was a young geyser. At five- to seven-minute intervals—no more than that—it swelled tumescently, let forth a series of heavy grunts, and into the sky shot a plume of flying steam. Meanwhile, the old geyser just sat there, boiling. We learned how—on special occasions—Icelanders make the old geyser do its thing. They throw soap into it, and it erupts.
Moving on, we passed a waterfall of the size of the American Niagara, and then we drove for an hour or two on the gravels of an outwash plain that was covered with rounded boulders and no vegetation, not so much as a clump of grass. Eventually, the car could go no farther, so we left it behind and proceeded north on foot. There was a stream to ford. Laura had running shoes and I had boots. She got onto my back and I carried her across. We then walked a couple of miles, also on rounded rocks, and up onto a high moraine, where, coming over the crest, we looked down into a lake backdropped by cliffs of blue ice. This was the edge not of a valley glacier but of an ice cap covering nearly five hundred square miles. Above the lake, the ice wall rose about a hundred and fifty feet, and was sheer. There came sounds like high-powered-rifle shots, as huge bergs calved away from the ice cap and plunged into the water. There was no going farther. On the way down the moraine and back toward the river ford, I attempted to increase my credit line by mentioning that glacial rivers grow in the afternoon with the day’s melt from the sun, and this time we could expect a larger river when I carried her across it. But this time she was having none of me. Apparently, she had forded her last river on her father’s back. She took off her shoes and negotiated the stream.
THE LIBERTY SCIENCE CENTER’S declared purpose is to combat what it sees as a general scientific illiteracy, to strike a spark in children in obvious and subtle ways, and then to draw them back and keep the spark aglow—ultimately, to educate many and, with luck, to inspire a few. And how does a museum do that? In the words of the management: “First, don’t scare them off.”
Up a ramp I go, fearless, and into the four-level atrium, my youth camouflaged by a gray beard. The escalators have glass sides and visible working parts. They carry you up to the Insect Zoo—to colonial displays of carpenter ants, Kenyan millipedes, pink-toed tarantulas, and emperor scorpions. Close by, second graders are digging in a mound of dirt in search of weevils, pill bugs, springtails, scorpion-fly pupae, centipedes, and small local millipedes. Don’t scare them off.
The African millipedes are longer than hot dogs and call to mind segments of BX cable. Would I like to handle one? In this company, what choice do I have? Nina Zitani, of the museum staff, lays a Kenyan millipede on my open palm. Curled like an ammonite, it covers the palm. “In a minute,” says Nina, “she’ll begin to move.”
She begins to move. She uncurls, stretches from my wrist to beyond my fingertips—her touch as tentative as an art restorer’s brush. She seems self-conscious. Understandably. People say she is a millipede, but she has only two hundred and fifty legs. Leaving my hand, she crawls onto Nina’s.
Would I like to hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach?
My nod is meant to suggest that this has been a lifelong ambition.
Madagascar hissing cockroaches, with their inquisitive and wormlike antennae, are flat and hard and about three inches long. They hiss because they think you are going to eat them. As I fondle one’s chitin, the roach responds with the sound of a printer printing. The roach is covered with crawling mites. What the egret is to the Texas longhorn, the mite is to the Madagascar roach.
Central American cave cockroaches thrive behind glass on a walnut limb. The adults are three to four inches long. Their pronouncedly segmented babies are scattered about them like horseshoe crabs. Not by accident are cockroaches, in such taxonomic variety, the star attractions here. This is Greater New York—roach utopia.
Stand in front of the thermographic sensing camera. Your mottled image appears on a screen in colors relating to the surface temperatures of your body. That’s me! A perfect likeness: green beard, yellow mouth, pink nose, red head. The body’s surface-temperature range can vary through thirty degrees. As I stick out my tongue, it licks like a white-orange flame.
At the Bernoulli Bench, you can pick up an air hose, blow it over the top of a ball in a cylindrical cage, and make the ball rise. You toss Ping-Pong balls and they stick like burrs to the sides of air jets you cannot see. You blow a jet between two bowling balls. Instead of scattering, they slam together. Bernoulli’s principle shapes the airfoil and lies behind the breaking baseball. Daniel Bernoulli was the Swiss mathematician who discovered, in the eighteenth century, that pressure is inversely related to the speed of moving air. Since air pressure acts from all directions, air flowing rapidly across the top of an object will make the pressure there lower than the pressure that is acting on the bottom and the sides. Enjoy your flight.
At the Stream Table, across the way, water flowing over crushed walnut shells forms oxbow bends and braided rivers, making point bars and cut banks while you watch. The staffer at the spigots is not the Carl Sagan of the earth sciences. He says he has been given to understand that the subject he is presenting is known as geomorphology and mentions offhandedly that he is a member of the California bar. His knowledge of limnology is about what you would learn in a torts course.
In an aquarium of streaming water, you try to control various objects through the glass with magnets—page 1, line 1, fluid dynamics.
The idea behind the museum’s various discovery rooms is that if something especially arrests your interest, you can take it further. There are twenty-five staff members on each floor, ready to help you assemble bones, deconstruct a wasps’ nest, or work on a CPR doll. Equipment is here (the scanning electron microscope) that is not in most schools. In the discovery rooms, whether children are digging for weevils or disassembling computers, they are, in effect, making their own exhibits. They bring their toys or machines from home to the basement Swap Shop—things for taking apart. They bring their dichroic reflectors, their capacitors and reed relays, their pop pumps and solenoids, and exchange them for hard-drive air filters, pancake motors, electromechanical scissors, and portable throwing stars.
As for me—the over-all effect on me—if I were ten years old, not even the feathery caress of a six-inch Kenyan millipede could coax forth a scientist from within; it would, on the other hand, tickle the hell out of the writer there.
A PERSON WHO SPECIALIZES in handheld altimeters will always know how high he is but may have difficulty keeping his bearings. This I learned in Fort Tryon Park, near the north end of Manhattan Island, from William Peet, of Allenhurst, New Jersey, an engineer trained at M.I.T., who has pretty much cornered the American market in high-precision pocket machines that disclose one’s altitude with respect to sea level. If Peet has a mission, manifestly it is not to replace the magnetic compass but to offer a supplement—an additional bit of gear with a utility of its own—for those who walk in wild terrain.
Fort Tryon Park essentially consists of two conical hills, which range in elevation from about thirty feet to two hundred and fifty. They are steep and, in places, sheer. On one summit is the Cloisters, medieval outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, surrounded by descending woods. Peet dropped from sight there, among the trees. When he came back half an hour later, he handed me a topographic ma
p that he had marked with an X. He said he had hidden a miniature Statue of Liberty at the X, and challenged me to find it. I had a compass, and spurned, for the moment, supplemental instruments of any kind. With map in hand, I departed.
From the northeastern corner of the Cloisters, Peet’s X was on a bearing of 44 true. Nothing to it, I thought. Just follow that bearing and look for the statuette. I followed the bearing and looked over an abyss. Large outcrops of Manhattan schist buttress the hill. Forty-four true involved suicide, and I wasn’t prepared to make a commitment. Deciding instead to approach the incline from below, I went down a circuitous path to the bottom of the park, where I emerged from the natural woods and entered a grove of plane trees protruding from the asphalt of a playground, where children were sliding and swinging and climbing on jungle gyms under small steepled roofs. The playground was in the acute angle formed by Riverside Drive and Broadway over the Dyckman Street Station of the A train. This intersection serves the Thirty-fourth Precinct as Times Square serves the Fourteenth. Inwood Liquors. The Cloisters Café. A McDonald’s with a large American flag reefed a few turns around a horizontal pole.
McDonald’s proved to be the best base point for a shot through the playground and back into the woods. Peet’s X was now on a heading of 272—close to due west of the Chicken McNuggets. Compass in hand, I followed the bearing back across Broadway, back across the playground from tree to target tree, then into the rising forest. There was much understory—bushes, thick vines—to break through. I broke into leafy, cavern-like spaces full of Smirnoff bottles of pint size, beer cans in brown bags, some coconut husks, and condoms. There were enough foam cups to suggest a football crowd. There were a couple of pillows almost as large as mattresses and in remarkably good condition. I found a doorless fireproof safe, so heavy I could not budge it. I found the door, forty feet away, uniformly dimpled in shapes of crowbar. When I came to a twelve-foot stone retaining wall, I left a Tropicana carton at the foot of the wall, went around the obstacle, returned on the uphill side, and followed the bearing to a height that made no sense. I found no statuette. I returned to the streets to choose another vector.
I walked down Payson toward Dyckman and turned around. On the topographic map, Payson happened to be lined up like an arrow pointing at Bill Peet’s X. I took the bearing—222—and retraced my steps. I climbed a five-foot wall and kept going, rising through the trees until I reached the crosshairs of the X. I leaned down to pick up the treasure, but none was there.
I bushwhacked to the summit, where an infinite number of Japanese men came out of a stretch limo and filed into the Cloisters. Sagging to a bench, I admitted frustration. Peet looked patient and pleased. Peet is a tall, quiet man who wears studious glasses. He was also wearing a short-sleeved print shirt. The print was a large-scale map of a small part of Maine. Spreading before me an array of altimeters, he said, “Try these.”
I chose one for each hand. I chose a Model 88, good to eighteen thousand feet, temperature compensated, with a sixteen-jewel shock-resistant movement, its face scarcely two inches in diameter but designed and calibrated to present with clarity any of nine hundred twenty-foot increments, at each of which it is accurate. I also chose an electronic altimeter, known in steep places as the Ultimeter, whose digital display, in a case 2.7 inches square, presents its elevation in ten-foot jumps.
Peet told me to go down the path until I was between sixty and fifty feet above sea level, then leave the path and go off to the right on a contour through the woods. Before long, I would come to a fallen tree, and then …
“To the right?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Peet.
With respect to the path, I had just spent an hour looking to the left, where the legs of his X crossed.
As if they were votive offerings, I bore the altimeters in upturned palms while making the descent. Steadily, the 88’s needle moved. Nervously, the Ultimeter jumped back and forth from level to level but generally took the plunge. This was not an airplane descending through five thousand feet on its final approach to Newark. This was cutting it fine. These altimeters were positioning a human being in distances not much greater than from a ceiling to a floor. A hundred and forty. A hundred and twenty. A hundred feet. I almost stumbled, tumbled down the hill. My eyes wouldn’t leave the machines.
Just below sixty, where the needle of the Model 88 rested confidently while the numbers in the Ultimeter kept jumping from fifty to sixty to seventy and back, I made my move. I left the path and headed off to the right through the steep woods, keeping the numbers steady, hewing to the contour. I came upon the fallen tree. I stayed on the contour and found the statuette.
“With an altimeter, each contour line is a position line,” Peet remarked after I staggered up the hill for the last time. “It is an extra dimension in land navigation.”
A person could go around, say, a ravine and reach a destination while walking on a level. To walk on a level requires a tenth as much energy and time as descending or ascending steep grades, Peet said. When you’re on a mapped trail somewhere, an altimeter will tell you what contour you’re on, and therefore where you are and how far you have to go. In steep country, dense foliage, fog, darkness, blinding snow, you do not need to see landmarks—as you do with a compass—to find your way. Traversing a mountainside, you follow a contour and avoid lateral drift, which can throw you off-line as you sight with a compass from tree to tree to boulder. You can use an altimeter to retrieve game. If you shoot a leopard, you can note its elevation, and go back and seek it at that altitude. Birders in Hawaii have found elusive species by learning the altitudes where they nest. Geologists looking for gold in Idaho last summer acknowledged that their altimeters were the most precious instruments they carried, and were indispensable in heavy timber. The exploration companies insisted that every rock sample be marked with an elevation. If a rock tested positive, they would need to return to the source. For want of an altimeter, they might repeat the legend of Lost Dutchman’s Mine.
My mind developed lateral drift. I saw myself using altimeters for purposes of which Peet may not have dreamed. What is the altitude of John McGillicuddy, the C.E.O. of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, at his desk at Forty-eighth and Park? (One hundred and thirty-five feet.) What is the altitude of John Reed, the chairman of Citicorp, Fifty-fourth and Park? (Seventy-five feet.) Where is the highest lawyer in New York? (Arnold Schickler, World Trade Center, twelve hundred and seventy feet.) Where is the lowest lawyer in New York? (In every precinct.) What is the altitude of Kathleen Battle, Sixty-fourth and Broadway? (A hundred feet and rising.) What is the altitude of Leona Helmsley, Federal Courthouse, Foley Square? (Fifty feet and falling.) How many buildings rise above the two-hundred-and-fifty-foot line? Two hundred and fifty feet—a calculated, data-based guess—is where the ocean will top out when the ice of Antarctica and Greenland melts. In the history of the earth, only three times has ice appeared in great sheets over the land: in a relatively brief episode six hundred million years ago, in another brief episode three hundred million years ago, and in the ice of the Pleistocene now. These anomalies aside, through forty-six hundred million years nearly all the water on the earth, which is a fixed amount, has been liquid. With an altimeter, we could go around and see who’s going to make it when things return to normal. At two hundred and fifty feet above the present sea are the nineteenth floor of the Empire State Building, the twenty-first floor of the Chrysler Building (which stands in a hollow), the nineteenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The Metropolitan Museum will not make it, the Metropolitan Opera will not make it, the Cloisters will not make it. The south hill in Fort Tryon Park will rise above the water as a tiny island three feet high.
Fort Tryon Park. “You were saying?” I said to Peet.
Peet was apologizing about his misplaced X. He had been so confident of his map reading in that small area that he took no bearings when he made the X.
It was a benign mistake, for in so doing he was able not only to demonstrate the u
tility of his small machines but to make another point, too: Never go into the trackless woods unless you have a compass.
• • •
[A 2018 amplification: For field geologists recording the elevations of outcrops, altimeters are superior to GPS if they are calibrated and the barometric pressure is not changing.]
AN UNKNOWN MOVIE ACTOR checked into an English hospital and took a couple of dozen scripts to bed with him. He is unknown because he has so far appeared in only three minor pictures. He had the scripts with him because producers all over the world are nonetheless begging him to work for them. He needed hospitalization because he is physically shot. During the past twenty months, he has suffered sand burns on his feet, sprained both ankles, cracked an anklebone, torn ligaments in his thigh and hip, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, partially lost the use of two fingers, sprained his neck, and suffered two concussions. The survivor’s name is Peter O’Toole, and he is Sam Spiegel’s Lawrence of Arabia.
TO BECOME INTERNATIONAL FILM STARS, Europeans once had to learn English, and all the Marlene Dietrichs, Paul Munis, Charles Boyers, Ingrid Bergmans, Peter Lorres, and Maurice Chevaliers did so. But now it is different. As ruins go, Hollywood is smoking more and enjoying it less, while the most renowned motion pictures of the present are being made by Europeans and Asians. Hence there is a new phenomenon—the movie idol who is adored throughout the United States in much the same way that Clark Gable was once admired from Saipan to Tangier. The greatest of these is Marcello Mastroianni.
