Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  I thought about turning back. I could have called out, yelled for my father to return, then said that I couldn’t possibly continue, that it was too dangerous and we should head back for the car. But no, I couldn’t turn back—partly because I needed to prove myself to my father, show him the strong, adventurous daughter he’d missed out on all these years, and partly because I was too damn curious. I needed to see those cave paintings, to inhale in their vicinity, even though I knew practically nothing about them. All I knew was that some sort of prehistoric art lay ahead, hidden in the caves high above.

  What puzzles me now is that even though I learned about the rattlers fairly early into the hike, early enough to turn around, I still continued. I feel driven to account for my decision to put myself in obvious danger that day, particularly since I’ve had a lifelong phobia of snakes. In hindsight, I’m smitten by the link between curiosity and fear, intellectual and physical connections both innate and learned—not only how these emotions have evolved in humankind, but also how they manifest themselves in my character. I wonder if an examination of curiosity might help me locate myself on the spectrum of emotional reconciliation. How does curiosity work, and what forms does it take?

  Fourteen

  From a biological standpoint, humankind’s sense of curiosity presents a paradox. As animals, our basic needs are pretty simple—food, water, shelter, and the ability to reproduce. But we humans tend to go above and beyond. Consider the complex world we’ve created for ourselves—the Internet, our marble-countered and triple-pane-windowed homes, lean-protein low-carb Stevia-sweetened diets, Captain Kirk-worthy iPhones, 355-horsepowered Chevy Tahoes—we long ago exceeded our basic needs. To a point, curiosity is beneficial. At its most extreme, though, our instinctual urge to gain extraneous, possibly irrelevant information can be dangerous.

  For example, imagine an early humanoid standing outside a dark cave. For fun, let’s say the humanoid is Chaka, the four-foot, hairy caveman-type character from the 1970s Saturday morning television show of my youth, Land of the Lost. (As a kid I’d wrap myself in a comforter and gorge on Cocoa Puffs, imagining myself one of the characters on the show, which revolved around the adventures of the Marshall family—father Rick, son Will, and daughter Holly—who, while on a rafting/camping trip, are swept down a gigantic waterfall and through a time vortex portal. The family, trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs and a primate-type humanoid species, takes shelter in a high bluff cave and eventually befriends one of the humanoids, the bipedal, flat-foreheaded Chaka.)

  Imagine adorable little Chaka hungry and grunting and leaning his wide head into the mouth of a deep, dark, unknown cave (not the one inhabited by the Marshall family). He wonders if he might find something to eat. Or just wonders what he might find, period. Curiosity draws Chaka inside. Depending on the cave’s geographical locale, he might be greeted by a coiled rattler, a poised scorpion, or a momma bear with her cubs.

  Curiosity, then, seems to defy evolutionary theory. The most curious among us should’ve been killed off before getting the chance to reproduce, with that trait losing out to less deadly ones in the process of natural selection. We don’t really need to solve the daily jumble, snoop inside the closed desk drawer, or explore the dark cave. And yet we do. Sometimes we are driven, unable to stop, unwilling to abandon the snake-riddled trail.

  Remember the scorpion theft: Alone in his house, I committed personal invasion. Snooping through his personal things was a way to get closer to the man I held at arm’s length. Even if I had wanted to cease my search, it would have been impossible to stop. Impossible.

  And now: I should turn back, I thought as I stood in the Mexican desert, but I cannot. I must see the ancient cave paintings for myself, inhale in their vicinity.

  We’ve long been aware of our curious nature, a trait generally revered among humans—save for that infamous period of intellectual obfuscation following the collapse of the Roman Empire: the Dark Ages. At the cusp of that shadowy era, Saint Augustine wrote in his autobiographical Confessions about “the disease of curiosity.” He suggests that furthering one’s knowledge purely for the sake of idle gawking invites evil because such aimless pleasure distracts us from exploring our theistic nature. Detailing regrets of his arrogant youth and subsequent conversion to Christianity, Augustine links curiosity to the sin of lust—as both, he claims, involve delving into things and people that should be deemed off limits.

  But sustained aversion to curiosity, of course, would bring society to a full and complete halt. To oversimplify the obvious: if not for the flowering of science, literature, art, politics, and educational reform following the Dark Ages, our current lifestyle—the way we experience the world—would not exist. We’d have no Maxwell’s equations of electricity and magnetism, no television, no Land of the Lost, no Hubble Telescope. No crumpled Automobile Club map, no road to Cataviña, no exhalation of certainty from the center of this particular four-foot radius of snake-free sand. One thing leads to another.

  Fifteen

  Curiosity leads to knowledge, an accumulation of information that supports humanistic needs, not only in a scientific, practical sense, but also on a personal, existential level. It was the latter that fueled our father-daughter, play-it-by-ear road trip to Baja in 1994, the journey that led us to the boulder fields of Cataviña. Although I was unaware of it at the time, several shades of existential curiosity came into play when we planned that trip, shades that still evolve today, full-hued and ever-changing.

  “I have so many things I want to tell you,” my father had said on the phone earlier that year, “about the origins of life and the universe and what it all means.”

  Although my interactions with my father during the preceding twenty years had been limited to two dozen or so strained phone calls and half as many month-long summertime visits to his home four hours away, some parental guidance sounded great. I was thirty at the time, and he was sixty-six. Perhaps it was my own growing maturity, or maybe it was the fact that I was in the process of a divorce, living by myself for the first time in my life, and generally struggling through a tough period—for whatever reason, I felt the need to get to know my father. Adult to adult, on equal terms.

  Call it curiosity.

  What a shame it would be if I never got to know him, to absorb his wisdom. I would have been happy with menial advice on how to get rid of the mouse in my kitchen, but a summation of existential reflection from a learned biology professor, a man of whom I knew so much about and yet so little of? It was a Tuesdays with Morrie proclamation, this universe-and-what-it-all-means offer—a gesture that promised insight as well as a very late back payment toward a longstanding parental debt.

  Of course, no one has the answers to grand questions about the meaning of life, the why-are-we-here contemplations that hypnotize us as we gaze into a star-filled night sky, but I was curious to hear what my father had to say. Taking a trip would give us the occasion to talk, leisurely and in depth.

  “Let’s go to Mexico,” he said, “like we used to when I was married to your mother. Do you remember?”

  Sixteen

  How could I forget the way my mother’s brown hair whipped against her neck as my parents’ VW camper van roared down the Baja coast? The first couple nights we’d camp on the beach and fall asleep to the ping-ping-ping of the tent’s unzipped flap as it bounced against the aluminum poles, silver in the moonlight, leaning into the salt wind. Then back on the road, the highway veered inland. We raced toward distant pools of water across the road that, as we neared, morphed into waves of heat that billowed into the yellow sky. Each time my father pulled off the road he’d mop his neck with a handkerchief before stooping in the gravel with his index cards and empty glass jars.

  As a child, I hadn’t realized the value of my father’s studying scorpions, other than the immediate benefit they served as general samples to show his students. In fact, I never gave the why-would-anyone-study-scorpions question much thought until
after my thievery of his favorite specimen, the one he captured in 1971 in Las Estacas, Mexico. Since that theft, which triggered a scientific, Google-by-night-public-library-by-day curiosity, I’ve come to recognize the biological significance and medicinal potential of scorpions, including the recent development of venom-based pharmaceuticals that fight cancer, treat stroke patients, and prevent malaria. In deeply examining scorpions, we have extended that knowledge and applied it to ourselves. While most of us loathe wild scorpions—shriek and jump back when we find one under a rock or in the backyard—I sure was thankful for my bottles of venom-based anti-malaria pills when I went to Africa and Ecuador. (And I was just visiting, unlike the millions of people who live with the threat of this disease every day.)

  But it wasn’t scientific curiosity that prompted me to steal the scorpion—no, the all-night Google pursuit did not motivate my little robbery. I snagged the scorpion because I was driven by a curiosity neither scholarly nor literary, but rather personal and visceral: who is this man, my father? Perhaps I took his scorpion in an attempt to recapture the sense of adventure and security that I felt when we traveled through the desert as a family those many years ago—the bottled scorpion a talisman of an almost forgotten father-daughter connection that diminishes with each passing year, like a dream dissipating in morning’s light until only an undefined emotion remains.

  And I think it was a similar kind of curiosity that made the proposed road trip to Mexico so attractive. The thought of exploring the Baja Desert, of retracing the roads and the hikes we’d taken during my childhood—it all seemed so irresistible as I sat alone in my under-furnished one-bedroom apartment with the receiver pressed against my ear and the spiral phone cord wrapped around my index finger. What a gift. I could get to know my father, the parent I’d never known, not really. What’s he like? How will it be, just him and me, alone in nature? Perhaps this trip would make up for lost time, like a cram session before a final exam proctored by Professor Grim Reaper. I was incredibly curious. What parental guidance, what father-figure wisdom, had I missed out on?

  The idea of getting to know him, to relate as autonomous adults, appealed to me. Although I wasn’t with him in the mid-seventies when he rolled the camper van off the Baja highway embankment (spewing hundreds of loose pages of his in-progress Stanford dissertation all over the dry roadside), I’ve heard the story so many times it seems like my own memory. I can see him zooming southbound from Rosarito toward San Quintín, game for anything new—music, food, language, social conventions, women, or a hit of acid while lying alone on his open-air cot, miles from the nearest rancher’s house, his limbs splayed beneath the Milky Way.

  His being the outsider seems to excite rather than inhibit the character I’ve created in my mind: a cross between a nerdy professor and an overage hippie, with shoulder-length red hair, worn leather boots tied at the ankle, and a large peace sign pendant bouncing against his sternum. As I’ve said, he was never what you’d call a traditional, involved father. But he was sort of a cool guy in other ways, up for any adventure, anywhere. And when the van veered full throttle off the highway in 1973 and rolled four times down the steep embankment, he miraculously crawled out the open window of the upturned vehicle and chased his papers on hand and knee, frantically slapping his palms against loose-leaf pages filled with field notes and diagrams of arachnid anatomies.

  His fearlessness, his uninhibited desert explorations, and even his lead-foot approach to life—while these character traits pushed against the boundaries of others’ expectations, to the point that they might qualify as personality flaws, to me they seemed proof of his invincibility. And that’s what appealed to me, to the grown daughter with the receiver pressed against her ear.

  On the other hand, I was motivated by something more than a nostalgic longing to recapture an idealized father-daughter bond that may never have existed in the first place. Yes, a shade of curiosity, but also fear—the fear of death, not my own but his. I couldn’t have articulated it the day I sat in my apartment with the swamp cooler blowing and the receiver slipping against my sweaty cheek, but I was preparing myself for his eventual exit from this planet. His sixty-six years seemed incredibly old to me at the time. I wondered: How would I feel if he died today and I hadn’t forgiven him for what I perceived as his parental shortcomings? If I didn’t make peace with him while he was still alive, how would I feel when he was gone? Would I have regrets? On some level I realized I was still trapped by my inability to forgive his parental absenteeism; I was ready to begin the purging of a lifelong grudge that must precede my getting to know him as an adult. The real him, though—not the polarized still-frame images of either heroic perfection or demonic culpability (depending on the filter of my recall). And this forgiveness-in-order-to-know was not of the What-Would-Jesus-or-Buddha-or-Mohammed-Do variety; no, it sprang from neither a moralistic nor sympathetic state of mind, but rather, it emerged totally self-serving on my part. I was pretreating my anticipated pain of his eventual death, however far off that might be, like taking two aspirin and gulping down a big glass of water before stumbling to bed after a night of heavy drinking. I sought to prevent my own existential hangover.

  My father repeated his question over the phone. “How about it? Mexico, just you and me?”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Where will we go, exactly?”

  “Let’s play it by ear.”

  Seventeen

  Question: If I’d known ahead of time that snakes might lay hidden beneath the sand, would I have gotten out of the car in the first place? Would I still go on the hike?

  Answer: Probably not.

  Answer amendment: Looking back, I see that what I was looking for, what I sought, wasn’t the cave paintings, per se, but adventure. So maybe I would have gone anyway. That’s what the whole Mexico road trip was about. Adventure. Everybody knows that driving around Mexico is risky to begin with. Then add a snake-addled hike to the mix. Now we’re talking danger. Going on an adventure—saying to yourself, “I don’t know exactly what I’m getting into or what will happen, but I trust myself to navigate through the unknown”—allows you to find out what it is you don’t know about yourself. Unless you push yourself into unknown territory, unless you give yourself the opportunity to assess a new situation, ask yourself a series of impromptu questions—follow my father through the snake-infested sand or head back to the car?—well, what better way to learn a little something about yourself, surprise yourself?

  This principle underlies not just human psychology, but scientific inquiry as well.

  Case in point: Recently, in a climate-controlled room at the University of Northern Colorado, stacks of clear-sided drawers and cluttered countertops surrounded a middle-aged, bearded man in a button-down shirt. Professor Steve Mackessy carefully lowered a long, J-shaped hook into a thick glass box containing a sprawled but very alert rattlesnake. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as he gently slid the hook underneath the snake and lifted it from the pen, then grasped the creature barehanded, keeping his fingers behind the animal’s head. In reflex, the snake opened its mouth, revealing two fangs, each capable of delivering lethal amounts of venom. Mackessy guided the fangs over a small, widemouth plastic measuring cup, where drops of yellow poison fell.

  Since 1994, Mackessy’s research on the biology of venomous snakes and the biochemistry of those venoms has centered on the hopes of developing an anti-cancer drug. Not unlike our discoveries of the medicinal uses for scorpion venom, snake venom has a lot of potential. Toxins promise life. “The difference between drugs and poison is a matter of dosage,” the inquisitive Mackessy said in a recent interview.

  After extraction, the venom is frozen and stored for research. Crude venoms—venoms taken directly from the snakes—are introduced to cultured breast cancer cells to answer general questions in early-stage experiments: which types of venom kill or inhibit the growth of cancer cells? Later, more complicated tests involve breaking venoms down into smaller components in an at
tempt to learn what, exactly, inside each venom is useful, and how those compounds might be developed into lifesaving drugs. While Mackessy’s team is far from producing any drugs yet, he thinks within the year he will have enough data to begin the next stage of in-depth research.

  My point here is that scientifically motivated curiosity like Mackessy’s and my father’s illustrates another shade of curiosity and exemplifies our need to exceed the most basic knowledge (Will the snake bite?). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. While biologists have inventoried over two thousand species of venomous snakes, we know relatively little about most of them, and unless we keep asking questions, we can’t know what it is we don’t know. We’re still too clueless to realize we haven’t a clue.

  “The work is just starting,” Mackessy said gleefully of the research ahead, “enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life.”

  And that’s how it is for me, too—trying to figure out my father, myself, my present position on the spectrum of reconciliation. The work is just starting, enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life. As my parents age, as my duties as an adult daughter shift, relative both to their decline and to the state and logistics of our respective relationships (Will my father continue to live in Mexico or will he return to Visalia? Will my mother move back into my spare bedroom, or will I take on an additional job to pay for a nice assisted-living facility?), I constantly navigate unknown terrain. Each phone call is a sinuous lump in the sand. Is my father calling to say he’s moving back? Is the caretaker calling to say my mother’s needs are too high for assisted living? For most of my adult life, I’ve considered my parents’ well-being separate from my own: my parents are kinda crazy, I’d say, but we stay out of each other’s way. Now our paths have merged. My father’s and my mother’s trails have veered into mine.