Clueless In Genetics

In September of 1966, I returned to the University of British Columbia for my third year of studies. I had already put in two years of less-than-stellar results towards a degree in Zoology. In this third year, I was required to take a one-semester class in “Fundamental Genetics”. As luck would have it, the professor teaching that class was none other than David Suzuki. This guy was already a rock star, known for his dynamic presentation and sometimes unorthodox views. He would go on to become a famous television personality, and, in a poll years later, Canadians ranked him as the fifth-greatest Canadian and the greatest living Canadian (the other 4 were deceased).

His genetics class was held in a large hall. I vividly remember showing up for that first lecture and was shocked to see the overflow crowd – students were sitting in the aisles and standing in every nook and cranny possible. I’m sure many of them were just there to audit the class and get close to this legend – he was young and fascinating. I can still hear his first words that day: “If you do not believe in evolution, whether it’s because of your religious beliefs or any other reason, don’t waste another minute of your time – turn around and walk out of the room right now.” Several kids did just that, accompanied by snickers from the crowd that remained.

As it turned out, I grew to hate the class – I just couldn’t grasp some of the basic principles he was trying to get across to us. After the midterm exam, he told us that he wanted to personally see each of us who had a failing grade in his office. My appointment came, and he was straight to the point. “I can tell by your midterm that there is no possibility at all that you will pass this course.” I assured him that I needed to pass the class to graduate with my degree, and that I would do everything possible to make that happen. He went on to tell me that I was wasting my time, that there was no way in hell that I could make that happen. He said that if I dropped the class now, it would simply show up on my transcript that I did not complete it and a failing grade wouldn’t be held against me.

I did not drop out. A friend of mine who was also taking the class and doing splendidly tutored me a lot, but I was still having a hard time grasping the principles. Just before Christmas, I wrote the final exam and felt I had done poorly. When the grades were posted, it was no great surprise that my grade for the course was a whopping 39%. Suzuki had predicted it, I had pooh-poohed his prediction, and he was spot-on. Never bet against the master.

Shit

Shit. I won’t pussy-foot around, I’ll just call it what it is – shit, plain and simple. There can be a lot of it where climbers spend a lot of time. I’m thinking of a just such a place, a base camp for a big mountain I’ve been to a couple of times. When I was there, upwards of 300 people were camped, waiting to move on up. At 14,000 feet, conditions can be harsh enough without worrying about where you’re going to take a shit. There was no outhouse, no pit toilet, no nothin’ – it was just you and the mountainside. All you could do was wander away from camp and try to find a bit of privacy. There were no trees or brush, as all vegetation had been left behind miles back and thousands of feet below. Unless you wanted to squat in plain view of others, about the best you could hope for was to hide behind a bit of outcrop. Of course, those were the places where everyone else had been, and it was a challenge to avoid stepping in someone else’s shit. To make matters worse, you had to hope that the water trickling from the nearby glacier, the water everyone relied upon, hadn’t been contaminated by some thoughtless fool who’d taken a dump in a bad spot. It’s a wonder a lot of people didn’t come down with some intestinal disorder. Some may have considered this place as being in a Third-World country, but if you consider that it was almost exclusively people of means who had spent thousands of dollars to get here and climb, it might be argued that it was a lot of First-World shit befouling the place.

Out of Breath

I had spent 13 days climbing in the Andes, sleeping over 10,000 feet each night and climbing on some of those days up to 20,000 feet. You’d think I’d have been pretty well-acclimated to the elevation by then. From there, I went straight to a different area where I spent 5 more nights sleeping above 14,000 feet. My grand finale was sleeping a final 3 nights at around 20,000 feet. You’d think that by then I’d be really well-acclimated to the lack of oxygen at that elevation. Imagine my surprise when the simple act of rolling over in my sleeping bag to a new position left me completely winded and gasping for breath – that’s not much exertion, right? It’s not as if I was physically decrepit – yes, I was 43 years old at the time, but I had worked my ass off in the previous 3 weeks doing a lot of hard climbing up high to get used to that elevation. It still surprised me, though, how helpless it made me feel, even if only for a few moments.

The Smell of Green

We had been climbing for several days up above tree-line in a wilderness of ice and snow. Moving from one peak to another, our path eventually took us down to a lower elevation one day where a few stunted trees grew amongst the heather by an alpine lake. How well I remember the smell of vegetation as we stepped off that last bit of glacier. It was heady stuff, almost intoxicating – we breathed deeply, savoring every inhalation. A night camped there before climbing back up into frozen wastes felt like a renewal of sorts, a brief re-connection to our other life down in the lowlands.

Little Blue Penguins

Kangaroo Island is a part of South Australia and happens to be the 3rd-largest island in the country. I have been there only once, spending a week getting to meet some of its wonderful inhabitants. I arrived there late one afternoon on the ferry which runs the 13 miles from Cape Jervis on the mainland to Penneshaw on the island. When I disembarked, I asked a few locals near the dock where I could go to find fairy penguins. “You don’t have to go anywhere, Mate, just stay right where you are” was the response. I was standing on a shrubby slope next to the dock, and since this was during my most ambitious years as a birder, I was really keen to see this, the smallest of all the penguins. These little guys only weigh about 3 pounds, and are also known as little penguins or little blue penguins. His instructions sounded a bit weird, but I thought that I had nothing to lose. It soon grew dark, and, lo and behold, I began to hear a sort of rustling noise. Soon, it was all around me. The penguins, which spend their day foraging at sea, were walking up the gentle slope in the dark and returning to their burrows. I turned on my flashlight and saw quite a few of them moving around. They didn’t seem bothered by my presence or my light. It was quite exciting, my first penguins seen in the wild.

Speed Demon

When I first moved to the States, I was young, single and foolish. One of the first things I did was to go to a car dealer a couple of hours away from the small town in which I lived and ordered myself a flashy sports car. Man oh man, how I loved that car! I also bought a radar detector which was supposedly state of the art. I said I was foolish, and here comes the proof. The speedometer could read up to 120 miles per hour, then go no farther because of a little metal pin that stopped it. One day I cranked it all the way up on a quiet country highway and buried the speedometer needle. What a rush! I’m embarrassed to say that it became a habit.

One sunny day, I really opened it up along a deserted highway, and, as I topped a gentle rise, I could see in the distance the flashing lights of a highway patrolman coming towards me. Caught!! I pulled over and waited for him to arrive.

He walked up to me and asked me if I knew how fast I’d been going. I mumbled some gibberish in my defense. He told me how much he admired my car, saying he’d love to be able to own one himself, then said: “I saw you come over that hill and could tell you were really hauling the mail.” Then he went on to say that I had been going so fast by his radar that, according to state laws, he had the right to arrest me right on the spot and have my car impounded! “I have a feeling that you’re a sensible young man, and if I’m not too hard on you today, you’ll come away from this experience having learned your lesson and won’t do this again.” I promised him that I was that guy and certainly had learned my lesson. He said that he would still write the speeding ticket, but he would write on it that I had been doing a lower speed, just enough lower that the only consequence would be that I’d have to pay a big fine. I considered myself lucky, that I had dodged a bullet.

So did I learn my lesson? You decide. Within a month, I had earned myself 2 more speeding tickets, betraying the trust of that highway patrolman, and was on the verge of accumulating enough points against my license that I was about to lose it. I finally saw the writing on the wall and sold the car to my doctor, a family man with more sense than I, then bought myself a pickup truck and called it good.

Bull Rider

One winter, my girlfriend and I hitch-hiked north from Vancouver up to Green River. After spending the night with a friend, we hitched on to Pemberton the next morning. The day was spent walking around the town, seeing what there was to see – not a lot, back in those days. We didn’t know what we’d do next, a couple of clueless hippies, but we found ourselves walking the highway east of town. Man, it was cold, with plenty of snow laying about! Near Mt. Currie, a man in a pickup stopped to give us a ride. He was an older guy, a member of the local First Nations band. Turns out, he was the chief of that group. Since it was New Year’s Eve, he insisted we spend it at his home. His family was very welcoming. We had dinner with them, then enjoyed a long evening together, seeing in the New Year and talking for hours afterward. This man’s passion was bull riding – he had participated in countless rodeos, and had a houseful of trophies and photos to prove it. To hear him tell of his adventures, it was a miracle he was still alive. After a couple of hours sleep, we left the next morning after they fed us breakfast, thankful to have met our new friends.

Ambition Mountain

In the summer of 1967, a friend and I tried to climb Ambition Mountain in the Stikine area of far northern British Columbia. It was a warm day in early August when we made our summit bid via the south-southeast ridge. This route was mostly on rock, with some easy snow thrown in for good measure. As the day progressed, we noticed that we could see and hear avalanches on both sides of us, roaring, in some cases, thousands of feet down both the south face and the southeast face. We were safe from any avalanche on our rocky ridge between those two faces, so didn’t have to fear being swept away. Still, it was awe-inspiring and enough to put the fear of God into anyone. But what a world-class show we had, thousands of tons of ice and snow roaring down around us, over and over all afternoon – sometimes, for extended periods, the sound was almost continuous. No climber would stand a chance if hit by one of them, and it was easy to understand why avalanches are the number one killer of climbers world-wide every year.