West with Giraffes: Thoughts on the Past and Future

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Copyright San Diego Zoo Global. Location: https://library.sandiegozoo.org/sdzg-history-timeline/#1930

I read a lot. It fuels my writing, gives me a better view of the world, and is a great way to travel through time and space. Every once in a while, I run across a book that really hits me as a must-read. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, is one of those; so is William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways. Lynda Rutledge’s novel, West with Giraffes, is another. Sabine recommended this one to me; as I closed the back cover, I realized that there were tears on my face. This is one great book.

West with Giraffes tells the story of two giraffes, shipped from Uganda to New York City in 1938. There, the animals were loaded onto a truck for a twelve-day drive to San Diego, where they became the first giraffes at the newly created San Diego Zoo, under the care of Belle Benchley, the world’s first female zoo director.

Lynda Rutledge tells a great tale, with well-developed, realistic, likable characters, and a terrific story thread. I LOVED the book. But it wasn’t the story that grabbed me; it was the context it gave me about three things: 1938, the year the book takes place; the current messy turmoil of what passes for politics and all the ridiculous attempts on social media platforms to get us to pay attention to things that deserve no attention whatsoever; and conversations I’ve overheard lately about how HORRIBLE things are right now. “I would NEVER have kids today,” one couple bemoaned. Really? Let’s look at that, because that’s what “West with Giraffes” made me do. It gave me perspective, and context, which is what reading is SUPPOSED to do. It made me laugh without humor about the use of the phrase, “the good old days,” which WERE pretty good—as long as you were white and male. 

Two themes are woven into the book: The Great Depression of 1929, and the Dust Bowl years—the so-called Dirty Thirties—which together, savaged the country and the world. In the U.S., the Depression eliminated work for most of the country, and the drought and winds and locusts of the Dust Bowl made the prairie states impossible places to live, and impossible places to make a living. 

So, people left, many heading west toward “Californy” as the main character in the book calls the Golden State, where they were met with roadblocks and violence and turned away with all their possessions piled high on their Tin Lizzies or their horse or mule-drawn wagons. Many were beaten; some were killed. We don’t want you here, the people at the roadblocks told them, as they brandished rifles and pistols and truncheons. There was no food, little water, and zero opportunity. The highway was littered with the possessions of those who had lost hope, and the bones of livestock—and people—who died along the way. 

Those were very, very bad times in America, so when I walk around today and see storefront after storefront advertising job openings, with big signs that say, ‘Now Hiring,’ and then I see people standing on freeway offramps and street corners begging while talking on their iPhones, my sympathy flags. In 1938, “Hoovervilles” were the norm: great, filthy shanty towns that sprang up alongside bridges, in alleys, wherever an open space could be colonized. They were the homes of the homeless, and breeding grounds for disease, violence and hopelessness. They were routinely torn down by the police, their residents beaten. They had no place to go, and there were no jobs for them. They weren’t living; they were existing.

We talk about the COVID pandemic as an existential global crisis, and yes—it was horrible, with seven million people tragically lost to the disease. But it wasn’t the first time we were hit with epidemics that killed at large scale. In the 18th and 19th centuries, smallpox, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and cholera swept across the United States, killing millions. In 1918, Spanish Flu descended on the world, killing 50 million people. COVID, horrible though it was, was contained because we had access to antibiotics and vaccines, neither of which were available during those earlier times. Before the development of these medical miracles, an infected hangnail could be a death sentence. 

When I was a kid, polio was the boogeyman. I went to school with kids who were disabled by the virus, their withered legs wrapped in steel and leather braces. And I knew people in our neighborhood who lived out their days in iron lungs, a long metal tube that they had to lie in every day of their lives so that the device could mechanically compress their chests, forcing air in and out of their lungs, because the virus had destroyed their ability to do so on their own. Vaccines for polio became available in 1955, 1961, and 1963, and by the early 1990s, polio had been eliminated from North America—because of those vaccines.

And what about casualties from war? More than 40 million died during WWI, 80 million during WWII, a million or so during the Korea Conflict, and four million in Vietnam. We’re talking about numbers that exceed the populations of Germany. Or France. Or Italy. WWI killed numbers that exceed the population of modern-day Canada; WWII killed twice that many.

The author of West with Giraffes describes in horrifying detail the plight of the pejoratively-named “Okies,” the people fleeing the Dust Bowl because they simply wanted to survive—to live. It reminded me of James Agee’s book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, about the meager lives of sharecroppers during the same period. Many people died of pneumonia during the Dirty Thirties from inhaling the ever-present dust; others died because it was the only thing left for them to do. They were immigrants within their own country, and they were treated as undesirables in the states they fled to to escape the hell of the Great Plains. But they weren’t the only ones. In fact, the evil of discrimination within the country started long before, and its targets were wide-ranging.

On May 24 of 1924, five years before the Great Depression and the Dirty Thirties, President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, which imposed immigration restrictions in the U.S. that were beyond punitive. The law banned Asians from becoming naturalized citizens, and established immigration quotas that severely limited entry into the country for Southern and Eastern Europeans. Why? Because they were considered “less white” than other Europeans. No big surprise: the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler were both inspired by the law. 

The Great Depression brought illness, hunger, hopelessness, and dislocation to farmworkers, but thankfully, Roosevelt’s New Deal was there to help. That is, it was there to help as long as they were white. Many farmworkers were people of color, and southern Democrats were all about preserving Jim Crow. So, unlike workers who lived and worked in urban areas, farmworkers were left out of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the National Labor Relations Act and Social Security Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. And because of the convoluted nature of state residency laws, migrant farmworkers, even those who were American citizens, were excluded from federal aid programs. 

Still think this is the worst time be living in the U.S.? See if this sounds familiar. During the Depression, Mexican migrant workers and Mexican-Americans—meaning U.S. citizens— were blamed for taking jobs from ‘real’ U.S. citizens, and at the same time were accused of living off public welfare. That makes ZERO sense. The one contradicts the other. So, immigration agencies kicked off deportation campaigns to get rid of unauthorized migrants. At the same time, legal residents and citizens with Mexican heritage who could not be legally deported were strongly and inexorably pressured to leave “voluntarily.” Somewhere between half-a-million and two million people were loaded onto trains and shipped across the border. More than 60 percent of them were American citizens. A few years later, when WWII started and people went off to war, the government begged the “illegals” to come back, because they were needed on the farms. What blatant, glaring hypocrisy. Oh—and if you happened to be an American citizen of Japanese descent during WWII? Good luck.


Do you still think this is the worst time to be living in this country? In 1962, The Cuban Missile Crisis brought us within hours of a nuclear war with Russia. President Kennedy, who was assassinated in Dallas a year later, faced down Cuba and the Russians and avoided what would have been a no-win outcome. This was the Cold War, during which I and my friends had to file out into the hallway of the school, face the wall, sit on the floor, and cover our heads with our arms, as if that would protect us from being vaporized by a nuclear bomb.

By the time the late 1960s came about, Vietnam was in full swing. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, crowds gathered at the barbed wire-ringed venue to protest the country’s involvement in Vietnam and the expansion of the draft to include 18 year olds, when the voting age was 21. They anticipated the violence that they were about to face from the 12,000 police officers and 6,000 national guard soldiers activated by Mayor Daley, and seeing the news cameras surrounding them, began to chant, “The whole world’s watching. The whole world’s watching. The whole world’s watching.”

Also in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In Vietnam a group of renegade soldiers marched into a village called My Lai and massacred the entire place. None of the dead were enemy combatants. They were farmers, men, women, children. None were spared.

In January 1969, a Union Oil rig in Santa Barbara, Calif., blew out, and three million barrels of crude oil covered 35 miles of California’s coastline. 3,500 sea birds and hundreds of thousands of marine animals died. 

Also in 1969, the Black Panther Party, a black political group, had become known for its Free Breakfast for Children Program, which fed tens of thousands of hungry children in cities all over the United States. But because it was so popular, and because it was the work of Black Americans, the FBI and local police forces kicked off a campaign to shut it down. In Baltimore, police raided one of the breakfasts with their guns drawn. In Chicago, they broke into a church after hours that hosted the breakfasts and destroyed the kitchen, then urinated on the food. In Harlem, the police and FBI started a concerted misinformation campaign, telling people that the food was poisoned.  

In 1970, protesters at Kent State University were shot and killed by National Guardsmen for protesting the war in Vietnam. And in 1974, women were finally allowed to have their own credit—and get credit cards—without a co-signature from their husbands. Of course, women weren’t even allowed to vote until 1920. There are plenty of countries out there today that severely limit women’s rights. This should NOT be one of them; this CANNOT be one of them.

During the COVID pandemic, science was attacked for failing to be right all the time. Vaccines are a sham, some said. The science is wrong, so we can’t believe anything the scientists say. But here’s the thing: Never in the history of science has it ever claimed to be one hundred percent right. The only thing it has ever claimed is that it will be more right tomorrow than it is today, and its track record over hundreds of years proves that to be the case. That was Dr. Fauci’s message—but many refused to listen. He was pilloried for it. 

All countries have periods of ugly history, and the U.S. is no exception. We ignore it at our peril, as the prescient quote from George Santayana tells us: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But I firmly believe that, as it is with science, we’re better today than we were yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll be better than we are today. But that’s only true if we choose to heed our own historical lessons, and that requires effort. The horrible things in our past will STAY in the past as long as we heed the lessons they teach us—and deliberately choose NOT to repeat them in any form. It behooves us—indeed, it behooves the people of every nation on Earth—to heed the fact that today is history for those who will come after us. What will we do today to create a national history that our descendants will feel proud of?

And yes, some things going on today make us uncomfortable, perhaps even scared, and they make us nostalgically wish for a better time. But looking to the past to find it is a mistake, because it’s not there. It lies in the future. How far in the future is up to us. We’ve come a long way, and just like science, we’ll never be perfect. We can only commit to being more perfect tomorrow than we are today, and even more so the next day. 

So: To all those people who believe that we’re in the darkest place in our history, trust me, that’s simply not true. Ms. Rutledge’s book, her descriptions of what her characters witnessed and went through, and history itself, prove it.

Harry Chapin’s song, “Let Time Go Lightly,” says this: 

“Old friends,

Mean so much more to me than a new friend,

Because they can see where you are,

And they know where you’ve been.”

By reading, by doing a little wide-ranging research, by stepping out of the disinformation sewage that has become so much a part of our lives these days, we can see where we are, and we can know where we’ve been. We can create context, and we can understand. We need to do that more often. We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to the world.

The book is West with Giraffes, by Lynda Rutledge. Give it a read.

Labels Redux

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Summer has finally arrived in Vermont, and like most of the continent, as expected, the political temperature is also climbing to insufferable levels as November approaches. The circus begins.

I’m a writer. That doesn’t define what I do; it defines who I am. As such, my toolkit has individual compartments for verbs, nouns, adjectives, participles, gerunds, and adverbs. Lately, I find myself rummaging around quite a bit in the adverb drawer. Remember those? Who, what, when, where, why, how. In today’s hyper-polarized political climate, adverbs, two in particular, just might save us from ourselves if we let them. Let me explain. 

“What are you?”

“I’m a Democrat.”

Wrong question, wrong answer. Why, you ask? (Another adverb, by the way). Because the instant we use the adverb what, we require the imposition of a label. Republican. Democrat. Libertarian. Progressive. Immigrant. Blue collar. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Vegan. NRA member.  Those labels have one purpose: to distill, to artificially simplify the essence of the person they’re attached to so that the other party can quickly and clearly label them as friend or foe, enemy or ally, someone to like or someone to hate. But they don’t. Labels fall short in the worst possible way, because they say nothing about who the person is. They’re easy: it takes work and effort, you see, to invest in another person with the goal of truly understanding who they are. But this is life: there is no easy button. 

Which is why a better question than “WHAT are you?” is, “Who are you?” Try to attach a label to that. I’m a college educated, white-collar, married man, with two kids and five grandkids. I don’t lean into labels; I lean into issues and ways to resolve them. I’m retired, fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and I have friends and relatives from both sides of the political aisle. I get along with all of them because I know WHO they are, not WHAT they are. And truthfully, I don’t CARE what they are. It’s immaterial to me.

Those of you who read my book, “The Nation We Knew,” might recall that in the last chapter of the book I described a conversation I had with a guy out in Ohio who is in most ways my polar opposite, politically. Had I assessed him using the convenient ‘let’s just assign the guy a label’ protocol, I could have saved myself the effort of talking with him and simply disdained him because of the handy-dandy label I would have assigned to the guy. But instead, he and I had a meaningful conversation about things that are actually important, things that make us who we are. We talked about kids. Grandkids. We talked about our work. We shared the things that make us happy, the things that scare us, the things we want for our kids and grandkids. We talked about the kinds of books we read (remarkably similar, by the way), the hobbies we have, our favorite foods, what we drink, the frustrations we feel. In other words, I came away impressed with the guy—even though our labels were different colors. I like WHO he is. I don’t care WHAT he is, because it doesn’t matter. For important, meaningful conversations, it’s irrelevant.

My wife said something recently that really stuck with me (as most things do that she says). We were talking about religion, about how it has been politically weaponized,. She also expressed her understanding that religion is important to many people, and then she said this: “Here’s how I look at it. Are you living it or selling it? Because if you’re living it, I admire you and support your beliefs. But if you’re selling it, trying to convince others, that’s a different story. Who are you really trying to convince—me, or yourself?”

Want an example? There’s a woman who lives in our small Vermont town who is staunchly Catholic. She never married, and she’s now in her 90s. We met her when our kids were in elementary school. One of her kids—one of her ADOPTED kids—one of her 27 ADOPTED kids—was in our daughter’s class. Her kids are of different races, and many are developmentally or physically disabled. They’ve gone on to become lawyers, carpenters, doctors, and other professions. Around here, she’s called SuperMom.

She’s living it. She doesn’t tell anybody what to do; she shows us. How easy it would be to assign a label to her and be done with it: “What is she? She’s Catholic.” Or, we can focus on WHO she is, and how she LIVES who she is, every day. Just ask her kids. What a gift to the world.

Can you imagine how the political carnival would change if we laid off the labels and stuck with what’s actually important? I know, I know, tilting at windmills again.

Just something to think about.

Blue Highways Revisited

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It was mid-1982. I had been married and working for the phone company in California for just about a year, the first phase of a 40+ year career in the telecom industry. I had left my commercial SCUBA diving business behind, but still wanted to be a professional travel photographer and writer even though I was now going corporate, becoming an Organization Man. It was different, and it was exciting, and I was grateful for the opportunity, not to mention the paycheck, given that I had a young family. But the writer and traveler in me still burned bright, as they do today, more than 40 years later.

One evening, Sabine handed me a book that had come out two weeks before, saying, “Read this. It has you written all over it.” The book was called, “Blue Highways: A Journey into America,” by previously unknown (and quirkily named) author William Least Heat-Moon. If you haven’t read the book, stop whatever you’re doing right now and go buy a copy. I can wait.

Here’s the story, and why even today, 42 years after its release, it’s one of the most important books that has appeared in the American publishing pantheon in the last century. I realize that that statement sounds bombastic, but it isn’t.

The cover of the original book.

Heat-Moon (his name comes from his Osage heritage; he was born William Trogdon) was an English professor at a small college in Columbia, Missouri when a sequence of events left him free of employment and personal attachments. He had a Ford Econoline van into which he tossed a sleeping bag, a camera, a typewriter and writing supplies, and a scattering of camping gear. Leaving Columbia, he drove east on what would become a three-month, 13,000-mile amble around the United States, during which he avoided freeways and interstates, choosing instead to drive only on secondary roads—which are blue on maps, hence the name of the book that grew out of the trip and that would stay on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 40 weeks. 

The Interstate Highway System that was built in the 60s and 70s bypasses the small towns of America, the backbone and soul of the country. Freeways, along with the soulless interchanges around which fast-food chains, hotels, discount stores, and gas stations cluster in a homogeneous nothingness, may create a fast and convenient way to drive across the country, but they don’t allow travelers to drive through the country. Traveling cross-country via interstates gets you there faster; traveling the Blue Highways, as Heat-Moon did, gets you there richer. 

As we enter yet another political election cycle characterized by vicious, puerile attacks between candidates, social media’s slimy degradation of whatever respect and reverence still exist between people of different viewpoints, and the reduction of thinking, caring people into meaningless labels because a label requires far less effort to hate than the complicated person behind it, it’s a very good time to read Blue Highways for either the first, second or in my case, 19th time (and yes, that’s a real number). Here’s why.

Heat-Moon’s journey took him from Missouri to the east coast, where he turned south to follow a slow, wandering route down the eastern seaboard, then westward across the southern tier of the country, up the eastern spine of California, back across the Great Plains states and around the Great Lakes, all the way up to Acadia, then back down and finally west to where the journey began in Missouri.

With William Least Heat-Moon in Vermont.

I had the good fortune to meet the author in the early 1990s, when he taught a week-long creative nonfiction writing workshop at the University of Vermont, and I managed to get accepted into the program after Sabine surreptitiously signed me up for it. In addition to the elements promised in the workshop syllabus, Bill also regaled us with stories about three months on the road in his van, Ghost Dancing, and what he learned during the journey.

Many of you have heard me quote Mark Twain in my own writings and audio programs. One of my favorites Twainisms is, “Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness, and most of our people need it sorely on all three counts.” Heat-Moon is anything BUT bigoted, prejudiced, or narrow-minded, and it shows, as does his adherence to Twain’s words. As he traveled the nation, he went out of his way to stop and talk with people in cafes and diners and bars, when he picked them up as hitchhikers, at their workplaces, occasionally joining in as part of the local labor force. These were not the travelers one meets at freeway exits, stopped only long enough to stretch, use the bathroom, grab a bite and fill the tank. These were the people who live in forgotten Blue Highway towns, the detritus of economies bypassed in pursuit of expediency, at the cost of rural relevance. 

But these were also the people Heat-Moon set out to find. They were, for the most part, genuine, welcoming, and interested. Of course, he met a few unlikeable people along the way, but most were kind and open in the stories they shared with him, and they came from across the spectrum of work and life. Every one of them had something important to say; every one of them had a lesson to share. Blue Highways is the collected teachings of those lessons. 

As it happened, as Heat-Moon listened to the stories of strangers and let them sink in, he realized that he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was a journey of national discovery. ‘Self-discovery’: an overused term from the realm of psychobabble, which makes me reluctant to use it here. In this case, though, it was William Least Heat-Moon charting a path to his own future through the stories of others. In the same way the First Nations people of Australia believe that the gods dreamed the world into existence, Bill dreamed his future into existence—who he was and who he wanted to be—by building a fabric from the weft and weave of collective story. In the process, he also painted a national vision, a picture of what could be, although he might deny it.

Blue Highways is not about a driving trip around the country in a van to see the nation’s oddities along the way—the world’s biggest ball of twine or frying pan, the Spam Museum, the biggest truck stop. It’s a vision quest, an attempt to see the future and all its elements in the context of a large, complicated, messy, ultimately good country that has, whether you choose to believe it or not, a very big heart. It’s who we are, and Heat-Moon’s trip in Ghost Dancing is the nation’s collective story writ large. To me, what Heat-Moon discovered as he traveled from place to place and story to story was that who we are as a nation is very different from what we are as a nation. ‘What’ defines a label; ‘who’ is something far deeper and richer and more important—and, very, very difficult to describe or quantify without seeing it firsthand. He proved that hegemony, the attempts of colonialism to overlay a new culture on a place when the existing culture works just fine, thank you very much, fails every time. And if you don’t believe that, then why is there so much discussion going on about ‘the culture wars’? Blue Highways chronicles a journey to discover the things that weave us together, not the things that tear at the fabric of national self. 

As we make our way through this latest election cycle, it’s important to remember who we are, not what we are. It says it all on the Statue of Liberty’s inscription:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Read the book. And for those of you who already have, it’s worth a second read. Or, in my case, a 19th. For me, it won’t be the last.

The Dubious Value of Interspecies Communications

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Like most young 19th-century boys, Hugh Lofting liked animals and playing outdoors. Born in 1886 in Maidenhead, in England’s Berkshires, he had his own little natural history museum and zoo when he was six years old. The fact that it was in his mom’s bedroom closet wasn’t a problem until she found it there.

The point is, Hugh loved nature, and everyone who knew him was convinced that he’d become a naturalist, or biologist, or something in a related field, when he grew up. So, everybody was surprised when he decided to study civil engineering. He started at MIT near Boston and completed his degree at London Polytechnic. When he graduated, he got work in the field: prospecting and surveying in Canada, working on the Lagos Railway in west Africa, then on to the Railway of Havana in Cuba. After traveling the world, he decided that a career change was in his future. He married, settled down in New York City, had kids, and began to write articles for engineering magazines and journals about topics like, ‘building culverts.’

In 1914, World War I, ‘The Great War, The War to End All Wars,’ broke out, and Hugh was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Irish Guards. He fought in Belgium and France, and the horrors of war affected him deeply. In fact, his feelings about the natural world once again came to the surface, as he witnessed the treatment of draught animals in the war. Their suffering affected him as much as the suffering of his fellow soldiers. 

To help himself deal with the emotional trauma of war, he returned to his writing. He began to compose letters to his two children about a mythical, magical doctor who took care of animals, curing them of whatever malady had beset them.

In 1918, Hugh was badly wounded when a piece of shrapnel from a hand grenade shredded his leg. He left the military and after recovering from his injuries in England, returned to his family in New York.

Serendipity definitely played a role in the direction of Hugh Lofting’s life. His wife, charmed by the letters he wrote to his children while he was deployed, had kept them, and suggested he turn them into a book. He did. It was called, “The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts.”

The book was an immediate bestseller, and between 1922 and 1928, he wrote a new Doctor Doolittle book every year, along with other titles. 

Interesting story—it’s always fun to hear how a writer finds the track that defines their life’s work. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. I just finished re-reading Doctor Doolittle for the first time in a long time (I love children’s books), but I also just finished reading Ed Yong’s “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.” I didn’t plan it that way; they just happened to pop up in my reading stream, and much like Hugh Lofting, serendipity kicked in. Doctor Doolittle could talk to animals; Ed Yong writes extensively in his book about the extraordinary ways that non-human species communicate. In fact, there’s been a lot of chatter in the press lately about advances in interspecies communication and our soon-to-be-available ability to translate what our non-human neighbors are saying. That’s quite a breakthrough, considering how much trouble I often have understanding what other HUMANS are saying.

Before I get too far into this, let’s lay down some basics. We are NOT the only species that communicates, nor are we the only species that uses body language. Lots of animals do that. Orangutans, for example, often use pantomime with each other, and even with their human caregivers in orangutan rescue centers. And after recording thousands of hours of sound and observing the behavior of herds of elephants over a long period, researchers have determined that elephants have a specific call that means, ‘Bees—Run!!!’ In fact, there may be a form of interspecies communication going on here. When African wild dogs show up, one of the fiercest and most dangerous predators in all of Africa, elephants have a specific warning call which also causes other animals, like gazelle and impala, to take notice and run. But when elephants bellow about bees or other things, calls that sound just as urgent, they don’t even flinch. They just keep grazing, entirely unconcerned.

Monkeys do similar things. Vervets, the annoying little monkeys that once invaded and destroyed my room at an African game preserve in search of the sugar packets that had been left for coffee, have distinct calls for distinct scenarios. If one of them sees a land-based predator, like a leopard, they issue a specific call and everybody takes to the trees. If they see an aerial predator, like a crowned eagle, a distinctly different call sends the troop into the safety of ground cover. 

Some species even add nuance and meaning to their calls by changing the order of the sounds they make. For example, if west African Campbell’s monkeys begin their threat calls with a deep booming sound, it means that whatever threat they’re seeing is still far away, but pay attention—be aware. If they start the call without the booming sound, it means that the threat is close and that whoever hears it should take cover immediately. 

Sixty years ago, Roger Payne, a bioacoustics researcher at Tufts University who spent his time listening to the calls of moths, owls and bats, met a naval engineer who monitored Soviet submarine activity using hydrophones scattered across the sea floor. The engineer told Payne about sounds he had recorded that weren’t submarines, and after playing them for him, Payne was gobsmacked. He asked for and was given a copy of the sounds, which turned out to be made by humpback whales, and after listening to them over and over for months, he began to detect that the sounds, which were extremely diverse, had a structure to them. He loaded the audio files into a software package capable of producing a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of a sound, using time on the X-axis and frequency on the Y. By the way, this required a partnership with IBM to get access to a mainframe computer to do the analysis. Anyway, what his analysis confirmed was that whales call in a very specific order of unique vocalizations. Sometimes a call lasts 30 seconds, sometimes thirty minutes, but the sequence is always the same—identifiable sequences that he called songs. In fact, in 1970, Payne published his recordings as an album called Songs of the Humpback Whale. It went multi-platinum, selling more than 125,000 copies and catalyzing the effort to end commercial whaling around the world. Some of its tracks were included on the gold album attached to Voyagers 1 and 2 when they were launched into deep space in 1977.

Most recently, researchers have taken their analysis of animal sounds even farther, using AI to identify more complex patterns. Shane Gero is a Carleton University researcher who for the last 20 years has studied the vocalizations of sperm whales. After analyzing hundreds of hours of recordings, he and his team identified specific characteristic patterns that he called codas. It appears that the whales use these unique sounds to identify each other. He and his team are now feeding the sounds they’ve captured into a large language model that they will then unleash AI against in an effort to enhance our understanding of whale speak.

That’s remarkable—stunning, in fact. But speaking for myself, I feel inclined to invoke what I call the Jurassic Park Effect: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In the movie, researchers re-created dinosaurs from the DNA found in dinosaur blood in the stomachs of Jurassic mosquitos that were trapped in amber. They did it because they could, ignoring whether or not they should, and it didn’t end well. In fact, none of the sequels did—for humans, anyway. Creating a large language model to translate other species’ languages into human language strikes me as the same thing. Because when it happens, the conversation might go something like this:

‘Hey—nice to meet you! We’re the creatures who violently kick you out of your homes and then tear them down because we want to live there instead; we destroy your food sources; we blast loud noises into your marine homes 24 hours a day; we capture and eat huge numbers of you; we pour countless toxins into your air and water and soil; we build huge dams on your rivers to prevent you from migrating home as you’ve done for thousands of years; we do all kinds of things to help to make the environment hotter and unpredictably violent; and we make your terrestrial habitat so noisy that you can’t hear predators coming or mates calling. So with that introduction, how ya doin’? What shall we talk about?’

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think we’re gonna like what they have to say. 

The Pleasure of Fecundity

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There is a word in the English language that I have come to love. It is onomatopoeic in a way, a word that, when pronounced, sounds like what it describes. The word is fecundity. Something that exhibits the qualities of fecundity is said to be fecund. It means prolific, and its origins are entirely feminine: rooted in old Dutch and Middle English words for the adjective feminine, the verb suckle, the noun nipple. It’s all encompassing. 

For me it defines a seasonal intermezzo: a short movement between the two longer sections of a major work. In this case, the major work is summer. In my mind it has two movements: the first, when winter fades and spring finally lets go and full-blown summer begins; the second, when the summer begins to grow tired from the feverish pace of the annual re-ignition of life. The intermezzo is the period that’s happening now, in mid-July. It’s used as a setup, an indicator of the beginning of the long slide once again toward bittersweet fall and melancholy winter.

I am sitting in a chair on my deck, trying to read a book while being unrelentingly ambushed by a multi-species land and air attack force. Ants of diverse sizes swarm the deck, the railings, and all the furniture, including the chair I’m sitting in. They don’t bite, but they send a message: don’t mind us, just passing through, but don’t get in the way of progress. 

Cobwebs and sheet webs are everywhere—on the ground, between the deck rail balusters, connecting the post lights to the rails in great gossamer sheets of webbing, barely visible filaments waving in the air with spiderlings attached, tiny paratroopers on their telltales, off to colonize anything standing still, ballooning, kiting off. Contrary to the oft-stated belief that these were the webs found in corn cribs, cob comes from the Middle English coppe, meaning ‘spider.

I stand and peer over the railing at the flowerbed below. Weeds have profoundly grown out of control overnight, as if there was a countdown clock that zeroed at midnight last. GO-GO-GROW! Yesterday, a lone grass blade among the daylilies; today, an occasional daylily among the grass hummocks. 

But it isn’t just the weeds that have mounted an invasion. The plantings in the garden redefine unruly, all fighting each other suddenly for center stage. A week ago, a walk among the hostas and daylilies and columbines was easy, the path we carved clear. Today, my mind turns to machetes.

Meanwhile the bugs and the birds grow weary of the manic pace of summer’s onset. The birds seem slower, less exuberant when they call; the bugs grow clumsy, with far more collisions and near-misses now than earlier in the season. The F35s have become Zeppelins. The fireflies, once staccato in their flashings, grow occasional, intermittent. The only exception seems to be the mosquitos. The black flies are gone, deer flies and horseflies make only half-efforts to land and bite, but the mosquitos are renewed, born-again assholes. They seem spawned from the humidity, a form of aquatic parthenogenesis, taking evil form from the very air. What a name: in Spanish, “little fly.” Who would give such an unpleasant and annoying—and in malarial miasmas, deadly—insect such a harmless name? And Spanish, for God’s sake—a language famous for stringing together extraordinarily colorful syllabic sequences for things far less annoying. Here, let me try: Hijo de puta gillipollas insecto cabrón. There. That’s better.

Another intermezzo phenomenon is that insects seldom seen suddenly appear in numbers: earwigs, grasshopper nymphs, potato beetles, and creatures I fail to identify. A second wave. 

The weather is different during the intermezzo. Different descriptors apply. Sullen. Sultry. Torrid. Dank. Muggy. The sky boils with evil black thunder bumpers that rise to the stratosphere before flattening in great anvils, but then tease without dropping rain. 

And water? It feels thicker somehow. I drop a hydrophone in a pond, intent on recording stridulating aquatic insects, and instead of the usual kerplunk I’m accustomed to, it comes back with more of a schloop, as if I were dropping a stone into Jello. Water moves more slowly, passing along the stream bed under protest. It doesn’t splash; it globs. It doesn’t flow serenely into back channels and eddies; it gets squished into them. 

The second act of summer begins slowly and secretly. It’s stealthy, sneaking up on us. The plants of summer, Joe Pye Weed and poison parsnip, Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed, rye grass and cattails and goldenrod, all start to look unkempt and sullen, brown and torn around the edges, ragged and uncared for. They droop and fall over as nature gets sloppy in the second act. Vernal ponds dry and disappear, streams shrink to trickles and mud flats, and there, in mid-trail, a red leaf, a maple’s announcement of things to come.

Enjoy it. The intermezzo is nearing its end.

Vermont’s Second Crop

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Spring is a special time in Vermont: the long, dark winter begins to release its hold on things; the ground begins to thaw and soften; and suddenly, we can smell things again during our morning walks in the countryside. Birds call; people emerge from hibernation; kids ride around on bicycles, the first time since November.

Spring also heralds the arrival of two special and unique harvests in Vermont. First, of course, is maple sugaring. All over the state, sugarhouses light the fires beneath their boilers, and soon, the air is redolent with the rich, thick smell of maple, as thousands of gallons of clear sap are converted into the golden amber elixir of maple syrup. It’s a rare commodity: the rule of 86 tells us how much sap we need to make a gallon of syrup, a rule based on the percentage of syrup in the harvested sap. At the beginning of the season, that number hovers around two percent sugar. Divide that number into 86 and we know how much sap we need to create that gallon we take home from the store. That’s a lot of sap.

Marshmallum dazekiae

The second harvest is equally important, but less well-known. Across the state, in farm field after farm field, bulbous, snow-white growths emerge from the fallow mud and ice. At first, they go unnoticed, because they are hidden in plain sight atop extensive snowfields. But as the snow melts, and as the fruiting bodies of Marshmallum dazekiae develop and grow, they become far more conspicuous as they rise above the field. Harvesters across the state take notice and prepare for the feast: It is nearing time for the annual Vermont marshmallow harvest.

The fruiting bodies of Marshmallum d. are quite large, sometimes growing to heights of four feet and weighing more than 500 pounds. They are roughly cylindrical in shape. When they first form, the fruiting bodies lie on their sides, but as the large stem that anchors them to the plant dries, it twists as fibrous proteins in the outer sheath of the stem dry and shrink, twisting the fruiting body until it stands more or less upright on one of its flatter ends. At this younger stage of its life cycle, the fruits of Marshmallum are still quite firm, easily supporting the weight of a small animal, as shown in Figure 2. 

Another defining characteristic of the Marshmallum fruiting body is the thick skin that protects the cascade of embryos developing inside. The skin, characteristically a brilliant white color, is thick and difficult to tear, almost leather-like in its toughness. It resists all but the strongest claws, and while a black bear could penetrate the membrane, they typically don’t. Researchers that dissect the fruiting bodies for anatomical study have found that the easiest way to open them is with a large-bladed carpet knife; smaller, more common dissecting tools are typically insufficient for the task and dull quickly.

The fruiting body of Marshmallum d. is morphologically analogous to those of pomegranates or tomatoes, in which individual seeds within the fruiting body are nestled in protective jellylike chambers. In cross section, the fruiting body of Marshmallum (which as we noted earlier is remarkably difficult to cut) contains four main chambers, separated by tough integumental membranes, each about a quarter-inch thick. Each chamber is filled with 200-300 rows of seeds, clustered in stalks, that are protected by white, sticky flesh. The seeds are tiny—smaller than a mustard seed—and difficult to spot within their white protective covering. 

A fruiting body cross-section is shown in Figure 3. 

Botanical Variation

Morphologically, there is little variation in Marshmallum d. However, it has been shown that soil composition plays a role in pigmentation, particularly when certain minerals are present. Sulfur and feldspar, typically found in soils that have some degree of volcanic origin, can result in a slight color shift of the seed bodies, in particular a light yellow or pinkish cast, as shown in Figure 4. This is unusual, however; it is rare in Vermont, occurring most frequently in the smaller fields of northern California and Hawai’i.

Another variant that can occur in addition to discoloration of the normally white seed bodies is dwarfism. Typically (but not always) related to a lack of manganese in the soil, the seed bodies within the pericarpal membrane become stunted, reaching a size that is about one-eighth normal. These are shown in Figure 5.

Conclusions 

Commercial opportunities for Marshmallum d. are now beginning to emerge, although large-scale production and market opportunity remains elusive. There is evidence to suggest that earlier societies may have harvested and roasted the seed pods over open fires [Kraft et. Al.] and occasionally combined them with other plant-derived substances such as raw sugars, cocoa [Hershey, 221-223] and thin crackers made from whole grains [ibid]. Perhaps insights gained from archaeological studies will yield opportunities for modern commercialization.

An Open Letter to America’s Young Adults

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Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more. It probably won’t surprise you to know that William Shakespeare wrote that; it’s the opening line from Henry V.

The United States is deadlocked over supposed ideologies that offer no leadership. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Why do I say that? Because neither side is offering a scintilla of what leadership is supposed to deliver, which is a vision of a better place in the future than the place where we find ourselves today. Instead, what we get is juvenile, playground bully diatribe: ‘Oh, you think I’m bad? Well, look at the other side. He’s worse.’ 

Just once, I’d like to see a leader in Washington who is willing to actually lead. To describe a tangibly better future for the nation, in some degree of detail. To explain how we’ll get there, and why it will be better when we do. Just once, without an overlay of the political badgering that adds no value.

Just once, I’d like to see a leader put nation before party, future before ideology, goal before winning at all costs. Just once. Just once I’d like to see a leader dispense with political rhetoric and speak plain English. Just once.

Just once, I’d like to see a candidate dispense with trying to sell me swag and instead of trying to sell me on a vision of a desirable future. Just once. Just once I’d like to see a candidate who speaks with the people, not at the people.

Just once I’d like to see a candidate reach across the aisle without an agenda, other than to make things better for some group of people in the country. Just once I’d like to see actions from a political leader that are undertaken for reasons other than vote-gathering. Just once.

Just once, I’d like to see a candidate for president take the phrase, “Of the people, by the people, and for the people” seriously. And on that note, just once, I’d like to see a candidate who is actually elected by the people—not by the electoral college, but by the people, because the people came out in large numbers to vote. It is a right, and it is a privilege, and it is a responsibility. And the majority of eligible voters in the country discard it as a meaningless waste of time. What a travesty, and what a tragedy.

There is a quote I like to use when I teach leadership workshops: 

‘If you want something different, you have to do something different. Hope is not a strategy.’

Both of the geriatric would-be leaders (and I use that word skeptically) want the presidency, and one of them will get it. Yet neither of them SHOULD get it. We don’t need another out-of-touch person setting the direction of the United States. I’m 70 years old and I don’t want either one of them in that position. I want someone younger, brighter, more dynamic, full of ideas, looking to heal the worthless scar tissue that divides the country. I’m old enough to have seen this country at its best, when we were revered as a people and as a nation. So please, Millennials and Plurals—take a stand. Show the gerontocracy in Washington that you are far and away more mature than they are. Send someone to the White House next time who is worthy of the street address. 

Abdication is also not a strategy. Edmund Burke wrote, “All that is required for evil to prevail is for enough good men to do nothing.” Do nothing, and you reward bad behavior. Do nothing, and you get what you deserve. Do nothing, and you have no right to complain about the outcome.

So please: Do something. Speak up. Vote. Write to your local, state and national representatives. Contribute opinion pieces to your local newspaper. Start a Podcast. Start a blog. Let yourselves be heard. Because to do nothing is not a protest: it is an abdication. I understand that you’re disgusted with the current state of things. You should be: So am I. But remember what I said earlier: If you want something different, you have to do something different, because hoping for change is equal to doing nothing. And when nothing is done, evil prevails.

You are too good, too valuable to the future to squander this opportunity to make a difference for yourselves and your children. So, step up and let yourselves be heard. Your voice is orders of magnitude more important than the collective voices of those older than you. Yes, we have wisdom to share that is valuable, and we will freely share it with you. But wisdom informs change; action leads to it. So please: Act. The country needs you. There are far more of you than there are of us: Make those numbers count for something.   

Fun with Geography

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I just posted a new episode on the Natural Curiosity Project called “Fun with Geography.” It’s sort of an homage to my favorite TV show, the Big Bang Theory. You may recall that a recurring theme was a Web TV show produced by Sheldon Cooper and his then-girlfriend Amy Farrah-Fowler called “Fun with Flags.” It was silly, of course, but it was also interesting in a lot of ways. My own mini-obsession with geography isn’t all that different.

I love maps–I always have. I can sit for hours with a map. just following roads to see where they go, looking for the funniest place names (the subject of an earlier Podcast episode), identifying unusual landforms, and so on. I love the fact that if you follow the major north-bound roads in Canada all the way up, they ultimately just…stop. They peter out. They end. I want to go there. I want to stand at the end of the road and wonder, “Why here?”

Early maps, those produced prior to the 15th century or so, had vast unknown areas that were often drawn showing them to be the homes of fantastic beasts. I don’t know about the fantastic beasts, but there are still places that are largely unknown–not as many as there used to be, but enough of them still exist to tantalize.

When I was in college, I found myself puzzled by friends who were getting degrees in geography, the same way I found it odd that there was a degree in library science. At the time they both seemed silly to me–the sort of “underwater basket weaving” majors that people used to joke about. Today, I can’t think of two fields of study more useful and applicable than these.

It was Mark Twain who wrote, “Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness, and most of our people need it sorely on al three counts.” Well, spending time with maps, taking the time to study a bit of geography, is a noble snd useful pursuit. Just listen to this new episode and you’ll see what I mean.

You can find the episode on Soundcloud or on all the standard Podcast platforms.

A Few Words of Career-related Wisdom

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That’s me in the silver suit with a class at Cannery Row in Monterey.

How many times during your career has someone said to you, ‘Do what you love. The money will follow.’ I know I’ve heard it, many times. And while it’s a wonderful sentiment, it isn’t entirely true. Not entirely. I’ll come back to that in a minute. But throughout our lives and careers, well-meaning people share advice with us—aphorisms, for lack of a better word—intended to keep us on the straight and narrow path to success. Some of them are true; some of them are partially true; and some of them are decidedly wrong.

I find myself in an interesting place: I’m retiring. There—I said it. I’m leaving behind the carefully planned, strategically executed career I’ve had in telecommunications that began in 1981. And if you believe that part about ‘carefully planned and strategically executed,’ then I suggest you ask your physician about an update on your meds.

I’ve been lucky throughout my career to have had friends and mentors, villains and heroes, and inspirational, quirky characters along the journey who showed me the way forward—or perhaps better said, different ways forward. I took something away from all of them, something valuable, even when the recommendation or suggestion or advice was ill-advised. I know people are supposed to say those kinds of things at their retirement party, the one where the company used to give you the gold watch. But I’m not going to have one of those. For me, retirement happens to coincide with my birthday later this year, so instead of a gold watch, I’m giving myself the gift of time. And as for all those characters I’m supposed to mention? They were real for me, and I’m grateful to all of them for the many things they taught me along the way. So: As a gift to all my friends and colleagues, as a form of paying it gratefully forward, I want to share some of those things I learned with you. I hope you find them helpful.

By the way, retirement, for me anyway, doesn’t mean sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch waiting to keel over. It means doing more of the things I want to do—spending more time with family and friends, and devoting more time to writing, a bit of speaking, and recording audio.

My career and the way it coincided—collided? —with my passions was an exercise in the purest form of serendipity. Serendipity: ‘a happy accident,’ according to various dictionaries. Like many kids during the Shiftless Seventies, I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life once I graduated from high school. Granted, I was a special kind of screwed up, because I went to high school overseas as a result of my dad’s work—an incredible, priceless experience—but when I came back to the States for university, I went through what at the time were the poorly understood reentry challenges that people have when they return to their home country after an extended period abroad. I couldn’t fit in, and I had a very hard time making friends because I had so little in common with my peers. I listened to different music, spoke multiple languages, watched different sports, dressed differently, and was acculturated to living under the dictatorship of Generalísimo Franco. What could I possibly have to talk with them about? It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand what I was dealing with and how to handle it; I even wrote a book about it to help others who were facing the same challenge. A big part of my initial independent consulting work was with companies that needed to build reentry strategies for their returning expat employees.

All that to say that I was personally and culturally discombobulated. I went to Cal Berkeley and got a degree in Spanish because it kept me emotionally connected to Spain, the place that was now the home that I identified with more than any other. I also earned a minor in marine biology because I’ve been a biology geek since I was nine years old, and I love the water and everything in it.

So, upon graduation, armed with a degree that qualified me to teach sea otters how to speak Spanish, I became a SCUBA diving instructor, then became a part-owner of a diving business in the San Francisco Bay Area that did underwater photography, commercial diving, sold dive gear, and certified new divers by offering eight-week classes that took place in the classroom, the pool, and the ocean. 

Of all the things I did as part of that job, teaching was what I loved the most. In fact, I got a commendation from the certification agency for certifying more new divers in a single year than any instructor ever had before. I loved it—I loved seeing the wonder bloom on the face of a new diver as they took their first apprehensive breath from the regulator with their face in the water, and saw the wonder that lay below the surface. I also loved the moment when they came close to drowning, as they attempted to inhale from the regulator while smiling broadly. Bad combination.

One of the aphorisms or lessons that was pounded into me early on by quite a few people was this: ‘Do everything you can to get into management. That’s where the money is. And once you get there, be tough. Soft managers are bad managers.’ Okay. Let’s talk about that, because it’s patently false and has misled a lot of people—me included.

In 1981 I left the diving business behind, and with quite a bit of trepidation, joined the high-falutin’ corporate ranks of the telephone company in California. In 1981, AT&T was still three years away from being broken up by the divestiture mandate, which meant that (1) they were a monopoly, and (2) they had a license to print money. They were rolling in it. And I was one of the beneficiaries, because upon joining Pacific Telephone, fully qualified to do so with a degree in Spanish and a single resume entry that said something like ‘jumped in the ocean every day for five years wearing a rubber suit and carrying a tank full of high-pressure air on his back,’ the company deemed me telco-worthy and put me into the first ever Computer Communications Systems Management Training course, or CCSMT to those of us who had the privilege of being selected to participate. 

It was a seven-and-a-half month, full-time intensive training program, during which we learned to troubleshoot every analog and digital circuit out there; learned how to operate the mainframes and minicomputers in the data center and how to deal with the dreaded outages that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute while the machine was down; learned sophisticated protocol analysis tools and techniques; learned how the telephone network worked (43 years later, it’s still magic to me); and a thousand other technical things that I can’t remember now. They sent us to Bell Labs and Bell Communications Research and the Bell System Center for Technical Education. We went to countless vendor schools. And, we learned about unions, and labor relations, and human resources, and time management, and how to calculate overtime for a union-represented employee who has already worked 48 hours on day shift for the current week of this pay period but has now been called in on night shift to work an additional eight hours on a Saturday because someone is sick, but Saturday is Christmas Eve, so which part of all that is paid at triple time-and-a-half?  The landing of the Eagle on the Moon in 1969 was less complicated.

This is how it sometimes felt during outages in the data center.

I hated that part. Give me a bad repeater under the raised floor, or a failed hard drive on the mainframe, or a 2,500-pair cable in the field that’s failing because earth movement from a recent earthquake caused the hard plastic sheath to crack and water’s leaking into it, any time. Timecards? Employee rating and ranking? Just shoot me now. That was work for managers.

I’ll admit it now; I didn’t  want to go into management, because I liked the hands-on stuff. Manage the diving business? Okay, but I’d much rather be in the ocean certifying divers. Run a computer room? If I have to, but I’d rather be on my hands and knees under the raised floor, looking for the bad cable or determining which component is creating that nasty smell of burning electronics. So, when they finally dragged me into management, I wasn’t good at it. I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it—it wasn’t the least bit inspiring to me. It left me cold. I did it because I had to, as part of the advancement track that everybody talks about. And don’t get me wrong: I learned a great deal being a manager, and I definitely appreciated the pay bump, given that Sabine and I had two little kids, but I know beyond doubt I wasn’t one of those managers who inspire people. I simply wasn’t good at it. And you know what? That’s okay.

Here’s the lesson to walk away with. I learned pretty quickly that success, especially in a corporate setting, is about knowing your own limitations and accepting them with grace, and being good at delegating things to people who are better at them than you are. That means you get to focus on the things you’re good at, and they get rewarded by being recognized for what they’re good at. Oh—and a nice by-product? The job gets done well. It’s called division of labor, and it has worked since the first time two people decided to plant a field together in the Fertile Crescent, 5,000 or more years ago.

Some of you have heard me mention, in previous episodes, my friend and mentor Tom Vairetta. Tom was one of the best managers I ever met—ever. I used to say that the best boss I ever had was a man who worked for me at the phone company. That was Tom. To this day, if I’m facing a difficult challenge, I always ask myself, ‘What would Tom do here?’ 

One thing Tom taught me was to pretend that every single person I encounter throughout the day, whether they were my own employees or people from other work groups, is wearing a sign around their neck that says, “Make Me Feel Important.” That’s all people want. Everybody matters. Make them feel as if they do and you will have fulfilled 90 percent of the mandate of a good manager. The other part is that timecard thing from hell. That’s NASA stuff.

Here’s another lesson I learned along the way that had significant personal impact that will become obvious to you through the telling. I was often advised by hardcore, career corporate types that ‘Whatever you do, don’t allow the company to EVER move you into training. That’s the dead end of death. Trainers are the walking dead.’

Wrong thing to say to someone whose favorite job so far was being a diving instructor. But it occurred to me at some point that if you put the walking dead in charge of engendering in your employees the skills and capabilities that are required to move the company forward, then how can trainers and educators be the walking dead? Seems to me that that’s a pretty important role. And given that I spent the majority of my career in various forms of education, and I’m still standing, it’s pretty clear that the advice was ill-placed. 

Here’s a corollary to that last one. ‘If you love what you do, you’ll never work another day as long as you live.’ 

Actually, that’s backwards. If you love what you do, you’ll work every single day of the year, and you’ll put in long hours, but you’ll have a smile on your face all day long and at the end of the day you’ll feel energized, not exhausted. I know this to be true from personal experience. In 1991, I left Pacific Bell and went to work for a small but highly respected consulting company based in upstate Vermont. I was recruited to the company by its founder, and man, I was walking on air. Talk about an ego boost! This was a company where we’d walk down the hall of a customer location and after passing a group of employees, they would whisper, ‘Those are Hill Associates people!’ What a buzz.

The sign says, “Hill Associates. We Train the Best.” The “geeks” were some of my students, playing the part.

Working for that company was one of the greatest opportunities of my life, and I’ll be grateful to the founder, Dave Hill, for the rest of my life for taking the chance he did on me. I often described the place as a repository of the smartest people on Earth. Most of them had forgotten more about technology than I would ever know. In fact, I was one of the only people in the company who didn’t have a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, or robotics. I would work so hard to learn a new technology—new to me, anyway—and when I had, when I felt like there was nothing else to learn from reading the standards, when I knew that I was the universe’s expert on that topic, I would make the mistake of having a conversation with someone in the company who actually hadlearned everything there was to know about that particular technology. 

Here’s an example. One of my colleagues, who is still a close friend, was once teaching packet switching at Bell Labs. If you don’t know what packet switching is, it’s the basis for how data moves around the Internet—and for that matter, most other modern networks, as well. Anyway, one of the most important algorithms to know about in terms of how data is uniformly and fairly distributed across a network where multiple paths exist between a piece of data’s source and its destination is called Chu’s Algorithm. It’s complicated stuff. My friend was teaching Chu’s Algorithm to a group of propellerheads at the Labs as part of the packet class. During the class, a guy kept sticking his head in the door, listening for a bit, taking a few notes, nodding, and then abruptly leaving. This happened quite a few times. Finally, my friend asked the class why the guy who kept interrupting didn’t just come in and sit down. The class told him that he’s too busy—that’s Dr. Chu. You know, the guy who wrote the algorithm. 

That’s what I was up against. But I was a good writer and teacher, and they needed those skills as much as they needed people like my friend who could explain the market implications of Chu’s Algorithm to Dr. Chu. 

Anyway, after ten years, I left the consulting firm to start my own business. I had written a book called Telecommunications Convergence, which had become a bestseller, followed up quickly by another book, the Telecom Crash Course, which ALSO became a bestseller. I wanted to write more books and pursue more international work, especially in Latin America. So, in 2000, I left and started the Shepard Communication Group, where I’ve been ever since.

All that to say, here’s another aphorism for you: ‘Find a career and stick with it. If you change careers, or companies, hiring managers will think you’re a dilettante and they won’t hire you.’ Well, that’s outdated advice today. Sure, there’s much to be said for staying with a company, year after year, but only if it gives you as much as you give it. And demographic behaviors are changing. 

Interesting word, career: it comes from the Medieval Latin word carraria, which means a road. Isn’t that what a career is? A road? A path to some destination? That’s something to think about.

Here’s a final quote for you that I took under advisement, early on: ‘Anyone can get a job, but your goal should be to find a career.’  Okay—or, you can find a job you love and turn it into a career. What’s wrong with that?

I’ve had the most non-linear career anyone could possibly imagine: dive shop operator, dive instructor, commercial diver, telecom analyst, IT data center manager, telecom educator and advisor, consulting analyst, writer, public speaker, and audio and video producer. Was that a career, or a string of unrelated jobs? I’d love to say that I planned this career, but I’m not that smart, and no one would believe me, anyway. When I think back on the last (wow) 48 years, and reflect on what I’ve already written here, I’d like to share a few things with you, especially if you’re reading or listening to this and you’re in the early stages of your career. Consider this a summary.

I started this essay with the aphorism, ‘Do what you love. The money will follow.’ That’s partially true. There are plenty of things that we all love to do that don’t pay the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean we should walk away from them, because in this life, we get paid in two ways. The salary we earn for doing the job we’re paid to do feeds the bank account; the passion projects we take on, what people used to call hobbies, feed our soul and our sense of personal well-being. Both are valuable, necessary currencies, and a focus on one at the expense of the other does us considerable harm. For example, I produce the Natural Curiosity Project Podcast because I love to do it and because people enjoy the topics I talk about and the interviews I do with interesting people. It doesn’t pay the bills; it feeds my soul, and makes me smile. But the paid audio work I do for clients, often because they’ve heard the Podcast and want something similar for their own purposes, that work contributes to paying the bills in a very nice way. And one more thing: I’m as busy now as I ever was when I was flying and working all the time, because I have lot of things to do that make me happy. But I know many, many people for whom their life is their job. What will they do when they retire? Please don’t fall into that trap. Keep both currencies flowing—you’ll thank yourself later.

‘Whatever you do, get into management’ was the next lesson that older, more experienced corporate types told me. And yes, there’s something to be said for that, if it calls to you—and for many, it does. It just didn’t call to me. I didn’t like it, I wasn’t good at it, and I went in another direction. The message here is this: listen to what others have to say but follow your heart. Is it important for everyone to have management skills? Absolutely! Is it important for everyone to be a manager? Definitely not.

‘Avoid training like the plague.’ Training and education aren’t a job; they’re a calling. If they call, answer. Agreeing to join the Advanced Technologies Training division at Pacific Bell was the decision that put me on the path to what became my amazing, wonderful career. That was how I met Dave Hill, who hired me away from the phone company and moved my family to Vermont; Hill Associates was where I became proficient and comfortable with technology; and Hill Associates was where I wrote my first two technology books, both of which became bestsellers and gave me the confidence to set out on my own in 2000. 

And I don’t mean to imply that this advice only applies to training and education. There’s an old and worn-out aphorism that says, ‘Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.’ Well, somebody had to teach those who do, HOW to do! So, listen to your own advice, and with both eyes open, make your own decision. Your heart and your mind will talk to you; listen to both, but really listen. The heart knows what it wants.

‘If you love what you do, you’ll never work another day as long as you live.’ I’ve lost track of the number of people who have said to me, “You’re so lucky to be independent and work for yourself. You can work whenever you want to.” True: and it’s a good thing I want to work every freaking day of the year, because that’s what happens. Independence does not translate to work-free, or less work. It means that everything is on your shoulders, and while the model worked for me very well, that’s not true for everyone. Be honest with yourself if you should ever entertain the idea of going independent. If you’re okay working long hours alone in your office, traveling alone, staying alone in a hotel, eating alone, and in general just spending a lot of time with yourself, go for it! But if you’re the kind of person who needs to have lots of people around all the time, think twice. I’m not saying don’t do it—I’m simply saying, think about it, and discuss it with those around you who will be affected by the decision.

‘Find a career and stick with it. If you change careers, or companies, hiring managers will think you’re a dilettante and they won’t hire you.’ There was a time when this was good advice, but today, not so much. Between the culture of the gig economy, elements of which have crept into the traditional workplace, the lingering work-at-home effects of the COVID lockdown, and shifts in workplace priority and balance caused by generational change, the practice of routinely changing jobs and companies has become common. But let me make a point here. Companies hire employees because they bring value to the workplace, and that value, more often than not, comes in the form of a well-developed, monetizable skill. Whether you call it a career, a job, or a calling, what matters is that you bring a well-developed differentiable capability that creates value for the company looking to hire you. 

And that brings me back to my first point, which is also my last point. ‘Do what you love. The money will follow.’ It has taken me more than fifty years to realize that above all else, I’m a storyteller. Whether I’m standing in front of a classroom, or writing a book, or crafting an article, or assembling a video script, or creating a white paper, or shooting photographs, or producing a Podcast, or directing a video, ultimately, I’m telling a story. I’m creating context for an intended audience. That’s my gift, and I use it to earn a paycheck. Writing, recording, photographing—all of those are paving stones in the road of my career. But let me remind you: I also have many years of expertise in the arcane field of telecommunications, which means that I use my varied storytelling skills to create value for my telecommunications clients. I don’t love telecom; I love telling stories about telecom as a way to convey content and context in the form of communications. That’s the essence of good storytelling.

In my case, the money follows because I have expertise in my chosen field. My passion, the craft of the well-told story, is my differentiator. So, I have the ability to engage in my passions, to do the things I love—writing, speaking, recording, photographing—because I’ve figured out how to use them as delivery vehicles for the things I do that earn me a living. That’s the magic formula. 

Do you know the word amateur? In French, it means, ‘a lover of.’ I am a lover of writing, speaking, recording, and photographing, which means that I am an amateur at all of them. And those are the things that make me good at what I do, professionally. 

So that phrase should be re-written as follows: ‘Do what you love. It will make you better at doing the things that make the money follow.’ And, it will prevent you from resenting the work you HAVE to do because you’re also doing the work you WANT to do.

So, take the advice of Mark Twain, who is my answer to the question, ‘What famous person would you most like to have dinner with’: 

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” 

A few thoughts that I hope you find useful. Stay in touch!

It’s a Thing

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“Here’s a quote you’re going to like.”

Seconds later, my phone vibrated, and in my inbox was the following message from my wife:

A fact is information minus emotion. 

An opinion is information plus experience. 

Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. 

And stupidity? Stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact.

As we once again prepare to enter the soul-sucking, hysteria-ridden, social media-driven, high emotion, largely fact-free presidential election cycle in the United States, it behooves us—ALL of us—to consider those words.

I spent a quarter-of-a-century of my career sparring with the construct of leadership: what it means, how it manifests, how it’s developed and demonstrated, where it leads when it’s executed correctly. I’ve seen breathtakingly bad leadership, and I’ve seen leadership that was so good it took my breath away. 

Simple fact: leaders are leaders because others follow them. Those that follow are called followers. It’s a two-party ecosystem. Back in the 1980s, I saw a sign on the wall of a cubicle at the phone company where I worked. I made a copy of it. It said, ‘WHERE ARE THEY? WHICH WAY DID THEY GO? I HAVE TO FIND THEM, I’M THEIR LEADER!’ 

Nope.

Followers follow because the perceived leader offers something they desire. As many of you know, my definition of leadership is bone-headedly simple: leaders create a vision of what could be, not what is. They provide the mechanism to escape the status quo, and therefore the mechanism to avoid complacency, which if ignored leads to irrelevance and the competitive death spiral. Good leaders show their followers a better future than the one they currently envision, and then enroll them to help the leader achieve the vision. That is leadership at its very best. Leaders lead with a vision; followers engage to help make the vision real. Ecosystem.

It’s a Thing

That’s the current jargon for something that’s trending, usually on one or more social media platforms. 

It’s a thing.

If you’ve read any of my research or papers or blogs over the last couple of years, you may have run across one or more of them that take social media to task. I admit it: I have a problem with social media, because of the platforms’ corrosive tendencies to widely propagate bad data, outright lies, and misinformation, and then hide behind the power of the First Amendment when the prospect of being responsible for their actions inconveniently comes up. 

Social media derives its power from two groups of people: followers, as in, “How many followers do you have?” and the other group, the influencers. Some influencers do good things; I wish their voices were louder. I wish they had a stronger signal-to-noise ratio.

Social media has an outsized voice, particularly among the younger end of society, those who are most easily influenced by misinformation. This morning I did a search on the top ten topics trending on social media platforms. They included the apparently life-changing impact of snail slime on wrinkles, one of the Kardashians talking about drinking her own breast milk for a quick pick-me-up, the it-will-never-go-away trend of swallowing laundry pods, and apparently, rough sex among children as young as 12, including asphyxiation as part of the sex act. 

I have no words. Except these.

A fact is information minus emotion. Correct. And information is data plus context. As Walter Cronkite, the revered newscaster, might have said, “Here’s what we know. Here are the facts. This is what actually happened today. You’re smart enough to think about the facts and decide what the implications are for yourself and your community.”

An opinion is information plus experience. The implication? “I’ve been around long enough to have seen this before, which means that I know what most likely comes next. I suggest the following action.”

Ignorance is an opinion lacking information. My friend Anthony Contino likes to say, “It must be wonderful to go through life, mercifully unencumbered by the terrible burden of intelligence.” Experience is only as good as the breadth of the knowledge landscape that generates it.

And stupidity? Stupidity is an opinion that ignores a fact. Never let the truth get in the way of a well-formed lie.

To return to the construct of leadership for a moment, I’d like to offer an observation. If we apply the leadership model to the social media landscape, a chilling parallel emerges. As I noted, leadership is a two-party construct—the leader, whether good or bad, and the leader’s followers. Social media also has followers, which implies that those they follow are the leaders. You know—the ones who drink their own breast milk, swallow laundry pods, let snails crawl on their faces, and choke young girls during sex. Maybe it’s me, but those aren’t the kinds of leadership role models I want ANYONE exposed to, especially children. 

When I was a kid, my dad told me a joke that I’ve never forgotten. Two kids are walking in a field, and one of them surreptitiously bends down and scoops up a handful of rabbit droppings. Later he shows them to the other kid.

“What are those?” the kid asks.

“Those are smart pills,” he replies.

“What do they do?”

“You swallow them and they make you smart. Here, try some.”

Suspiciously the kid takes a few and chews them carefully. He grimaces. “These things taste like shit!” He exclaims to the other kid. 

The other kid responds, “See? They work! Now you’re getting smart.”

Dad also told me a story about a guy from the east who was visiting a relative in the west. The two were out walking in the barnyard, and the easterner was complaining about how dry the air was, and that his lips were badly chapped.

“I can fix that,” the grizzled farmer replied. With that he bent over and scooped up a blob of chicken poop and without warning, smeared it on the guy’s chapped lips.

“What the hell is that supposed to do?!?” The guy replied, disgusted.

“The main reason your lips get chapped is because you lick them too much. That will keep you from licking your lips.”

I should post that. I could become a wealthy influencer.

Fact? Opinion? Ignorance? Stupidity? We all have a choice.