Pater: Curiosity... I've run out of decent electronic images of my dad, so for the rest of these posts I'll add different images, but from things we did together. The image at right is of a blue columbine taken high on the slopes of Picayune Gulch in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, in July 2005. They were one of his favorite flowers there...
Curiosity...
On one of my family's epic camping trips “out west”, circa 1965, we visited Yellowstone National Park, entering via the Beartooth Highway (the northeast entrance). My parents and all four of their kids were jammed into an incredibly underpowered Volkswagen Microbus along with a few hundred pounds of camping gear and supplies. My dad had that poor vehicle in second gear, engine roaring, for most of the climb to Beartooth Pass, at nearly 11,000 feet. It's an awesomely beautiful drive. If you've never been on it, your life is needlessly impoverished.
Near the highest point the road travels through green hills (the area in the center of the map at right), almost like the rolling hill country of Pennsylvania – except these “hills” are really just knobs on 10,000 or 11,000 foot high mountains. At one point my dad glanced outside and noticed that the green meadow we were passing was full of flowers, which meant (of course!) we needed to stop and take a look.
This sort of flower-worship was completely normal and expected in my family, and we all participated except my baby brother Mark, who was too young (and, perhaps not coincidentally, is the only family member not crazy about flowers). I still have this habit, as anyone who has ever traveled with me can attest. I love wildflowers, will drive thousands of miles to see them, and for damned sure I'm going to stop and enjoy them when I see them.
I've forgotten what kind of flowers these particular ones were, but there were two kinds – both with tiny blossoms (perhaps a quarter inch across), one blue, one yellow, and they were both growing densely, all mixed together with each other, grass, and other greenery. I remember that the blue ones had a delicate scent, a bit like fresh-mown grass, but sweet.
My dad was puzzled by something that most people would never even notice: he wondered why he was surprised by these flowers. Ordinarily he'd have spotted any wildflowers at a considerable distance – his eyesight was keen, and he was very good at picking them out of any scene (a skill that I seem to have inherited). But these he didn't see until we were almost upon them.
He looked over toward a little knoll perhaps a couple hundred feet away. It appeared to be completely covered with greenery, but no flowers. He walked over there, some of us with him, and discovered that the knoll was covered with these little flowers, too – but we couldn't make them out until we were much closer. After some thought, he came up with a theory: that when we were far enough away that we couldn't make out (resolve) the individual blooms, our eyes mixed the blue and yellow together, much like a painter mixing colors on a palette – and blue and yellow together make green, which would effectively disappear against the greenery.
Once he had a theory, he enlisted our help in proving it. We gathered up enough blue and yellow blossoms to make a small bouquet without any greenery in it. One of us kids held it, and he walked away – and sure enough, when he was a couple hundred feet away, he said it appeared to be a light green, not blue and yellow. Then he came back and held the bouquet while we all walked away until we could see the same effect – which we did. My mom, waiting back in the car for us, got the bouquet when we were done. I don't think she knew why we had picked it :)
My dad was very curious about the world we lived in, and he had a sharp eye for the unexpected. If he saw something that piqued his interest, he was perfectly willing to invest time and effort into investigating it. I grew up thinking that was normal; it wasn't until many years had gone by that I realized that most people never even noticed such things, let alone take the trouble to ponder them and figure them out.
I seem to have inherited my dad's curiosity about the world, or perhaps his example instilled it in me. There have been many occasions when others looked at me askance as I pursued it, or even called me weird. I wear that as a badge of honor – I'd really be quite ashamed to be called “normal”. I suspect my dad had the same experience, though he never mentioned it to me. He'd have paid no attention, and would have considered his own interest to be more than sufficient justification. It makes me smile to know that's something we shared...
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