Nature Notes: A Man Can Dream
All animals of a species have culture. If we accept the notion that plants communicate with one another underground via mycorrhizal connections, plants also have culture. In evolution, not only does a species adapt to changing climes and competition by evolving adaptations — as a fish evolving lungs to become an amphibian — but a species also changes its behavior to keep up with quicker changes in its environment. The Italian wall lizard is normally an insect eater, but when introduced onto an island in the Mediterranean where there were very few insects, it began feeding on plants. This is the kind of plasticity that is needed in order for species to survive short-term impacts. It’s a plasticity not attributable to genetic changes but to behavioral changes, in other words, cultural changes.
The human species is the most adaptable of all and has the most complex cultures, which differ from one part of the world to the next, from one American city to the next, from one township or village to an adjoining township or village. It may be that changes in human culture are occurring faster than ever. Take our pop music, for example. In the early 1900s jazz got under way. It morphed into swing by the 1930s, progressive jazz and mostly vocals by the early 1950s, followed by rock ’n’ roll and doo wop in the mid-1950s, then Motown, the British invasion, beach and surfing music in the 1960s, followed by disco in the 1970s, ending in rap, hip-hop, and pop ever since. Every sphere of human activity is up for grabs. Here today, gone tomorrow is the guiding principle. Some call it progress.
When I look back at my boyhood in the late 1940s and 1950s and glimpse the very structured way in which children grow up today, I am thankful, very thankful that I was born during the Great Depression. Not much school homework, a slew of daily chores such as carrying out the ashes, mowing the lawn with a push mower, climbing trees and picking wild fruit, lots of tag, hide-and-go-seek, giant steps, red light, and marbles, almost no organized sports or other demanding activities, Sunday school and AM radio, no addictive video games to while away the hours and numb the brain.
That was the life! There were no soccer moms back then, no opiates to numb the brain. We didn’t watch TV to see what the weather or traffic might be, we went outside to see: sun, rain, wind, snow, or storm. Ah, for the simple life.
There are some new birds in the yard. I watch and listen to the old ones and follow the antics of the squirrels. The notes issued by the birds familiar to me in my youth are quite similar to the ones I hear each spring and summer today. The squirrels look the same and hide acorns in the ground and then dig them up today, just as they did back then. The tree crickets and katydids that lulled me to sleep as a teenager sound the same today, too. The more things change for humankind, the more they stay the same in nature to some degree.
What if seagulls suddenly stopped dropping bivalve shellfish and crabs on hard surfaces to break them open and get at the meats inside? What if crows stopped calling at before 6 each summer morning to wake me up with the same caws they woke me up with at that same early hour when I was a boy? What if ospreys stopped diving for fish and began doing as the citified gulls do, feeding in Dumpsters, on school playgrounds, and in dumps? It might be a much easier way to make a living, but what would it do to their esprit de corps?
Parenthetically, very few ospreys nest in trees. They prefer utility poles, but during their boom years before the widespread use of DDT on the North Fork, they already had adapted to the tops of utility poles. In East Marion and Orient in the 1950s practically every other pole had a nest atop it. There were no purple martin boxes prior to the 1900s. Now, just about all purple martin pairs nest in these purple martin apartment houses. In the eye of the osprey, what could be more convenient than a utility pole with Peconic Bay on one side and Long Island Sound on the other? To purple martins, any small hole will do, as long as there is a living space behind it.
We humans are not only flipping from one culture to the next every few years, we have never had to learn so many things to survive in the brave new world in such a short time. Computers and TV have changed our daily routines dramatically. My head has become a chaos of details fading into other details, morphing them in the process, almost no instant-recall ability. It sometimes takes 30 minutes to remember the name of a close friend or associate.
Yes, I am 80, but every day I run into much younger humans who have similar recall problems.
The one thing that keeps me going is what I call my automatic memory. If I have to go somewhere, I press the button on my key holder unlocking the car door; as soon as I get in my car, I put on my seat belt. I release the emergency brake, but not always, then start the car in park where I left the gearshift. I look both ways before backing out of the driveway. When I come to a stop sign or red light, I brake. I drive down a familiar route consisting of different roads and streets without thinking. They’re all automatic reflexes, like the kick of the foot when the knee is tapped just so.
If we weren’t so enculturated, I wonder if we would be able to do some of the things birds and other animals do: celestially navigate, sense an approaching tornado or other storm, sense the presence of a predator stalking us before we actually see it. In the very old literature, the Holy Bible, for example, wise men would take trips to remote areas such as deserts or mountaintops for long periods to sit and ponder; we take vacations. It’s not the same. A thousand people on a cruise ship is anything but a philosopher’s dream. My salvation is sleeping late into the morning. Sometimes, dreams or reverie are much more salutary to the brain than being awake and active.
Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].