Shaping the Earth - Hardcover

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent was born in Minnesota and grew up in Marin County, California. She received a BA in biological sciences from Stanford University of California at Berkeley. She now lives in Missoula, Montana, with her husband. Dr. Patent has written more than thirty-five nonfiction books for children and young adults, many of which have been selected as Outstanding Science Trade Books for children. In 1987, she received the Eva L. Gordon Award from the American Nature Study Society in recognition of her outstanding contribution to science literature for young readers.

I was four days into Africa when the jet lag caught up with me, when
everything caught up with me. Standing naked in my boots at 2 a.m.,
sweating and wired and doing raggedy tai chi to make the night pass.
Reading Jesus from Gideon's little Bible and thinking about the girl
from Bujumbura and machetes and machine guns and time and the
Internet.
Please fasten your seat belt firm and low, a little voice advised at
thirty-nine. Instead, I was quietly slipping free. I was ready for a
change, for rebirth, for a new skin and tang. I wasn't sure how it
would come or what it would be, but I had to have it. Deep in a
career, in a life, I was unbuckling, eyeing the exits, ready to walk
on the wing.
That night in Bukavu, dreaming wide awake and turning, I saw
everything. I saw Jesus and the girl and old John Peng all moving
with me, soft, intense, in unison. "Combing the mane of the wild
horse," like John Peng taught. Turning like slow motion kung fu
kings. Breathing steady, eyes deep and cool, leaning in and out like
tai chi masters.
"The white crane stretches its wing," John Peng would say, and we
would stretch side-by-side in smooth duet, far from cares and close
to happiness.
"I will help you," the girl from Bujumbura whispered at the airport
in Rwanda. I was the American reporter, arriving late at night and
lost. She was tall and very fine, a Tutsi, and close in the taxi that
drove down dark roads where the dead had lain. Oh, Danielle, I am too
far from home.
Then Jesus off the little page, like a friend, like a taunt: "Is not
the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?" I was
reading, he was saying, we were moving. In a crumbling hotel room, in
a fever in the dark, he moves with grace so focused I become a silent
mirror.
On this long day I have seen bones and darkness wrapped in beauty. I
have driven out of Rwanda to Bukavu, where Belgian masters left
chteau after chteau on the equator and hatred in each stone and vine.
I have seen the villages with every third house destroyed, and sullen
bloodshot boys with dull exhausted knives and guns, and wide
boneyards still soft to touch. I have seen truckloads of dull-eyed
peasants wandering in dread through sweet green hills and the
grimacing joy of old friends finding one another quite unexpectedly
alive.
"The Internet will change everything except human nature," I hear
Rolly murmuring. Somewhere in the hotel's dark rafters an ancient air
conditioner kicks to life, sending one sharp, cold stream down
through the swamp of heat. And I am sweating and shivering and
turning.
Maybe I'm too old for this. Maybe this is too old for me, for anyone,
a creaking, pointless trick of history too bloody, too endless. Who
said I had to see firsthand? Who said there was no other way?
So I will think of everything, and think of change. I will take stock
and move. I can't sleep anyway. It's too damned hot and cold.
- from Africa notes, January 1995
Chapter 1
Unbuckling
Everything.
That word was in the water lately. It was in the air. It was
ubiquitous.
Everything to win. Everything to lose. Have everything. Risk
everything. Walk away from everything.
And, of course, everything changing. The way we thought and felt and
dreamed. Our expectations. The economy. The century. My marriage. The
news business. Me. Everything.
It had been almost fifteen years since I first walked into the Boston
Globe on a bright winter morning with shoes full of snow and a couple
of scribbled names in my pocket. The Globe was a temple to me then,
with its big presses and its brassy editorial voice. It had colorful
characters and idealism and prestige and power. It hired me, and it
held out the possibility of changing the world. I loved it.
Now things were changing, all right. But the paper didn't seem to
have much to do with it, and neither did I. It was the economy,
stupid. It was technology I barely understood. And some kind of new
world, humming through the telephone lines, that we couldn't touch
but was all around us. Changing everything, they said. Everything.
I had always been a heat seeker, but somehow the heat had slipped
away from my corner. I was a top editor at the paper now, but what
were we editing? And when we went out to report and write, who was
honestly panting to read the stuff? We held a management retreat to
look into the future, and a somber professor told us that tumbleweeds
would blow through the pressroom within a decade. Nobody would bother
to pull the last paper from the presses. Nobody would care to read
it. When we all laughed, Ted Leonsis, the burly tough guy who would
soon be president of America Online, flushed and growled into his
microphone from the podium.
We had a simple choice, he said. "Digitize or die."
And I didn't know what he meant.
I would lie awake in bed with Danielle, her leg thrown over mine, and
ramble in the night, when the boys were tucked in and she was diving
for sleep and rest to face another day of work. I never knew how much
she heard. My rant was almost always the same. I don't know where I'm
going, I would say to the dark. I'm working for an outfit that pours
ink onto wood pulp and sells yesterday's news. We're writing stories
I'm not sure anyone cares about. I'm not even sure they're the right
stories. I'm not sure anymore, I would say, about anything.
"Uh-huh," she would murmur.
I'm restless, Danielle, I would say. I'm crawling out of my skin. You
know, at work, people actually sit in the cafeteria and debate
whether newspapers will last long enough for us to retire. Maybe I'm
paranoid. But the whole place is starting to smell of dinosaur. I
didn't get into this business to be a minor priest in a dying
religion, Danielle. I got in because it had gusto and life. Because
it felt big and urgent and true. And now I don't know. I don't know
if I've still got the passion for this. If it's worth it.
Everything's changing. It's not what I came for anymore.
And she would sleep. And I would not. And I wondered what that meant,
too.
Danielle was pregnant again. It was her third time, not counting the
false starts, and this time we knew it was a girl. It had been eight
years since Ben had come, twelve since Dylan. This pregnancy was an
indulgence, but we weren't ready to be finished with kids.
We looked at it this way:
If I got promoted to a fabulous career at the paper, this third baby
would be the icing on the cake, the lucky jewel in the crown. It
could happen. And this would be the lucky child who got the extra
trips to Disney World, the fancy skiing lessons, the long summers on
the Cape.
And if the career just chugged along, well, that would have to be its
own reward, and this child would be our alternate joy. She would be
our fresh stake in the simple life, in soccer games and school
concerts and silly dancing on winter nights in the living room.
"And what if I just go nuts and throw everything over?" I asked
Danielle one Sunday afternoon as we walked around the neighborhood
lake. "You know, try something crazy. Something new."
At the water's edge, a fat brown duck fought with two seagulls for a
crust of bread. I wished our house were on this lake, with a great,
wide lawn and fine veranda and the summer splashing of happy children
and us around to hear it.
"You won't throw everything over," she said, pulling my hand onto her
budding stomach. She was beautiful. She was sensible. She had known
me for a long time.
"Not everything," she said.
Then a promotion passed me by. The next rung on the ladder was
suddenly far away. The pull of the chase for the top had kept me with
the program. Now I had taken a slap. It didn't mean I had to bolt. I
could sit tight. Or I could jump to another paper. But here,
suddenly, was a moment to do some completely fresh mapping. Here was
a time to look honestly at myself and the world, to acknowledge how
much I was chafing, how urgently I needed to make some big decisions.
And there was something else. My old college pal Rolly Rouse had been
calling with a stream of wild ideas lately. I couldn't get used to
hearing his voice again. In my mind's eye Rolly was still a skinny
kid with a long ponytail and an unplugged electric guitar, racing
through Jimi Hendrix riffs in 1973, our freshman year at Yale. We had
shared a suite of rooms and some sweet, goofy growing up. I could
still see young Stone Phillips, already anchorman-handsome, rolling
on our floor in tears of laughter, reciting Kant while we lit farts
with a match. And David Levitt, now a software wizard for Bill
Gates's old partner Paul Allen, wrapping on a boa constrictor and
dancing free and naked under his banana curl Afro. And Danny
Schneider, an attorney in New York now and my dearest pal, grinning
his beautiful idiot Buddha grin at the whole show.
But intense, hyperkinetic, driven Rolly Rouse on my phone? Now? This
I would not have predicted. For years we had barely kept up. I knew
he had gone on to study architecture and engineering and to do
something with energy and housing. I knew he was married, to Carole,
and that they had a young daughter. And that was about it until we
happened to move into houses a mile apart and ran into each other at
the local liquor store in Newton, our leafy suburb on the western
edge of Boston.
Rolly was as high-strung and cerebral as ever - a "brainiac," my kids
would say. At first the reaquaintance made me jumpy. His rate of idea
production per second seemed almost crazed. At any moment he would
cut loose on lessons of history and economic cycles and patterns in
time, on Peter Drucker and George Gilder and technology waves and the
finer points of inflation adjustment. Everything.
Danielle would roll her eyes and flee. I was charmed. My world of
reporters and editors and deadlines was full of quick takes and deep
irony and carefully veiled inner lives. We had our passions, but they
tended to be well armored and held in reserve. Rolly was different.
Twenty years after college, his personal world was still charged
right out front with clenched-fist conviction and a dukes-up passion
for big ideas. He wore everything on his sleeve - heart, brain,
obsessions. He would talk and talk with complete and sincere
absorption in his subject, whatever it happened to be, and I would
wait for the cynical disavowal or ironic cocked eyebrow that never
came. This was strangely refreshing.
We saw each other occasionally for a beer and conversation, and now
he was on the phone almost every day. Talking about "new media."
Talking about the Internet. Talking about maybe starting a new
company - maybe with me.
How could we do that? He had a mortgage. I had a mortgage. We had no
money worth mentioning. We had car payments and insurance bills and
credit cards with all-American balances. We had lives already and
kids to feed!
But I always returned his calls. They were too interesting to ignore.
And I was too restless not to listen.
For a while, John Peng saved me from the itch. He showed up like a
perfect gift, like oxygen, wisdom, and calm.
I met him early one morning on the big field near our house. I was
out walking our tall yellow lab, Sadie, as I did every morning. The
field was dog central for the neighborhood. When Sadie was a pup, I
had always socialized with the neighbors rounding the field, jogging
along in twos and threes or mobbed up for a stroll while our dogs
tumbled and yelped. I had loved the fresh air and early morning sky
and the easy puppy care chatter of feeding schedules and chewed
shoes.
But now Sadie was a few years older and less frenetic, and I often
walked alone with her, tossing her sticks and thinking. Work was
weighing on me. Money, too. And time. There wasn't enough of it, and
the little we had was slipping by. I was hopeless at office politics.
The paycheck was good but never enough. The kids were growing up too
fast, and the hours we worked seemed only to get longer. Danielle and
I weren't laughing the way we used to laugh. Passion, even
communication beyond the car pool schedule, had to wait in line with
everything else. Life was a mess of compromises that I was tired of
making.
I stopped noticing the morning sky. I started talking to Sadie more
than usual, and one morning had to admit flat out that I was talking
to myself, muttering vague complaints and bits of combative
conversation like an old man on a bus station bench. I was living the
two-car, six-figure, green suburb American dream - and muttering to
myself like a bag lady in the rain. I was scaring the dog.
Then John Peng appeared. The first time I saw him, it was as if I had
stumbled into a misplaced clip of exotic film. The neighborhood field
was a familiar zone of soccer balls and L. L. Bean jackets and well-
fed hounds with names like Brewster and Benson. Neighbors walked
their dogs and rushed off to jobs as psychiatrists and lawyers and
architects and software programmers. They had different degrees but
one class: striving suburban strapped. Nobody felt secure, but
everyone tried to act it.
On this morning, on a low hill in a corner of the field, I saw a
dignified Chinese man slowly removing a dark blue jacket, folding it,
and placing it carefully on the grass. With an old athlete's ease, he
moved to a sunny spot at the center of the hilltop and began what was
clearly a deeply familiar routine of stretching and deep breathing.
By the time I had rounded the field again, he was doing tai chi.
I couldn't stop staring. Danielle and I had spent almost ten years in
Asia, a good chunk of that time in Hong Kong, where for several hours
every morning the parks were lined with people moving through the
smooth ballet of tai chi. It looked like underwater martial arts,
with its slow, meditative mix of balance and motion, retreat and
attack. I had always wanted to learn but had never found the right
opportunity.
Within a few weeks John Peng had become both my teacher and my
friend. I didn't make new friends much anymore. Certainly not seventy-
five-year-old friends from Harbin, in the far north of China. He was
visiting his son, a mathematician in Boston. He was my good luck.
John Peng was a man of action, with clear, dark eyes and a striking
strength of bearing. In our third conversation, I asked if he would
teach me tai chi. He agreed, glad for the company, I think. The next
morning he met me on the low hilltop with a handwritten list, in
English and Chinese, of the first twenty-four basic moves I would
need to learn, and we began.
We met every day, on fine mornings and in rain and in snow. I was
awkward. He was patient, moving side-by-side with me, working to
convey the significance of each motion. He was insistent that my
learning be more than physical. Tai chi, he said, was about the mind
and spirit.
"Comb the mane of wild horse," he would call out in his halting
English and dignified Chinese on our first mornings, starting me
through the sequence of movements that added up to simple tai chi.
"No thinking," he would say when we paused. "Only moving. Breathing.
Be focused but...