Rare Birds, the Cerebral Cortex

I saw the glass flowers in the Harvard Museum, but the rest is mostly a blur.  It was February, sometime in the late 1980s, and I was attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Boston that year.  The National Association of Science Writers, to which I belonged for many years, holds their annual meeting at the same time as the AAAS.  

It's a perfect symbiosis.  Science writers need scientists.  Disheveled scientists are hived together, striding around with briefcases and rumpled papers, standing by elevators, chattering like magpies about very odd topics.  If you're a scientist-watcher and a science-seminar buff, it's the the place to be.  These otherwise rare and seldom-seen birds may be sighted in fairly close proximity.  A parallel may be made with birds in the Chiricahua Mountains in southwestern Arizona, the only place in the United States where certain species may be found and added to one's list in a short time.  I did not keep a list of my AAAS sightings, but they have included Jonas Salk, Isaac Asimov, Shere Hite, and Leonard Nimoy (the latter two undoubtedly strays from another continent).  

NASW members attend press conferences every day and write stories about the scientific "news" presented.  The press conferences are an additional hiving together where, say, the five scientists in the world who are working on, for instance, the cuticle of the nematode, or the locomotory behavior of gerrid bugs in the open ocean (I am making this up just now; usually the topics are chosen for their appeal to the masses) sit shoulder-to-shoulder, looking a bit dazed.  

It is also the place where a scientist is asked to tell a roomful of ADD-afflicted journalists in five minutes, in layman's terms, the high points of his or her life's work.  At that time of year, the science-attentive back at home will note that newspaper and radio science stories are derived from AAAS presentations.  At the press conferences were the agitated newspaper and radio people, on the front row with microphones and recorders, filing every day.  They seemed to grab a bite at the hospitality suites.  The magazine writers were characterized by a more take-your-time leisurely demeanor.  They dressed better.  They could do lunch.  The university people were schmoozing shamelessly, trying to get attention for their institution's scientists' presentations.

This trip started all wrong.  I flew to Boston, where the slush was knee-deep.  I told the taxi driver where I was staying, the Holiday Inn, let's say.  I was driven somewhere, and dropped off.  The hotel did not have my reservation, but they graciously found a room for me.  I have trouble translating maps to the real world, and it takes a while for me to figure out where I am, if I ever do, and as I navigate new territory, I always feel as if I am listing.  Usually to the left.  I get dizzy.  The conference was some distance away, so every day I took public transportation into the conference center.  My impressions of Boston in February:  dirty slush and snow, youth with great mops of springy hair (where were the limp blonde tresses?), everyone reading books on the--was it a subway?, the smell of wet wool, dangling mufflers, fur coats of every likely species, lots of black and brown and other subdued colors.  John Updike has called Boston the "cerebral cortex of America."  Presumably I was traveling around with the many students associated with the many colleges and universities in the Boston area.  I could imagine the neurotransmitters released, the electrons of thought crackling.

As I began to talk with the other science writers at the conference, I asked where they were staying.  I realized I had been deposited at the wrong Holiday Inn.  The taxi-driver had not given me a choice, but had decided for me.  I was made painfully aware of my demeanor, which, maybe because of the listing to the left, always seems to lack authority.  

But the programs had begun, the days were full, and even if my other reservation had not been lost, it would have been too difficult to retrieve my suitcases and schlep myself to other lodgings.  So every day, the slush, the wet wool, the readers, the furs, going the distance.  My briefcase becoming heavier and heavier with the free papers I had picked up in the press room, and the fatal attraction of handouts from the exhibits: key chains, jar openers, pens, posters, candy, buttons (I *heart* science) and other doo-dads.

And I got sick.  I came down with the flu.  I developed a fever and red, runny eyes, and my cerebral cortex, already swimming with strange surroundings and navigational problems, felt as though it had been replaced with cotton batting.  My airplane ticket fare was based on a Saturday to Saturday or Sunday to Sunday, something like that, and I was getting per diem that I already had to supplement from my paycheck.  Changing my flight was impossible.  I could not go home.  I couldn't stay in my room.  I needed to make prudent use of the hospitality suites.  I went to the conference center and found corners to hide in and I absorbed what I could.  I apologize now if I exposed anyone.  I couldn't help it.  I have an idea those bugs were widespread, anyway.

One afternoon I took a bus tour to Harvard.  If Boston is the cerebral cortex of America, Harvard is its hypothalamus.  For a Westerner, whose great-grandfather (Dad's grandfather, very familiar to my father) founded the town I grew up in, Harvard and Boston seemed positively historical.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is the repository for, among other things, Charles Darwin's sand dollar, George Washington's pheasants, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition.  How exciting is that?