Author Lowell Harrison Young

Kristy Nelson and the Bedraggled Bio-X Class of ‘75

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Kristy and Ray Goble
Kristy and Ray Goble

With over 4,000 ex-students, sometimes I struggle remembering who was in what class. Stepan Hovenesian asked me in Yosemite if I would forget him. I laughed and said that I was sure I wouldn’t if he did something remarkable or awful, otherwise, I was not so sure. Although, every Biodesign Class was remarkable, some had experiences that called for extraordinary courage and resilience. When the news of Kristy Nelson’s passing arrived, I was trying to place her in the right class. I knew that she went “way back” but couldn’t pin down the year. After posting the announcement about her on Fb, an astounding number of responses poured in. Immediately, I saw a pattern of many members of the class of ’75. A quick check with my niece, Jennifer Mensch, confirmed my hunch that Kristy was in that class.

Oh my goodness, a flood of joy/sorrow; good, bad and ugly memories washed over me. The Class of ’75 was the second year of Biodesign, a class that was still called Bio-X as in experimental. Lettie Hudak planted a seed and a few adventurous kids wanted to “reinvent” the advanced biology program at St. Helena High School, and that was pretty much it. I only had sketchy plans that involved taking students to Yosemite and the Mendocino Coast to check out the biology in the respective areas. Looking back, I shudder over how naïve and foolish I was. The first trip to Yosemite was in the spring and the trails were still covered in snow. The next year (‘75) we decided to go in the fall in order to hike into John Muir’s back country. We were scheduled to drive to Yosemite on Thursday, hike on Friday and Saturday and return home on Sunday. I bought a USGS “topo” map of the Yosemite area and planned to hike to the top of El Capitan.

We started at the Foresta Trailhead. The hike winds uphill 3,000 feet to the top of El Capitan, 4 miles along the upper cliffs, and 4 miles down the steep Yosemite Falls Trail. The overall distance was about 19 miles and we were woefully unprepared. Four miles up the trail we realized that some students would not be able to make the trek. Dr. J.C. Pickett was along and he agreed to lead a small group several miles out to Hwy 120 where they hoped to hitch a ride back our Valley campsite. Half way up the El Capitan Trail we realized we were in for a huge challenge. Most of us were not in great physical shape; we didn’t pack enough water, and I had never heard of “moleskin.” Some students were developing blisters on their feet. We reached the summit of El Capitan around 3:00 PM , which was only about the half-way point. By the time we reached the top of the Yosemite Falls Trail it was dark. We didn’t anticipate this and failed to bring flashlights. Therefore, we had to grope and stumble our way down 4 miles of mostly switchbacks. It was about 7:00 PM when we limped back to our Valley campsite. Some were too tired to eat and went straight to bed.

The next morning, some of our hikers, looked a bit like George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. They could barely walk, due to blisters or achy bodies and some of the blisters had ruptured and socks were oozing with blood. Fortunately, I had a first aide kit and Dr. Picket got busy cleaning and dressing wounded feet. Amazingly, they laughed and playfully moaned and groaned as they struggled to walk. I did not find the situation humorous. Instead, I kept hearing lawyers in my mind asking if it was my intention to wound or maim innocent students.  As a medical doctor, and parent of one of the hikers, Dr. Picket exercised extreme compassion by not exclaiming how reckless and ignorant I had been.

We spent Saturday hobbling around like we had been through a war. We unceremoniously returned home Sunday and I realized that I had much to learn physically, mentally and logistically.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hear from any parents, school administrators or lawyers. 😉

Over the years I have met students from the class of ’75 and instead of bashing me, they said that after that ordeal, they were able to cope with many of life’s challenges.

Eventually, the Class adopted a poem by R.L. Sharp:

“Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules,
And each must make,
Ere life is flown,
A stumbling-block
Or a stepping stone.”

From the stories I have heard and read about Kristy, she went on to live an exceptional life as a wife, Mom and school secretary. She converted many, many stumbling blocks into stepping stones and was part of an extraordinary group of students who had a profound impact on my life.

Lowell H. Young, Author: Biodesign Out For A Walk

It’s About Time

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Father TimeWarning! Readers of this post are likely to experience a severe brain cramp!

Excerpt: Biodesign Out For A Walk,  Chap. 10, Matthew I.

Unbeknown to me, a quiet, thoughtful Latina girl went to church the following Sunday. After the service, she approached her priest and asked, “Father, if God made the universe, what made God?” The priest’s face turned red, and he stooped down and whispered sharply in her ear, “We don’t ask questions like that!”

The pope once asked Stephen Hawking not to try to inquire about what happened before the big bang, and Hawking agreed. Not because he wanted to comply with the pope’s wishes, but because it is fundamentally impossible to find out something that happened before the literal beginning of time. As St. Augustine pointed out, “there was no ‘then’; when there was no time.”

Circa 400 AD, Augustine of Hippo formulated the first known version of the “Big Bang” theory. There may be no “scientific” proof for the existence of God, but 1600 years later, scientists have not been able to refute his theory. In fact, excepting the cause, it aligns well with the currently accepted “Big Bang” theory.

I suspect that this will be the most extraordinary blog-post I will ever write and, as usual, it involves someone else’s thinking process. I am not being self-deprecating, it’s just that many of the world’s greatest minds are far more intelligent than I.

This includes a pantheon of scholars including Bishop Augustine of Hippo. In 397 he wrote, Confessions: in thirteen books, which, according to some scholars, is the greatest collection of books other than the Holy Bible. It had a profound impact on the evolution of Christianity and Western philosophy, ergo Western Civilization.  In a wonderful synchronicity, I found Eric Rosenfield’s post on-line:

http://www.ericrosenfield.com/time.html

“In 1917, Albert Einstein completed work on the General Theory of Relativity, one of the rules of which states that time is fundamentally bound to matter and gravity, and that without matter there would be no time. Oddly, this concept was presaged almost 1,300 years before that when Bishop Augustine of Hippo (later St. Augustine) put forth the idea that when God created the Heavens and the Earth, he created time itself as well. Before Augustine, no one that we know of had tried to consider “time” as being something changeable, something that could start and stop; after all, we always perceive time as moving forward, and contemplating temporality as being finite or malleable seems unnatural, and the implications headache­-rousing. Plato and Aristotle both regarded time as being infinite. Yet it was Augustine’s application of the methods of the principles of Grecian philosophy and reason to the Christian concept of God that forced him to arrive at his conclusions…”

But then, what’s really strange about Augustine’s interpretation of the eternal nature of the Beginning is that, when taken entirely apart from the Bible, it resonates not only with Relativity (Augustine saying that for the World to happen in time there must have been something that experiences time being roughly analogous to Einstein saying that matter and time are linked, and without one you would not have the other) but also with modern Big Bang Theory. Briefly, according to Big Bang Theory, because matter and time are so inextricably bound, when all the matter in the universe was compressed into a single point it formed what’s called a “quantum singularity” in which, the math shows, the curvature of time and space became infinite. This means the Big Bang singularity exists at all times at once, in all places at once much like Augustine’s God – ­ the singularity that created the universe is all around us, all the time, forever. Of course, it’s not a perfect correlation, since whether a quantum singularity wants to offer us salvation through its divine grace, like Augustine’s God, is another question entirely.

Moving forward in Book 11, Augustine then asks, “What exactly is time?” and says, somewhat comically, “If no one asks me, I know what it is.” We know that time, he states, has three parts – the past, the present and the future. And yet, we also know that the past and future don’t actually exist, since we can in no way interact with them except when they are the present. That is to say, if the past and the future exist in the physical way that the present does, we have no way of knowing it, because we only experience the present. And yet, if the past and future don’t exist, then what exactly are we measuring when we measure time? Obviously, time itself exists, since it can be measured, and yet if we say something is a hundred years ago, what exactly is that hundred years ago when it is past and therefore doesn’t exist at all? And since the present must become past in order to be time (otherwise, it would be eternity), then if “time present — ­­ if it be time —  ­­ comes into existence only because it passes into time past, how can we say that even this is, since the cause of its being is that it will cease to be? Thus, can we not truly say that time is only as it tends toward nonbeing?” He then tries to further examine what exactly is meant by the term “present”, since the present cannot be broken down and examined – is the present a second, a nanosecond, less than a nanosecond? In truth the present has no length at all, it can only be measured as it passes from future into past – two states that do not actually exist – and therefore, can it be said that the present actually exists at all?”

In a devilishly humorous irony, in his book, The Great Design, Stephen Hawking proceeded to claim that believing in God has become obsolete because the universe is so complex that it created itself out of NOTHING! Imagine that. Hawking has egotistically assumed that he is smarter than God ergo; God must be obsolete.

So, 1600 years ago, Bishop Augustine proposed a theory that is just as plausible today as anything science has to offer. The fact that he chose to name the Great Mystery “God” and Stephen Hawking chose to name it “nothingness” suggests that Moses was correct when he  wrote, 3500 years ago, that man has been endowed with the awesome privilege of “free will”.

According to the “Big Bang Theory”, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, there are 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, the earth is 4.5 billion years old and there are 7 billion people living on our planet. So, what are the odds of us being here at this precise moment?

Lowell H. Young, Author: Biodesign Out For A Walk

The Spirit Of Thanksgiving: Pilgrims On A Journey

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Ellis Island - Isle of Hope, Isle of TearsEllis Island – Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Pb2ia28QM

From a purely biological perspective, what has evolved into what is currently called the United States, is simply a matter of ecology. Darwin would describe it as “survival-of-the fittest,” but it involves plants and animals seeking a place on the planet to live. From a spiritual perspective, however, according to Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle) God went away and left it to us figure out the meaning.

Our daughter Maureen recently informed me that the earliest immigrants to North America crossed the Bearing Land-bridge circa 70,000 years ago. They were either escaping brutal tyrants, following food sources or seeking a better place to live. I had previously thought that they immigrated 40,000 years ago and mentioned in, Biodesign Out For A Walk that I felt it was disingenuous to credit Christopher Columbus with discovering America in 1492. Also, while it is true that the Pilgrims may have been the first white settlers to successfully immigrate to the New World, many other groups have since immigrated and made huge contributions to the unique human tapestry of people called Americans.

This brought me back to the one “immigrant” who profoundly changed my life. He was the most responsible for the Biodesign Class and therefore this facebook page and website. As a lad, in his native Scotland, John Muir experienced the horror and pain caused by diseases, poverty and semi-starvation that were common.  Eight out of ten of his aunts and uncles died from the “white plague” (tuberculosis). Life in both of the northern lands of Ireland and Scotland was often harsh. The temperatures were often cold; the soil too poor for crops and the growing season was short. Little wonder for the phrase, “Scotland’s greatest export was her people.”

Daniel Muir and three of his children immigrated to the US in 1849. After crossing the Atlantic, they made the arduous 1,000-mile-trip, up New York’s Hudson River, 380 miles along the Erie Canal and eventually, by horse-drawn wagon, to Portage Wisconsin.

John Muir eventually walked to Florida, in hopes of sailing to Brazil to retrace the footsteps of naturalist Baron Von Humboldt. Unfortunately (?) he contracted Malaria and his doctor recommended that he go to California. He sailed to Cuba and later to Panama, where he crossed the Isthmus and sailed up the West Coast, landing in San Francisco in March 1868. In his only reference to the sea voyage he wrote, “Never had I seen such a barbarous mob, especially at meals.” After landing in San Francisco, he walked south to Pacheco Pass, across the San Joaquin Valley to Yosemite Valley.

Although he could not have known it at the time his walk would be what Thoreau called a “saunter” to the holy land (ala sainte terre). He walked into what he later described as a “cathedral”, eight miles long, one mile wide, one mile high, with stained glass windows, incense cedar, Half Dome altar and the sky for a ceiling. He came down from the mountains like an Old Testament prophet preaching: Repent! Repent! The kingdom of Nature is at hand!

In an amazing irony he wrote:

“The mountains are fountains of men as well of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature’s work-shops.”

So Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the “Ten Commandments” and Muir came down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains with a spiritual message that has “moved the world.” Although the US National Park Service was not created until 1.5 years after his death, his life and work have become a beacon of light shining around the globe. No other Nature writer has stirred the souls of so many people.

Although Ellis Island wasn’t opened until 1882, I am certain that Muir would have reverberated with what his fellow Scotsmen and Irish immigrants had to endure.

Lowell H. Young, Author: Biodesign Out For A Walk

In Remembrance

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Normandy“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” -Plato

The town of Eindhoven, Holland has no special interest in the 4th of July. It does, however, celebrate each September 17th, greeting each other with the slogan “Remember September!” I know this because, before he died, my foster brother “Rusty” Quirici was annually invited to return to Holland.  He, and any surviving US Army buddies, were treated like royalty.  The reunion ceremonies included Dutch “old-timers” who survived the German invasion leading up to WW II. Their responses were often tearful and included comments like: “Thank you! Thank you GIs! You not only saved our lives, you freed us from the horrible oppression of the evil Hitler. Without your sacrifices, our children would be speaking German.”

They were not mistaken. WWII was the bloodiest war in world history resulting with between 60 and 80 million deaths. The little country of Holland lost over 300,000 people. The American military cemetery near St. Laurent, France has graves of 9,387 US soldiers and a list of 1,557 who are not accounted for. There are 13 additional American cemeteries on foreign soil containing 93,234 graves and 55,860 listed as missing or unaccounted for.  By the end of the war, 420,000 US soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and Coast Guardsmen perished.

Rusty graduated from St. Helena High School in 1943 and did what thousands of young American men did, enlisted for military service. Hitler was leading the Germans on a rampage through Europe and he and his friends felt that they simply had no other choice. His choice, however, was sobering. He joined the US Army with the intention of volunteering for the 101st Airborne Paratrooper Division, also known as “The Screaming Eagles.”  He went through six weeks of boot camp, was assigned to “jump school” and six weeks later was sent to England. Preparations were being made for the US-Allied invasion of France, secretly known as “Operation Overlord,” which began on June 6, 1944 with the “D-Day” invasion.

The primary D-Day invasion, on the beaches of France, resulted in 10,000 casualties, including 2,500 American soldiers.  Shortly after D-Day, the 101st Airborne was assigned the treacherous task of being airlifted and dropped behind the German lines in Holland on September 17, 1944 as part of “Operation Market Garden”, a follow-on to D-Day.  His unit was assigned to destroy roads and bridges that would prevent a possible German retreat.  As they were clearing a German minefield along a key Dutch road, a German landmine exploded and killed all of his squad-mates. The explosion tore a large hole in his back, blew the lower half of one leg off and left him struggling for air.  Miraculously, medics were able to stop the bleeding in his back and leg, perform a field tracheotomy, which restored breathing, and connect with Dutch sympathizers who helped get him to a hospital in England.

When he returned home he was fitted with what would be one of several prosthetic legs, which allowed him to resume a nearly normal life.  In the late 1940s he became the first amputee to earn a private pilot license in California.  He found a career, married, fathered four children and lived a full rich life. We met at family reunions for over 50 years and I never heard him complain about his compromised life-style, but was quietly proud of the fact that the sacrifices he made helped alter the fate of Western civilization.

Every year, on November 11, I take time to pause, reflect and offer prayers of gratitude for all of the men and women who paid the ultimate price of “laying down their lives” to protect my freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HR6mj3Cexs

Lowell H. Young, Author: Biodesign Out For A Walk.

Love Lessons

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Love Lessons “Into this one mountain Nature gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion.” – John Muir

 

 

Fans of John Muir clearly understand that his love of nature stirred every fiber of his being. For him, nature was not only a pathway to the universe, but also a pathway of enrichment for personal and interpersonal communion and spiritual growth.In the sphere of human biology, there are countless millions of examples of making love and only one involves the genre of sexual reproduction. And, while a huge amount of time and treasure are spent pursuing carnal love, pursuing the platonic virtues of compassion, tolerance, forgiveness and soul-nurturing are profoundly important.

Corey Rich’s glorious photo celebrates life at so many levels (pun intended). If love is a verb then that is exactly what these young people are up to.  Whether climbing partners, siblings, lovers or soul-mates, these two must have made a verbal (or tacit) pledge to love, honor and support each other (if necessary) “until death do them part.” The simple fact is that they needed each other for this monumental moment to occur. She needed him to carry out his part and he needed her to do her part. It should not be surprising to look at this photo as a metaphor for marriage; total mutual commitment is required on the journey to higher physical, mental and spiritual ground. The payoff is views and experiences that neither could experience without the other.

I don’t k now if she is reading, The Wilderness World of John Muir, but I am certain Muir would rejoice to see the latest climbing equipment and females joining in the celebration.

I don’t know if any couples have been married on the face of El Capitan, but I do know that Shawn Reeder recorded a wedding on a Half Dome ledge.

http://www.shawnreeder.net/blog.php?bid=154

Also, several years ago, a soon-to-be bride and groom, best man, maid-of-honor, able-bodied family, friends and pastor all made the 10-mile trek from Yosemite Valley to the top of half Dome for a wedding celebration. No word if champagne and gorp were served to guests after the wedding vows were exchanged.

While researching this post, I found Reverend Carol Dewey who lives near Yosemite in the town of Mariposa, Ca. http://www.weddingsinyosemite.com/.  I chatted with her and found out that she officiates at weddings throughout Yosemite and even did two weddings on top of Half Dome last year.

John Muir would have rejoiced in all of this as he considered Half Dome as the High Altar appropriately situated at the east end of his Yosemite Cathedral. Truly a prophet, Muir predicted that Yosemite would become a favorite place where lovers would be drawn “into close and confiding communion.”

The eminent anthropologist/humanitarian Loren Eiseley fully appreciated this concept by suggesting that he was less concerned about man conquering nature than about nature, in the form of God, conquering the human heart.  When this happens, he asserts, men lack vision and inspiration and cease to be fully-functional human beings.

Lowell Harrison Young, Author: Biodesign out For A Walk