Excerpt from novel, Two Trains Running

Chapter 16, from Two Trains Running

Bill was a biologist. He’d done a world of things in his life, not all of them pretty, but he’d finally decided to study life.

            People struggle to find a line of work that can keep them satisfied, fuel their interests, and maybe provide a living. Bill became convinced that the study of life had to be the greatest endeavor you could set for yourself. People were born, lived, and then died, as sure as the snake captured the neck of the mouse. We were caught up in the middle of it all; it surrounded us, this life.

            Yet, in the middle of the grandeur so many people schemed like petty scriveners, apparently oblivious of any of this green and pulsing panorama.

            At first it was the microscopic, it was the utter fascination of being able to peer into an entirely foreign world; foreign, yet a world that crept on your skin, and teemed in the tiny pools on littered sidewalks or in the rain filled footprints of moose or bear or fisherman. There were ecosystems in a drop or a dust mote. There were ecosystems in the colony of cells that composed the body of a bear, or a mite, or a blazing anemone, or a plant, or a human. The alarming activity that took place inside a single cell sitting on the tip of a vine climbing up some old oak tree deep in the forest and reaching toward the sun was enough to alert him to a life worth leading. This view of life was how Darwin had seen it; and what a view it was. It went from the microscopic and finally to the macroscopic until it seemed to encompass the whole panoply of life. The world buzzed for him like no electric sizzler frying the flies could.

            Tromping through the forest or tramping up a mountain the microscopic world would ever be with him. He could almost hear the movement at that fine level as sure as he heard the cicadas banging about in the bush. Then there were times when the whole sphere of the earth seemed to be nothing more than a cell in a larger body.

            And still it was all lost on a people who saw only the tips of the trees.

            It was clear that humanity knew nothing. But science seemed like a way to know something. The knowledge was just crumbs falling off the table, he knew. But it was nice putting things to the test. Once you were convinced that nature was the overarching dome of your life, and that not to understand it, or at least not to try to understand it, was to suffer a kind of eternal death, it became the simplest step to ask questions of it, and when no answers were forthcoming, to devise the answers and build the tests that would see if the predictions came true.

            It was so much like play, but with so much more reward Bill thought.