Bunch of Amateurs (30 page)

There are several Indian creation stories about coming out of ice. The Paiute tell one that ends this way:

Many Native American origin accounts involve coming out of ice, which certainly fits into all the theories of America’s human origins. So why aren’t these stories studied the way Ingstad examined his own sagas? Why is the benefit of the doubt given to the scientists’ story? It’s quite possible that every objective fact that went into the telling of this new “scientific” pre-Clovis story is not true at all—only a factoidlike projection of racial anxiety—and are more “mythic” than the creation story the Indians are telling.

Part of the problem of reading either of these stories is that we no longer have a capacity to appreciate the real power of myth. Most of us are reared to think of myth as an anthology of dead stories of some long-ago culture: Edith Hamilton making bedtime stories out of Greek myths; Richard Wagner making art out of Norse myth; fundamentalist Christians making trouble out of Scripture.

When we read ancient stories or Holy Writ or founding epics, we forget that the original audience who heard these accounts did not differentiate between mythic and factual storytelling. Nor did these stories have authors, as we conceive them. Stories arose from the collective culture, accrued a kind of truth over time. For that reason alone, they were sacred and had real power to move people. Belief is what keeps any tribe together.

Today we’ve split storytelling into two modes—fiction and nonfiction. And we’ve split our reading that way as well.

The idea of the lone author writing truth has completely vanquished the other side of storytelling—the collectively conjured account. I think we still have these stories, but we just don’t recognize them for what they are. Tiny anxieties show up as urban legends. In the late 1980s when the queasily mortal idea of organ donation was infiltrating the social mainstream, suddenly one heard an author-less story of a man waking up in a Times Square flat after a night of partying to find a stitched wound on his lower back and his kidney missing.

Enduring myth can be based on fact, as in Ingstad’s case. But often the collective account needs no factual basis, just a mild apprehension that the world is not quite what it seems. No one has ever found a razor blade in an apple at Halloween, nor has any doctor treated anyone for gerbilling. Bill Gates is not giving away computers, and the sewers of New York are gator-free. The story of the Ancient European One is this kind of story, toggling back and forth between the world of fiction and nonfiction, authored by a few curious facts and the collective anxiety of the majority.

Because we no longer read mythological stories, we no longer appreciate their immense power. We find ourselves stunned at how something so many deeply long to be true will simply assemble itself into fact right before our eyes. The scientists who eventually won control of Kennewick’s bones have been studying them now for ten
years. What have they learned? Well, they don’t like to talk about it much. The only new idea that has been made public is an analysis of levels of mineral deposits in the bones, suggesting Kennewick was buried intentionally. Great.

More recently, Chatters has reverted to his incoherent ways, happily agreeing that the anachronistic word “European” aptly describes the skeleton. I’ve heard him celebrate “Solutrean Pride” and cheerfully joke with racist radio hosts who sneeringly refer to Native Americans as “Berengians” and guffaw at declaring February to be “Solutrean History Month.” The scientists have discovered almost nothing of Kennewick, but the growing band of amateurs they set loose have conjured a new and powerful creation myth. And if they profoundly long to believe that men of Caucasoid extraction toured here sixteen thousand years ago in Savile Row suits, ate gourmet cuisine, and explored the Pacific Northwest with their intact pre-Christianized families until the marauding horde of war-whooping Mongoloid injuns came descending pell-mell from their tribal haunts to drive Cascade points into European hips until they fell, one after another, in the earliest and most pitiful campaign of ethnic cleansing, then that is what science will painstakingly prove, that is what the high courts will evenhandedly affirm, and that is what in time ever more amateurs will happily come to believe.

n the crane shot of this moment, from high above the walnut trees in a large backyard in rural Oregon, the camera would come in on a ninety-two-year-old hippie, with long, snowy hair neatly tied off in a perfect ponytail, lightly bobbing up and down on tiptoes all around a workbench—capering, really, like a geriatric satyr. Seated at that workbench is his student, me, sweating in a T-shirt and scrubbing what looks like a two-layer cake made of opaque glass.

“No, NO, NO!” he screams. “Straight up and down! Along the sides!” His voice is so attenuated with age it registers as an old woman’s. You might think he is in a true fit of pique, except that it’s impossible to miss the sly grin occasionally cracking through his chiseled face. Fit and svelte, with an elfin body, the old man has on Air Max Nikes with a nicely creased pair of khakis tucked into high white athletic socks. Despite the warm summer air, he wears a billowing
North Face jacket. He reminds me constantly that I am embarking on serious work—the figuring of a telescope lens—a piece of work that will, in the end, require that my range of error be “one-one-thousandth the width of Saran Wrap.” His name is John Dobson, and he is probably the most famous and successful amateur anything. A former monk of the Ramakrishna Order in the Vedanta Monastery in San Francisco, Dobson was kicked out some sixty years ago for not devoting enough time to his commitment but also because he realized that his cosmological desire in life was not to contemplate the universe but to teach others how to look at it—with really cheap, really big, easily made telescopes.

At the time he started, in the mid-1950s, the only kind of telescope one could get readily was the store-bought model often advertised in the back of magazines and comic books. It stood on an aluminum tripod and was a tube a little thicker than a paper-towel roll. The mirror—the key piece of any telescope—might be two inches in diameter. If you were lucky and your daddy rich, you might get one that was four inches. The piece of glass I am beginning to shape—“Straight up and down! Straight up and down!”—is fourteen inches in diameter. (It’s the difference between seeing a big fat moon in your eyepiece and seeing the granular texture inside a crater on that moon.)

Before Dobson came along, if you wanted a bigger telescope, it was possible to build it yourself. The classic text was Jean Texereau’s
How to Make a Telescope
, published in English in 1957. Here’s the chapter summary covering what I’m doing right now:

2. MAKING THE MAIN MIRROR

So I’ll take the yelling.

Half a century ago, when the world first began to notice the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, Dobson made the classic amateur move. He took a technological process that years of expert exclusivity had led everyone to assume was abstruse and esoteric, and he made it simple and available. (Although he did it, not on Haight, but a little farther north, near the Presidio, at the corner of Broderick and Jackson.) Where serious astronomers insisted on certain types of glass and procedures and mounts, Dobson figured out that with a cheap piece of porthole glass, some sand, a large cardboard tube, and an eyepiece unscrewed from a pair of used binoculars at the Salvation Army, he could jimmy together a telescope that rivaled those found in major universities. In the intervening half century, Dobson has inspired generations of uncredentialed enthusiasts to prowl the heavens.

While it’s worth stating the obvious—that the university professors of astronomy and the big guns at NASA, the European Space Agency, and increasingly the Chinese National Space Agency are the primary leaders in astronomical exploration—there is a Dobsonian army of amateurs out there, and their current work is changing once again the nature of the backyard telescope and even some of the cutting edge issues regarding outer space.

The essence of a good telescope mirror hasn’t really changed since Galileo shaped an objective lens out of glass and formed the kind of telescope (refractor, to get technical) once called a spyglass and now associated with pirates. During the Enlightenment it also became
popular to grind a concave curve into a piece of glass and then silver-coat it into a mirror (a reflector) that could focus the image and throw it to an eyepiece and then to your eyeball. The trick was to scoop out this chunk of glass to form a parabolic dimple and do it precisely. Dobson began with the simple idea that if you rub one blank piece of glass, as flat and round as a layer of cake, onto another with certain repetitive motions (“straight up and down” and “along the sides, you’re going to ruin this thing!”), one piece of glass will develop an indentation, which will eventually become your mirror. The other piece will develop a bulge and become what is known as your “tool.”

This work is advanced by tossing some sand in there to scour the glass. When Dobson started doing this, he got regular sand and sifted it himself into various sizes using different gauges of window screens. Now he’s upgraded to buying Carborundum, a fine black grit that comes in extremely precise gauges—80 Carborundum is sifted through a screen that has eighty tiny holes per inch. A teaspoon of Carborundum sprinkled on the glass with a little cool water is like setting thousands of little blades to work with each stroke. As the mirror gets closer and closer to the final shape, the gauge of Carborundum increases to, say, 900. This is why when Dobson refers to error margins measured in fractions of Saran Wrap thickness, he means it.

When I plunked the top piece of glass onto the other and he heard a glassy click, Dobson freaked.

“No, NO, NO,” shouted my guru, back in his normal rant state. “Slide it on, don’t drop it.” He bobbled off, huffing and muttering like a querulous grandmother. I hurled myself, carefully, back into my work. Getting this mirror into shape would take about three days of sweat equity. I applied the grit and started pushing the heavy glass up and down. It made a monstrous noise, so I often could barely make out Dobson’s reedy voice as he changed tempo to one of merry
commentary. “Carborundum is star dust. We’re using star dust to look at star dust,” he said, in one of his many Zen koan–like notes. Carborundum is silicon carbide, he explained, manufactured naturally in the Orion nebula.

“We get ours at a closer outlet,” he chirped. Dobson speaks in a singsong voice when he’s in commentary mode. It’s a prophet’s voice. “Star dust, we are,” he actually said to me. Our pop culture has made it mandatory that all gurus affect a singular style, but I see now that this is based on reality. Dobson shifts in and out of several modes, like pull-stops on a mood organ: cosmic paradoxes, corny jokes, and fake volcanic rage—the standard rhetorical strategies of most gurus, I suspect, from Plato to Yoda.