By
Marcelo Gleiser,
The
boy inserted his fishing rod into a plastic pipe secured deep in the sand. The
surf was low and the sun was already setting behind his back. Gone were the
girls in scant bikinis and the muscular guys playing volleyball. Copacabana
beach lay bare in front of him, a perfect, golden horseshoe. Here and there,
older fishermen tried their luck along the beach, retired men in their sixties
and seventies with little to do, their skin leathered from years under the
tropical sun, beer bellies bursting out of their shorts. They all knew the
persistent eleven-year-old who would come three or four times a week to the
same spot with devout discipline. The routine was always the same: he’d string
three hooks to the end of the line and carefully load each with a small piece
of sardine. Then he would run to the water with the rod behind his back and
cast the line as far as he could beyond the breaking surf. After placing the
rod into the pipe, he’d sit down on the sand and wait. He paid little attention
to the older men. Entranced, he shifted his gaze back and forth from the
distant horizon to the tip of the rod. He didn’t know then why he had to fish.
But he knew he did. Alone.
Usually,
he’d go home stinking of bait and empty-handed, or at best with a meager catch
of a small catfish or a cocoroca, a bony relative of the sergeant fish common
off the beaches of Rio. His older brothers would smirk, clamping their noses,
amused at the boy’s stubbornness. But not on that day. Two large silvery
shadows darted fifty feet away, high on a wave. The boy retrieved his line
quickly, hooked some fresh bait, and cast right behind where he had spotted the
pair.
For
ten minutes, nothing happened. Discouraged, the boy started to retrieve the
line. Suddenly, he felt a strong tug. The bamboo rod bent in half with a fury
he had never seen before. His arms turned rubbery. “It’s a shark!” he yelled.
“It’s a shark!” Two older fishermen nearby dropped their rods and came closer.
It had been years since someone had caught a shark there. The boy ran to the
water’s edge, holding on to the rod with all his might, trying to reel line in.
But he could hardly turn the handle. “It’s gonna snap! The line is gonna snap!”
shouted one of the men. “Give up some line, boy! Let the fish run!” The boy,
trembling head to toe, released the reel’s lock. Line swished out as the fish
tried to regain control of his destiny. The mighty predator had become prey to
an even mightier predator, a stunned eleven-year-old boy. After some ten
minutes of give and take, the boy finally reeled the fish ashore. It wasn’t a
shark. But it was big, bigger than anything he had ever caught or seen anyone
catch at Copacabana beach. Silvery, flat on the sides with a large yellow tail
fin; probably a young albacore, weighting about eight pounds, a beautiful
creature to behold.
The
older men circled the boy, amazed at the sight. Bursting with pride, the boy
collected his equipment and tried to shove the fish headfirst into his bag. It
wouldn’t fit. The V-shaped tail stuck out as he walked the two blocks back
home, pretending not to notice the looks of amazement from the passersby. He
opened the door to his apartment and placed the fish on the kitchen counter.
The cook, a large black woman in her fifties, came running in. “Lindaura, look
what I caught for dinner tonight!” the boy said. “Grandpa is coming, right?”
The cook eyed the fish with incredulity. “You caught this down by the beach?”
The boy beamed. “I did. And no one helped me either. I wanna see who’s gonna
make fun of my fishing now.”
It
took me over thirty years to reconnect with that boy.
Life
took me adrift and I forgot all about that young boy and his big fish. My head
turned upward to the Universe, and I became a theoretical physicist, interested
in questions that, not long ago, wouldn’t have been considered scientific: How
did the Universe come to be? What about all the matter that makes up stars,
planets, and people? And life? Can we ever hope to understand how inanimate
atoms first joined together to become living things, and then thinking brains?
And if life took hold here, could it exist elsewhere? Could there be other
thinking beings out there in the immensity of the cosmos? Even as a teenager, I
marveled at the fact that such fundamental questions about existence could be
answered in rational ways, without invoking supernatural agency. At the very
least we could try to answer them, if not in their entirety, at least in part.
The value, I realized, was in the trying, in being a participant in this
continuous process of discovery we call science.
I
now nderstand that those long afternoons of fishing and contemplation were a
prelude to what was about to come. After all, fishing teaches us to be patient,
tolerant, humble—key qualities needed in research. How often do fishermen go to
the water with their rods, dreaming of the day’s catch, only to come home
empty-handed? Likewise, how often do scientists passionately explore an idea
for days, weeks, months, years even, only to be forced to accept that it leads
nowhere? Notwithstanding the frequent failures, and just as in fishing, they
keep coming back, even if the odds for success are pretty low. The thrill is in
beating the odds, occasionally landing a big fish or an idea that reveals
something new about the world.
In
fishing and in science we flirt with the elusive. We stare at the water, and
sometimes we see a fish stir underneath the surface or even jump, betraying its
presence. But the watery world is not our own, and we can only conjecture about
what really goes on down there, polarized lenses and all. The line and the hook
are our probes into this other realm, which we perceive only very imperfectly.
“Nature
loves to hide,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote some twenty-five
centuries back. We see very little of what really goes on around us. Science is
our probe into invisible realms, be it the world of the very small, of
bacteria, of atoms, of elementary particles, or the world of the very large, of
stars, galaxies, and even the Universe as a whole. We see these through our
tools of exploration—our reality amplifiers—the telescopes, the microscopes,
and the many other instruments of detection, the rod and line of the natural
scientist. If we are persistent, once in a while we see Nature stir, even jump,
revealing the simple beauty of the unexpected.
This is an excerpt from The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected:
A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything.
That is so good , Thanks you for sharing . .. . .
ReplyDeletePlease click to play,if you wanna join casino online. Thank you
gclub
โกลเด้นสล็อต
บาคาร่าออนไลน์