matching tracksuits

The first camera I remember owning was one our family bought at Sears just before a trip to California in 1984. I believe it was even a Sears brand; it seemed terribly fancy for a twelve-year-old, though it was just a point and shoot.

The next camera I remember was an SLR manual focus that I borrowed from a friend. I took some pictures of birds, but I don’t think I ever developed those shots.

It wasn’t until I went to Poland in 1996 that I became seriously interested in photography. I took a Canon point and shoot with me, but I quickly discovered its limitations. I headed to the market and bought a Zenit — a Russian made SLR that could drive nails. Literally.

K’s first camera was a Russian view finder that I can’t even recall the name of. She moved to Zenit and Nikon; I replaced my Zenit with a succession of Nikon and Canon manual and auto focus cameras.

Finally, K and I ended up with our current primary: a Nikon D70s, which was fairly cutting edge when we bought it. Since then, we’ve added a couple of lenses to our collection and have a whole bag of glass to carry around.

Friday, we pack our things and head to Charleston for a day of wandering about the city, stopping at cafes for coffee, taking pictures, and simply experiencing one of America’s most historic cities. We arrive and I glance in the back.

“Where’d you put the camera?” I’d been packing our bikes and related materials. I assumed…

“I didn’t get it. I thought you…”

We look at each other for a moment.

What to do?

Simple: enjoy Charleston without a camera. Life without a camera is possible.

In the meantime, Nana and Papa took the Girl to the serpentarium. Nana and Papa remembered their camera…

Wednesday afternoon, Nana and Papa arrive for a short stay on their way down to visit friends in Florida. It’s lovely to see them, but just as lovely is the prospect of having sitters for the Girl.

The day begins as it usually does: breakfast and the beach. This time, L makes a friend. They dig in the sand together, build things together, destroy things together.

Then the girl heads to the water. We’re hopeful: maybe L will see her friend playing in the surf and think, “Hey, maybe I’ll give that a try.” Maybe, but not likely.

Still, with L occupied and Nana and Papa there to keep an eye on her, K and I do something we hadn’t done all week: go swimming together. Papa obliges our photo request and does a fine job.

The afternoon brings more babysitting — what to do? It’s not that we’re thrilled to be free of L, but we are. In a sense. Every time we’re without her, the same things happen: a strange sense of freedom from obligation followed very quickly by a quirky little tinge of emptiness.

Before the tinge sets in, we get in kayaks for a quick tour of the marshlands.

It has been over ten years — closer to fifteen — since I’ve been in a kayak, but I still keep my arm straight by my side when the guide asks, “Who has little to no experience in a kayak?” Surely it’s like riding a bike. What’s there to worry about? The greatest danger in a paid tour would be raising my paddle too high, dripping water onto my lap.

We set off, and sure enough, K and I are pros.

Lindsey, our guide, stops frequently to explain the flora and fauna about us.

“How many think that’s mud on the banks?” she asks. Some of us would probably raise our hands if we weren’t so busy paddling. Lindsey explains that it is, in fact, hundreds of years of decayed marsh grass (I can’t recall the name of the grass). It’s also floating about in the water, and this is the primary component of the mussels’ diet.

A couple of times, Lindsey has us back our canoes into the bank while she discusses the environment in detail, and answers questions.

The pressing question: Alligators? Generally, none in the marshes — they stick to fresh water and keep themselves as far away from humans as possible.

It’s from Lindsey that we learn about pelicans’ potential for eye damage due to diving for fish.

As with the spider wasp, that lays its eggs in a paralyzed, still active spider so that its young can feast on the still-living spider, it strikes me as a particularly cruel twist.

Our first view of the marsh behind our little cabin was at high tide: a sea of greenish water with twigs sticking out. We wait for low tide, wondering just how far down the water will draw.

The next morning, our answer:

I go out into the muck, make a quick discovery, then rush back for the girls. “You’ve got to see this,” I tell L, wondering if she’ll be as fascinated as I hope she’ll be.

In the briny muck left behind, fiddler crabs roam about, the males waving their enormous claw, clamoring for the attention of the females.

“Their name derives from the motions they make when they eat,” our kayaking guide will tell us later. “They raise their small claw up to their mouths very rhythmically, and juxtaposed to their large claw — which is used for nothing other than attracting females — it looks like they’re playing a fiddle.”

L watches, and she’s immediately fascinated. It’s a fascination that will continue through the vacation, especially at Botany Bay. In the meantime, though, it’s beach time, and the Girl is ready for more digging in the sand.

K and I insist on a hat for L, and with her Dora sunglasses, she proclaims, “I’m a movie star!” Judging from our YouTube account, I think I’d have to agree.

After a nap and some lunch, we decide it’s time to explore downtown Edisto Island (inasmuch as there is a downtown) and get some ice cream. When we arrived, we drove about a bit, looking for the marina and shopping district we’d heard about, but all we found were million dollar beach-front homes and tourists like ourselves.

A slower pace should help.

In the end, it takes us almost an hour to find the small marina tucked in the corner of the island. All the while, we’ve heard the same mantra from the bike trailer. “I want ice cream!” and it’s a relief when we find a tackle shop with a small freezer.

“I want blue!” L proclaims. It’s a common combination, food and color. She often pulls out our pots and pans to make soup and proclaims, “I’m making blue zupa!” combining the majority English with a single Polish word — another habit.

We take a quick walk down the short marina, pondering the prices of the boats and the careers of people who can afford $200k boats and $130k slips to moor them. To be able to afford such expensive toys would be a dream and a nightmare, I’m sure. K and I play the age old game of “What would we do if we were rich” as we walk along, and boats and expensive cars never come up. Living off the grid; having the fiscal freedom to live wherever we want; knowing that L’s education is paid for — these are the things we talk about. And maybe one or two toys…

Satisfied with the wealth we do have — health, jobs, a happy family — we head back through the swamps.

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This was the afternoon activity for our first morning on the beach. I didn’t combine the posts because I had yet to transfer the pictures from the small Canon we borrowed from Nana and Papa.

The first few days, we spent our afternoons on bikes, with L in a trailer. The state park at Edisto Island has a few miles of packed-shell bike paths with wooden bridges over the marshes. After negotiating the treacherous sand access road (riding on sand without knobby tires is much like riding in slushy snow that’s layered atop pure ice: there’s as much lateral movement — sometimes the front tire, sometimes the rear, sometimes both simultaneously — at times as there is forward movement), it was really a pleasure.

Who would enjoy riding in an environment like this?

No strenuous climbs, as it was coastal terrain. No merciless sun, as it was all in a forest filled with Live Oaks and Spanish Moss. It was, in every sense, leisurely riding.

Several friends thought we were nuts to go cycling in a South Carolina July. The ocean breeze combined with unseasonably cool weather, though, and it was an absolute joy. Except for the sandy road.

Our first destination: a prehistoric oyster shell bank. No one knows the significance of the location; no one knows why Native Americans chose this particular spot to eat oysters (and lots of them). But we do know that the mound is some ten percent of its size when discovered by Spanish explorers in the seventeenth century.

Perhaps this was inspiration for Lewis Carroll:

‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,
‘Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed –
Now, if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.’

Or perhaps not. All the same, it was a frabjous day, and we chortled in our joy all the way back to the cabin.

Sam Harris, author of the excellent The End of Faith, has an op-ed in the New York Times about Obama’s selection of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health.

Collins is famous for his work leading the Human Genome project as well as his stance that there exists “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between science and Christianity. While he is not a proponent of Intelligent Design, Dr. Collins believes both Genesis and Darwin. Harris explained it thus:

What follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture on science and belief that Dr. Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?” (Source)

Harris is concerned about this blending of religion and science. He writes that when Collins is

challenged with alternative accounts of these phenomena — or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent or, indeed, absent — Dr. Collins will say that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of his existence at all.

Similarly, Dr. Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to his perfectly moral character and to his desire to have fellowship with every member of our species. But when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.

In short, Harris is worried about the fact that, when it comes to the moral dimension of the universe, Collins ceases being a scientist and becomes a theologian. Certainly the statement “God’s will is a mystery” is not something that can be tested scientifically, Harris rightly points out.

But Harris is up to more, though. He rightly points out that this view of creation — evolution to one point, divine spark-of-morality injection at another — recreates an age-old problem: the mind-body problem.

Just how is the mind/soul connected to the body? Where does one end and the other begin? Things we’ve traditionally thought of as part of the mind/soul (such as personality) are oddly susceptible to influence through physical media. The most famous example is Phineas Gage, a railway who, through a series of unfortunate events, had a railroad stake placed in his skull. He survived, but was never the same. He changed. Instead of the kind, fun-loving Gage, he became a foul-mouthed, short-tempered jerk. His personality changed through violent manipulation of his brain. It kind of indicates that personality is not an aspect of the soul.

Contemporary examples abound. As a teacher, I see it every day: Ritalin. Over-medicate a child on Ritalin and you’ll get a somber, introverted, sleepy individual; get it just right, and you’ll get a “normal” person; under-medicate and you’ll get someone almost bouncing off the walls. When I was in school, this would have all been chalked up to “personality.”

This is exactly what Harris has in mind when he writes,

Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc.

As someone who believes that our understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr. Collins’s line of thinking. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?

Dr. Collins sees morality as an element of the soul; Harris points out that this is untestable and amounts to a re-introduction of the mind/body problem into contemporary science. It’s an insightful point, and Harris builds to this point very effectively.

It’s a tricky issue. Religious beliefs are often bedrock beliefs: they inform and shape other beliefs. Would we want a Christian Scientist in the role, someone who believes that all ailments are spiritual, figments of an unenlightened imagination?

But will Collins’ religious beliefs affect his scientific reasoning? I’m not convinced, like Harris, that it will. It didn’t when he was director of the Human Genome Project. Then again, Sam Harris is a long-tailed atheist in a Christian rocking chair country: he’s more than a little skittish, and often justifiably so.

Source: Gary Stern, at Blogging Religiously.