Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1865) Ch. 10

Lewis Carroll, 1832 – 1898

"Tales From The Underbrush" documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that has experienced them.

The artist proposes to post monthly herein a new chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry documents the start of it all.

THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.

Confucius

While the tales within this book are in no particular chronological order, most of them have to do with life spent as a geologist, or at least they describe some of my experiences in the bush. But as with everything, there is a beginning, not always perceived at the time nor perhaps identified until an ending is near or at least apparent. In my case my sojourn into geology had a definite and memorable beginning.

It was 1958 and I was aimlessly adrift. Robbed of an Air Force career as a pilot due to near sightedness, I had enrolled in Montreal’s McGill University in the Faculty of Engineering, almost by default and under a less than rigorously defined and untested assumption that commerce did not particularly interest or perhaps suit me, and that I was certainly not intending to indulge in any of the professions that an arts degree might offer. This latter philosophy proved particularly ironic in later years, meaning now, when my interest in art became intense as have my efforts to become a serious artist.

But that is now and not the then of which I wish to speak. A freshman student enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering was still several years away from the time when specialization in a particular engineering discipline would be chosen, be it civil, mechanical, electrical or whatever. In the meantime engineering students in the initial years of study were required to take a certain number of obligatory non-engineering courses such as English or history. In addition to these were other non-engineering courses that were required to fill the curriculum but could be chosen from a list of options.

Scanning the list of options I debated a number of these before deciding on Geology 101, an introductory general course on geological principles and earth history that would cover a wide range of subject matter in that discipline. The underlying reason for this choice was both vaguely general in nature but with underlying specificities. Oh, come, come my good man! There is no room for such pretentious and esoteric drivel in a journal of such scholarly intent. What I meant to say was that I had always liked geography, particularly the field of physical geography. In fact, I had excelled in the subject all through public school, an academic achievement that was almost singular in its nature. Moreover, I had always loved the outdoors, what we used to call nature but what has been re-branded as the environment, in much the same fashion as used cars have been re-branded as “pre-owned.” A complete and useless waste of time but good for printers if you have to alter signs and letterheads, or if you are a scientist looking for funding grants for an old concept branded as new. Geology 101 seemed therefore to be a solid choice as an optional non-engineering course and one that might be useful if I chose to pursue a civil engineering career. It also occurred to me that I might stand an excellent chance of booking a good mark, a calculated presumption I could not apply to many other courses I was to take.

As an urban university with a large student population, introductory “101” courses of whatever nature at McGill, be they English, history, geology or whatever, were invariably well attended and held in auditoriums with seating capacities often in the range of three to four hundred students. Thus, sitting for a course in such an environment was somewhat like attending a concert, although usually quieter and most often more boring. Such an environment also limits the opportunity for dialogue between the lecturer and the audience, since sixty minutes divided by 300 students is, well, you do the math, but you get my point. Throw in the timidity-shyness factor and it is only the aggressive and super keen student who normally dares to raise an arm in question. The chances of response often depend on the time left in the lecture and the professor’s attitude.

When you come right down to it, “101” courses were mainly exercises in listening…………..and various degrees of note taking. This latter quickly developed into a science in its own right, highly dependent on agility, adaptability, and the development of a personal style and form that might rival hieroglyphics or the Enigma code in its complexity and decipherability. As preamble, it might be useful to note that all through primary and high school I had achieved near perfect marks for the quality of my writing, not necessarily in its content, but in its form and legibility. By the time I was half way through university, my writing had deteriorated to the level of medical prescription scrawl.

The whole process of note taking was almost entirely dependent on the particular course requirement and the dictates of the professor giving the course. Under some circumstances, note taking during a lecture was a fairly relaxed and simple undertaking, augmenting any hand-out notes, copying topic headings from a blackboard or slide screen, noting book references, or just emphasizing particular points of the lecture that might strike your fancy. Moving up the scale of effort and hardship was the circumstance where there were no hand-out notes or there were an abundance of topic and sub-topic headings to copy, in addition to sections of the lecture where the professor might advise that close attention be paid and detailed notes taken on some topic deemed to be particularly important. Finally on the hardship scale there was the ugly extreme where all semblances of recognizable English writing, grammar and form all but completely disappeared in a hail of frenzied scribbling. Fortunately, over the course of my university career, such occurrences were minimal, but sadly often enough to permanently ruin my writing if not my passion for learning. One such example is worth mentioning however, if for no other reason than for its abject stupidity and complete absence of learning achievement.

I think it was sometime in my second year at McGill that I found myself taking a course in physical chemistry, a discipline that essentially studies the dynamics of chemical systems by applying the principles of physics to those systems. For reasons I later came to suspect were obligatory in nature, attendance in this course was sufficiently large to warrant its presentation in one of the auditoriums on campus. The professor, whose name I have gratefully forgotten, would stride into the room and without greeting or salutation of any kind, never mind an introduction, launch into his lecture, head lowered and reading verbatim from notes with few if any graphics that I remember. In fairness to him, on the very first day of the course, he had taken all of about sixty seconds to tell the assembled unwashed that all his exams would involve the entire, exact and specific regurgitation of parts of his lectures, in absolute verbatim form, no hand-outs to be distributed in advance thank you very much! Those students who failed to heed this warning loosely veiled as advice invariably failed the course, no matter how brilliant were their general academic abilities. It was one of the most futile and stupid exercises I have ever had to undertake. Whether this was meant to represent some form of arrogance, ego, laziness, insecurity, or all of the above, I was never to determine. The approach certainly represented the lowest form of learning and indeed with me, achieved the opposite effect that I assume it was meant to. For me, nothing was ever directly learned from the course, at least nothing that I consciously remember. I did however sufficiently overcome the hand cramps and concentration fatigue to actually pass the course exams, a feat that was not easily matched by many, the course having a traditionally high failure rate.

A particular aspect I do remember however was that each lecture’s notes had a specific lifespan after which they became illegible. It was as if they had a time delay fuse attached that when the fuse expired, the notes blew up, or that the notes were radioactive with a very short half life before they expired. Maddeningly, this meant that in order for the course’s verbatim standard to be maintained, the lecture notes invariably had to be re-done in order to preserve their legibility over the length of the course leading to exams. It was like taking each lecture twice, a depressing practice. But that was an example of the worst extreme. What follows is the example of the best.

The hubbub of noise that some three hundred students can make quickly settled down as a tall, erect and broad-shouldered figure with a silver moustache and equally silver lion’s mane hair strode to the lectern, seemingly bereft of any signs of supporting documentation. Gazing around at his audience with a somewhat imperious but friendly demeanour he said, “Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I’m Tom Clark and I hope you are all here because you want to be.” That was it, the entire introduction to the course and its exams. What followed in the ensuing weeks was shear joy, a learning experience of unparalleled proportions, the poetry and dance of the earth’s history revealed as legends of scientific truth passed on to us by a masterful story teller. Each lecture was always the same; Tom Clark in love with his subject and happily enthusiastic to share his vast knowledge and experience with a bunch of kids.

Over the entire length of the course, Clark never consulted any notes and I never was to take any…………………not a single word! I was too enthralled to write, to busy listening and devouring slides and diagrams, my notebook forgotten and unused, my senses dry sponges into which poured copious liquids of learning. Tom Clark’s Geology 101 class was one of the few I have ever taken that, unless prevented by scheduling conflicts, never failed to run into overtime and with few students opting to leave until all questions levied had been responded to. And many questions there always were. It was that sort of atmosphere where the nature of the topic, the manner of its presentation and the excitement of learning all engendered large and confident audience response, even by the shyer specimens in attendance.

I don’t recall Dr. Clark ever giving any exam guide lines, any advice on what to study, or any warnings about the repeatability of his lectures for exam purposes. I am sure he knew that he did not have to resort to such matters, for he had captured our attention and concentration in a manner that had completely opened the channels of learning and optimized our capabilities to retain the subject matter. In this regard the styles of Tom Clark and the physical chemistry professor could not have been more dramatically different, nor could have been their learning results. Retention versus transient mimicry. Clark must have been doing something right. He became almost geological in his longevity, finally slipping away back to the earth he loved at the ripe age of 103.

While over the course of my university career I experienced the usual mix of professors whose teaching abilities clustered around both sides of the mean, I was only to encounter one other professor who approached Tom Clark’s stature, and who similarly engendered from his students high levels of the hunger, curiousity and enthusiasm to learn. As it so happened, he was also a professor of geology. He was The Chief but that perhaps remains for another tale.

Oh by the way. In case you had not already guessed, I quickly abandoned engineering the next year and took up geology, the profession that has dominated most of my life since that time. While it sometimes is necessary to recognize an ending in order to identify its beginning, that has not been necessary for me. Very quickly I came to know that taking Tom Clark’s Geology 101 course was the true beginning of the beginning of my career as a geologist.

“A great flame follows a little spark.”

Dante

Copyright © 2008 Ian de W. Semple