I wasn’t thrilled on the first morning of my required college biology class. I was a music major and my most recent bio class experience, in high school. was a nightmare for me, from being forced to harm an innocent frog to fainting during a film on open heart surgery and waking up on the floor to hear the teacher yelling at me for rocking back in my chair (which only happened because I fainted). She never even asked me if I was okay.
My earlier science experiences at least were nicer, including having been invited with a few other kids in the district to attend a free weeks-long science adventure program. Our teacher, the program’s creator (appropriately named Mr. Vines) was most kind. The best of our adventures was an entire morning on a deep sea fishing boat. I didn’t like hurting fish and recoiled at having to put a worm on a hook, but was thrilled to sail on an enormous boat into the Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by gentle winds and quietly beautiful water and sky.
Yet despite having experienced at least some of the beauty of science studies growing up, I was worried about this college class. On the first day the youngish and unintimidating Dr. Bamforth talked to us, and that’s mostly what I remember about the class. I don’t remember a textbook, and there were no dissections. But I wasn’t bored, so the lectures must have fired my imagination at least a little. I now suspect that this class was designed for students the school knew were not majoring in the sciences. In any case for me Dr. Bamforth took a lot of the fear out of biology yet made it interesting, and I was grateful.
At this time I was, though I didn’t realize it yet, abnormally vulnerable for a college student. I was younger than my classmates, and as a child had mostly been over-shielded and kept on a tight leash. So almost every aspect of college life could at any moment become alarming, or amazing (the latter was of course best, but the former happened the most often). So much was new! I could choose my own food and when and where to eat, or choose to walk or take the streetcar (this was in New Orleans), or to run around downtown by myself or not, or date frat boys (or any boys—I’d been on a total of three dates in high school), and I had many more opportunities than ever before to find really good friends.
These experiences seemed to come at me at lightning speed, yet things at home were in flux and not always good. So college, while exciting, also became a whirlwind of stress, including my nearly choking to death at lunch with friends one day. (A very alert waitress saved my life. She didn’t use the Heimlich maneuver, but rubbed in a circle with a lot of pressure on the back of my neck. I still don’t know why that worked, but clearly she knew a thing or two about biology.)
As for Dr. Bamforth’s class, one of my main memories of it is an assignment he gave us, one that would help determine our final grade. We were to write an essay. I can’t remember his exact words, but it was something close to “write anything about biology.”
I was paralyzed at first, then somehow able to let my mind run for a while. (Was that his intention—that we all feel that way? I’ve always wondered.) After some time the assignment seemed to cause a wave of new realizations, or maybe just notions, about all the things that were happening to me on this first real time away from home. For some reason this led to recognizing, I think mostly subconsciously, that being out in the world was the greatest adventure of my life, and on the flip side, being in nature seemed one of the safest, most calming, and most inspiring parts of life.
I’d experienced a number of traumatic events as a child, and one especially extreme one occurred after I’d been dragged to a horror movie that was way too terrifying for an already-anxious little kid to have seen. One of the scariest scenes (I was later told by a therapist) must have collided in my brain with some things that had actually happened to me, and seemed to have caused the beginning of what would become lifelong PTSD. One unfortunate symptom was that at age nine I developed a phobia about dying and/or my parents dying that kept me up most nights, frozen with fear.
During those frightening moments at night my only escape from the fear and movie images was to stare out my window at a star, and, while I wasn’t sure there was a God, to pray to one anyway just in case, begging for relief from my terror. If I focused hard on the star, the light from the moon or clouds gradually fell away, and the star was all I could see. I took this, probably mostly out of desperation, to be a comforting message from something unknown yet kind that seemed to be out there, and soon I became calm enough to sleep. This went on for years, along with, during the day, panic followed by depression whenever I saw images, say in museums or in other movies, that reminded me of the movie and the fear. I couldn’t understand at the time why this was happening, but it seemed to be the beginning of my own particular struggle with how to deal with life and death.
Some scattered perceptions about these experiences seemed to surface when I was given that freedom by Dr. Bamforth to think about biology in absolutely any way. Emotions more than memories seemed to flow over me, and I found myself writing something about the person I was becoming—loving life even while fearing it, and loving nature especially. I think partly because Dr. Bamforth seemed caring and unthreatening, I was able to write about these things, and how they made me feel calm yet filled with awe, and that because they were out there, that even though there was so much to fear, I guessed there must in fact be a God. Because how could there be all this, and no God? I told myself that this must be at least part of what biology was, or at least that it fit in some way.
But despite my conviction that Dr. Bamforth was kind, I believed this essay would likely earn me an F. I hoped I’d done well enough up to this time so that maybe the F wouldn’t make me fail the whole class, but I was resigned to a bad outcome.
On the last day of class, Dr. Bamforth thanked us for what we’d turned in, and I waited for the bad news. But he hesitated before handing back the papers, saying he wanted to read to us one particular essay which he thought we all would like to hear. I was most anxious to hear it, wondering what sorts of things he’d really wanted us to write about.
I was stunned to hear him say the author’s name. It was mine.
Thank you Terry!
How wonderful!