Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:00:25 You are listening to right on radio on cafe 90.3 FM and streaming live on the web at <inaudible> dot org. I'm Josh Webber. And tonight I'll write down radio. Liz, we'll be talking with bark Costco about his novel cool earth. 60 years in the future. Life on earth is threatened by global warming and three scientists and a group of teenagers fight on a mountain to survive Navy award winner. Greg Benford calls cool earth, a fast and furious novel, and I'm losing the old in the second part of our show. Ian speaks with Sue leaf about her new book, Minnesota theologists, the life of Newton, Horace Mitchell. The story of the scientist who first mapped Minnesota is geology setting us the backdrop of early scientific inquiry in the state, all of this and more so stay tuned to write on radio.
Speaker 0 00:01:18 <inaudible> Hey, Bart, are you there? Yes, Liz, can you hear me?
Speaker 1 00:01:37 Yes, I can. How are you doing tonight? I'm doing fine. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. So you are the author of the novel cool earth. Um, do you have a, I forgot to send you a note saying we wanted you to do a reading. Do you have a reading available?
Speaker 2 00:01:56 Yeah, I have a, if it, depending what you want, a very short reading from the very opening a taste of the novel, and then if you want, there's a paragraph later, which the guy explains how he got the idea of how to cool the earth, but the opening, I think for sure you wouldn't do.
Speaker 1 00:02:11 Yeah. Why don't you do the opening and we'll do the other paragraph a little later,
Speaker 2 00:02:18 Daniel bellman saw his first snowflake in years. He glanced up at the late afternoon sky as he walked up the steep hiking trail, the gray clouds still boiled slowly above the three of them. The clouds seemed so close to the tops of the tall Pines and for trees because the clouds workloads at this high subalpine elevation that only made the roiling gray bubbles that much less natural. The high Sierra landscape looked otherwise as if it belonged in the wild West of the 1880s, but they were just 170 miles from downtown Los Angeles. It was the first Sunday of June in the year 2080, the calendar called for full moon. And Daniel knew that it would likely be the last full moon that he would ever see. That's how the novel opens was.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 Uh, why don't you tell us a little bit about the story of the arc of the story and how it all works together?
Speaker 2 00:03:19 The story is this, what would happen the big picture? If you simply move the earth and moon a little farther away from the sun in order to cool the earth? Well, it might work. It might work on average. A lot of things work on average, but you could also have on average, the cracking of the Hoover dam, the freezing of Europe, and a lot of other things, and somebody just might get the crazy idea to move it back. And that's the premise of the story that big astrophysical background. And it turns out that the three gentlemen who were scrambling to get to the top of the highest mountain in the continental United States, which is Mount Whitney, the 170 mile away mountain just happened to be those who set this whole motion in process and encounter the fruits of their own labor. It, the goal of the novel is simple simply to get to high ground.
Speaker 2 00:04:16 What has happened is the attempt to move the moon back, which was done by some radicals in a suicide attempt. Again, this is all backstory has broken off different sized chunks of the moon lunar debris, which is now starting to pummel the earth. And it starts with a cascade of very small sand like pebbles and a beautiful meteor shower, but builds up to huge depth chunks bigger than those that actually wiped out the dinosaurs. So the only safe place to be if there's any safe place for while is as high as you can get as the tsunamis raise enough what they're doing. And as a, as I said, as they go up the mountain side and the starting to get dark, they encounter the fruits of their own labor. It is a real time novel Liz and I prefer that it's hard to write and general and drama, but I think it's a tighter timeline.
Speaker 2 00:05:12 It is a thriller, for example, I've always had a problem when there's the characters in the story. And if I go to sleep or take a month off here, you've got a couple hours and that's it. And so you really, as a writer, you have to work very hard to get that iceberg in shape. You're just exposing the tip of it, all the characters and all their backgrounds have to be worked out. And, and I worked on this for a period of years and I wouldn't even dream about these characters and how they interact. And I see it, the story again, itself unfolds very quickly in a real time. Another way to think about that. A writer always has to ask this question, when do I start the story? And when do I end it? And I think the answer to when I start the story is as late as, and the old rule, the old guideline, at least from the silent film era, if you recall, was to quote, burn the first real, uh, reflects the fact that you can click around on the TV and come into a movie a little ways into it and still follow it.
Speaker 2 00:06:13 Uh, but cause it takes a while to develop the story and you don't often need a lot of that foreground. The question of window I ended is as soon as possible. So start as late as possible. And as soon as possible, if you take that list to its logical limit dramatically, you get a chunk of real time. Something like a play, which really all novels or stories are in cooler. This, it grew out of an elaborate effort here thinking about the physics of this. It was a short story. I tell the story in the preface to the novel called cool earth that I came up with skiing one night and in 1993, and that grew over time and I had a good facts relationship with the late great author, sir, Arthur C. Clark. Your listeners may recall he wrote 2001, a space Odyssey and a lot of other things.
Speaker 2 00:07:07 And I'd caught him in a mathematical mistake in one of his later novels, the Rama novels. And when I told him I had a short story coming out in a magazine that had just published a story by Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, he said, I got to see it. So I faxed it to him and he came back with some interesting praise and he caught a huge hole in it in the background. And I was able to patch that hole pretty much because he was Arthur C. Clark, and I could fit the patch into the same paragraph that had already been typed set in the galley proofs. And in the story grew from there, I did dedicate the novel to him because the patching of the hole, which had to do with the conservation of energy was no little thing. And then Liz had just sat there. A lot of these things have in memory for a long time and just think about it. And I lived most of my time in the mountains, uh, outside of Los Angeles, which are very similar to Mount Whitney and walking and hiking and thinking and looking at lot of the, the Moonlight, uh, the story just evolve in group. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1 00:08:11 Talk some about the nanotechnology. That, that was very interesting to me, but I don't know what a fuzzy thinking or a fuzzy, uh, what is it fuzzy? I have fuzzy thinking, fuzzy logic and, and also, um, all the things that, uh, these guys had, the blood, the nano blood, and
Speaker 2 00:08:32 Yes, yes. I'll tell you about that. Thank you for mentioning fuzzy thinking actually was that book that came out in 93, that Arthur Clark had many others had. And so I got to know him a nanotechnology, something. I do work in sometimes university of Southern California. And if you go to my webpage, you can see an article that I published in the <inaudible> transactions on nanotechnology from 2006, where we took a carbon nanotube, it looks like chicken, wire, wire wrapped up and it acts it's so small. It acts like an antenna. And we showed how to improve that. Now, when you do something like that, Liz, when you spend a lot of time with the mathematics and the science of something like this, chicken wire nanotube, and you're a writer, you know, you can't help, but start coming up with some applications. Good and bad. That, for example, one of the concerns I had with that, it was nanotubes.
Speaker 2 00:09:26 And a lot of things I've proposed is what I call nano trash. And we're starting to see that already, when you add nano products or nanos substances to things like pants or nano pants out, coffee spills on your pants and rolls right off, or your tennis racket eventually throw that stuff away. And we just don't know how that will leak out. And our trash dumps, that's one kind of thing. And also working, just have a lot of colleagues who work on the science of this. And I think I know where the problems are. And then the question is when we try to re-engineer you, the human being, uh, yeah, we're starting to program the DNA and that's a lot of what's in the background of the story that your DNA right now is fixed. And while I could see the rom, but it's going to be much more programmable, like a piece of software and that's, what's involved with the children or the teenagers in the, in the story.
Speaker 2 00:10:21 But the weak link of the human is really well. It's twofold. First it's through brain, which is not backed up. And the novel takes place when that's starting to become possible. It almost certainly will be. And if you think that's pure science fiction lives, I'll just remind you that the national Academy of engineering has made one of its goals for this century, the reverse engineering of the brain. I think they will certainly achieve that. So we've got brains that contain us, whatever we are our most sensitive information. They're not backed up. It's a huge design flaw. We're trying to fix that. The other weak link is your heart. The, and it goes out it's the basis. It's the way most of us die. We really die. If you look at it carefully, I hope this is not too clinical for your audience. We die through oxygen starvation.
Speaker 2 00:11:10 And that can happen. For example, if you have a heart attack away from a hospital, I think about 80% of those are fatal inside of the hospital, much better likelihood of survival. Now what's happening is you're not getting enough oxygen to the brain and waste products out. What if it were the case that we had some kind of artificial blood? There are a lot of people working on this right now, just in terms of freeze, dried blood and things like that, but more deeply, what if we had some improved blood, some molecular engineering to go down there and help the hemoglobin transport the oxygen in and take it out. That's what I call Nanoblood now not saying it's available now. I think by the year 20, 80 virtual certainty, that that will be available. It's just so important. So if you were to have that heart attack away from the hospital or anywhere else, much more likely to survive it, I mean, you might be able to sit under water for 10, 20 minutes, maybe for a couple hours where it occurs in the story.
Speaker 2 00:12:12 I don't want to give it away, but part of the quilt reveal here, but one of the characters has it. And you find out there are unintended consequences of it because you can have what I call a zombie death. If you die by way of oxygen, starvation, and the body and the brain doesn't, doesn't die apparently at the same time. But if you die by oxygen starvation, then you could still be in effect awake or semi-conscious during some very unpleasant processes, which are, which take place in the story. But Nanoblood is part of it. I, I think I would not want to leave home without it, but again, I'd be careful about the risk involved.
Speaker 1 00:12:55 Well, to take technology back a little bit, you do have a lot of knowledge about guns and rifles and things like that. Now that's something you knew already, or did you have to recently
Speaker 2 00:13:08 I grew up on a farm, Liz, uh, I was shooting guns as a kid. I don't know how, how young I was, was awfully young. And, and over the years, uh, I came back to it. There's a big gun park in Los Angeles where a lot of people, and by the way, a lot of celebrities do this to, uh, shoot trap if clay pigeons and you know, and I, and it's my nature to kind of get obsessed with things. And you have a box of 25 shells and you go out and now it's automated. And the clays come out at random, out of the so-called trap. And you try to break all 25. I've never done that. And, and if I don't stop myself, I would do that. I don't know, several times a day. And so I had a chance to think about the, for example, in the nonfiction book, fuzzy thinking that you mentioned one of the ways I illustrate fuzzy logic, things, not being black or white shades of gray is you don't either just break that clay pigeon all or none.
Speaker 2 00:14:05 You often Nick it, you get a 70% hit or 30%. So again, I started thinking about it and I saw the difference. I knew the difference just from again, as a kid target practice and things like that, uh, between, between a 22 and a high powered rifle, like a 30 odd six and in the physics of that. And the other thing is it just drives me nuts in the movies. It's always wrong. I think it began with the movie. Shane and guns are used in movies, just as terrible props, I think for bad writing. But let me just say this for your viewers. So you notice that it starts with movies, Shane, if somebody shoots some, a shoots B and beagles flying backwards, well, a better go flying backwards too, because of Newton's third law, maybe more so because some of the energy's decay by the time it hits, but you never see that.
Speaker 2 00:14:56 Uh, it's, it's very little of that is accurate. Like when you see the point of view of the camera, someone looking through binoculars and it's two overlapped circles and you look through binoculars. No, no, no, it's, it's just one circle, that kind of thing. And then what happened was the FBI came to the U S at USC and said we would like someone to help us tell us about what's happening with Bulletproof vests. And they went to the president, the university, and the president university recommended some people to work with. And next thing I know, I get a call from a Dean saying, there's someone in the medical school would like, uh, who works with the FBI? Would you like to talk to him? I said, sure. And I was really intrigued by this, just the pure science of it. And I want to say Liz, if you go to my webpage, I post all my research there.
Speaker 2 00:15:43 You'll see all my papers, that there were no acknowledgement sections in general. I don't take money from the government or from corporations. I have once in a while, but I do only what I want to do. If it interests me, I just, I just put a new paper up there last week on the nature of the mathematics of the brain and AI. But this was a question came down to this. What would it feel like to get shot wearing soft body armor? Cause apparently a lot of police officers are concerned about wearing it legitimately. And that was a tough question. I had the idea that maybe you could associate that with getting hit with a baseball and I, that happened to me once it's a kid on the bare chest and it worked and it's become, it took a lot of work in the orange County.
Speaker 2 00:16:26 Ballclub allowed us to go in at night and, and hit some balls and compare that. And the orange County gun club allowed a graduate student had to go in and target you. But the net effect was I learned a tremendous amount about ballistics. I mean, a lot about maybe more than I even cared to know, although I always found that kind of fascinating. And it just, well, one thing is when you understand how horrible guns are high powered guns, when they hit human flesh. And it's just something that, I mean, it's the writer and may I get tired of seeing this garbage in the movies and TVs. People don't know how I'm not, I'm not an anti gun guy, but I'm just trying to make clear the facts of the matter, how dangerous guns are even even small caliber guns, let alone what's used in the military and things like that.
Speaker 2 00:17:16 And, and so you see that here, and this is the, the story of coolers is a story of survival. I mean, after all, it's the end of the world and there are a lot of guns at play here. There is a intense interest in this, at the film level and the set you're seeing how the Hollywood folks describe things. And film usually is two films, film, a meets film B the description for cool earth is a clockwork orange meet straw dogs, Stanley Kubrick meets Sam Peckinpah. If you've seen those movies here and involves, it does involve some gunplay.
Speaker 1 00:17:53 Well, I'm curious then, uh, also there's been a lot of transition in laws by 2080. And I'm wondering, you know, if you want to talk about that, including the gun thing, but also other things that have happened.
Speaker 2 00:18:08 Yeah. That's the, thank you for bringing that up and, and looking at a scenario like this, as small as it is, uh, you still have to wonder what, how will the rules of the game have changed? And among my other interests, I'm also a lawyer and a law professor, and I fought a lot about that. And one, one issue is cloning and making designer children. Basically another one is the gun rights are there, but another one would just be intellectual property and things like patents and copyrights right now, that's the forefront of technology. That's driving society. It's hard for me to believe that there will still be patents of any real type. And I teach this material by the way, uh, by that point. And the reason is a patent must be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art. What computers will almost certainly be the ones you'll have to convince that it wasn't obvious.
Speaker 2 00:19:07 And I just don't think we can do this. So I think patent law will largely fall apart. On the other hand, I think there'll be a broadening of rights that comes right out of the tradition, reproductive rights of row and Roe versus Wade. I'm talking about in the Casey modifications and that there's a doctrine in the Supreme court of what's called fundamental rights and it's been evolving. It literally grows out of something called footnote four and the Carolyn products case long time ago, it's a different lecture, but it's the idea that there's different levels of scrutiny for certain kinds of things. So if we're talking about voting, we're going to be real tough. If we're judges about restricting any kind of voting rights and likewise with any type of reproductive rights. So we saw a version of this to some degree when the Supreme court under justice Kennedy and the five, four decision allowed in effect gay marriage.
Speaker 2 00:20:04 But I think it's much broader than that. I think just the whole concept of sexuality, gender, and these things, there's a subject, shall we say to much more fuzzy logic then I think people have thought through. And part of that is of reproductive rights is your right, for example, to change your own genes. I mean, surely you'd want to do that if you could reduce the risk of getting colon cancer, for example, okay. And now if we're going to have children and I have the ability to reduce the risk of cancer and the child or anything else, I'll probably want to do that, especially if it's very easy to do, if it's just a matter of programming the genome and looking and finding in genome space, as we call it healthier genes, I think that's inevitable. I just posted a paper of mine on quantum computing with what's called a kneeling and physical review.
Speaker 2 00:20:59 You can see it from November. It deals with where we search very high dimensional surface for things. It would be like not this, but it would be like searching for a healthier genome cause he searches would overwhelm today's computers, but not tomorrow's super computers based on quantum computing. And so you should be able to find that I think it'll all be illegal at first. There'll be immense demand for it. And there's often happens. The law will take a while to catch up and there'll be in the black market. It'd be like drug legalization and things like that. Uh, it will come to pass. People will simply do it and then we'll become the tougher issues. So for example, one thing I think, uh, there's no reason why a child has to have just two parents that we take that as granted. But once you look at this scientifically, it certainly doesn't, it can be three parents.
Speaker 2 00:21:45 It could be 300 parents where you can imagine. And I mentioned this in the novel, the intellectual property problem let's suppose the parents want to have a child of a boy. And they say, well, we'd really like that boy, to be super handsome. How about he looks a little bit like Tom cruise, for example, whoever the celebrity of the moment is, and you could imagine a properly or improperly legally or illegally modifying the genome somewhat to look a bit more like Tom cruise. It opens up a real question for the agencies, the talent agencies of how much of the so-called right of identity expands out behind, beyond the current Gino Tom cruise to a bigger we'd call fuzzy ball, but you get the idea of that. It would expand out. And the other time, one of the consequences dramatically of that in the story, in the sense of the story, that drama is that when you modify your children away from you, that child identifies less with you. And especially if you've sorta amped them up. And you think you're looking at teenage rebellion today or on the air of clockwork orange, wait til you see what happens in coolers. And again, the novel explores dead.
Speaker 1 00:22:55 Well, I, as a scientist and a lawyer and also an author, how did that, I mean, was it, was it difficult? Was it, uh, uh, was it like a fight between being a scientist and being an author? How did that work for you?
Speaker 2 00:23:12 So there's that Chinese saying that you can't stand a stride, two boats and a, I think I'm a counter example to that. You can do it. It just takes some work. It lives for me. It's just a matter of creativity. I try to learn new things. So the toughest thing maybe is just to keep from forgetting the old things. And so you practice them. I started when I was an undergraduate saying on Sundays, it wasn't a religious thing. I'm going to review math from previous trainings. And I continued that and math on the one hand, I actually started a music, which is very, to mathematics, right? And it was just a matter of learning things and integrating them. It's taking me longer to get where I am, wherever I am, because I went very wide and I do try to go deep on subjects, but I I'm just fascinated by it. I'm, I'm always learning. I'm always training. My house is full of books. And a little bit of that. You'd come up with ideas a little bit. You come up with something new and in terms of a creative idea, at least 99% of those are not worth pursuing. And then you sell filtering once in a while, you'd come up with a story. Something is interesting, like moving the earth, moon system a little bit to cool the earth. And there actually is a way of doing that in principle.
Speaker 3 00:24:27 Well, you know what? We are almost out of time. I can't believe it's. This interview has gone very fast and I've enjoyed talking to you. Why don't you give us your, uh, uh, website address and how people get ahold of you and what's next?
Speaker 2 00:24:45 Well, the, the web, you can just type my name, Bard Costco, K O S K O. And words like noise or fuzzy. And my webpage will come up and all the contents is there. And another novels coming out. Liz, if you thought this novel was dark, wait till you see the next time we'll talk to you about it.
Speaker 3 00:25:01 Okay. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I've had fun doing this. I hope you have too. And I'm going to let you go now. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye. <inaudible>. Hello, Sue. Welcome to right on radio. We're here to talk about your new book. Um, Minnesota's geologists, the life of Newton, Horace winter, probably have a couple of little readings ready for us. Is that correct? I do. Okay. Well, why don't you give us one,
Speaker 3 00:25:57 It's all about who you are once you start with that. Sure, sure. I will set the scene. This takes place in the st. Anthony main area. Windshield has been in Minneapolis for about four months, January 6th, 1873, no one who windshield puts his back to the wind as he makes his way down main street, his boots squeak on the snowy sidewalk. His breath comes out in frosty props, stiffening his scarf as it freezes and leading delicate crystals has whisker Harbor ever been Minneapolis is nearly beyond enduring the factories of the milling district emit billowing plumes drifting off to the South. The air is Milky with ice crystals. Even the river is frozen and stretches. So not of course at the cataract who's roar fills the air as night comes on. December had been frigid. The worst call had come on Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve day, a numbing 38 below degrees below zero.
Speaker 3 00:27:01 He and Lottie had been quite concerned about taking baby Eva's horny in Ima out in that weather, even to attend Christmas services. Newton is leaving a meeting, held in dr. EISA Johnson's medical office at the corner of main street and central Avenue, 11 men from both sides of the river devoted scientific inquiry. Majority were physicians. Newton was the only professional scientist, but most had taken science courses in college. Although that was not a requirement besides the doctors, the club included a math teacher, a lawyer, a dentist, and a superintendent of schools. Its aim will be to observe nature, make collections, identify and preserve the specimens and discuss current scientific topics. In short, the group wanted to promote high quality scientific knowledge in the young state of Minnesota. They called their club, the Academy of natural sciences and agreed to meet monthly at 3:00 PM at dr. Johnson's office. They adopted the model Fox, not tree Fox day. The voice of nature is the voice of God.
Speaker 4 00:28:14 Um, so you're listening to me and Graham Lee speaking with Sue leaf. She is the author of Bullhead queen a year on pioneer Lake, a love affair with birds, the life of Thomas Sadler, Roberts and Portage, a family, a canoe, and the search for the good life, all published by university of Minnesota press. Uh, she also wrote potato city nature history and the community in the age of sprawl. She's trained as a zoologist and writes on environmental topics. And is the editor of the newsletter of the wild river Audubon society of East central Minnesota. You are a very busy woman.
Speaker 3 00:28:58 Well, yes, I think so.
Speaker 4 00:29:02 Well, let's start by talking a little bit about, um, that piece that you just read. Uh, it's interesting that most of the book obviously is not in that voice. That voice is what used to be called on, uh, probably still is called the historical present. Um, and you italicize that and spread it all the way through the book. Uh, but most, of course, most of the book is in a conventional history telling voice. What made you decide to go into that historical present that sort of fictional version of history?
Speaker 3 00:29:35 That is a good question. Um, when I was doing my research every now and then I would like, I was losing sight of the man of what he was really like. And so I would write for myself these little scenes to raise him up, to make him walk and talk and see if I could get him to live again for me and my writing group loved him and I loved him. And so he decided to keep the same in, and I do think they animate, I have once at least one scene in each chapter and I think they animate the chapters.
Speaker 4 00:30:07 Yeah, they do. They, uh, they certainly bring him to life, especially when he's in, um, in the field as it were. And I particularly enjoyed this because I did a year of geology in college. And this brought back that the end of those, uh, field sessions that you do and he'd go out and get bitten by bugs. And, um, I loved that part of it. You really did bring it alive on a lot of different levels.
Speaker 3 00:30:33 I do want to point out that each of those scenes are based on fact, like it really was 38 below on Christmas Eve day in 1873, 1872. I consulted the old Minneapolis Tribune if there were letters around the time. So that I knew exactly what the weather was like, what was going on in town. So I could inform the piece.
Speaker 4 00:30:55 Well, tell us, I mean, just to remind listeners, this is the book is about the life of Newton, Horace Winchell, who was hired by the university of Minnesota to do the Minnesota geology geological survey, which lasted for 20 years, you know, a good portion of his professional life. And as soon as he gets done, he's off, he goes to Paris. And it's a wonderful arc that you pull off through the book, but tell our readers a little bit about how you write such a book about somebody who's relatively obscure, not well known in the community and probably was better known in his time, but you've managed to get a wonderful hold on who this man was and his family. And, uh, and the times we learn a lot of history along the way. Tell us how you go about doing this as a professional historian.
Speaker 3 00:31:50 Well, we went till houses, family papers at the Minnesota historical society archives. So I could draw on those. You can obviously write a biography like this. If you don't have substantial papers behind him, like letters, journals are always helpful. In this case, I had some letters. He letters to his wife were always very valuable, but he was often, he was usually at home. So of course then there aren't any letters. And he wrote, he wrote all these annual reports, 20 annual reports to the board of Regents of the university of Minnesota. And I went through all those. Most of them are geological in nature, but he always had some tidbits that I would blame that would give me an idea of what he was doing in the field, what his home life was like. I, you know, he would, you could read between the lines and kind of figure things out.
Speaker 3 00:32:43 So that was helpful. But I will say that I didn't have a good understanding of what his life was going to be like until I got to each section. So everything wasn't surprised. I mean, it was a surprise to find out how he went through the university of Michigan to get his undergraduate degree, is his surprise. When he met his wife, it was a surprise when he started, they started having children. So it was really, I mean, it's delightful actually to work on a project like this, that that can be so rich and give you so much while you're actually researching it.
Speaker 4 00:33:15 Cause there's nothing much else written about Tim, is that correct?
Speaker 3 00:33:19 No. And that's why that was actually one of the driving forces. Why I wrote the book is because these early scientists really were important in, in the young state of Minnesota. And I wanted to emphasize that, that, um, people in political power were very interested to be informed by science to see what science had to say. I mean, that was actually to see that that was true. And he was a pivotal figure. Um, I, I don't know a lot about geology. And so I tried hard not to write this book every time I was, um, kind of, I was putting it down in my mind. It would come back up again and thinking, this was the go to guy for natural history at the university of Minnesota. If you were a buggy boy, buggy, little boy interested in insects, you eventually found your way to Winchell slab. And, uh, and so I thought I just have to write about this guy.
Speaker 4 00:34:18 Wow. So looking into his material, I've done a little bit, this looking into my great great grandfather and one of the things that stalled me in the library up there in Orkney, in, um, Kirk. Well, uh, my cousin and I were looking into his life was the handwriting, uh, everything. It was this very, very tight, very good handwriting, but I'm not used to reading it anymore. Did you struggle with that too?
Speaker 3 00:34:48 Windshield's handwriting was legible. I, I, you know, I, I wrote the biography of Thomas Sadler Robertson. His handwriting was terrible. He was a physician and he was always in a hurry. And I was so happy when he got a typewriter back in the 1890s, Winchell most is most of his field work. Most of his work, as on the geological survey was done before he got the typewriter. I didn't have that much trouble. He there's some really wonderful letters that he wrote to his wife shortly before they were married. And I think I got everywhere. I transcribe it all. I'm I would read the letters or the journals in the, um, library and type it into my computer so I could have it when I was went back home and started.
Speaker 4 00:35:34 Oh, interesting. And that'll be a resource one of these days, I suppose. You'll end up giving it back to them. Right. I hope so. That's really good. So I'm, I did find this book just, um, absolutely fascinating. I mean, having a little bit of a background in geology, not much just, you know, a year's worth, uh, I understood, you know, what he was trying to do. And, um, you know, I realized that I probably know more about the earth now than he did then when he started, you know, because we've, we've learned such a lot, we've come such a long way, but I really loved the arc of his life and discovering with you the small things that he begins to learn about like Agassi and about the, um, the re the retreating of the glaciers. And, uh, you know, what that lovely red earth is up there on the North shore of Lake superior. And you really bring Lake superior particularly alive more, or perhaps more than anywhere else. Cause he loved it up there and spent a lot of time there. And it, it just struck me. I was caught up in a book that I might not otherwise have picked up about somebody that I didn't know anything about the must be lots of guys, women, women, and men, and all sorts of personalities out there that have not been opened up in this way. Is that true?
Speaker 3 00:37:02 I think there are, I don't know. Well, I am actually thinking of a couple, I would like to do another biography, not right away, because you really get, you really go down rabbit holes in a biography, you know, so you, you get into my new HSA and then the world gets, comes really small for a while. And so I give him, I'm writing a book on essay essays right now to open myself up again. But there are people that I would like to think about it. And particularly I'm interested in science scientists and there is a woman at the U who was, um, did work on LG, who would be very interesting, but I, you know, again, you, you don't know what you can do until you go to the archives and see what kind of papers are behind them to see if you can actually flesh out a life.
Speaker 3 00:37:52 Although I will say for the dr. Roberts book, a love affair with Bruce, he had a sister Emma who turned out to be quite important in her own, right. But there is only one letter from her in the archives, from the Roberts papers, but using tidbits from the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minneapolis journal, which was the evening paper at the time. And, um, other little tidbits here and there, some from Roberts journal, I was able to write at least a magazine article about AMA just from just the, I, I started out by thinking, well, what do I know about her? What can I find? And how can I tell this story? And when I got done, I realized I had a fairly good estimate of her life. So it's yeah,
Speaker 4 00:38:36 Yeah. It, it was interesting to be reading this and come across somebody new that I hadn't really had much connection to a few years ago. We had bill Bryson on the show, um, famous author. And we were talking about his book, a short history of nearly everything. And he, uh, he of course dug into a lot of people who hit the tubing obscure. You, you bring up, um, some quite interesting personalities that worked with windchill and they, obviously, your focus is, is on wind chill and don't go too far into them. But there were several of them that I was quite interested in. I wondered, you know, if you were ever going to get back to those, was there any possibility of you digging into somebody here? Like, um, what's the, uh, the chap that did the, uh, Warren Upham and he did it, he did it, he written about him.
Speaker 3 00:39:39 Um, he really does. So you
Speaker 4 00:39:42 Interesting. That's very cool because yes,
Speaker 3 00:39:44 He is interesting. And you know, one thing he has, his papers are at Minneapolis historical society archives, but what is interesting about Upham? He led a, he took an extended holiday to Europe and the first place he went was Scotland. And he was able to see the remaining glaciers in the Northern Scotland. And then he went to France and I can't remember, he went to Northern Germany. He went to the film Valley before, you know, this is way before world war one, before it became such a notorious place for a young man to die. And he just did a geological tour. And then I w I always thought it would be fun to go through those letters and his journals and construct that for a magazine article. I don't know what kinds of letters he has that he's left. Um, and he, you know, he went to the, um, Minnesota historical society. He spends, he spent a lot of time out in new England, too. He was a glacier geologists. And so he was interested in the extent of the glacial ice sheets in like the long Island area of New York and Massachusetts. And then he was up also in Canada working for the, um, Canadian survey. Uh, so he went all over. He didn't just stay in Minnesota, but he came back to Minnesota, I think, possibly because he married a Minnesota woman.
Speaker 4 00:41:08 Oh. And he writes this tone that you mentioned about Minnesota place names.
Speaker 3 00:41:14 Yes. That's a very famous book, a lot of things.
Speaker 4 00:41:18 Wow. I didn't know about it. And I looked it up and I thought, Oh my God, that's absolutely, I love place names. And what they tell you about the people that have said, yes, it should. Somebody needs to get me that one, this, um, so he's, um, one of the many people that you introduce your reader to, and, uh, there's lots of little anecdotes in here about, uh, all sorts of things that happen in field work and the rest of it. And windchill goes on a survey of the black Hills with George Custer with general Custer. Tell us about that.
Speaker 3 00:42:02 Well, this came at a time. He had been two years in Minnesota and windshield had been collecting rock specimens, and he actually didn't have room in old Maine to store everything and to get to it, to catalog it and identify it and characterize it. The old man was under construction. It was, they were short on space at the university. And so he actually was looking at a summer where he didn't have a lot to do. And then this invitation came for him to be the geologists on the customer expedition to the black Hills. This is the one in 1874, which was, um, officially to, uh, just survey the black Hills and to look over the territory that they had ceded to the Lakotas on officially. It was to look for gold. And, uh, the country was in a recession, a very deep, deep recession. And, uh, they needed a discovery, a gold, and the black Hills with jumpstart, the economy now Winchell, you know, supposedly that would be up his alley, right?
Speaker 3 00:43:04 To look for gold. He was more interested in, uh, identifying the other rock types and doing traditional scientific geology. And in fact, there were two miners on the trip that were brought along specifically by Custer to look for gold. So when they got to the black Hills and lo and behold, these miners found gold, um, it was suggested that windshield didn't even really believe that they had finally found it, but they had maybe planted it there just to say that they had found it. And he, but he did not himself pick him. As soon as they said, we found some goal, pick himself up and go out to the site and look for it. He was in it. There wasn't really a good explanation that I could find for why windshield was so uninterested in the discovery of gold at the black Hills. But anyway, he paid for it professionally. Um, he, when he said he didn't see, think there was gold in the black Hills and made all the local, local and national newspapers name was called considered a crappy geologists for that reason. And it took a long time for him to live that reputation down.
Speaker 4 00:44:09 Yeah. But what I liked about him is he stuck to his guns. Didn't he? And he had a lot of integrity. Yeah. I liked that about him.
Speaker 3 00:44:18 Interesting that, um, he and Custer had a lot in common and yet they never really struck up a friendship. And after he left the, the expedition and went on with life, Winchell never mentioned Custer again in any of his papers.
Speaker 4 00:44:34 Hmm. Of course, for years later, customer gets himself killed at the battle of the big horn.
Speaker 3 00:44:41 And a lot of the people that windshield knew from the 1874 expedition were also with Custer and killed up a little bit
Speaker 4 00:44:50 Incredible that's so that's a whole other beautiful place to go and visit very evocative, um, windshield and, uh, precious metals. Uh, he is very interested in the, what he calls the ancients, which is really early, um, native Americans, uh, discovers how they would, um, process copper on isle Royal. Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 3 00:45:20 Well, the copper deposits on isle Royal are so pure that they don't need to be, um, purified any farther. You can just actually, if you have stone tools pry the copper out of the ground and then hammered into like piss shucks, it was something they frequently made or spearheads when windshield visited Iowa roll. And I should point out, of course, this isn't Minnesota. So he's just doing it for out of his pure scientific curiosity. He finds a pit, at least one pit on isle Royal that has dozens and dozens of stone mallets, you know, mallet heads in it, what the ink that the ancients used to hammer this copper. And he filled a whole barrel with them and send them back to Minnesota. And I don't know whatever happened to them. I don't, maybe they're in the collection at the Minnesota historical society, but I haven't seen them in there. They're not displayed anywhere.
Speaker 4 00:46:17 And these are from what, um, what era
Speaker 3 00:46:20 Thousand years, 4,000 years, it wasn't
Speaker 4 00:46:23 Very, very old. There is a book out that I think I talked to the, uh, the author many years ago called America, BC. And the, um, one of the contentions in there was that copper was being hammered into a shape that a person could put around his or her neck. And they walked it all the way to, um, to San Marie where boats would pick the stuff up and take it back to Europe. I mean, I, I think who knows, I mean, that certainly blows the whole idea of Columbus. If that's what was going on, did you, do you know anything about yeah. Um, also he was interested in, in silver and he goes down a mine in silver, um, islet Canada, 750 feet below Lake level. Tell us about that places. Is it still,
Speaker 3 00:47:15 Isn't that amazing what people will do? Well, the mine is no longer producing silver. It was a fabulous way of producing mine in its time. And this was about 1879, right. That he went to isle silver islet. Yeah. It didn't go straight down. It went kind of at a diagonal, but it was eventually at an up, ended up under the Lake that they took all this nearly pure silver. Oh. And of course that was on the Canadian side. It was not an American operation. You can go to that area. Um, I think where the mine was is underwater. Now. I haven't been there myself.
Speaker 4 00:47:57 Interesting. Interesting. Um, I wanted to talk a little bit more about his wife, uh, Lottie. Uh, she was, uh, a woman. She turned out to be later in her life. Women's Christian temperance union WCTU. Is that still around? Does that still exist?
Speaker 3 00:48:15 Well, I'll have to tell you, in my early married years, I lived in North branch, the, the head, the president of the WCTU for the North branch area lived next door. She was in her mid eighties. She would invite me repeatedly to the monthly WCTU meetings, but I was a young mother. I had children, I couldn't get a babysitter. I didn't ever go, but I would watch her group, all women in their eighties with their walkers kind of creeped slowly up her step steps. And I, you know, you can't help but feel a little smug at the point. But I also, at the time I was active in Audubon. And at the time I thought, you know, in 30 years, that could be me.
Speaker 4 00:48:59 Well, hopefully it's not. I love the section. I love the section you wrote towards the end of the book when they go to Paris for a deserved a sabbatical of a year. And, um, he takes her with him and she, she writes back that she's back to the U S that, um, she's, she's very disconcerted with the amount of wine that the French drink. And she's a wonderful character is you almost need a book on her. She's a fascinating character.
Speaker 3 00:49:30 She is. She was. So she was so clear in her feminist views, the 1850s, 1860s. She is, she was a farm girl from central Michigan. And her father had enough together to send both of his daughters that he had a number of daughters, but he saw that everybody got a college education. This is before the civil war, they got college educations. And then she herself turned around and was hired to teach at her college. She was exceptional to begin with, but during their courtship, she made clear to Winchell what she expected their marriage to be that it was going to be a partnership that she was going to be an equal intellectual partner that she had these career concerns in that want to have a help meet in him. Um, and he, he was ready for it. He had a mother who was very strong and, uh, kind of was the breadwinner of the family. He a sister who was just two years younger than expected to have a college education, just like he did. And she got it. And she also ran for school board and won opposition on the school board, in her hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts. So he was kind of primed for Lottie and for Lottie's dreams and ambitions.
Speaker 4 00:50:49 And he, uh, certainly they helped each other and they were a fantastic team, great family, the rest of it. And you can read all about this in Minnesota is geologic geologist, the life of Newton, Horace windshield by Sue leaf. We're out of time soon. Unfortunately I could talk to you for another hour, very easily, a lovely book, uh, congratulate you on it. I'm looking forward to talking to you again about the next one.
Speaker 3 00:51:16 Thank you, Graham. It was very nice to talk.
Speaker 4 00:51:18 Alright, Medea. Thanks very much for being on riding radio.
Speaker 3 00:51:22 <inaudible>.
