Franklin & Marshall College biology Professor Timothy Sipe ’78 was honoring his mentor, Professor Bob Petty, when he returned to Wabash for the second summer in a row to work with students in the College’s Allee Woods. It was Petty who invited Sipe to do his first research at Allee Woods as a student, and Petty’s advice that redirected his career from forestry to ecology.
But a course he teaches at F&M extends Petty’s work in ways the botanist/poet may not have imagined. Nature Essays is a biology/ environmental studies writing class Sipe created in which science students absorb the work of 25 writers, including Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Barry Lopez.
Then his students write their own essays.
“The purpose of this class,” Sipe tells them, “is to inspire your interdisciplinary awareness and understanding, especially of the relationships that link us to the universe and to home on earth, and for you to become a more accomplished writer.”
If that wouldn’t make Bob Petty smile, what would?
Sipe’s introduction to this year’s collection of his class’s essays quotes Loren Eiseley. Petty introduced Sipe to Eiseley’s writing fresh out of grad school in 1982, when Sipe was an instructor in the biology department. Sipe’s sense of wonder and dedication to his own students so evident in the following excerpt speak to the unexpected ways one teacher’s legacy can live on in the work of another.
Loren Eiseley’s essays began to appear in the early 1950s, when confidence in the power of science and technology to transform the world for human gain was surging, while the damages and dangers being conjured by us, the sorcerer’s apprentices, were less appreciated. Eiseley was not the only scientifically trained humanist to express concern about where such hubris would take the human race, but he was one of the most thoughtful and eloquent.
His essay “The Bird and the Machine” expresses Eiseley’s concern about our overconfidence while noting how little we really grasp about the lives of other creatures. The essay begins with the author reading an article in the New York Times over breakfast about biologists and engineers predicting that it would not be long before lifelike machines could be created in the laboratory. Eiseley is not sure about the degree to which this is really possible, but his greater
concern is that living beings are so much more than sophisticated biochemical machinery.
The reason for this belief resides in his memories from a time during his 20s when he was part of a western expedition to collect fossils and living specimens for museums and zoos in the East and abroad. He was called upon to capture any birds that were roosting at night in an unused stone cabin they had come across. He managed to catch one, “a sparrow hawk, and a fine young male in the prime of life,” while a second one, the male’s mate, got away. He placed the hawk in a box for the night.
Eiseley describes how he retrieved the box, lifted the hawk out, and studied it for a while the following morning. The bird’s limpness made him seem resigned to his captive fate, or at least indifferent, but the fierceness in his penetrating eyes never faded. Without knowing why, really, Eiseley laid the hawk on the grass. For a long minute, nothing happened. And then the hawk shot upward without warning, rising fast “straight into that towering emptiness of light and crystal that my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate,” where he could no longer be seen.
There was silence for a moment, and then Eiseley heard a hawk cry. But it was not the male:
“I was young then and had seen little of the world, but when I heard that cry my heart turned over. It was not the cry of the hawk I had captured; for, by shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing further up. Straight out of the sun’s eye, where she must have been soaring restlessly above us for untold hours, hurtled his mate. And from far up, ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us, came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that it sounds down across the years and tingles among the cups on my quiet breakfast table.
“I saw them both now. He was rising fast to meet her. They met in a great soaring gyre that turned into a whirling circle and a dance of wings. Once more, just once, their two voices, joined in a harsh wild medley of question and response, struck and echoed against the pinnacles of the valley. Then they were gone forever somewhere into those upper regions beyond the eyes of men.”
The essay ends with Eiseley back at the breakfast table, pondering the newspaper’s claim that there is probably nothing in the processes of life that scientists cannot replicate with machines, even reproduction. Eiseley considers and then firmly rejects the conceit by remembering the hawks: “Ah my mind takes up, on the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird.”
The theme of “The Bird and the Machine” is clear. “It is life I believe in, not machines,” the author says elsewhere. But there is another message in his story. Nature essayists like Eiseley have spoken to us all about the fundamentals of our life in this world, about our own vital belonging to the great ecosystems around us that we cannot abandon and should not degrade no matter how foolishly or ignorantly we try. They write with conviction and joy about the soul-stirring connections with wild beings we can know if only we will look and listen well, when we finally glimpse the brightness of our fellow sojourners on this earth—the animals, yes, but also the plants and fungi, protists and bacteria. See and hear the radiant singing world for what it really is, and your heart will turn over, too. You will never again be the same person you were before that moment when you and all the wild world become one.
The young writers in this class have experienced moments like this. They have heard the cry of the hawk in different forms and places, and at different times in their lives. They have searched the realms of light and crystal, of sky and waters and earth, and they have felt the scintillating kinship with all life. Their voices rise from hearts that have been changed, from hearts that understand and will always remember.