A Song in the Night Read online

  Between the two islands, I could just make out the steady line separating pale blue sky from the gray-green of the water. It was this horizon that attracted my eyes and excited my dreams about the future. I pictured myself in a sharp wooden sailboat, slicing through the waves, streaking past the islands until I reached the ultimate freedom of open ocean and all the unknowable beauty that lay beyond. That moment might seem impossible from where I was standing, but I willfully and joyfully pictured it anyway. What I could see with my eyes blurred with what I could see in my mind.

  In a sense, I was being introduced to the elementary building block of faith and hope, the belief that what I hoped for but could not see would come to pass. I may be here, I told myself, temporarily confined by my braces and by the present, but someday I will be there, moving with grace through a whole new future.

  There were other horizons I hoped to cross, including the horizon of time. I grew up in the generation after World War II when Americans instinctively believed that every problem would eventually yield to technology. To a child bound to crutches, leg braces, and wheelchairs, science offered the thrilling hope of eventual release. I was unfamiliar with the troubling moral complexities of technologies such as the atomic bomb; for me the domain of science was idealistic and optimistic to its core. If machines could do the work of a thousand men, if new chemicals and drugs could alter nature and combat disease, then surely it was only a matter of time before someone announced a cure for hemophilia.

  My interest in science was not only driven by my personal hopes; I was also delighted to be growing up in a nation whose strength, brilliance, and virtue were changing the course of history. The United States had defeated the demonic Nazis just eleven years before I was born. I was taught that we were holding the line against other people who intended to overrun the world if we weren’t standing in their way. And we were destined for new forms of greatness through our national life. This conviction—that a nation could live up to its ideals and be a force for good—was thrilling.

  I was very young when John Kennedy became president—only four years old—but I could tell that a change had taken place in the whole country. The new president was energetic and funny and looked a bit like my father. I could tell that my father admired him. And this new president told us what I was already fully prepared to hear: that the country was going to do exciting, virtuous things, like sending astronauts to the moon.

  Fifty years later, now that we have stopped launching space shuttles and seem to be abandoning the space age, it is hard to recapture how exciting rocket launches were for everyone. People paused at work to listen to the radio. Schools held special assemblies when the entire student body was marched into the auditorium to watch the launch on a single television. People would stare transfixed as the flight clock lost seconds and then would shout out the final countdown. Even on our small black-and-white televisions, the thundering climb into space made our hearts thump with excitement.

  The space program got off to a fast start. Just a few months after Kennedy’s inauguration, Alan Shepard became the first American to ride a flaming missile in a huge arc from Cape Canaveral to an ocean splashdown 116 miles away. When I was five and a half years old, John Glenn blasted off on February 20, 1962, and became the first American to orbit the earth.

  More Mercury rockets took off, each containing one astronaut, until we moved to the Gemini program, in which two astronauts traveled together into space. The great objective, still years away, was the Apollo program, designed to send three astronauts a quarter million miles to the moon. John F. Kennedy’s consistent message—that difficulties should intensify rather than weaken our commitment to boldness—became a window through which I began to see not only my own challenges but those of the nation and the world. The president made this clear in his initial announcement and in his subsequent comments about the space program. As the president said in Texas, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade … not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

  Drawn by such daring visions, bubbling with curiosity, I yearned to know as much about the workings of the world as I could. My mother brought home stacks of brilliantly illustrated volumes from the Time-Life Science series that revealed some of the hidden mysteries and glories of our planet. I pored over volumes on the cell, the body, and the mind; on energy, matter, sound, and flight; on weather, planets, and space. Each photograph and diagram and paragraph reinforced what has become a fundamental part of my view of life: that we live in a magnificent universe with innumerable and beautiful secrets; that many of these secrets can be unlocked through the steady application of the human mind; and yet at the same time there will always remain an awe-inspiring complexity, vastness, and unknowable glory to creation. Those books, and the other materials that my parents carried home to feed my ravenous curiosity, helped me to peer past the edge of my wheelchair and bed, beyond the boundaries of our home and backyard, and into the mysteries that ruled everything from the tiniest cell in my body to the rhythm of galaxies in space.

  While I was in elementary school, I missed weeks of classes at a time. At home, day after day I stared out my window, watching the trees sway in the wind as I waited interminably for my joints to heal. In the time before the Internet, the only sources of information were people, television, newspapers, books, and mail. I scoured them all. Whenever my parents invited other adults to dinner, I quizzed them about their lives. Our primitive television carried exactly seven channels, and I watched them all. I tried to make sense of the newspapers that arrived on our doorstep. I pulled every book I could reach off our shelves. I went through the mail like a detective, studying TV Guide, Time, and even the Sears catalogue with forensic care. When my parents finally bought an encyclopedia, I could not believe my good fortune—there were articles about everything, neatly bound in leather. My loneliness nurtured an insatiable desire to learn—about people, about places, and about the mysteries of life.

  My parents did everything they could to feed this hunger. My sisters, Susanna and Elizabeth, helped me even more by providing companionship and balance in the struggle to grow up. I was far from a perfect child; I was often willful, noisy, impatient, and selfish. There was always the danger that my difficulties might drag me into a black hole of fury and self-pity.

  I survived the long periods of convalescence by imagining the future. Having picked a moment or an event that I would like to see take place, I acquired the habit of working backward from that point through the steps that needed to take place so that I could get there. I lived through anticipation, and I was often disappointed, as bleedings and other problems forced the postponement and cancellation of dozens of longed-for events. With the encouragement of my parents, I steadily developed the rapid capacity to accept the new reality and establish a new goal. Through this process I slowly gained the upper hand over the soul-crushing emotion of regret.

  As I observed others, I also inched away from my self-centered view. I realized that many, if not most, other people faced their own struggles. Passing in and out of hospitals, I saw children with far more serious physical problems than mine. Scanning the pages of the newspapers, I glimpsed the horrors of war and poverty and disease. Dipping more and more deeply into works of history and fiction, I imagined the hard lives that others had lived. I wanted to understand not just their ideas but their feelings, and this desire helped to move my curiosity past the mind and toward the heart. Slowly, as I did these things, a new emotional equation took hold: if my suffering prompted people to help me, then when others were suffering, perhaps I should try to help them.

  The intuition started to influence my actions. I began to admire my parents and other adults when they took offense at injustice. I became incensed when I witnessed small acts of unfairness. Indeed, one of my ea
rliest memories involves defying my elementary school classmates to defend a boy I did not even like.

  I was in the first grade at the Valhalla Elementary School in Hartsdale, New York. One of my classmates brought his lunch every day in a brown paper bag. He was pudgy, abrasive, and loud—not someone I wished to get to know. His daily meal was dreary: a piece of bread, a stick of celery, an apple, and a hard-boiled egg. Every day at noon, when we arrived in the cafeteria, he would walk over to the lady at the cash register, reach into his pocket, and plunk down a nickel for a small container of milk.

  Over time some of the boys in my class—the little lords of the lunchroom—began to object to the hard-boiled egg. His lunch was ridiculous, they said, snickering. It smelled. In a sense they were right—the eggs often did exude a slightly sulfurous odor that made me wonder how old they were. With each passing day, the egg boy’s lunch became the focus of greater and greater ridicule. Finally, one day, when I was sitting at a nearby table, he sat down with some of these boys. When he pulled out his lunch, the cackling band pretended to gag. They punched him in the shoulder and demanded that he throw his whole lunch away. When he refused, they stood up, gathered their lunch trays, and marched as a group to another table on the other side of the lunchroom.

  I watched him carefully. He slowly took another bite of the egg and wiped his eyes and nose on the back of his sleeve. With alarm, I realized that he was crying.

  Up until that moment I had been an observer, eager to stay out of the line of fire, but his misery moved me. Without thinking, I picked up my tray, limped over to his table, and sat down beside him. He did not look at me or speak to me. For five awkward minutes we ate together in silence. From the corner of my eye I noticed the other boys giggling and smirking. Then, without a word, he and I stood up and went our separate ways.

  In a movie version of this tale, he and I would have gone on to become the best of friends, but that did not happen. He remained loud and abrasive. His egg did smell pretty bad. And though I still didn’t like him very much, at some elemental level, I had understood his feelings.

  At other times I was only an observer of events that affected my parents and friends. During this period of his career my father worked for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. His editors would assign a story, he would spend weeks working on it, and at the last minute the piece would be blocked, leaving my father with a tiny “kill fee” instead of the more substantial payment he had expected and deserved.

  On another occasion, my mother, still working part-time for Time-Life Books, had come up with the daring idea that they should produce a cookbook series. The editors asked for her ideas, so for weeks she pounded out suggestions, including proposed book outlines for two, the first on French provincial cooking and the second on Russian cuisine. The publishers loved the idea, and then my mother heard nothing more about it. Eventually she discovered that the whole project was being moved forward with substantial support from Time-Life Books.

  The new editor in chief was a man without cooking experience. She rocketed into New York City and demanded to see the relevant executive.

  “Why didn’t you at least give me the chance to run this series?” she demanded.

  The executive looked bemused.

  “You couldn’t possibly have thought that we would allow this series to be run by a woman, could you?” he asked her contemptuously.

  When she came home crestfallen, I seethed.

  At the age of eight, I learned that a large utility company, Consolidated Edison, had filed plans to build an immense hydroelectric storage facility on top of Storm King Mountain, a historic peak on the shore of the Hudson River in the Catskills, just a few miles north of West Point. The engineers planned to create a vast industrial storage tank into which water would be pumped at night, when electricity rates were low, and then that water would be released during the day to generate power through gravity-fed turbines. We had been on a school field trip to those breathtaking places—Storm King, Bear Mountain. I instinctively objected to the idea of destroying all of this to build a power plant.

  Indeed, the battle over Storm King, which roiled the courts from the mid-1960s until 1980, was one of the earliest environmental legal fights—so early, in fact, that the term “environmentalism” did not exist, nor was the field of “environmental law” even recognized. At the time people who objected to the destruction of public beauty for private gain were known as “conservationists.” Back then it was not a partisan issue; the nation’s leading conservationists had included two Republican governors of New York, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. As the project advanced, citizens in the area, including the well-known Hudson Valley historian Carl Carmer and his wife, Betty, who lived in a huge and whimsical octagon-shaped house across the street from us, began to organize.

  I wrote letters and drew pictures and mailed them off to the president of the United States and to national school newsletters, one of which printed them. The president sent me an autographed picture—which thrilled me—but did not comment on the dispute itself. As it turned out, the Scenic Hudson project, of which Storm King was a major component, became one of the most influential land-use cases in the country, establishing a host of precedents that launched the field of environmental law. The dispute took more than eighteen years to resolve before the courts finally ruled to block the power plant. The whole episode taught me that activists had to be committed for the long haul, because important battles often took years to be resolved.

  To this day I wonder, how do we learn to speak up? How do we learn to find our voice and then to use that voice to open conversations, to raise questions, and, when necessary, to demand answers? We know that speech is fundamental to democracy, but why? Because the words we use, the reasons we offer, and the choices we make determine our future.

  Many forces in the world would prefer us to remain mute. Speech is subversive, whereas silence, as the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, is acquiescence. If we do not speak up in the face of injustice, we give others the right to decide not only what happens but to whom. Through speech we bind ourselves to each other and to our destiny. In silence we drift in both time and space.

  To create community, to forge a bond in common, we must be able to communicate. When we understand one another’s ideas and emotions, when we see into each other’s lives, we span our differences and bring conscience and comfort to heal the brokenness of our world.

  Somehow I figured this out at a fairly early age—as a gift from my artistic parents, as an insight handed to me through my own experiences, as a blessing from life itself. With each passing year I discovered more deeply that humans have both the definite duty and the glorious opportunity to cross over the divisions that naturally seem to separate us. Yes, we are all born into different moments and places, but our very individuality carries within it the mysterious key to a shared humanity. We speak separate languages, but our restless attempts to translate our thoughts into words and our words into deeds cause us to discover new points of contact and pathways of expression. We struggle in different moments and manners, and yet each apparent step into isolation can also create the opportunity for empathy.

  Who was I, after all? Was I primarily a middle-class white American boy born into relative privilege compared to most children in the world? Or was I a pitiable child with a severe physical disability and a grim life expectancy? Did my future hold promise because of my mind or danger because of my body? Did my emerging fascination with American history and with the conservation of our environment mean that I was evolving into a conservative who disliked change or a progressive who embraced it? Was my love of reason, science, and astronomy at odds with my growing conviction that the universe was a place of overwhelming spiritual beauty?

  When I reached adolescence I had an experience that vividly taught me how my own experiences, as dissimilar as they might seem to some, made me feel connected to others. As a young teenager, just after I had been r
eleased from extensive physical therapy in a hospital, I had the opportunity to tour Harvard College. The tour included a visit to the pool, where we came upon the swimming team at practice. We watched from the sidelines as the members of the Harvard team carved their way up and down the lanes as elegantly as dolphins. The coaches paced along the edges, blowing whistles and issuing instructions.

  Watching them, I thought about a boy I had known in the hospital. Jamie had been born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as “brittle bone disease.” His bones lacked a protein that maintained their structural integrity, so they snapped under the slightest trauma. Though only nine years old, he had already had twenty-seven operations. One of his legs had been amputated at the knee, the other at the ankle. He spent hours floating in whirlpool baths to strengthen his limbs and ease his pain.

  His appearance was disturbing. When he sat on a chair, it looked as if he didn’t have any legs at all. I think most people would at first have been horrified, as I was, yet as I came to know him, I grew to admire his humor and his courage. I encouraged him whenever I could. Sometimes I swam beside him in the pool, and whenever I did, I was grateful that I still had my legs and my strength.

  While standing by the university pool, I thought about Jamie and about the Harvard men. I realized that the Harvard men would probably feel nothing but pity for Jamie, and Jamie would have trouble understanding the swimming team at all. And I realized that I belonged to both of their worlds—and to neither.

  From then on, whenever I was in the pool myself, or taking on some other hard challenge, I returned to this core dream of bridging the gap between worlds. Whether in the swimming pool or during the daily challenges of life, I try to take a deep breath, drop my head below the surface, and push off toward the other side.