Foreword

Pieces of the Plains is intended to make permanent the American Great Plains experience as lived by one individual whose profession is the study of nature and whose daily life, like those of all other Americans, has been and still is shaped by the global forces at work during the last half of the 20^th Century. In sponsoring its publication, Rhonda and Jim Seacrest are treating me exactly like I’ve treated hundreds of my students, asking me to solve some problem not by finding an answer, but by making one. So I’m responding to the assignment [of writing it, at their insistence] in exactly the same way I’ve wished my hundreds of students each had responded, namely, by contributing what I believe to be my very best work. “Best” in this case means most creative, most original, most visionary, most experimental and exploratory, but, of course, grammatically and stylistically correct, although with an acknowledgment that grammar and style often must be subordinate to originality if a writer, or an artist or composer, or even a scientist, is to contribute something new to the human conversation about the world we occupy for such a brief time. But be forewarned: most of my best work has been rejected repeatedly by the commercial world.

Pieces of the Plains is a book mainly about our intellectual and emotional interactions with nature, although “interactions” is defined rather broadly. Successful writers eventually learn to follow the dictum “write about what you know,” and Pieces certainly adheres to that advice. The essays are organized into sections beginning with Part I – Oklahoma, which includes two chapters about Karen’s family and her history, and one about my grandfather. Each of these pieces has an “afterword” attached, an explanation of how and where it came about and what my intent was in writing it. Thus I open with a biologist’s backstory.

None of us come into the world with a completely clean slate; we all carry the burden of a time and place where we first see the light of day and first hear the words of those attending our birth, and we have no say whatsoever in the sights, sounds, smells, and touches that we experience for the next year or two. By the time we reach kindergarten, we’ve been told the stories, read the nursery rhymes, and steeped in whatever traditions our extended family possesses simply by being alive in a particular part of the world, at a particular period of history, and as a member of some culture. And by the time we get over our teenage rebellion against loving parents, the time and place of our existence is as permanently embedded in our being as would be some tattoo of the mind. Part I – Oklahoma, is about this mental tattoo, and I’ve tried to write it in a way that makes a reader put the book down for a while in order to review his or her own circumstances of birth and maturity. As a result of reading Oklahoma, however, I hope you understand how kids end up deciding to study nature for the rest of their lives. You should also know that at my sixth grade graduation ceremony, some of my classmates predicted I would be a scientist; this prediction was made in the spring of 1949.

Part II – Aksarben Spelled Backward, focuses on the present, which is to say, the last forty-three years of life in Lincoln, Nebraska, and as an employee of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. When you start a family of your own, your backstory merges with your partner’s, becoming an integral part of all those conversations that make up the foundation of a relationship. And when you’ve been married to this same person for nearly fifty years then that relationship, and all its familial history on both sides, becomes one of your truly defining characters as well as a highly adjustable lens through which you see the rest of the universe. A family relationship also comes to be enriched by our professions, at least for those of us lucky enough by virtue of birth circumstances to have a profession. My life as a biology professor has provided everything and more than I ever thought possible for a post-WWII Oklahoma child who has resisted, with all his might, the problem of growing up. But Karen’s involvement in the arts has been perhaps the most enriching aspect of our lives in Nebraska, and if there is a strong statement to be made about this state, indeed about the very word “Nebraska” as a metaphor for circumstances assumed to be culturally impoverished, then my first task is to dispel that notion.

For example, every day, while simply doing what college professors do as part of their job, I walk past, and could easily touch if I wanted to, sculptures by Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, David Smith, and a dozen others with globally recognized names. There are at least five million residents of New York City who cannot make that claim. Numerous times over the past few years Karen and I have sat down to elegant dinners with Norman Geske, an eminent art historian, occasionally in places like Paris, France, and talked art for hours. There are at least seven million residents of New York City, and at least six billion other humans, who have never had such an experience, even once, and are never likely to have one. And we have had lunch with the Seacrests, listening to a budding opera star, just back from an international prize-winning gig in Europe, sing beside our table the Overture from Le nozze di Figaro in honor of Rhonda and Jim’s support of UNL’s opera program. There are at least six million people in New York City who have never had a private and personal, table-side, performance of Mozart’s comic masterpiece, and at least another five billion people on Earth who do not know, or care, who Mozart was or what the fact of a human like Mozart, or Picasso, tells us about our species.

There are three pieces from these forty-three years as a biologist; their subjects are: microscopic animals, western Nebraska, and my job, although I’ve given those chapters rather noble-sounding titles, considering their contents. Through a Lens is my summary of encounters with nature, especially microscopic nature, as a University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty member. I’ve spent a whole lot of time looking at things very few others get to see, so I’ve tried to let you join me in the lab and share the lessons one learns from dealing with tiny creatures. The Horse is an excerpt from a book entitled The Ginkgo: An Intellectual and Visionary Coming-of-Age. This piece is likely to seem strange and even embarrassing, mainly because it deals with a man talking to a horse. The conversation is not the type that you usually associate with men and horses, so I’ve provided a short introduction, which is not a part of the original novel. The Ginkgo is about the burdens of traditions. In this case, the traditions are those of the ranching life, and the necessary burdens, both the behavioral and economic ones, run right up against the information age and Third Millennium American values. The Ginkgo also is about what we learn from museums, painting, and sculpture. The book is a direct result of my encounters with the visual arts through Karen’s work as Education Coordinator at the Sheldon Museum of Art and assigning papers to students in BIOS 101, most of whom arrive at UNL with a heavy load of backstory. A conversation with a horse is not exactly what comes to mind when one reflects on lessons learned from being married to Karen, participating in her life surrounded by the visual arts, and contemplating the burden of tradition, but trust me, stranger connections have been made in the past and this one is legitimate. But you get to hear, and imagine, only a . . . yes, conversation with a horse. The Ginkgo, the book from which this piece is taken, is fiction, but written as if it were the literal truth; it’s available as a trade paperback from Amazon and on Kindle.

The Firm deals with life as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At one time in the past, a colleague at another university suggested that I write a book entitled The Department, spilling all the secrets, insider information, and intrigue that comprise academic politics. It was quite a temptation, although liability issues prevailed and the only people who might be half-way interested in reading it were those who could have written it as easily as I. Nevertheless, there is something to be said about a business in which reputation is the currency, and especially about the way humans behave when our sense of self worth is defined only by what others say about us, especially behind our backs. Thus that last chapter in Part II is entitled The Firm, a play on all the other works that have been so entitled, thus giving this phrase, “The Firm,” a somewhat sinister connotation.

Part III – A Future, focuses on the next two millennia and the role played by scientific literacy in directing our behavior over those two thousand years. The pieces in Part III come straight out of my classroom presentations, my teaching and research—in the broadest sense—and related creative writing about science and the natural world. These essays, then, are a statement about what I believe I’ve learned from my career. In this section, you get a scientist’s perspective on life as a member of the species Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758, but you also get one person’s attempt to move beyond where he or she resides, intellectually, on a day-to-day basis. The vast majority of my everyday experience involves the lives of microscopic parasites: how they live, how they’re transmitted, their reproduction and development, and their evolutionary relationships. But in addition to the daily research, planning experiments, backing up data, and designing figures for publication, a scientist’s life also involves a constant engagement with larger questions about the scientific enterprise itself. We’re always asking ourselves the question: what is the fundamental nature of this human activity we call “science”? So even as we’re dissecting beetles, our thoughts drift off into the realm of planetary processes, the history of Planet Earth, and the future of life on this only planet known to support it. The human condition is an integral part of this discussion; without humans there would be no awareness of the universe as we now understand the term.

Because evolution is the central unifying theme of biology, a biologist’s mind constantly wanders from the Cambrian to the distant future, all the time wondering why others don’t seem to have this intellectual affliction. I’m sure that physicists’ minds routinely wander between the subatomic to the cosmic, chemists’ minds regularly explore a bewildering array of molecular structures and their associated functions, and geologists’ minds journey easily from the planet’s molten core to its highest mountain ranges. In other words, scientists go places, not only mentally and metaphorically, but also literally, places that a massive body of knowledge can take us. Part III – A Future is a product of this metaphorical travel, a projection into the future of what I’ve thought about, mainly since 1966, in my four labs—room 124 Bessey Hall, room 424 Manter Hall of Life Sciences, a converted storage closet in Cedar Point’s Goodall Lodge north of Ogallala, and the Swallow Barn at Cedar Point Biological Station—while dissecting insects and fish and identifying and counting their parasites.

I need to thank Karen, my wife of forty-eight years, for reading this manuscript carefully, more than once. The first two chapters are personal enough, and focused on her family, so that I felt she needed to give me permission to use the material. But Karen is also a perfectionist editor with a distinguished publishing career herself, and she certainly put her skills to use on Pieces from the Plains. Four students have read, and commented, on at least some of the material: Paige Ahart, a former BIOS 101 student who came by unannounced to talk about her own writing, thus got caught; Alaine Knipes and Gabriel Langford, my two doctoral students whose papers and presentations have been matters of constant discussion; and Ben Vogt, an English doctoral student (and recent graduate) upon whose supervisory committee I served. Finally, I would like to give my sincere thanks to Rhonda and Jim Seacrest for sponsoring the publication of this book. If it were in my power to take every one of the seven billion human beings on Earth, or maybe the four billion that are twenty-one years of age or older, and sit them down in a booth at The Olive Garden, order them a Stolichnaya martini on the rocks (with olives and a twist of lemon), then offer to publish any book they’d write, I would do it instantly. Then the world would be, I honestly believe, not nearly so violent and corrosive a place.

John Janovy, Jr.

July, 2009