The Last Word On Nothing

This first ran Sept. 22, 2010 — the same time of year as now. It’s not clear that the auction is still going on, and maybe it’s been replaced by a 5K race, and maybe by a bunch of other auctions in different places. The clinic is building a new home and has a lot more staff and treat even more diseases. Holmes and Caroline Morton have certainly retired and you know what? things change and sometimes they get better. Though this was pretty good to begin with, splendid even.

I drove up to an auction in the Pennsylvania hayfields, parked in the field to the left because the lot to the right was reserved for buggies and horses. Maybe five auctions were going on in different parts of the fairground and everywhere were Amish in black and dark jewel-colored clothes, Mennonites in black and light sprigged cottons, all the old Anabaptist sects, the people that locals call “plain folk.”  They spoke a dialect of German you couldn’t understand even if you understand German. They had no-shit faces, meaning they don’t hand it out but if you do, then that’s the kind of person you are.

Kids were quietly all over the place, and a surprising number of them were in wheelchairs – plain peoples’ kids are unusually likely to have genetic diseases that interfere with the way their bodies process proteins, which in turn plays havoc with the parts of their brains that control muscles. The auctions were to raise money for the clinic that treats them, The Clinic For Special Children, which is what the plain people call these kids, God’s special children. The clinic supplies these people who have no telephones, no cars, no electric stoves, no electric lights with what was at the time the only true personalized genetic medicine in the country.

The clinic was started by Holmes Morton, a West Virginia boy who dropped out of high school, talked his way into college, got interested in pediatric neurology, wound up at Harvard Medical School. He worked at a children’s hospital in Philadelphia where he analyzed a case of glutaric aciduria, a disease in which the child is normal at birth, is healthy for months, then one morning gets some common virus and by afternoon, can’t walk, and in the worst cases, can’t sit, talk, or swallow. Abrupt onset like that is the hallmark of a treatable disease, so Morton decided to go out to Pennsylvania Dutch country and meet the family.  In fact, he met a lot of other families with a lot of similar problems, and because he thought glutaric aciduria might be not only treatable but preventable, he wrote a proposal to the National Institutes of Health. He got turned down. So at age 38, he decided to open his own clinic, though he doesn’t remember deciding anything except that the kids needed help. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about him, and money and lab equipment appeared as if by magic. In November of 1989, the plain people raised the clinic in one rainy day, because that’s how they do things, fast and all together.

The clinic equipment eventually included a genetic sequencing machine, and Morton hired a geneticist. Now during childbirths, which are generally at home, the midwife takes a sample of amniotic fluid and has it couriered to the clinic to be tested for genetic disorders; sometimes the baby hasn’t even been born yet. Babies with genes for a disorder spend the first two years of their lives on special diets and don’t get sick. Kids with less-treatable diseases are tested in the clinic, and though they don’t recover, they don’t get worse. The tests cost a tenth what they would in a commercial lab, results are back in a half hour, and the kids are treated before they leave the office.  The clinic buys its own diagnostic equipment and charges nominal fees; it buys medication wholesale and charges retail.  It’s a model of health care, says Morton’s wife Caroline, the daughter of a country doctor who works in the clinic, “that’s very old.”

The plain people came from a dozen couples who immigrated in the 1700’s, and though they don’t marry cousins, they also don’t marry outside the church.   So a mutation on a gene in one of those dozen couples now runs through a population. Maybe 7,000 people are at the auction. The clinic’s budget is around $1 million a year, and the auction raises a third of it. Everything being auctioned – food, crafts, farm equipment, motor oil, toys, handmade furniture – has been donated outright. A quilt can have 5,000 pieces and take a year to handsew, and during this year’s auction, next year’s quilt was being started.  The quilts are art.  They could be sold commercially for between $1000 and $3000.  And they’re given outright.

I bought a tiny quilt, a wall-hanging really, the Amish dark jewel colors. I heard how much the auction brought in and forget the exact amount but a lot. And back in Baltimore, my life is full of intense people doing interesting things, but that auction was a little disconcerting.  It was also full of intense people but the things they do, the outright gifts, go way beyond interesting.

Credits:  Photos all by, and used with the kind permission of, Mary Caperton Morton.  Holmes Morton is her father.  Much of the information was lifted wholesale from her story, here and here.

Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family for the turn of the New Year.

We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.

Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling ponderosa-covered waves of the foothills breaking on the snowy, treeless slopes of the high Rockies to the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.

I had a conversation with an owl the other night. It was a barred owl, a pretty common species in the woods around our cabin in central Virginia. The bird got going early—well before dusk—and I happened to be outside with my native wooden flute (purchased from this lovely flutemaker in Canada), so I found similar notes and replied in the same pattern. There was a pause while cicadas and crickets took a turn. Then, the owl again. Four quick hoots, repeated twice, the final one dropping off into a guttural drag. I waited a few beats, lets the insects hum some more, then played again, the eight notes. Seconds passed. Then, the owl.

Barred owls aren’t just one-note birds: They have a variety of calls, more than a dozen by some counts, including one that you’d swear came from a monkey. But this was the one people like to say sounds like “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” (I’m not sold on that comparison, but it endures.)

It’s very possible, likely, even, that my flute playing had nothing to do with the owl’s decision to keep hooting. In my experience these owls will repeat the sequence at least a few times over a couple of minutes, regardless of any back talk. But I like to think we were conversing. There’s something magical about hearing a wild animal respond to you the way he would to his own kind, as if what you said was meaningful enough in his language to warrant a reply.

If barred owls weren’t so vocal, I wouldn’t know for sure they were around. Only once did I spy one, barely, as I pointed my flashlight beam into the big oak where a call seemed to be coming from. It was fully dark, but I glimpsed the bird’s eyeshine before he swooped toward me and then away, over my head. (A little anatomy: An owl’s eyes are super reflective, having an extra layer called the tapetum lucidum that snags light passing through the retina and bounces it back to what are already very sensitive rods.) The swoop was almost silent; I felt it more than heard it. Which is the owl’s way: The structure and texture of the wing feathers lets them funnel air very quietly by breaking up the turbulence that would otherwise whoosh.

But it was the calls moving through the air more than the bird’s anatomy that interested me that night. I thought about how the animal’s vocalizations in a sense fill a niche much as the physical animal does. It’s a more temporary residency, but still. I had the same notion some months before while lying in my tent in a rainforest in Borneo. I was listening, on my first night there, to the delightfully unfamiliar calls of wild things coming awake just before dawn. As cricket chirps were topped by a bird’s song that gave way to monkey chatter, I envisioned the soundscape in 3D with each unique noise—with its own pitch and volume and frequency—rushing in to inhabit an empty spot, standing tall to make itself known—ta da!–and then vacating just as quickly. Picture Tom Cruise in Minority Report flinging bits of data around in space with his finger…sliding this bit over, that one up, another one off screen, a new one in to replace it. That’s sort of how I saw it.

So, I think of animals as competing not just for a physical niche but for an aural one as well—a slot in the soundspace not yet taken that they can fill with chatter and alarms and music and be heard despite the din. It’s another way to make oneself known in a crowd. The variety makes it all possible: An elephant sending low-frequency rumbles through the Earth reaches her intended even as lions roar and cicadas scream. Like a lioness intent on spotting the weakest gazelle in the herd, an animal can hear a familiar voice and a known language rising above all others.

I don’t know that this is a terribly profound notion, but conversing with the owl, I realized that my flute toots were taking up one tiny pocket of aural space, filling that sound niche just for a moment, then flitting offscreen, leaving that spot vacant for the owl’s reply. Profound or no, it was kind of a neat way to think about it.

–Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash