Running with the Pack (15 page)

After about a mile or so of generally low-grade anxiety (occasionally escalating to soaring panic), the forest opens out into grassland. Here is a small lake where Hugo can cool down, after I've checked for gators and moccasins. Both are ubiquitous in south Florida, and you always have to keep a
wary eye open. But I've never seen any at this particular watering hole, and I think the definite danger of overheating has precedence over the potential danger of a passing reptile. So Hugo wades around in the water — I won't let him swim here — while I scan the surface for movement; tense, on my toes, ready for action. A few minutes later we are on our way again, Hugo reinvigorated, bounding ahead of me as he knows I will now allow him to do. There is an old road here, and I can — usually — see far enough along it to recognize the outline of any snake that might be sunning itself.

We see snakes here almost every day, but most are harmless. Black racers are everywhere. There is a big orange ratsnake we sometimes glimpse in the dead grass that lines the trail. And there is an improbably long and thin coach-whip we occasionally find basking on the cracked and faded tarmac. That snake is an admirably phlegmatic character — once, when I first discovered this place, in the twilight days of Nina and Tess, I wasn't looking out as carefully as I should and Nina walked right over the top of him. But when he does decide to move, boy is that snake fast! I doubt I could catch him, even if I tried.

Encounters with poisonous snakes are, thankfully, rare. There are the moccasins I've already mentioned: sometimes known as the cottonmouth — when alarmed, it opens its jaws wide and the inside of its mouth is pure cotton-white. Moccasins are a species of pit viper — so called because of the hole or ‘pit' that can be seen between their eyes and their nose, which contains the heat detectors that these vipers use to identify and locate prey. In this part of the world, you will find no shortage of people ready to regale you with stories of just how aggressive, almost diabolical, is the moccasin. I suspect this has much to do with the fact
that they just look so utterly evil. There are no beautiful markings, as on some of the other local venomous serpents. Their bodies are black and fat, almost bloated looking if the snake is healthy, and the head is often a lighter shade — like a brown skull. I have not yet seen a moccasin in south Florida, but I saw plenty when I lived in Alabama. There, they could be a little problematic during breeding season — April and May — soon after they have woken up from their hibernation (in south Florida, they don't hibernate). But in general, at least in my experience, they were relatively placid. Also, while they have been known to travel miles from water, it is quite unusual for them to do so. So while I have to keep a keen eye open for them when Hugo goes swimming, once we have left the lake behind there are other snakes more worthy of worry.

Here, everyone is afraid of coral snakes, largely because they are members of the cobra family. Brightly banded in red, black and yellow, they are easily mistaken for the harmless kingsnake. You have to look closely at the order of banding: red touching black, friend of Jack; red touching yellow, kill a fellow. Of course, with my markedly failing eyesight, I suspect that the inspection needed to identify this information would have to be done from uncomfortably close range and, all things considered, I think it would probably be better to just run the other way. The venom of the coral snake is neurotoxic — it attacks the nervous system, and death is the result of asphyxiation — whereas the venom of all the other poisonous serpents of Florida is haemotoxic — it attacks the red blood cells. Neurotoxic venom is more deadly, but does not come with the wish-I-would-hurry-up-and-die sort of pain associated with haemotoxic venom — or so I am told. If you're bitten by a coral snake, Floridians tell me, you'll be dead in
thirty minutes. In fact, this is exaggerated. First of all, death is by no means guaranteed. It all depends on where they bite you, how much venom they inject and how long it takes the nearest anti-venom team to reach you. Secondly, for poorly understood reasons, it can sometimes take hours for the symptoms of coral snake envenomization to occur. The first symptom is a sore throat, followed by an inability to keep one's eyelids open — not because you can't stay awake but simply because your eyelids won't do what you tell them. If this happens, you need help fast — but as long as you get it your chances are still very good.

Pygmy rattlers actually worry me a lot more than coral snakes or moccasins. There are no timber rattlers this far south, but its smaller cousin — they rarely grow beyond two feet or so — the pygmy, or dusky pygmy, rattler is an aggressive little sod, the Napoleon of the snake world. They don't move aside when they hear you coming; and they are useless at warning you of their presence — a rather unfortunate combination. Their rattle is small and often so faint that it sounds more like a cricket than a rattlesnake. The venom of their bite also belies their small stature. Their bite is unlikely to be fatal, at least not for me, but is nevertheless extremely painful.

But today's run is going to be special. We are going to see something that we may well never see again. On the road in front of us, sunning itself, unconcerned, in the morning heat, is perhaps the most singularly impressive snake in North America: an eastern diamondback rattler. Diamondbacks are truly beautiful animals. Their name comes from the pattern of wedges that runs all the way along their body, forming a latticework of diamonds, dark brown around the edges and beige inside — brown and beige, the colours of the 1970s, my
childhood, my home. Hugo and I stand and look, just for a while, and then run on.

This is a story of snakes, and fathers, and of a home to which I can never return. There is a reason why Satan chose to appear to Eve in the form of a serpent. There is a reason he did not choose to appear as a rabbit or a bird, a squirrel or a bug.

In the beginning there was darkness on the face of the deep and the world was without form and void. But then God the Father said, ‘Let there be light!' and there was light. And He saw that it was good. A neat trick, you might think, but how did He pull it off? Light is, of course, energy, and in creating energy, God — our ingenuity has subsequently allowed us to discover — employed two principles: the first and second laws of thermodynamics. According to the first law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely converted from one form into another. According to the second law, any closed system tends towards the maximum disorder.

If we were closed systems, then we would tend to the maximum disorder. This means we would soon cease to exist. Complex structures, like you and I, are ordered: our complexity is a measure of our order. The more disordered a system, the less complex it is. A maximally disordered system is one that has broken down into its constituent particles. This is the destiny of all closed systems. ‘Entropy' is the name scientists give to disorder. To avoid the ravages of entropy we need energy. This is what the second law tells us. But the first law tells us that we cannot simply create this energy from nothing. We need to get it from somewhere else — or, more precisely, from something else. And so, like any
living thing, I am an energy converter: I take something else's energy and make it my own.

Think of what God did when He said, ‘Let there be light!' and chose to implement this injunction through the laws of thermodynamics. In that instant, the world He will go on to create is destined to be a zero-sum competition for energy. The first law makes it zero-sum: since energy can be neither created nor destroyed (presumably this applies only after the initial act of creation), there is only a certain amount of energy and no more. And anything that wants to avoid the depredations of the second law must take in energy from other things that have it — and it must do this by breaking those things down, and so appropriating the energy they contain. Complexity is order, and order is a defiance of the second law. We are all minor outlaws. We live in defiance of the Law. We live on borrowed time and stolen energy. Ever since God said, ‘Let there be light!' the universe has been a brutal, unforgiving place.

The laws of thermodynamics shape all living things, and they have one clear consequence: the fundamental design structure of most living things is the tube. The reason is not difficult to discern. The tube is the energy-conversion device par excellence. Plants are stationary tubes; animals are mobile ones. For those tubes that became animals, energy, in the form of structured living matter, goes in at one end. The matter is broken down, the energy released and the waste products excreted at the other end. From a design point of view, the tube is the simplest way of satisfying this requirement. A zoologist from another universe, where we can suppose the two laws do not apply, might justifiably classify most earthly fauna as subspecies of worm. We are superstructures built on and around our alimentary canal — on and around the worm that we once were.

Before he was cast to earth, Satan was Morning Star, the most beautiful of the angels. Lucifer is Latin for ‘Bringer of light'. But to be cast to earth is to become subject to the first and second laws of thermodynamics — the fundamental laws of the earth. Morning Star, the bringer of light, is transformed from producer to exchanger of energy. It had to be a serpent in the Garden of Eden, because Morning Star had to become a tube. When Satan appeared to Eve in the form of a serpent, he was both medium and message. His form simply reminded us of something we have tried to forget. Our fine bodily clothes are draped around the frame of a worm. We can almost forget this, but the evidence just keeps seeping out.

The worms of life become more and more complex: more and more impressive bodily frames become built on and around the worm. This, too, is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. One worm tries to eat another and so appropriate its energy. The other worm develops a defensive shell — a carapace — to prevent its being eaten. The first worm develops mechanisms — teeth, claws — to break down the carapace. The other worm develops a more robust carapace, or means of locomotion to escape those teeth and claws. And so life unfolds.

But, then, something strange and unexpected happens. Some of the worms — or what the worms have become as the result of this arms race — reach a certain threshold level of complexity and become conscious. No one is entirely sure how or when this happened. But it did happen. Was it a blessing or a curse?

The two laws of thermodynamics entail that death and destruction are built into the process of life, as essential elements of that process. One organism can live only if another
dies. A universe designed by way of these laws will be a montage of destruction. However, until consciousness — in the form of animals — developed, there was no suffering in this universe: there was nothing capable of suffering. A living thing — like a plant or very simple animal — that is not conscious can be damaged and it can die. But it cannot suffer because suffering is consciousness of this damage and this dying. It is consciousness that brings both suffering and enjoyment to the world. If the enjoyment it brings outweighs the suffering, then I don't think anyone would deny that it was a blessing. However, it is difficult to see how consciousness could do this given the sort of universe in which it developed.

The nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer — usually thought of as German although he was actually born in Gdansk, in what is now Poland — saw this more clearly than anyone else. Even though he knew nothing about the laws of thermodynamics, and the idea of a zero-sum competition for energy was one that he did not consider, his view of the universe was similar to the one I have just sketched. Given the sort of universe in which it developed, Schopenhauer thought, it was inevitable that consciousness should introduce more suffering than enjoyment: ‘A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.' Consciousness is not, itself, a bad thing. But it has arisen in a bad universe: a universe designed according to the laws of thermodynamics.

When the descendants of worms reach a certain level of complexity — and so become conscious — then each is able to consciously discriminate how it is faring in the competition
for energy. Roughly, the sign that the battle goes well is called ‘enjoyment' or ‘pleasure'; and the indication that it is going badly is called ‘suffering' or ‘pain'. When the battle is going well, then as long as nothing changes it will keep going well. But when the battle is going badly, this needs to be addressed — because soon there will be no further opportunities for the battle to go at all, well or badly. Therefore, the consciousness of the children of the worm needs to be far more sensitive to a battle for energy that is going badly than one that is going well. And so, in the life of any conscious creature, if it is not extraordinarily lucky, it is likely that its suffering will outweigh its enjoyment: that the pain it experiences in the course of its life will overshadow the pleasure.

That is why we never really notice when things are going well. My snarling right Achilles tendon — it went to sleep for the last couple of miles, but has now woken up in a foul mood — makes this point for me in a painfully unambiguous way. I am utterly oblivious to just how well everything else is going. It's all relative, of course, but my heart is still beating nicely, my lungs are still doing a passable job of inhaling and expelling air and, the one Achilles tendon aside, the remainder of my legs are still doing what they are supposed to without any complaints. So all in all, my body is doing a good job. But do I notice this? Do I feel any sense of gratitude that things are going so well? Of course not, as Schopenhauer realized:

Just as a stream flows smoothly as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will. If we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, or to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes,
frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself on us instantly, directly, and with great clarity.