Mark Trail
Animals
Anatomy Lesson
Once, when my nephew Jonathan was a few months old, I picked up a packed of X-rays marked "J. Sacks" that had been left in the lounge. I started to leaf through them curiously, then perplexedly, then with horror -- for Jonathan was a nice-looking little baby, and no one would have guessed, without the X-rays, that he was hideously deformed. His pelvis, his little legs -- they scarcely looked human.
I went to my mother with the X-rays, shaking my head. "Poor Jonathan . . . " I started.
My mother looked puzzled. "Jonathan?" she said. "Jonathan is fine."
"But the X-rays," I said, "I've been looking at his X-rays."
My mother looked blank, then burst into a roar of laughter, and laughed until tears ran down her face. "J" did not stand for Jonathan, she finally said, but for another member of the household, Jezebel. Jezebel, our new boxer, had had some blood in her urine, and my mother had taken her to hospital to have a kidney X-ray. What I had taken for grotesquely deformed human anatomy was, in fact, perfectly normal canine anatomy. How could I have made such an absurd mistake? The least knowledge, the least common sense, would have made it all clear to me -- my mother, a professor of anatomy, shook her head in disbelief.
-- Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (New York: Knopf, 2001), 240.
A Shark Inside a Wave
William Willis's raft voyage from Peru to Samoa in 1954:
In the patterns of light around the raft, he once thought he saw an octopus extending enormous tentacles toward him, and he ran for his ax. Lying one afternoon asleep on the deck, he suddenly woke and in a wave looming above him saw a shark that looked ready to attack him. He jumped up to defend himself. The shark fell, and the raft rose on the wave that had contained it. Occasionally at night, the sparks of phosphorescence thrown up by the bow would seem to merge with the sky, and he would feel as if he were sailing among the stars.
Even though he wore sunglasses, the sun eventually blinded him, and he had to remain for hours at a time in the cabin, bathing his eyes with salt water for the pain. The first island where he might have landed was surrounded by reefs and had no shore. No one answered his radio call for help, so he had to sail past it. During a squall he heard a crash in the cabin but was too busy to address it. The cat had toppled the parrot's cage and killed the parrot. Willis sewed its remains in a piece of sail, put them in the cage, and lowered them overboard. After finding finding no way to enter a harbor on a second island, he saw an American ship headed toward him, and they towed him to land. He had been at sea for 112 days.
-- Alec Wilkinson, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Papa Neutrino (New York: Random House, 2007), 68.
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