Читать книгу pH: A Novel - Nancy Lord - Страница 7
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
It was cold, standing at the ship’s rail that early on a September morning, without a hat. Ray’s annoyance at having left his wool cap in his cabin only added to his general peevishness about all things Jackson Oakley.
“Puker,” he said to no one in particular, as the smaller boat approached their ship.
“Huh?” Colin, as usual, stood attentively close—too close—as though mother-of-pearl wisdom would fall from Ray’s hard mouth and he would be there to catch it.
“Puker boat. You know, what they call those sport boats that take tourists out fishing, and everyone spends the whole trip puking over the side.” He gave the gangly young man with watery eyes a sort-of grin, as if to say: Not like us, serious seagoers doing serious work, nothing so trivial as slapping around for sport.
He was trying as much as he could to make the best of a bad situation.
He and the others who had roused for the transfer watched as the boat, its white cabin roof bristling with an array of fishing rods, slowed. The opening into the Gulf of Alaska was righteously calm, with just the rise and fall of its oceanic swell. The mainland behind them formed a dark line like a charcoal smudge between the blue-green sea and paler sky. A couple of gulls, trailing the puker boat, flapped sullenly.
Their captain, up on the bridge wing, faced the ship into the swells as the smaller vessel jockeyed to its side. On the boat’s bow, a man in clean yellow fishing bibs dangled a pink buoy over the side to protect the precious puker boat from smacking. Yellow, pink, white fiberglass—it was all very Easter-egg bright on a blue morning.
Ray avoided looking at Oakley, who was giving some final instructions, presumably, to Helen, his (Oakley’s) star student. Ray was trying to mitigate his anger with relief. While on the one hand, Oakley’s abandoning ship and his duties with the chemical oceanography part of their research was unforgivable, the man would be gone. As his daughter, Aurora, might have said about a school bully, “good riddance to bad rubbish.”
The two vessels came together with barely a bump: a sea louse nudging the side of a salmon. Oakley’s duffel was pitched through the open gate, and then Oakley himself stepped through, down onto the smaller boat’s bow. The vessels separated, and Captain Billy tooted his horn. Oakley, heading for the cabin, raised his hand in a gesture that was somewhere between a Marine’s salute and a queen’s wristy wave.
The last thing Ray saw as the other boat turned toward port and sped up was someone reaching out of the cabin to hand Oakley a bottle of beer. Or at least Ray chose to believe it was a bottle of beer. It wasn’t orange juice. He resisted the temptation to perform his own good-bye wave, which would have been a middle-finger salute.
“Well, that sucks.”
Colin again. Ray wasn’t sure how much Colin or any of the other students knew about what had transpired in the last few hours, less than a day out on their weeklong cruise. The official story—what he and Oakley had announced in the galley—was that Professor Oakley had been called back to the university. They’d assured the eight students that nothing would be disrupted. Oakley had arranged for a boat owned by a friend to pick him up so they wouldn’t lose research time returning to port. Helen, who’d been on several cruises already and knew the sampling protocols, would take over responsibility for the chemistry work. Alex, of course, was still overseeing the wet lab. They’d be a little short-handed, but everyone would chip in.
And they would. In his nine years of co-leading the University of the North’s twice-yearly research cruises on the Gulf of Alaska, Ray had never had a problem with student slouches. They might occasionally pause to vomit over the side in rocky seas—it did happen—but nothing would keep his team from filling their bottles, netting their specimens, counting their copepods, getting the work done. Joyfully.
In Ray’s opinion, nothing would be lost by losing Oakley. Nothing they couldn’t do without.
“We’ll make the best of it,” he said to Colin.
If things were a little more complicated, and perhaps more personal, than the official explanation—well, things always were, weren’t they?
For years, Ray and others in the School of Ocean Sciences had been advocating for more attention to ocean acidification. With more coastline than the rest of the United States put together, it only made sense that Alaska institutions should lead the science. Not just in understanding what happens to ocean chemistry as the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the overloaded atmosphere, but across all the scientific disciplines. Biology, certainly—you can’t change ocean chemistry without affecting what lives in the ocean. Even physics is affected by chemistry; pH influences how sound travels underwater. So when the university president expressed an interest and came up with money to fund an office dedicated to the subject, Ray and his colleagues were thrilled—or as thrilled as a bunch of science nerds could be. The next thing they knew, the president was bragging about the “top-notch” chemist he’d recruited to head the new office.
That would be Jackson Oakley, the man from Texas. The press release that went out praised his “pioneering work in developing calibration instruments for measuring ocean pH.”
Ray liked to think that he was open-minded, liberal in the best sense of the word, but he couldn’t help it if his thirty-six years in Alaska had put him off Texans: their clichéd but ubiquitous cowboy boots, their syrupy drawls. If oil development had—admittedly—been good for the state’s finances, it had exacted enormous costs on the environment and social fabric. Many perfectly nice Texans must have come north with the industry; he just hadn’t known any. In any case, his prejudice was not something he generally shared. Only his wife, the eye-rolling Nelda, ever had to listen to him.
It had been just over a year since Dr. Jackson Oakley—“Oakley” like the tree, Ray always thought—came to campus, and Ray still wasn’t sure what he did in the new Office of Ocean Acidification Science. The man rarely had anything to say in meetings when the departments came together, instead seeming preoccupied with his laptop or tablet or phone, scrolling and tapping. He was younger than most of the professors—the aging boomers, like Ray, who had started at the university during its own boom time, when oil money had first gushed loose. He wore nicer clothes—shirts with collars, lambswool sweaters. (Ray only knew about the lambswool because Nelda had pointed it out, perhaps admiringly.) He had a headful of beach boy hair and cheeks that were always smooth and shiny, the proverbial baby’s bottom, as though he’d not only shaved within the hour but then rubbed in some kind of lotion. Ray had noticed that Oakley smelled like coconuts, confirming, for him, the lotion theory.
In the elapsed year, Oakley had not, to Ray’s knowledge, spoken out about the dangers of ocean acidification.
Ray had made overtures, on several levels. He’d shown Oakley a few of his pteropod photos and offered them for any publications or posters the new office might produce. He told him about the farmer’s market and the ice museum, testing his interest in local attractions. He asked if he liked winter sports, and Oakley said he was a skier, which Ray misunderstood as cross-country (understandably, he thought, since that was what people did in Fairbanks, on the many trails) until he was corrected. “My former wife and I had a place in Park City, but now I go to Banff,” Oakley said, which is how Ray learned that Oakley was accustomed to travel and resorts and had, in addition, apparently come to the campus in an unmarried state. Oakley did not ask Ray about himself or his work.
The students seemed to like him well enough. The thesis students said he was smart and that he texted them his comments, very modernly. An older chemistry professor had retired, and no one was sorry to see someone more up-to-date take over his advising.
When Ray complained to a colleague that Oakley seemed “smug,” the colleague said, “That’s because he knows he’s brilliant.”
Now, as their ship resumed its course, they all moved back inside. Ray found himself following Helen, the grad student who worked most closely with Oakley and now was left with his responsibilities. The two men had easily agreed on her assignment. Aside from having previous cruise experience, Helen was the epitome of a responsible woman, given to getting the work done without a lot of noise about the fact that she was getting it done. She was also an Alaska Native—part-Iñupiat—and everyone these days was very big on diversity. Ray said to her now, “You can expect a little extra in your pay envelope for this week.”
She gave him a confused, brow-lowered look. Pay envelope?
“I’m joking!” Why, Ray wondered, did he always have to explain his jokes? There was, of course, no pay envelope. There was not even any automatic deposit. The students on the cruise were all volunteers. There were benefits to them, of course. The experiments they conducted, the data they collected—these were for their studies, their theses and dissertations. The cruises went on their vitae. If they worked hard, they also had a great time together. In any case, every May and September, there was never a problem choosing a crew from among eager applicants.
This time, the job of assembling the student crew had fallen completely to Ray, without complaint. He’d been a little slow, perhaps, to realize that Oakley, his putative co-leader, had basically ceded him all the work of preparing for the cruise. And Ray had done it, because it was easier to do it himself than to try to work with Oakley, who only became more distant and distracted every time Ray tried to talk to him. “Sure, sure,” Oakley always said. “That’ll be fine.”
Then, when the rest of them made the long drive to the coast in a couple of vans, Oakley had chosen to fly. “To save time,” he said. That was the beginning of Ray’s awareness that Oakley was not going to have time—to make time—for a week on the water, away from his phone and whatever else he deemed more important than data collection and mentoring students. Oakley had apparently thought that he’d have constant satellite communication, and when he learned, not long after they’d gotten underway, that that was not the case, he told Ray he was leaving. He had already called, while he could still reach him on the marine radio, an old friend with a boat. “A fanatical fisherman,” he told Ray. “He works now for Shell in their offshore operations. Lucky I could reach him.”
Lucky indeed.
“I feel very confident leaving everything in your capable hands,” Oakley had said, with false flattery. “And Helen’s. She’ll do a better job than I ever could.” The false modesty bothered Ray only a trace less than the false flattery.
There was no use arguing with him. Ray could only think about the government grants, the ones that included their names and credentials as co-leaders and spoke to the ways they assured best practices in all the data collection and analysis, the strict adherence to protocols, and the importance of consistency and continuity year to year with the time series. Ray had written into the narrative whole paragraphs about the significance of ocean acidification and the need to track ocean chemistry and understand what that change might mean in the cold, biologically-rich waters off Alaska. This year’s grants had specifically emphasized student mentoring and all the benefits that students would receive from spending a week with experts in their fields. And now they would have just the poor sucker zooplankton guy.
On top of that, this was the cruise on which he’d decided to bring his daughter, because he hoped she might discover, before she became an indifferent teenager, a love for science—or at least the ocean. He had hoped to spend some time with her.
What was more important than the research cruise? He had asked Oakley this, but Oakley had only shaken his head. The implication was: Everything about me is important, and this is only a boat trip.
Ray looked at his watch. They were nearly on schedule, not far from their first station.
The image of Oakley reaching for that beer was really bothering him. There was a reason they jokingly referred to research cruises as “Seahab.” Ray preferred to think of them as “cleansings,” as he preferred to think of himself as a social drinker, not an alcoholic, although his wife might disagree. Anyone might get headaches when stopping a regular habit; it happened with coffee drinkers, too. And only once on a previous cruise had he even thought about looking for a bottle of vanilla in the ship’s pantry. If his hands shook, it was probably from drinking more coffee than usual. The students, with their youthful, small-fingered competence, easily changed the chlorophyll filters in the lab and only kidded him about his inability to work with tweezers.
Still, it was hard not to want that beer. Or at least to want Oakley not to have it.
Back in his cabin to fetch a data sheet and a hat, he glanced at his interrupted work. He’d got the computer set up, photos of his beloved zooplankton swimming over the screen. The general messiness of books, papers, instructional manuals, loose batteries, the cruise plan folded back on itself to the list of personnel—these were the proof of his life.
He found Colin and the three young women in their padded float coats on the back deck. They were leaning against the rail, exclaiming about the Dall’s porpoises jetting around the ship. Tina, the funny one, said something that made the others laugh. Cinda, Ray noted, wore new rubber rain pants, still creased from their packaging. The lovely Helen stood just apart from the others, dark ponytail tossed over one shoulder.
They all watched the porpoises for another few minutes, and then the two women who had been working in the wet lab joined them. They gathered around the giant pumpkin of the CTD—the instrument package they would drop to the bottom of the sea—to await Ray’s approval and instructions.
Where was Aurora? He thought she would have come out with the women students. She wanted to see this.
“She’s in our cabin,” Tina said. “Listening to her iPod. Er—I mean reading. Studying.”
Aurora was missing a week of school and had brought along more books than the grad students.
“And what about Annabel? I haven’t seen her since last night.” Annabel was the artist. The government funders liked them to include a teacher, a journalist, or an artist on every cruise. The theory was that non-scientists could help interpret the work and convince the public of its value, and then the public would convince their legislators to provide funding. Good luck with that, Ray always thought before writing up his boilerplate bullshit.
Annabel had been recommended by someone in the art department, but he wasn’t sure what her art was, other than she called it “environmental.” He had not had time to talk to her yet, except to learn that she wanted to be with the night crew and had something in mind that had to do with bioluminescence. He made a mental note: talk to Annabel. And another: have an open mind about frigging modern art.
“We haven’t seen her this morning. Last night she was in the kitchen asking for sheets of nori.” Tina had removed her hat that looked like a rabbit’s head with floppy pink ears to straighten the wire in the ears.
“She had a bunch of chemistry questions,” Cinda said. “She’ll be disappointed that Professor Oakley left.”
Ray looked at Helen. “Did she talk to you?”
“Not about chemistry,” she said in her quiet Helen voice. “About drugs.”
“Drugs?”
“She had three different kinds of motion sickness pills, plus those wristbands with the pressure points. She wondered if she would need any of them.”
Cinda asked, “So what big-deal consulting thing is Professor Oakley doing?” She was picking at something on her new raingear, and Ray couldn’t tell which of them her question was addressed to. Helen just looked away.
He felt obliged to say, “I don’t know about any big-deal consulting thing.” He waited. “Helen?”
“I don’t know that it’s a big deal,” she said, even quieter than before. “He’s been getting a lot of invitations to speak.”
Everyone looked uncomfortable now, or maybe they were just eager to get on with the work. Ray stretched his face into what he hoped looked like a smile and said, “It’s his loss, missing out on all our fun.” He would leave it at that, leave his fresh anger in the cold place behind his heart. How embarrassing was it that students knew more than he did about whatever his so-called colleague was doing? And how annoying that acidification was the media’s new darling and everyone wanted a piece of Mr. Acidification himself. No one would miss Ray Berringer and his zooplankton expertise for a week, but apparently the world couldn’t live without constant contact with His Hotness Jackson Oakley. Apparently, the public could not get enough explanation of instrument calibration.
Only Marybeth, the undergrad helping with zooplankton studies, hadn’t worked with the CTD before, so he quickly went over the basics: conductivity, temperature, depth; the collection bottles that would trip closed at different depths; additional instruments; and the communications cable that connected to the computer.
Ray checked that all the knobs were tight and the troublesome wires free, though he knew that Colin would already have done this. He looked at the milk crates filled with sampling bottles. “Is Alex set up in the lab?” Alex was another incredibly diligent student. Not for the first time, Ray wondered why so many of the best students, like Alex, had Korean and Chinese family names. He had his theories, involving stereotypes that were best left unspoken.
“Almost. He says he has to do the rest himself.”
“Computer?”
“Ready to fire.”
The CTD drop at the first station went well. When the bottles were back onboard, the three women took their places on overturned buckets, like milkmaids around a cow, to siphon off samples—carbonate, nutrient, chlorophyll. In the wet lab, Alex had finished assembling his towers and was setting filters in place. Ray passed through to the dry lab, where Nastiya and Marybeth were back to work with samples from the first plankton tow. On their high stools, they peered into microscopes while their hands fluttered with eyedroppers and tally counters.
Ray had now entered his realm, the world of living zooplankton. Though he was dedicated to the study of marine organisms overall, there was nothing that excited him more than the tiny, footed, flagellated, ciliated, bristled, tentacled, transparent creatures, in all their life-cycle stages, all the way up to pulsing jellyfish as large as the reflected moon. It had become a primary goal in his life to encourage as many people as possible to look at his microfauna, to know that they existed. If ordinary people could admire their great beauty, maybe they would want to learn more about them, and maybe they would begin to understand why it was important for such creatures to have a home in the ocean. With his photographs, shot through the lens of a microscope, he was able to capture and enlarge the tiny larval forms of fish, the amphipods, the copepods, the microzooplankton radiolarians with their incredibly intricate mineral skeletons, and the shelled pteropods known as sea butterflies.
Ray liked to tell students, “My goal is to make people want to hug plankton.”
“How’s it going?” he asked now. He picked up a clipboard, to have something to do with his hands.
“Is very good,” Nastiya said.
It wasn’t just her Russian accent; it was the off-the-beat syntax that got him every time, and something about the harshness of her consonants. Good. My God, how could “good” be such an attractive, even sexy, word? When he talked with Nastiya he always wanted to adopt her own speech. The couple of times he had inadvertently done this, she had looked at him, wounded, and thought he was making fun of her.
Nastiya’s great attribute was her ability to sort zooplankton. She had a tremendous eye for the subtleties between species, and she could sit at a microscope for hours.
His inner voice repeated “Is very good,” but his outer one said, “I want to set up the carboys on the foredeck after lunch, and we’ll try some incubation.”
“Okey-dokey,” Nastiya said, finally looking up from the scope and straightening her back.
Okey-dokey?
“So,” said Marybeth, “the lack of wind equals lack of mixing equals lower productivity? Not so many nutrients up in the water column where the phytoplankton can reach them? And then the zooplankton have less phytoplankton to eat?”
“Precisely.” Ray moved around the table to stand closer to her. The room was tight between the lab tables, the big freezer, and the boxes of supplies. “That’s the theory. That’s the value of all these data sets, the time series, year after year, to match ocean conditions to primary production and to be able to apply what we learn to understanding and managing the species people care about, like salmon. Other people, I mean. People like us care about zooplankton.” He was trying to be funny again. People like us, crazy people like us, wacky scientists. He wasn’t yet sure that Marybeth was one of them, but she seemed an eager student—and had sworn, when he’d interviewed her for the cruise, that she’d been sailing all her life and had never gotten seasick.
“Let me have a look,” he said to Marybeth, taking her warm spot on the metal stool. The sample teemed with several species of the bug-like copepods, with their long rowing antennae and plumose setae extending like the horizontal fins on airplane wings. How could anyone not be in constant awe that a critter only three or four millimeters long could be so finely, elaborately designed? He used the eyedropper to pick out a few, one at a time, and squirt them into the adjacent dish. He counted aloud and she clicked the tally counter.
“A few Calanus pacificus,” he said. This was significant, but not unexpected. He explained to Marybeth: “One of the southern species that’s becoming more common here. A warm water copepod, ‘warm’ in quotes, moving northward. Smaller than our resident species. If it becomes more dominant, the foraging efficiency of visual predators might be affected. And, to the degree that it displaces our larger, fatter, more nutritious northern species, those predators will have less to eat.
He refocused the lens. “What I’m not seeing is Limacina helicina. Nastiya?”
“What?” She said this more aggressively than seemed warranted.
“Are you finding any Limacina in your sample?”
“No, I have not.”
“And, Marybeth, why are we interested in Limacina?”
“Because it’s a pteropod, and pteropods are a keystone species. Lots of other things eat them.”
“That’s right. And pteropods have shells, so they’re vulnerable to ocean acidification. That makes them an indicator species as well. There’s two species we should be finding in these waters—the more common Limacina helicina and the less common Clione limacina.”
“The naked one,” Nastiya added.
“Right. The naked pteropod, because it only has a shell in its embryonic form and loses it a few days after hatching. It becomes a predator itself, and eats the shelled pteropods.”
Nastiya again: “Clione suck those suckers right out of their shells.” She laughed wickedly.
“Yes, it’s specialized that way. It uses its buccal cones to grab and turn the little snails and its hooked proboscis to extract the bodies. OK, I’ll leave you two to your work.”
Was he concerned about the lack of pteropods in their first tow? Not really. One tow wasn’t significant. One season wasn’t even significant. That’s why they needed tow after tow, year after year, along with all the temperature and other data—the time series that showed trends and long-term change.
The chemistry. The ocean’s chemistry—its pH—was going to be significant.
Coffee cup in hand, he went looking for his daughter. He had hope for her inquiring mind, which seemed more promising than her brother’s. At sixteen, Sam loved driving fast machines but seemed to have no interest in how they worked or what to do when they stopped working, and he avoided the natural world except as a playground for said machines. Of course, science recognized that the adolescent brain, especially the male one, was incompletely formed. Hadn’t he himself been an idiot, in multiple ways, during his teenage years? Aurora, on the other hand, was watchful and attentive to detail, and she loved animals.
But where was she? Not in the galley. He headed for her cabin, a vision of a disapproving Nelda hurrying his steps; you didn’t just leave your eleven-year-old to fend for herself in a strange place! What if she’d gotten disoriented and fallen down a ladder into the engine room? What if the ship’s crew, whom he knew from previous cruises to be incredibly nice guys, really weren’t? What if she was barfing her guts out? If she was seasick now it was going to be a long week’s cruise.
But there she was on her back on her top bunk, still wearing purple pajamas. She was plugged into her iPod, jiggling one leg, and staring into another electronic screen that he’d never seen before.
“There you are,” he said, pretending that he hadn’t just panicked. “Would you like to get dressed and come see what the others are doing?”
“No.”
He waited a couple of beats while the electronic device beeped. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to get my binoculars. Let’s go up on the flying bridge and see what birds are around. And porpoises. There were porpoises a little while ago. I should have come and got you then.”
“OK.”
They passed onto the deck where the carboys—those glass incubation jugs they’d hauled from Fairbanks—would be set up, and up the stairs to the pilothouse where Captain Billy refilled Ray’s coffee cup with an earth-friendly blend. It was already afternoon in New York, and a Mets game was playing on the radio. Billy showed Aurora the GPS and the depth finder and then the paper charts that marked their course straight out from the mainland to the edge of the continental shelf. She feigned interest, politely. He let her sit in the captain’s chair. Ray could tell that Billy really wanted to listen to the Mets game. He thought he’d like to hear the game, too, but he had the wrong job for that.
“Let’s go, Nanook,” he said. “We’ve got contracts to fill, eggs to hatch, and cats to kill.”
Aurora frowned at him but was already through the door, a fairy princess in an oversized hoodie that reached almost to her knees.
They climbed the ladder behind the pilothouse—Aurora as fearless as a monkey, Ray spotting from below. Topside, she took a seat on the padded bench where biologists on survey cruises sat to record their marine mammal and bird sightings.
Ray’s boyhood fascination with birds had never worn off, even as he’d learned that his eyesight and temperament were better suited to small things he could capture and control. That was like so much in his life, starting off large and getting smaller—dinosaurs, then gorillas and bears, hawks and owls and the wood ducks of his Michigan youth, down to passerines he could hold in his hand, dragonflies and beetles, the nearly invisible world of microorganisms. Not that there was anything inherently “better” about the larger and more charismatic species, but he had seemed to know at an early age that he himself would not be large—in the sense of attainment—or charismatic. He’d recalibrated his ambitions several times along the way, through school and in the romance department, where he’d somehow lucked out with a wife who exceeded his expectations—but who also knew this and sometimes reminded him.
He raised his binoculars now, setting on a single kittiwake that winged lazily across the bow. Off to one side, three glaucous-winged gulls, two of them juveniles with muddy-looking feathers, rode a half-submerged log.
“Where’s the porpoises?” Aurora bounced on the bench.
“You know what to look for?”
“What?”
“Rooster tails. Water will be spraying from their backs when they break the surface. It’ll be just quick splashes, they swim so fast. Here.” He handed her the binoculars, placing the strap around her neck. “Look at those gulls on the log. Oh, and look! There’s a puffin, a horned puffin.” The football-shaped bird with its white front beat past; he could just make out the orange bill with his bare eye.
She was slow to track the bird, to lift the glasses and aim them in the right direction. He could tell she was only pretending to see it, for his benefit. It was too far away now.
A retired bird biologist had told Ray, just a couple weeks earlier, that he used to do surveys along the coast behind them, and that the numbers of birds today were mere fractions of what he’d observed in the 1970s. Especially murres. They used to be as thick as flies, he’d said. Now tourists saw a few murres and puffins, maybe a red-faced cormorant, and thought they were looking at abundance because they didn’t have anything to compare with. They couldn’t begin to imagine the thickly packed and cacophonous cliff colonies, the huge rafts of seabirds covering the nearshore waters, the darkened skies when they flew. Ray had also heard from a tour guide that the guides never said anything to their customers about diminution. If they saw just one puffin or one orca, they exclaimed over it: You’re so lucky to see that! The tourists went away thinking they’d just had an amazing nature experience in a pristine, undisturbed, Serengeti landscape. Because really, the guide had said to Ray, these people paid a lot of money to go on their tours and cruises and you wanted them to think they were having the best wildlife experience ever. Why would you want to depress them by mentioning climate change or that there was oil under the beach sand or that the reason a group of birds was resting on the water in the middle of summer was because they’d had a complete reproductive failure?
And now, on top of all those other insults, an acidifying ocean.
A picture of Jackson Oakley crowded back into his mind—that shiny smooth face that reminded him of the smiley faces people sometimes used, annoyingly, in their e-mails. Who was the man consulting with? What was he saying in his apparently many speeches? Was it all about his precious calibrating instruments and the need to study, study, study more ocean chemistry?
Ray looked at his daughter, her uncombed hair blowing back in the breeze as she held tightly to the binoculars aimed at the sky, at feathers of clouds farther out over the Gulf. The Gulf stretched to the horizon, an achingly beautiful scene if you didn’t know better. He was the cup-half-empty guy, the realist, but he knew he ought to let others—children at least—enjoy some innocence. He would bite his tongue. He would not say, “You should have seen this place when …”
He did the best he could under the circumstances, which was to say nothing.
