The Incidental Tourist Read online

  Perhaps it’s a result of the stresses associated with the inevitable ups and downs of living in such an unpredictable, rapidly changing society, or maybe we are now getting better at acknowledging such problems in both ourselves and in others, but I have the sense that all of us are increasingly conscious of psychiatric illness. It’s likely that airline personnel, especially the pilots with their requirement for a high level of expertise and regular medical checks, are at the top end on the functional spectrum and deal well with the inevitable ups and downs of life. Even so, psychiatrists are well aware that highly competent, middle-aged men, for instance, can spontaneously suicide without showing obvious warning signs.

  Anyone who has ever had any responsibility for managing very competitive and focused people knows that individuals can be very good at hiding their problems till the inevitable breakdown happens. That’s one good reason for not owning a firearm – 61 per cent of US gun deaths are suicides. That statistic may have changed in October 2017 with the insane slaughter in Las Vegas, where an apparently normal middle-aged guy cut loose with automatic weapons to kill at least fifty-eight people and wound hundreds of others, an event that (for him) ended in suicide.

  Mass murder/suicide by plane happens, as we all know from the story of Germanwings Flight 2525. The co-pilot locked the captain, Patrick Sondenheimer, out of the cockpit. Then, without saying anything, responding to queries from air traffic control or leaving a suicide note, he calmly crashed a perfectly functioning Airbus A320 into the Massif des Trois Évêchés in the Provence Alps. In all, 150 people, including a number of schoolchildren, perished on that plane. When investigators listened to the playback from the cockpit voice recorder that survived the crash, the copilot could be heard breathing steadily as Sondenheimer shouted and tried to break down the door. Most airlines now mandate that there must be at least two people, including one pilot, up front at all times, though the Calloway example illustrates how even that could go badly wrong.

  Delusional and crazy, Calloway clearly planned what he did. But was that true of the Germanwings co-pilot, though he was psychiatrically fragile and succeeded in concealing his condition from the airline? There’s been a lot of soul searching on the part of carriers as they try to develop fail–safe mechanisms to ensure that such events never happen. And, just as the change in global culture that has given us locked cockpit doors has caused most to be more aware of any odd behaviour on the part of the person sitting next to us, whether on a plane, a train or a bus, it’s also important that each and every one of us develops much better antennae for detecting changes in the mental health of those we know well, especially if they are in jobs where an acute psychiatric crisis could endanger others.

  Being trained as a professional to see everything in terms of probability and relative risk, it’s reassuring to look at the evidence and see that the chance of being a victim in a murder/suicide by a pilot event would have to be incredibly low. Millions of people are in the air every day and, though it has made great material for a recent novel (unnamed in case I spoil the plot for someone) that explores complex ideas about culpability, the media and the public attribution of blame, the psychiatric ups and downs of pilots, it would have to be the least of all worries regards flying. It certainly won’t change me from being an incidental aerial tourist to a no way José groundhog!

  CHAPTER 18

  Sea to shining sea

  WAY BACK IN THAT more innocent time before the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001, we were occasionally invited into the cockpit of a Qantas Boeing 747 to chat with the pilots and see the world from their perspective. That reflected a very brief period of minor celebrity after I was on TV fairly often during my 1997 stint as Australian of the Year.

  Once a young co-pilot, who had gone to school with our elder son Jim, asked us up front in the middle of the night as the plane flew over the Himalayas on a crystal-clear night. We looked down to a seemingly endless snowscape, with high peaks, a rare drift of smoke from a chimney, and occasional lights in the valleys.

  On another occasion we were on a US-bound 747 that, as some still did at that time, stopped to refuel in New Zealand. We were invited to sit behind the pilots and experience the landing approach into Auckland. It was disconcerting to lose all visual reference as the massive, descending machine flew into cloud. Flying blind is a bit scary when your experience of being in control of a vehicle is limited to a car! Auckland sprawls over an isthmus connecting the North and South islands. From ‘sea to shining sea’, we saw right across the country, from the Tasman Sea and Manukau Harbour to the Hauraki Gulf and the vast expanse of the Pacific beyond.

  Most of my transcontinental flying has been across the essentially equivalent sized (about 7.7 million square kilometres) landmasses of Australia and the lower forty-eight mainland US states. Once the brightness of an airport and outer suburbs/commuter towns are left behind, the experience of an Australian night flight from, say, Melbourne to Darwin or Sydney to Perth is of darkness till the very end. By contrast, taking a red-eye from Miami or Atlanta to Los Angeles in the United States, the twinkling lights of small towns below remind us there are always people down there, at least until we approach the Rockies.

  The Australian inland ranges from semi-arid and arid grassland to desert and bare rock. Most of the country’s nearly 25 million or so citizens are located in big cities on the coast. The much more productive agricultural landscape of the United States supports more than 300 million people, with large numbers living in small towns. Among the many effects of this, it explains some of the political differences between the two nations, with insular, small-town conservatism being a much more potent force in American politics. The liberal, open communities of the United States concentrate in the big cities (especially the seaports) and a horseshoe-like rim running up the two coasts and across the top, where the Scandinavian immigrant influence (and democratic tradition) is much stronger, with the country there sharing a border with Canada and its more British social-democratic culture.

  Making the cross-country, east–west transit in daytime, the US view past the massive cities is of criss-crossing roads, rolling farmlands, white farmhouses and outbuildings, and small settlements with (many) church spires. Major rivers snake across the fertile plains, with the darker green of trees and hedges separating brown, russet and lighter green areas of active cultivation. We can look down to see fields of all shapes and sizes. Some may be perfect circles, defined by an artesian well at the centre that supplies water to the moving radius of a long irrigation spray arm. Beyond that, in the latter third or so of the flight, the terrain, though still penetrated by roads, becomes more mountainous. Here we cross the heights of the Rockies to the Colorado Plateau, and on a clear day you can’t fail to sight the sinuous gap of the Grand Canyon. Then the land falls away steeply to the Mojave Desert until, in the final stages before we hit the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, the scene is dominated by the substantial peaks of the Traverse Ranges, with snowmelt-fed dams deep below the surrounding mountains. As we approach the west coast, it’s a delight to see large wind farms – though the United States as a country has been less than pro-active in efforts to combat anthropogenic climate change, that accusation cannot be levelled at California.

  Taking a northern transit from, say, Boston to Seattle in winter can give a pretty much constant view of white fields, leavened, of course, by rivers and the waters of the Great (and smaller) Lakes. By contrast, the small snow area down under is limited to the Australian Alps, north of Melbourne and South of Canberra. Melbourne, the mainland city that’s furthest from the equator, is much the same latitude as Memphis. Australia’s ‘inland sea’, Lake Eyre, can be a massive, though shallow, expanse following occasional flooding rainfalls, but the area is more often a dry pan of white salt and mud that cannot support any form of intensive agriculture or productive use beyond low-density grazing or tourism when the lake is full. Once the plane has crossed the watershed of the Great Dividing Range
that runs down the East Coast, the Australian landscape dries out rapidly and, dominated by rocks and salt at its worst, rates high among the most desolate and inhospitable (to life) areas of the planet. If you want some idea of what that’s like on the ground, watch Tracks, the movie about Robyn Davidson’s epic 1977 walk (with four camels and a dog) from the Australian centre (Alice Springs and Uluru) to the Indian Ocean.

  Coming in to land at Memphis or St Louis airports in the United States, or flying north from either of those cities to Minneapolis, the dominant sight is the continuous, brown stream of the mighty Mississippi and its bordering ‘oxbow lakes’ that snip off as the river changes its course. Fed by snow melt and rain, the Mississippi system takes its waters from the great rivers of inland America that drain west from the Adirondack Mountains and east from the Rockies. The Australian equivalent, the Murray/Darling river system, is ancient and much diminished through geological time, lacking both the contribution from snow accumulation (and subsequent thaw) and a major western range system to act as a watershed. The Murray looks quite small from the air and any large body of freshwater in Australia is most likely to be a dam, used for water supply or to generate hydroelectricity.

  As you can see from either the riverbanks or the window of a high-flying plane, vast amounts of material (coal, minerals, grains, fuel oil) still move by barge along the US Mississippi River and its tributaries, especially the Tennessee and the Missouri rivers. While the commercial traffic on the Murray consists of a few small tourist boats, the powerful Mississippi tugs push twenty or thirty big barges lashed together. At the end of spring, the lower Mississippi (after St Louis) is a fast-flowing and massive waterway. A long-established commercial port for the wood-burning paddle steamers that carried goods and people, Memphis is one of the few cities where there is visible housing on only one side of a major river. Those living downtown on the Memphis bluff, the high land accessed (perhaps) in 1541 by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, look across to the floodplain of the Arkansas bank. At its peak the Mississippi there can be more than a mile across.

  When it comes to salt water, both continents are bound by ‘shining seas’, though the Atlantic of the US east coast often seems much greyer and grimmer than the brighter blue of the Pacific and Indian oceans. And, as the Australian national anthem reminds us, this smallest continent (or largest island) is ‘girt by sea’. Being surrounded, it’s also possible to travel north–south ‘from sea to shining sea’. The Indian Ocean borders the west coast to give way in the north to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Gulf of Carpentaria, Torres Strait and, on the east, to the Pacific Ocean and the Coral Sea. The south of the continent is washed by, again, the Indian Ocean, then the Great Australian Bight, the Southern Ocean, Bass Strait and the Tasman Sea. Flying down the east coast from the tropical rainforest of the north to the temperate south, the view is dominated by the mountains of the Great Dividing Range, high fertile tablelands, sub-coastal agricultural areas with short, fast-flowing rivers draining to the sea, and the towns and big cities that are home to most of the population. The further west that north–south transit is made, the more the landscape is dominated by dryness, open plains and emptiness.

  The consciousness that the shining seas, the oceans and estuaries that border our habitable land, are both a glory and a threat will become ever greater as the populous coastal cities across our planet are (as we saw in 2012 with super storm Sandy in New York and in 2016 with the Northern Sydney beaches) progressively threatened by massive deluges (Houston and Florida 2017), high tides, storm surges and floods. And, as the earth and the oceans warm due to the heat-trapping, thick blanket over the atmosphere resulting from ever increasing greenhouse gas (CO2, CH4, N2O) accumulation, the patterns of both snow and rain fall will change, in ways that are not necessarily predictable. What will humans see as they fly over these vast continents a hundred or two hundred years from now?

  CHAPTER 19

  Up to date in Kansas City

  WHEN DOROTHY SAYS, ‘TOTO, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore’, it’s a good bet that the 1939 Wizard of Oz Hollywood scriptwriters used Kansas as shorthand for Midwestern America – flat, safe, comfortable, and oh so narrow and boring! Sweet, naive Dorothy does, of course, indeed show those sound values and a certain toughness of character that most associate with the Midwest. And the stories of many great American achievers (from Abe Lincoln to Dwight D Eisenhower) tell the tales of people who, formed in that conservative inland culture, headed further afield to make their mark. That includes many of the US scientific colleagues I value as absolute straight shooters. Inland United States of America is, as summarised by Midwesterner and 2016 Noble Laureate for Literature Bob Dylan in his song ‘With God on our Side’ (1963), a place of irreconcilable contradictions.

  For someone like me who grew up in Australia and had not, at that time, visited the United States, Dylan’s stark analysis of conservative America was a welcome alternative to the saccharine, Technicolor (though tuneful) schmaltz of movie musicals like State Fair (1945) and Oklahoma (1955) – ‘Everything’s up to date in Kansas City / They gone about as far as they can go’. Which voice is the more authentic? Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein grew up in New York, New York, while Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan) is from Duluth, Minnesota. The Dylan voice, to me, speaks to underlying truths, while those post-Second World War musicals were all about entertainment that would not offend even the most unreflective.

  Australia can also be pretty conservative politically. A good friend, the late Polish immunologist Hilary Koprowski (from Warsaw, Poland, not Warsaw, New York) summarised the Australian cultural landscape of the 1970s as ‘Kansas with beaches’. But, despite Hilary’s insight, which had some small truth but was more the equivalent of the classic Polish joke (or Newfie joke, or Kiwi joke), I’d never felt any particular desire to visit Kansas and, in fact, when I did accept an invitation to present a research seminar in October 1999 in Kansas City, it turned out that I wasn’t going to Kansas City, Kansas, but across the Missouri River to the much bigger Kansas City, Missouri. Missouri is also a typical midwestern state, though generally more ‘liberal’ (Democrat) than some. Later, we did visit Kansas as guests at a wedding in Wichita.

  The invitation to give the talk came from Lindsey Hutt-Fletcher, who works on the very complex herpes viruses and was then a professor in the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC) Department of Biology. Most of my research on viral immunity over the decades has focused on the small, readily eliminated (from the body) RNA viruses (like influenza, with eight gene segments), but we diverted for a while to study a big (greater than 200 genes), persistent pathogen from the same family as the human Epstein Barr virus (EBV). Classified as a herpes virus and more distantly related to Herpes simplex (the cause of cold sores), EBV causes ‘kissing disease’ (infectious mononucleosis) in adolescents and stays in the infected body for life without, in the main, causing further symptoms. But lethal EBV-induced lymphomas (cancers of the white blood cells) can emerge when our host response mechanisms are severely compromised (by HIV infection, or by cytotoxic drug therapy for organ transplantation), and it was that failure of immune control that we wanted to understand better. We did the experiments, answered the questions as best we could, published the results for anyone interested to read then, convinced that these big herpes viruses were just TBH (too bloody hard), moved back to the HE (hard enough) world of influenza research.

  I expect my talk in Kansas City focused on our herpes experiments, though, apart from chatting with Hutt-Fletcher, who I knew from serving on review committees, I don’t have any particular recollection of the day. No doubt I met with students and researchers and had a reasonably early dinner with a few of the faculty members. That’s the usual protocol, but I was travelling too much at the time and my detailed memories of many such visits are somewhat homogenised.

  Back then, my primary job was at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Memphis was a major hub for Northwest Airlin
es. That meant there were one (or maybe two) direct flights a day to many, not too-distant middle-America destinations, including Kansas City. Housed in pleasant boutique accommodation near the city centre I woke early and, with a few hours to spare, checked that the area was generally considered safe and went out for a habitual walk.

  What was it that made my visit to Kansas City worth writing about? This brief acquaintance with the second city (after St Louis) of the ‘Show-Me State’ (as seen on car licence plates) introduced me to some great artworks. Walking through parkland I suddenly encountered the unlikely prospect of a green field dominated by giant, brightly painted, orange and white shuttlecocks. My immediate response: to laugh with delight or, at the very least, smile broadly! That’s what great public art does, and why people love it.

  From childhood memories, many of us will associate the sight of shuttlecocks with languid, summer vacations, picnics, or just messing about in the backyard. At least for the game we played as children, the high net could readily be rigged in any open space and boundaries didn’t matter all that much. After all, it was hard enough for most of us to get the small racquet (or battledore) to even connect with the light, feathered, floating shuttlecock and, even if we did make the hit, to send it very far. By contrast, the much more professional sport of badminton is a classy game that, requiring great anticipation and finesse, tends to be dominated by Asian athletes.