My Brother, the Doctor

Yesterday I took time off from my rigorous and demanding schedule of watching three World Cup games per day and drove down to Philadelphia to attend my brother Luke's dissertation defense. Luke had asked me to lend whatever moral support I might have to spare. I was expecting a kind of academic version of a football match, with a coterie of mudslinging professors going forehead-to-forehead with my poor brother, kicking him in the shins and exploiting every opening and weakness in his argument as they rampaged through the hallowed halls of the University of Pennsylvania. While speeding down the New Jersey turnpike, listening to Argentina pummel South Korea on the world's best portable radio, I imagined myself as a sort of boxing trainer who would crouch in Luke's corner with a towel, ready to mop up the inevitable tears, blood and vomit that would soon be splashing onto the floors of the Department of Anthropology.

In fact, and almost to my disappointment, the event proved to be far more affirmative than combative. I've forgotten the long and challenging title of Luke's doctoral thesis, although I know that it is about linguistic exogamy in the tribes of the upper Rio Negro of the Brazilian Amazon. If you don't know what linguistic exogamy is, don't feel bad; I only know because Luke told me, a few times. It's the practice of only marrying people from a tribe who speak a different language than your own. Much of the terminology in Luke's presentation was so far beyond me that if I so chose I could practice linguistic exogamy myself, simply by marrying a linguistic anthropologist, that remote is their idiom from our own. Words and concepts like "performativity," "virtual metapragmatics," "patrilects," "proleptic," and "signaling indigeneity" flew through the air like hard-hit soccer balls. (By the way, it isn't just me that's clueless, Blogger, on which I'm writing this, thinks all of those words, except for "virtual" and "signaling," are misspelled, meaning they aren't in Google's dictionary either!). Soon I was using the towel I had brought to mop my own sweaty, confused, brow.

But if I had trouble following, not so the committee of professors also in attendance. Professor Greg Urban, making introductory remarks before Luke began to speak, said that the dissertation in question "reshapes our understanding of what is going on in South America in major ways." GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAL! The Graduate Group Chair, Professor Deborah Thomas, then announced that Luke would have approximately half an hour to discuss his work. Twenty-nine and a half crisp minutes later, he concluded a presentation packed with almost mathematically precise powerpoint slides.

It was at this point I thought the bloodletting would finally begin, and I awaited the first of what I expected would be dozens of excruciating and unanswerable questions, flying flat and fast like an endless series of penalty kicks, with Luke as the hapless goalie. Here, too, I was sorely disappointed; the few questions asked were more like suggestions, softballs intended to promote minor changes in the text that might help catapult this already epic, if specialized, work to new heights of popularity. The subtext seemed to be that after a few slight adjustments, a bestseller, at least in the peculiar language of linguistic anthropology, was not only within reach, but virtually assured. Deborah Thomas then unceremoniously kicked us all out of the room so that the quartet of professors could discuss Luke's fate (apparently, in this sort of trial, the jury stays in, while everyone else leaves). We stood in the hall chewing our knuckles fearfully, while assuring Luke that he had done an excellent job. But these agonizing moments were short; the jury did not deliberate for more than a handful of minutes before we were called back into the salon. "The verdict is, you did a fantastic job," announced Professor Thomas.
OTRO GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLAAAAZOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

He's the smart one, on the left.

...

The Great Wade

My brother Luke, miraculously back in the United States after months spent learning to speak Ningatu in the upper Rio Negro of the Brazilian Amazon, skyped me last week to propose a weekend camping and canoeing excursion to New Jersey's fabulous Wharton State Forest. New Jersey bashers and the tellers of "what exit?" turnpike jokes have likely never ventured into the southern third of our home state, and its expansive and sparsely populated pine barrens, vast tracts of scrub oak and pine forest cut by meandering coppery-red streams colored naturally by the tannins of the cedars that grow on their sandy banks. It is truly beautiful, a piney oasis in the midst of the northeastern megalopolis. Automotive superhero Joe Atlas offered to join and bring along a superior bottle of plonk, priced, he said, in the triple digits, a gift from a financier relative. Although current scientific research, not to mention a day recently spent cycling around Napa Valley from one tasting to another, suggests that there is little or no relationship between price and taste when it comes to wine, I don't often have the chance to prove this to myself at the upper end of the spectrum. In an attempt to do Joseph's hoarded bottle justice, I spent Friday night producing a boeuf bourgignon (with a $7 bottle of wine from LeNell's) to be brought along for some fine al fresco dining, and on Saturday at midday we rendezvooed with Luke at Goshen Pond, just upstream from Atsion Lake.



My brother and I have been twice before, and canoeing is always a major part of our Wharton Forest wilderness experience, so while I busied myself erecting the tents, Joseph and Luke took off in the F150 to go and see about a boat. They returned fifteen minutes later and forty dollars poorer with a keel-hulled aluminum beater rented to them by a curmudgeon so unwilling to do business that he gone so far as to ridicule the proposition that one could canoe in Goshen Pond at all, so clogged with snags, downed trees and beaver dams it was, so he said. But as Luke had negotiated a full day rate for a rental beginning at two that afternoon, and including the proviso that we have the boat back without fail by eight-thirty the next morning, I was too busy ridiculing his lack of business acumen (I believe I compared him to a naked Amazonian savage recently emerged from the jungle and being fleeced by a real estate speculator) to pay much attention to the ancillary report on the navigability of the local waterways.



It was a balmy October day, the sun warm overhead when we set off, 620 pounds of manhood in a canoe ominously labeled "max load 580lbs." The glassy, reflective waters of the placid pond divided and subdivided into narrow channels as we weaved amongst the lily pads and the standing carcasses of inundated trees. Not a sound was to be heard save the chirping of the birds and the swish of the paddles pulling gently through the water. Soon to this peaceful soundscape was added the crunching of tortilla chips, the slurping of salsa and the grunts of exertion of the weekend warrior unused to the taxing paddle stroke. And then, some hundred yards into our epic journey, we ran aground.



Our attempts to propel ourselves the way one might on a sled stuck in the snow, by pressing our hands against the bottom of the lake and scootching forward, proved futile. Rolling up our trousers we disembarked into the chilly ankle-deep water. There was nothing for it but to push. The sandbar was only a few feet wide, however, and soon we were back aboard and paddling onward. And soon, too, we disembarked anew, to negotiate the second of a seemingly infinite collection of obstacles, from sandy protrusions to massive felled logs and murky gummy clots of rotting leaf mold. With the campsite still in view, I protested that I preferred to walk in the water rather than sit down and stand up and clamber in and clamber out every few moments. I'm too fat for that and my movements are having a deleterious effect on the stability of our conveyance, I observed magnanimously. It was clear that we were not to reach the mighty Delaware River that day.

Luke runs to catch up with Joseph, seen here pushing the world's largest floating bowl of tortilla chips.


Disembarking at beaver dam number 34B.

Pondering our options at downed tree number 167.

After being rescued by a passing helicopter, the boeuf bourgignon, served over couscous on the tailgate of the truck, tasted mighty fine. And Joseph's bottle of wine was insane!

Happy Birthday, Luke!

My beloved brother is living with some pre-Columbian Brazilians and learning to speak Tucano somewhere in the farthest upper reaches of the Rio Negro, near Brazil's border with Colombia, so it was a sort of miracle of telecommunications that I was actually able to speak to him in person all the way from McMurdo and wish him a happy birthday.

We're thinking of you and toasting your adventures!

I'm the good looking one.